An Interview with J.T. Nero, Birds of Chicago: I See You
Birds of Chicago releases its latest record, Love in Wartime, on Friday, May 4, on the western-Mass label Signature Sounds. It’s a gem. It rocks, it’s poppy sometimes, and the songs just explore so much emotional and sonic space that you’ll find yourself listening again and again. I got to chat with JT Nero, who writes songs, sings, and plays guitar for BOC. He was driving from Chicago to Nashville, changing time zones occasionally, and thanked me for distracting him from the most “aggressively uninteresting” part of the drive. Read on, it’s a good one.
RLR: This album feels like it’s centered a lot on resilience. How do you think about this set of songs in conversation with each other?
JTN: I’m glad you hear that, because that was a big theme. There were a few sort of imperatives for us going into it. We knew we wanted to make a little more of a rock n’ roll record, a little more of a record with some dynamic peaks and valleys, with more of an arc, and peaks and valleys that reflect the dynamic scope of what we do live. The previous record, Real Midnight–we’re all very proud of that record, but it felt like it was occupying a kind of somber, melancholy space. And it physically reflected that as well, in its sparseness. That suite of songs really asked for that, and that’s why Joe Henry was the absolute perfect producer to help shepherd those songs along. But there was no doubt when we finished Real Midnight that we had a gut-level urge to make not just a rock record but something that had a kind of cinematic scope to it.
With that in mind, if you’re going for wider breadth, the question is how to establish your throughlines, so that things feel connected, like they are all supposed to be there on the same record together. For us, the answer was the emotional core of the record, and resilience is a big theme. If you really want to boil it down, it’s basically a concept album about love. Love in the kind of everyday, the small covenants between people that, of course, are not small at all. And then also “Love” in the all-caps, celestial variety; they’re all part of one thing. An underpinning [idea for us] is: love is an act of bravery, and the purest act of bravery. There’s no doubt that that has always been true. But given the particular feeling of turmoil and dread for a lot of people that is toxifying our culture right now, those notions had a certain urgency to them.
RLR: Building on that, I would love to talk a bit about the title track, which seems so important. It opens with this very mundane but powerful scene: “I woke up, you woke up, filled your cup, filled my cup, we sat there and tried to remember our dreams” and expands to really broad and abstract ideas: “we are not made from metals’ hammar, we are lightning, clay, and grammar, we’re the whispers in the dark when the night comes round.” I can imagine many people being stuck in one of those places (mundane or abstract), but this song really moves back and forth and I was hoping you could talk about that song’s development and how you puzzled it out.
JTN: Artistically, it’s always been my tendency that the macro is particularly bewildering and terrifying. I tend to re-entrench and dig in on the micro because it feels like the thing you can wrap your head around. Part of that is acknowledgement that there is no micro. We talk so much about the general feeling of disconnection and disaffection between humans, between souls, and all of the forces that exacerbate that disconnection between people. But the hard truth is that connection in a real way is never easy and never has been easy. That first scene starts off waking up in the morning, coming out of your subconscious, and that basic desire to mingle your sense of the world with another person, presumably the person who’s closest to you in the world. But that’s always the first battle and it all unfolds from there.
RLR: You said ‘connection is never easy,’ and you said before that you’re thinking about love in this broad sense, and it feels like that level of connection shouldn’t be easy.
JTN: No! No. There is a bit of that notion, “Nothing’s valuable that’s not hard-won,” and maybe that’s a bit of the Irish/Scottish tint through which I see the world. And that’s part of what’s going on in this record. That’s beauty, art; John Keats, the light and shadow intensified get high relief. The more perilous things feel, the forces on the periphery that feel particularly venomous or dangerous, the darker that is, the more intense your experience, the more precious, more rarefied the love and the joy feels when you can carve it out. That tension, that negotiation, that’s a constant.
JTN: The nice thing about that is that it didn’t need to be an intellectual process, it just sort of followed a gut level. One of the things I value so highly about this band is it’s a tribe of musicians and we’ve definitely reached hivemind status. There’s a strong intuitive bond. As always, with any good relationship or team, every once in a while you are reminded of all the conversations you don’t have to have with these people. You can be in a situation where you have to articulate process for someone who is outside that [group] and you think, “Oh yeah, that’s right, we never have to talk about that.” And we’re constantly discussing things, but on that basic level, we were just in that place. A lot of times, the songs sort of tell you as well.
The previous work, Real Midnight asked to be handled with a certain kind of delicacy, so there was a sense of extra restraint on the last record. But interestingly, when we play a lot of those songs live, they reassert themselves in a different way, and they have a little more arc to them. And that’s an interesting process as well, the way songs grow up live. Playing as often as we do, 180 shows a year, a lot of that just kind of works itself out night in, night out.
