Johnathan Rice

Johnathan Rice’s doe-eyed stare on the cover of his sophomore album, Further North, doesn’t do him justice. The young looking singer/songwriter, though graced with cherubesque features, has a wit and sense that far outweighs any youthful naivete his age or gaze may imply.

The 24-year-old Scottish-American, despite having signed with Warner/Reprise in his late teens, has often been embraced by and compared to the indie elite. And there’s little surprise as to why. The current Los Angeles resident’s rough-around-the-edges voice recalls Love Is Hell era Ryan Adams. He’s toured with indie rock goddess Jenny Lewis and he even releases his albums on vinyl. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

On a leisurely Thanksgiving-eve Rice chatted up SSv about working with dashing damsel Jenny Lewis, hearing Modest Mouse on the radio, and the fact that indie rock as we know it is doesn’t really exist.

SSv: So you’ve grown up in Glasgow and you were born in Virginia. How have your experiences in both places influenced your songwriting?

Johnathan Rice: I don’t know if I could consciously state, but I think the initial inspiration to start singing and writing probably came from the Scottish part of my upbringing because it’s just kind of a nature of the Irish-Catholic family to be very musical. There’s a very musical vein running through that. It’s kind of a culture of large family and friend gatherings with a guitar and piano, and everybody’s kind of expected to do their bit, you know? That’s definitely how I first was exposed to any kind of performance. I liked the feeling it gave me.

SSv: Having that background, how does the fact that you now live in L.A. influence your creative process, if it has?

Rice: Again, it’s hard to say what influences me, but every time you change your surroundings it influences you in different ways. It’s certainly one of the more beautiful places that I’ve lived. Virginia is beautiful in its way, but when I was a kid I used to holiday in Spain. Ever since I moved to California I’ve felt the same way, I kinda feel like I’m in the Mediterranean because it looks similar to that. So. I feel like I’m on a European vacation all the time. I’m sure that’s influenced my songwriting.

SSv: Since Further North was recorded “live” in the studio will a full band, why did you decide to record it that way?

Rice: Well, I wanted the songs to have a sense of urgency to them and a sense of spontaneity to them. Being what they call a “singer-songwriter,” there’s a lot of traps you can fall into. I think a lot of kids who do what I’m doing, well, young men, are recording their albums with professional session players in world class studios with world class engineers and it makes these very pristine, perfectly executed recordings. I appreciate that and I respect it, but I wanted to set myself apart from that by making something that’s maybe rougher and maybe doesn’t have as much polish to it. There’s a certain quality to some of my lyrics and so I didn’t want to dress it up too much. Didn’t want to over-stuff the turkey.

SSv:I’ve heard that you tend to focus on the lyrics in your songwriting. Are lyrics more important to you than the corresponding music then? Or what comes first with your creative process?

Rice: Well, it depends. It kind of varies from song to song. I don’t think there’s necessarily a consistent pattern, but sometimes, music is more important. And sometimes the lyrics are more important. The first song on my album is called “We’re all stuck out in the desert and we’re gonna die.” When I was writing that song I was just saying all these different things, I had pages and pages of different little phrases. They kinda didn’t necessarily make sense with each other, they were just words that sounded good to me in a rhythmic way. All the words had a good rhythmic quality. I wasn’t try to convey some deep meaning of anything with the words, I just ended up picking the ones that sounded best to me, or just made me feel good. But it’s funny because the intention of the writer isn’t always the feeling that the listener gets. Which is the great thing about it.

That’s the wonderful thing about music and songwriting and all these things is that I could have a completely different intention than the one that the listener actually establishes. And as a good example with that song is that a lot of kids and journalists have asked me if that’s an anti-war song. And I had never thought of it in that way, but I really like the idea.

So I guess they think it’s about soldiers in the desert or something and I really like that idea, but I didn’t think that. I wrote the song after having a dream about making love to this enormous woman. [Laughs] I was taking an afernoon nap and I was dreaming about making love to this woman who was about the size of a football field.

SSv: That is crazy. Although whenever I take naps in the middle of the day I usually have the strangest dreams.

Rice: It’s weird because you’re not supposed to be sleeping during that time, I don’t know what it is. Something is definitely going on in that mid-afternoon nap time. That’s why you can never trust old people because they do it all the time. They must be thinking about some crazy shit all the time.

