Interview IV, Henry Crawford, Take 2, 1/13/11

Full disclosure: This is the second time I interviewed Henry. The first time, I threatened to purchase a bottle of bourbon, get him/us drunk, and talk about the life, and the music, for the hours until we blacked out or ran out of things to say. I made good on my threat. Nothing was taboo – I wanted stories, he told stories; I wanted him to name names, he named names. My plan worked so well that I didn’t press record on the machine. I assure you all that this lost interview was the finest and best thing I had ever done, and that the world is less for my blunder. In any instance, this is the second interview with Henry Crawford, at a diner in Park Slope, over a sensible, sober meal of tuna melts, cheeseburgers and watery coffee. This is presented as he returns to New York this week after six months in Chicago. As usual, most of what follows is true.

Rich Gin: So this is the second interview with Henry Crawford, talking about what it’s like to be Henry Crawford, living in Chicago and all that entails, and I think in the interest of thoroughness we’ll start back at the beginning and mention Cool and Unusual Punishment and power through that piece of information. So, Cool and Unusual was you, Jack [Greenleaf], Scout [Pare-Phillips], and Ian Cory…

Henry Crawford: …and for a brief time, Kenda Zapasodi. But that was very [brief], and Scout didn’t get into [the band] until about two years in. We were around for four years. I don’t remember how she got [in the band]. I think Jack just wanted another guitar or something and Scout was… there….

RG: A warm body to strap a guitar to.

HC: Right. But she ended up doing other shit, too. We were “Young Indie Band,” [she played] a glockenspiel. What else did she do… glockenspiel, keyboards, and sang. We [played] one or two of her songs that have since disappeared.

RG: You guys recorded though?

HC: Kind of. We recorded and EP that barely exists and think Jack Greenleaf, Eli Sidman and I are the only people who have it.

RG: And then where did The Mighty Handful come from?

HC: It was born out of frustration… Jack wrote most of the songs for Cool and Unusual except for one or two and I started writing more songs near the end – we started doing Uptown Drunks. At the last Cool and Unusual show we debuted Uptown Drunks and then Jack Ferencz and I started getting close and [The Mighty Handful] came out of a desire to front a band and be in a fast, loud band – to be in a band that wasn’t trying to do whatever was popular in 2006. In our minds we wanted to play in a punk band, but we ended up being a pop band, essentially.

RG: Do you remember what the reception was for Uptown Drunks?

HC: Of course. We were playing for our friends; it was really good. I think that was our second-to-last song and it was my first time playing guitar and [after] Jack Ferencz and Sam [Caravaliga] came up afterwards and hugged me and said, “That’s an amazing song,” and for a while after Sam was trying to convince me to let Tetsuwan Fireball play it and I was like, “I don’t think that’s gonna happen.”

RG: I recall someone saying how uncomfortable it made parents…

HC: Up until that point, we were in 8th or 9th grade – actually I was in 11th grade when I wrote that song – but up until that point we were barely teenagers and that was the first song that any of us had written that had anything to do with drinking or sex to a bigger degree than, “I have a crush on this girl,” [even though] that song’s about that too. I think at the first Mighty Handful show Aviva [Tilson’s] parents were like, “That song’s inappropriate; you shouldn’t play that song,” and we thought that was awesome.

RG: And then you had to play it every, damn, time…

HC: Right, then we played it for the next two years…

RG: I’m thinking about the reaction of the Handful at their end, and of Bad Teeth and you’re playing your first shows outside of Chicago as Small Wonder; you come here and a lot of people know all the words to the songs – do you think important validation of what you do? To have that kind of sing-along, audience participation?

HC: With The Mighty Handful and Bad Teeth it was definitely me writing songs that everyone could sing and I wanted to write these big anthems and with Small Wonder I’ve been trying NOT to write big songs as much – to write songs where the verses aren’t just build ups to the chorus, or the bridge isn’t just a chant.

