An Interview with Bhi Bhiman: Peace of Mind
Bhi Bhiman has the type of voice that stops you in the middle of whatever it is you thought was so important and makes you listen. I clearly remember throwing on a new daytrotter session years ago and hearing this soaring, powerful, totally unique croon: “A buzzard riding the rails / I steal my meals when all else fails.” Since that first record, Bhiman, Bhi’s work has broadened in scope and sound, but has maintained a dark humor and moral clarity that I haven’t heard in such perfect combination since Warren Zevon.
Bhi released his latest album, Peace of Mind, as a podcast this year, and I strongly urge you to both listen to the album and subscribe to the podcast. It’s a fascinating project. I’m not an early adopter by nature, so count me among the skeptics when anyone tries anything new; it took me exactly one episode of the Peace of Mind podcast to realize that this is an incredibly powerful way to use new technologies to provide what people always say they miss from liner notes and the tangible packaging of LPs and CDs: a bigger picture. This is not a Song Exploder redux; it’s taking us deeper into the issues that Bhi sings about with people who really work on voting rights, immigration, mental health, and more. But none of it would work if the songs weren’t damn good, and they are. It’s a broad album, in terms of sound and in terms of topics. We got to chat with Bhi ahead of a run of shows up the east coast about the new record, writing in this particular political moment, and taking a chance on this new way of releasing music.
RLR: There’s a huge emotional range on this record: it’s angry, it’s funny, it’s sorrowful, it’s hopeful. As you were choosing the songs, how important was it for you to have that full range of emotional quality?
BB: I guess when you’re talking about emotions, there’s a couple things: there’s songwriting, so the lyrics and the story of the song; and then there’s my singing and the way I’m emoting the lyrics; and then how energetic or solemn the music is. It’s funny, because sometimes people will see things that I don’t know are there. But it definitely starts with the songs: the lyrics, the chord structures, the melodies. And I have different versions of songs, where some are lowkey, low tempo, and that’s not working, and I change something to find the right emotional component.
In terms of balancing the record, I had maybe fifteen songs that I was considering, and only eight or nine made the album. Sometimes a good song doesn’t fit the style of the record. It’s kind of painful, but it also makes the album better. And that can be funny in this streaming age, where albums don’t matter as much, but I guess I’m a tiny bit old school in that way.
RLR: Is it helpful to you, creatively, to think in terms of an album?
BB: I think that’s true, for sure. For this particular project, it came together a bit more piecemeal. I was writing kind of haphazardly, where I wasn’t really [so much] considering an album, as much as I had a focus, in terms of the songwriting on some of the topics I discuss.
My first record, Bhiman, was heavily inspired by things like Blood on the Tracks. My next one [Rhythm & Reason] was a bit more sixties R&B–it was more electric, with rock and soul mixed in. On this one, I was taking cues from modern music, in terms of sounds and styles, and producers. I was heavily influenced by Top 40 stuff for the past few years, but then it goes through my heavy classic rock background.
RLR: You’ve got a huge range of sounds on this record, and I was wondering how you think about taking it on the road with a live show.
BB: Half of it is kind of electronic, and half of it is organic, but [playing it live] was afterthought–it was a move-fast-and-break-shit mentality. And I didn’t really know how to bring it on the road, but it wasn’t a concern at that time. It was just: how do I make this song as good as it can be? Since I recorded the album, I’ve worked on the live show, and it literally requires some tracks to pull off, using software and computers. But, at this point, that’s kind of normal, at least across a lot of music.
RLR: On “Beyond the Border,” you sing “I’ve been saying for so long that something’s wrong.” Some folks might think this album is about Trump and this moment we are in but many of the problems are about our culture and values that preceded Trump’s election, especially for people who have been marginalized and oppressed. How do you think about helping people see this bigger picture that is, and is not, about who is in the white house?
BB: I don’t know. I have mixed feelings about protest music. I’m a huge fan, but I certainly know its limits. It’s just entertainment on the low-end, and you could say it’s art on the high end of the spectrum. The Beatles are the biggest band ever and they sang about love, and I don’t know what kind of impact it made. So you have to take everything with a grain of salt, in that regard.