SSv: Another thing I noticed about Further North is that most of the record was co-written with Jenny Lewis. I was curious, how do you guys write songs together? Do you start something and take it over to her and work on it together? Or do you both sit down and start from scratch?

Rice: On this record, you know, again it’s not always how it appears on paper necessarily. Jenny’s contribution to this album, a lot of people have assumed that it’s lyrical contributions. But to be honest with you, it was actually a more melodic and musical contribution. I think she kind of enjoyed stepping out of her usual role as a songwriter with her own material. With her own material she writes the music and the lyrics and they tend to have a certain character to them. With mine, I definitely wrote a majority of the lyrics myself but that definitely came through in a few though. We don’t really have a songwriting pattern. It came out of me, I played guitar and sang in her solo group that she had. She put out this record, Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins. Do you know that record?

SSv: I do!

Rice: Well, she put out that record and I joined her band and so we kind of found ourselves in these back stages in Berlin, Chicago, Detroit or wherever, we’d be backstage somewhere playing guitar bored for hours and it was around the time when I was writing all my new material so Jenny was around during that time. So, if I was playing something she might sit down and go ‘hey, what is that?’ or something. It was pretty natural. We certainly didn’t roll up our sleeves and get down to business or anything like that. It was very much a casual kind of thing.

SSv: Also just from reading your bio and hearing other things about you, besides working with Jenny, you’ve also done a live duet with Conor Oberst, you’ve opened for R.E.M. and Wilco and Ben Gibbard and been compared to Nick Drake and Ryan Adams and all those sort of esteemed artists that are clumped in with the indie side of the spectrum. Is it safe to say you’ve been acceped by the indie clique?

Rice: Clique. I don’t know. I’ve been very fortunate to observe and participate in the lives of some of the best artists working today and I think that the indie clique, that thing you just mentioned, is only really acknowledged by people who know nothing about it. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t think that thing really exists. I don’t think the indie clique exists. I don’t think it’s a real thing.

The lines are so blurred nowadays that indie rock isn’t really applicable to anyone. I actually at the moment don’t really have any friends who aren’t at least partially distributed by major corporations and things like that, so I think it would be safer to say the group of artists that I have earned a kind of camaraderie with are certainly to the left of the mainstream. But at the same time, just as anything happens in history, I’m kind of slowly watching my friends and artists that I don’t know become the new mainstream. That’s the inevitable path of anything, you know? Once you’re on the outside then you become on the inside.

SSv: Well, sort of what you said about “indie rock” not really being applicable anymore, I definitely agree with that, mostly just from the standpoint that people use it to describe such a variety of sound, but also I know that out in L.A. they have an indie radio station.

Rice: Indie 103.1

SSv: Exactly. But in Atlanta and we have country stations and rap stations and just one sort of generic alt. rock station. And even they’re playing The Shins and bands like that who are typically considered “indie.”

Rice: They do this thing here on KROQ, which is the biggest mainstream station in Los Angeles. It’s actually the most influential radio station in the country and when you turn on KROQ you’ll be hearing everything from “Nothing Else Matters” by Metallica to Limp Bizkit and all that kind of stuff, but they just announced a yearly show called KROQ’s acoustic Christmas and it’s where they get their favorite bands or the newest bands starting to break and I was listening to the radio the other day driving around and they said that the bands that are going to play this year are Feist, Spoon, The Shins and like Paramore and some of these other mainstream bands, but half the bands are really great bands that just a couple of years ago were on independent labels and couldn’t get arrested by the mainstream.

But that’s just the way that the tide is turning. And I think it’s a wonderful thing. The more people listening to Britt Daniel’s records, the better. The more people who can hear James Mercer’s voice, the better. I’m very pleased to see that and KROQ putting them on their thing, that’s acknowledgement of those artists, not only their creative work, but in terms of the station, it’s an acknowledgement of their share of the market. They are now very much a share of the marketplace. They’re making dollars out there which is what makes the world go round. Regardless of what anyone may say about it, there’s nothing fashonable or chic to say that within the indie community, but there are some indie rockers out there, my dear, who are out there getting rich.

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