I was watching this David Byrne interview where he said the venue you play in affects the kind of songs you write and I think that’s true. When I was in bands that would play a show every single week it was more about, “What can I do on stage while playing these songs? How will this song compliment Shea Stadium?” Now with Small Wonder we’re much more interested in recording so it’s, “What’s this song going to sound like when it’s mixed?”

RG: About recording – Sam [Caravaglia] was still making noise two years, a year and a half ago about trying to get signed – like that was something to strive for. Is that still a reasonable goal to have?

HC: Not realistically. I feel like if you get signed you’re probably going to do worse than if you’re NOT signed. I mean it seems like all you get from a label now is distribution and maybe a little bit of money. Still, I like the IDEA of being signed because if you get signed you can say you’ve “made it,” you’re a musician now. I mean we’re much more professional now than when we started but in my mind we’re still just kids playing music in bands.

RG: But your influences are just “Kids playing music in bands.” That has to mean something too.

HC: Yeah, that’s true. There’s a sort of Peter Pan complex with rock music in general. But as for getting signed, I feel like the sensation of being [in a touring band] now is basically the same sensation as hearing your song on the radio [used to be] in the 50’s. At least that’s the way I imagine it; the feeling of, “It paid off.”

RG: You talk about Small Wonder being more interested in recording, or at least being a more finished product. And of course being in a band is collaborative but… how much of Small Wonder is collaborative? Because with this band – they’re all your songs.

HC: Well, Small Wonder is a lot more collaborative than Bad Teeth because Bad Teeth, barring a few moments in a few songs, it was pretty much, “Do what I want, or I’m going to yell at you.” I wanted Bad Teeth to be the Henry Crawford Song and Dance Routine. Also with Small Wonder it’s Jack [Greenleaf], Ian and me, and since I started playing music I’ve been playing with Jack and I’ve known what Ian’s doing the whole time as well and I feel like there’s a certain amount of kinship between the three of us. So I definably feel like there’s a lot of collaboration but at the end of the day, if I bring in a song Ian will say, “What do you want?” So it’s collaboration but in the end the [choice] is on me – if I don’t like something we don’t do it.

RG: Talk about the relationship between you and Greenleaf. I kind of think of you two as brothers.

HC: I’ve known him since… Remembering a time that I wasn’t really good friends with Jack is very hard. With anything he was either “there” or I’ve placed him into it. Although Jack is the king of placing himself into stories – a master. The thing about our relationship is… No matter how proud I am of a song, Jack will say, “Oh. It’s alright.” And I’ll say, “Are you kidding? That’s the best thing I’ve written!” And he’ll say, “Yeah, I’ve heard all your songs. I set the bar higher.” It gets frustrating sometimes.

RG: That’s a good friend.

HC: Exactly. He’s also the type of person who’s able to make himself give a shit about things. Like, with The Mighty Handful, if we played a bad show it didn’t matter. Like, after a show I’d be like, “That was really fun! People were having a great time!” and Jack would say, “That was the worst thing I’ve ever done. I’m ashamed.” And he would give me all this shit.

RG: Well he was the one who wanted everyone to be in tune.

HC: Yes. He was the one who bought a tuning pedal.

RG: That was the end of The Mighty Handful – when you guys started tuning between songs – because it took fifteen minutes for everyone to get their shit together.

HC: And I never wanted to be in tune. I liked us better when we weren’t in tune. ‘Coz that’s Punk.

RG: Right. Let’s jump around and break things.

HC: If you’re out of tune it doesn’t matter if you’re playing the right chords.

RG: Or if you play loud enough.

HC: I think Oliver [Kalb] said about Starscream that no matter what they played they had that perfect volume where everything sounds like the greatest thing you’ve ever heard. They could just be playing feedback but it’s so loud it just gets into your bones.