This isn’t about Trump. It is, but it isn’t. I have mixed feelings about politics and music: this is one of the craziest political times in our history, and still in the popular world of music, politics is taboo. Music is mainly escapism. I get it, and I like that escapism sometimes, but it doesn’t make sense to me why there’s so little sociopolitical stuff in the face of this crazy time. So, Donald Trump didn’t make me political, he just put me on steroids.
RLR: I think you’re right that most of the reason political music is avoided is because of fear that it will cost you your career. But I also feel like everything is happening so fast right now that it’s hard to get your arms around it.
BB: It’s really crazy, and it’s disheartening. And it’s exacerbated by twitter, instagram, and facebook. You could be on instagram for ten minutes and then literally not know what you just looked at.
Not long ago, even just the way people ingested news, you had to read it or watch TV, but TV was a lot more mild. So it’s no wonder that these places are battlegrounds for espionage or psychological warfare: people are holding it in their hands all the time. Even where facebook stored unencrypted passwords that anybody at facebook could look at–they’ve gone through scandal after scandal and nobody is deleting their facebook account.
RLR: I think I heard on the podcast that it was Katie’s idea initially for the podcast – can you take us through that initial conversation and what you both thought about in terms of what this concept could be and what it definitely should not be?
BB: Katie’s been a huge fan of podcasts, and she said, “You know it would be interesting to release your next album as a podcast.” I was thinking of it as releasing my songs as mp3s on a podcast, as eight or nine songs as three-minute songs. She talked some sense into me that it wasn’t really good enough.
I didn’t really know what I was doing. I knew I had interesting people, and I knew I would interview them, and then we’d figure it out. And that’s how I record music too: let’s get good shit, and I have faith that we’ll figure something out.
I interviewed Glynn, and I knew what I wanted to interview him about. He grew up in a religious cult and I knew I wanted to ask him, as someone with a lot of experience, to connect it to our current political experience, where people don’t listen to each other and Donald Trump is kind of a cult leader.
The album was done in December, 2017, so the album came first, and then the podcast idea was afterwards. All my songs had a theme. Like “Beyond the Border” is loosely about immigration, but it’s about a head of a household being deported and the rest of the family back in the US, and the strain on family life. In the episode, we go way deeper; I talk to Ahilan Arulanantham, who works for the ACLU’s Immigrant Rights Project. So he’s doing frontline work, and he’s pleading the cases for the ACLU. He’s the last line of defense there. These people know so much and I wanted to talk with some smart people who are very experienced in these issues that I touch upon in the songs.
In another song [“Eeenie Meenie”], I look at voting rights and gerrymandering and voter suppression. And I take the role of the bad guy in that song, where I am suppressing votes and doing it with a lot of joy.
There’s a mental health episode, a Russia episode. So as we started compiling a few interviews, we started to see where people would slot in and choosing the best guests we could get.
RLR: It seems like you really thought through when you should be speaking and when others should really take the lead, with this spirit of allyship. How did you think about talking with people on the podcast when you were showing up as an ally?
BB: A mantra of mine is: say what I have to say and get out of the way. I am the least knowledgeable person in all these interviews. We choose guests as widely as we can and let them go.
All of this has been a learning experience. The first interview I did was with Dave Eggers, and I was stepping all over his tape. We had some other people working on the pod and they were like: you gotta stop doing that. So learning to shut up was a skill I had to learn.
I didn’t have major stars on. The news is just so day-to-day, that there’s rarely a 30,000 foot view. It’s nice to get a longer term view, and the people who have that perspective are the people who have been working on these things on the ground. To me, it was always about this crazy time, and I wanted to make a kind of time capsule, so if someone listens to this ten years from now, they’d have a pretty good idea of what the political situation was like. And I assume it will be kind of hard to fathom…hopefully.
Hopefully, indeed.
Be sure to get out to City Winery this Saturday, April 20 to hear these fantastic songs live. If you’re in DC and NYC, he’s coming your way too: tour dates are here.