RG: I think it’s also that electronic frequency they live in – that spectrum of sound. Speaking of which, talk about – I phrased this before as competition between bands. There were a lot of people making music in your peer group. Was it like the Spanish Influenza – you just woke up one day and everyone was doing it or was it slower?

HC: It’s funny – when I started Cool and Unusual, the people I was a friend with [before the band] I don’t talk to anymore. The people who came to those first shows I haven’t seen in, like, five years. The way I became friends with Sam was his band. And then I met Felix [Walworth] and Eli Sidman through The Floor is Lava. I think the only person I can say I saw “become” a musician is Oliver Kalb. And Felix to a certain extent. When I met Oliver it was like, I was the one who wrote songs, but he was the one who could play any song off any album. He was the campfire guy. I think after he started hanging out with us at our shows that ego kicked in and he said, “Fuck, I can do this,” and he started Women [the band] and started writing twenty songs a week.

RG: How many shows did Women play? I only saw them once…

HC: Not many. They played a fair amount for a band that was only around for six months. But nobody came to any of them. Women shows were always empty because Oliver didn’t care to make connections [with people].

RG: I asked this question last time and I don’t remember your answer, we were so bombed. Is there a Henry Crawford character you filter your songs through or is it straight from your brain or experiences to the page?

HC: I mean, obviously not everything I say in songs actually happened. I say a lot of shit. By the way, the last interview would have been slurred by drunkenness; this one will be all [mumbles with his mouth full of tuna melt]. I think it’s less the Henry Crawford character, which there definitely is, but it’s more about the characters I create for the people around me. Like, this year I got really into the idea of using [consistent] motifs when singing about a person, lyrically. Like, when I sing about XXXXX XXXXXX I usually refer to her as an angel. Like, “Your Angel Clothes” is about XXXXX. And songs about XXXXX all have similar stuff about bones. I like to think that someone who doesn’t know me personally but listens to my songs could glean something about my personality from them.

[Editor’s note: I had originally welcomed Henry to name names and drop names. And he did. However, I didn’t bother to consider the second parties’ reactions. I am a male. I am insensitive. I am a jerk. Therefore, I’ve bleeped the names. Rest assured, when we all die, and the aliens go to the tapes, they can put the names back in. But until then, only the people who know the stories can know all of it, and the people who don’t… well… do your research yourself.]

RG: To that end, and this is Ian’s question to you – are you worried that your songs are too specific? That your songs are so tailored to a certain group of people that you limit your audience.

HC: I said this last time you asked this question, but I think most songwriters are writing about their personal experience and there are very few who are writing for everyone at all times – like, maybe Dr. Luke. But when it comes down to people who are artistically inclined, as opposed to someone who wants to make money, they’re writing about their own personal experiences. But I also think that so many personal experiences are so universal that even if you put the girls’ name in a song, or your own name in a song, people will automatically substitute their own. They’re going to fill in the blanks.

RG: So now you live in Chicago – for now – and a lot of your songs are, at least in my mind, very New York-centric. Do you find that Chicago has influenced your productivity or your subject matter in a way that is different from New York? And this is specifically in reference to [your songs] “Same Flame” and “As We Were.”

HC: I think it definitely has. Even that Bad Teeth song, “New York,” [and] “Same Flame,” are about how New York thinks it does all this shit but it really doesn’t do anything – like it’s boring here. And going to Chicago has made me realize how jaded that is. It’s not true at all -- It’s more like I wasn’t doing anything. Or I wasn’t doing as much as I could have been doing. If I had wanted to go to a show every night I could have.

I never thought of “As We Were” as being about New York. I always thought of it as about being scared of change. But I think that relates to [my life] in New York in the end. I think the thing Chicago made me realize is all those songs I wrote about feeling sorry for myself and being like, “New York sucks and there’s nothing I can do about it,” felt good to sing, but they weren’t saying anything. It made me want to write songs that mean more, or carry more weight.

RG: Gonna throw another Greatest Hit at you here. I had five songs I thought were worth talking about in detail. The first one was Uptown Drunks, which I won’t make you re-hash, but the second two were “St. Daniel Johnston” and “Trichotillomania,” and both of those are kind of joined in my mind. I guess if you could talk about those two in the abstract a little…

HC: Yeah they were written within a few weeks of each other. That whole album, or EP, or whatever – Daguerreotype – was written right when I first started dating XXXXX and when I was breaking up with XXXXX and having to deal with her. For instance, I don’t know if you noticed this, but on “Again and Again and Again,” there’s this loud bang in the middle of the song – just a [boom]. And that’s XXXXX slamming the door and walking out of the room while I was recording a song that’s about her. She got furious at me and smashed the door closed. And I was too lazy to record the guitar track – kind of like the Facebook bleeps on [Oliver’s album] “I Floated Up To Heaven.”

RG: But thematically, that’s the sort of thing you have to leave in there.

HC: Yeah, it’s a good story. I feel like “St. Daniel Johnston” and “Trichotillomania” are the two strongest songs on the album. “Trichotillomania” is a song where I can never tell anyone what it’s about because I don’t even know myself. I don’t know what I’m talking about most of the time in that song. I’ve thought about it being about someone obsessed with being the good guy or being pure or clean. Y’know [like in the song], giving up smoking or sex or drinking.

Well, XXXXX was doing that at the time; she decided to give up smoking and drinking and sex. I was like, “That’s stupid. Why bother? You’re not actually making yourself a better person.” And then “St. Daniel Johnston” is about XXXXX, and having no idea what was going on with her when she was on tour. And the [answer] to [the lyric] “Are you suck/are you well” is, “I have no fucking clue where you are.” And I was walking about the desperation of wanting to know; being cut off and trying to mend the ties.

RG: Let’s keep going with this thread. Talk a little about “My Mortal Hands.”

HC: I wrote that song because I got really angry with Jack Greenleaf one day. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard his song, “The Ocean.” He has this really great acoustic song, “The Ocean,” and it just happens to be to the tune of “A Baby for Pree,” the Neutral Milk Hotel song. And I stole the melody from “The Ocean” and he’d say, “You stole my melody,” and I’d say, “Well you stole it from Neutral Milk Hotel,” and he’d say, “No, mine’s in 3.” So that really frustrated me that he would say that all the time. And so I said, “Fuck it. I’m gonna take a Neutral Milk Hotel song and write it in 3 and he’s gonna see how annoying that is.” And then I started playing with the chords from “Naomi” and I realized I actually had a song for it. And that [song] is where the whole angel-thing with XXXXX comes from – “You are an angel all dressed in white.”

RG: You wanna tell that story on record? About crashing prom?

HC: Oh yeah. Well, when I was first getting involved with XXXXX, it was pretty early on after meeting her; we were hooking up a little bit, and I had a thing for her, and it was her prom night. And I was like, “I really wanna see her on her prom night,” because I’m That Dude. But I was with Oliver Kalb, and I was a little bit ashamed about wanting to see her on prom night. Because [the idea] seemed a little pussy.

RG: Well, you wanna see people you care about at their best, right?

HC: Yeah. So, I’m walking with Oliver and she had her prom at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, so I’m kind of inching our way there, like, “Oh! Let’s go this way!” And we finally get to the botanic gardens and he says, “Hey! Isn’t XXXXXX XXXXXXXXX’s prom here?” And I say, “Oh right! What an amazing coincidence! It’s XXXXX’s prom too! Let’s call her up!” And so I call her and they come out and we’re talking and XXXXX and I are kind of standing off to the side talking in whispers, and she was wearing this really magnificent white dress, which was her mother’s wedding dress, I think, and that’s pretty much the end of the story.

Interestingly, on MY prom night I was wearing an all-white seersucker suit and where XXXXX was sober at her prom I had [consumed] a half a bottle of whiskey before mine, and been kicked out for being too drunk. So I saw XXXXX that night and she said, “You should go home or you are going to die.” I was like, “Alright.” That’s what the third verse of that song is about.

I was always a little ashamed when we played that song, because I felt like singing about prom was showing your age. For a long time I didn’t… I don’t really like singing about computers. I never want to talk about computers or the internet in a song because I feel like it takes away the timelessness of the song. I mean it’s timeless if “You’re writing me a letter.” Of course, in fifty years computers could be such a fact of life that singing about them seems natural and in some future time it’ll be you and I saying, “Goddammit I wish they would stop singing about hover cars in that song!”

Like, I have this song, “Weights.”

RG: I don’t know this.

HC: It’s alright. But it has this one verse about inviting people to shows, and trying to get people to come to your shows because you’re really proud of your band. And it has this line, “This isn’t a party/this is a march, this isn’t a phone call/this is a call to arms.” And I don’t call people about shows, I always send out mass texts. And I knew I didn’t want it to be “This isn’t a mass text/this is a call to arms,” because that’s so lame. I think it’s important to be able to send a song to some guy [who was born] seventy years ago and not have anything he wouldn’t understand [in it].

RG: Do you think of yourself as a showman?

HC: Yeah, I think so. Like, I’m not like Sam – I don’t do the hand gestures; that’s awesome when he does that, but that’s never been my thing. I don’t think of myself as the ringleader of a circus, y’know, in that sense, or like Freddie Mercury. That said, there are people who move MUCH less than I do onstage. I think theatricality is important – if you want the crowd to be into it and like it then you have to show that you’re into it and that you like it. You can’t let it all rest on them. There’s something that Charlie [Dore-Young] said… he said much less eloquently but he was like, “If you want them to dance, then you have to dance, if you want them to sing you have to sing, if you want them to cheer you have to cheer. You have to do whatever you want them to do.” Actually, I think the way he said it is, “I hate it when bands don’t dance and they want me to dance, but I’m not gonna dance if they’re not gonna dance.” Some Charlie Dore-Young-ism.

RG: Talk about “¿Quien es?,” which I really love and I can’t say enough, and I’m thinking specifically of “Terror of New Mexico,” which is in my top 5 songs of last year. I think the thing I said and I want on the record is the only music I really care about these days is the stuff my friends put out. Anyway, talk a bit about “¿Quien es?,” the origin story and specifically about how different it sounds from everything else.

HC: Making it electronic was part of this dream I had, but part of it was also that my guitar broke. I was playing guitar and I broke two strings on it, and I didn’t have any money and I was too lazy to buy strings. My choices were, “Well, I can record an album with only three strings on my guitar,” and there’s one song I wrote that’s just that – I don’t know, have you heard “Like Tom Waits”?

RG: No. Oh, wait, is it on your Tumblr?

HC: Yeah. I had listened to this interview with Andre 3000 and he said the way he writes lyrics is he sings in baby talk, and then writes it down. David Byrne also did that on “Speaking in Tongues,” apparently. And I said, “That sounds cool, I should try that.” And it ended up making no sense, obviously – I think one of the lyrics is, “Is there nothing to help us helter skelter home,” [or at least] that’s what it sounded like. So anyway, I had no guitar, and I decided to experiment with MIDI, which is something I had been meaning to do anyway, because I was sick of depending on Jack Greenleaf for drum [sounds]. I said, “I’ll teach myself how to program drums!” which I’m still really bad at. I can only do [beatboxes in a very slow, ponderous way].

I think the first song I did was “Worth Dying For,” and when I was finished I was actually really proud of it, so I kept going [with the electronic direction]. And the interesting thing about making an electronic album is that I’d never done it before so I had no idea what I was doing, so [the result was] I had the same prolificacy as when I first learned how to play guitar – write a song every day because I’d learn a new chord and be like, “Fuck yeah!”

So I wrote “Worth Dying For,” and then I wrote “¿Quien es?,” because I had this dream about writing an album for Billy the Kid that was electronic, and I woke up and decided to do it. Then I did some research on Billy the Kid and discovered some things that [I could relate to]. And “Paulita M.” was me trying to write a fast song. It was just fun to make synth tones because each new sound was completely new to me and I had never done it before.

It’s the same thing I like about [being in] a three piece like, Small Wonder; you’re so limited by the personnel [as in Small Wonder] or the medium [like Garage Band] that to do something interesting you have to be really creative and try things you haven’t done before to fill out the sound.

RG: How do you see Small Wonder playing out? Cool and Unusual was four years, the Handful was two…

HC: My bands are getting progressively shorter lived. Bad Teeth was one year. If that.

RG: Do you see Small Wonder being around for a while?

HC: The thing I told Jack and Ian when we started was, “No matter what happens, I am Small Wonder. If you guys quit or if I leave Chicago, Small Wonder will keep on going and I’ll just get new people.”

RG: “If I fire you…”

HC: Right. I got so sick of it being to the point where people would say, “Oh! You’re in the Mighty Handful,” and we had started a new band. Even during [the] Bad Teeth [era] people would still e-mail us asking if The Mighty Handful wanted to play a show. Even last Monday at the Silent Barn show some guy was like, “Does Bad Teeth want to play a show?” Well, Bad Teeth doesn’t exist.

RG: Do you see your solo stuff as a feeder system for whatever band you’re in? Do you run your songs through a solo show and then pick the ones that play big and move them to Small Wonder or Bad Teeth?

HC: I guess so, but it’s not that I tested them out on the crowd. It was more like I play them in my room by myself, and if I felt like rocking out when I’m done then it became a Bad Teeth song. Now it’s more like my songs are my songs, and it doesn’t really matter. [When I was in] The Mighty Handful it was pretty much like all the fast songs were Handful songs and if it’s not fast then it’s a Henry Crawford song. With Bad Teeth, if a song got me pumped then it was a Bad Teeth song – it could be slow, but it had to get me pumped. With Small Wonder, if I can do a song and not have it sound muddled – if I can do a song with Small Wonder then I want to.

One thing I’ve been trying to do is experiment more. Instead of taking a song and doing it the way it’s asking to be done, changing the song so that it can be done a different way. Like, “As We Were” was originally this fast-paced, boppy song and we [made it slower with Jack playing the riff on bass], which totally changed the form. “Oracle” was an acoustic song and we changed it and put in the Weezer bass chords. I wanted to take my songs and put them through the crazy fraction machine, like on your elementary school worksheets.

RG: Are you ever worried, and I guess you’re not, about the personalities you write about becoming upset that you’re writing about them so distinctly?

HC: I try not to think about that. You know “Set the Bone”? That one really worried me because the end, “It’s easy to sleep when your dead,” is an Of Montreal song, and the reason that’s the lyric is because that was XXXXX’s answering machine [message] when she stopped talking to me. So I’d call her and she wouldn’t pick up and I’d have to hear, “It’s easy to sleep when you’re dead, it’s easy to sleep when you’re dead,” and I wanted to kill myself. Whenever I’d get sad that song would get stuck in my head and I’d be like, “What is this? My life is a joke. This sucks.” And I just decided that it would be really cool to have that as the end of the song.

And on [the album] “Big, Big City” there’s that song that’s supposed to be spoken word [“On the Subject of Birthdays, But Not Really” –Ed.]. That one really freaked me out because the line before that song is, “I didn’t really want to fuck her, I didn’t want to be a fucker,” and I didn’t want XXXXX to think that I was just trying to fuck her. I was really worried she’d take that song the wrong way. That’s really the only time I’ve been worried and asked myself if I really wanted to say [what was in the song].

That song “Henry We Can’t,” I think I only played it one at a Bad Teeth show – the whole thing is supposed to be a duet between me and a girl who’s supposed to be XXXX about me trying to hook up with her and her saying, “We can’t,” and me being a wise-ass; “Henry we can’t, no you mean we shouldn’t. If we wouldn’t we couldn’t, but here we are.” That song is a pretty uncomfortable song if you were involved with my life at that point, but I really like the idea of making people uncomfortable with a song.

RG: “Anyone,” uncomfortable, even the subject matter?

HC: Well especially the subject matter, but yeah, anyone.

RG: You’re trying to do 30 songs in 30 days on Tumblr. Is that sort of production – that sort of product churn – is that where you’re at creatively? That you have so many things to say that you can just whip them out – or is it just something you’ve taken on to see if it can be done?

HC: It was sort of an exercise, but at the same time I want to get to the point – and I’m not there now – where I’m creating music that no one else has created; like a totally new sound. And I thought that if I produce something every day, just push out everything, eventually I’m going to come up with one or two songs that sound different from everyone else’s songs. I don’t know if I’m [succeeding]. I think “Psychosomaticon” is different…

RG: It’s certainly different within the context of the series. It really sticks out. I guess the takeaway is that your hit can come at any time. Did that one feel good when you wrote it?

HC: When I finished writing it I thought it was a pretty good song, but everyone else is going to make fun of me [for having written it]. And then I sent it to Oliver and he said it was the best thing I had done. Then I started listening to it more and decided it really was [pretty good]. I was more excited about this other song I had written the day before – I thought it was so much better than “Psychosomaticon.”

RG: To that end, what you’re experience with things that you think people will like versus the things they actually like? I mean, of course you make art for yourself, but do you think your instincts are in tune with your audience?

HC: Generally I think they are. You know, sometimes there are songs that I don’t think people will like and then they really like it. And then… there’s a song… “Your Other Plans,” there’s a lyric in there that I really love but that’s a song I get made fun of for writing. Oliver thinks that’s a bitch song. I can’t tell which songs are really great, but I can tell which ones people will really like. Like, “Raised by Wolves,” that was a song I knew [Bad Teeth] were going to open with, and eventually everyone will start doing the howling part. I think that was one of Bad Teeth’s goals, to have everyone do it at the same time.

“I am Wildfire,” I wouldn’t have expected people to like that as much as they did. I thought it was a good song, but people seemed to latch on to that song. That’s what I mean – that song is very personal, very specific, about a lot of things – the beginning of that song is basically verbatim conversations that XXXXX and I had, or all stories about XXXXX and I meeting. People have attached their own meanings to that song; like some kid out there is thinking, “Yeah, Henry was there with me and stole my life, what the fuck?” Because the [kinds of things that happen in that song] happen to everyone.

RG: I guess we’re pretty good with this interview, and I like to think this one is better because the first version would have torched a lot of bridges. There’s this question that’s staring at me from the page and it’s kinda pretentious and weird but… is there a God in Henry Crawford songs?

HC: That is a strange question.

RG: Yeah. I don’t know why I’m stuck on this.

HC: I mean, I think so. I’ve never been a particularly religious person, but the idea of God is the thing that keeps me from having a major existential crisis at all times, because I’m not one of those people who can accept that life is meaningless. It’s an argument that Ian Cory and I have a lot, about whether faith is a good thing. And I’ll say, “Faith is a good thing, whether it’s faith in God or something else.” And Ian is a realist, “No there’s no proof. If there’s no proof, then why brother….”

I think there’s a God in Henry Crawford songs, but I think the Henry Crawford character puts more faith in God than I actually do. There’s this Isaac Brock quote I think about a lot. Someone asked him a similar question and he said, ‘I don’t really believe in God, but “God” is the most powerful thing you can say.’ No matter who you are, the word “God” resonates. You could write a song called, “I Hate God,” or take “God Only Knows,” if the lyric was, “Your mom only knows,” it wouldn’t be all that great of a song. There’s a certain resonance God has with people whether they believe in him or not.