So luckily, there was not too much precognition, which is the enemy of a lot of good music and good art. You don’t want to be getting too attached to any kind of blueprint; at least I don’t.
RLR: So as the hivemind is working together, what are you listening for as you’re developing a song together to know what the song is asking for?
JTN: I guess I’ll answer that in terms of writing the songs and arranging with the band and they both have similar trajectories.
I remember when I was starting to write songs, a lot of times it would be like you’re creative writing grad student: you write out a poem with some big ideas, and then you set about trying to hammer it into a chord structure and a melody. And there are probably some good songs written that way, but when I was writing that way, I never really felt like I was dipping my hand in that underground river of consciousness that we humans have, that is really raw and palpable.
More and more, what usually happens now is there will be a little fragment of melody that has a few syllables attached to it that loops itself in my head. And if it’s good, the best way to describe it is you see the tail of–you know, pick your deep-sea fish–great white whale, and there’s this rush of excitement, like the chase is on. With that excitement, it’s not about “Maybe I’m going to write a song.” It’s “Oh! The white whale is out there, and I just have to hunt it down.” Another metaphor to think about is when sculptors talk about the idea that the sculpture is already in that slab of rock, you’re just fighting through to get at it. So for me, it’s waiting for that rush of excitement and that moment where you know there’s a whole song.
When we bring it to the band, that process repeats itself, where we sort of take it apart and put it back together and people get on different instruments. There’s not a lot of talk when we’re trying things, but there’s a moment when something locks in, and it’s like, “There it is, now we’re on the path.” And now the race is on, and there’s an escalating excitement. And you rely on that intuitive thing, because people have to be willing to try things out; sometimes when you’re trying something, you know almost immediately they’re going to get scrapped. But everybody has to have the comfort level to throw those things out and scrap them, and when there’s no egos attached to the ideas as they come. When you have a group of people together where that can happen in a real time, it’s a special thing.
RLR: I’m thinking about some of the specific songs on the record, and on the song “Try,” you cover a lot of emotional ground with very spare lyrics. Even just the repetition in the song, but the nuance with every repetition is incredible. How do you think about finding the emotional core of the song?
JTN: That feeling that you talk about, that’s what you’re always chasing in popular music. Sometimes you stumble across a phrase and you’re just needing to say it, and if you’re needing to say it, then it’s taking a lot of the initial work out. Just acknowledging, “I need to say that over and over.” That it’s a mantra. And then you work backwards: why do I need to say that? What are some set-pieces that are related to where I’m at that might be pushing that phrase to the forefront and causing that need? The nice thing about songs and when you stumble across that broad urge, the beauty is that people are going to pour their own narratives and their own needs into that thing, and that’s part of the community of music. There are specific emotional things for me that brought that to the fore, but who does haven’t someone they want to tell to try a little harder?
JTN: So much of what this this record is about is recognition. For all the yoga practitioners out there in that basic namaste sense: I see you, I honor you. The importance of that, the difficulty of that, but everything starts from that. So there’s instances on the record where it’s happening in that immediate person-to-person level, and this one just pulls back a little bit and it’s written from a Chicagoan, northerner literally to Baton Rouge. Baton Rouge is a proud city, with a lot of history; and it has a lot of wounds and troubles. When I wrote it, they had just had the violence with the police force, and then they got hit with that incredible flood. And living in Chicago, at least from the police force side of it, we have very similar problems, and I was thinking about how northerners sometimes when ugly stuff happens down south, northern-folks like to pretend that we’re not dealing with the same wounds. There’s the line, “Baton Rouge, you’re beating heart is my heart.” So it was coming from that basic beginning point: not only do I see you, I am you.
RLR: A few years ago, you said this in an interview: “There’s something about words and music that lets us, for little brief windows, love each other better than we can any other time.” How has that sentiment deepened or changed over the past few years?
JTN: We are in a climate right now–and this is happening just culturally in general, but it’s been accelerated with our current leadership–where there is a numbing of people’s sensory, emotional receptors to language. In some ways, it’s a self-defense thing, because if you were really to let the language we’re hearing every day the way it would for a person in 1850, you’d throw yourself out a window. So there’s an almost necessary deadening, but that has a lot of ramifications, and I think we’re worse for it.
Words connected to song, for whatever the reasons, seems to have the ability, if you’re hitting it right, to re-electrify those nerve centers and reconnect what those words mean with the receiver.
Shit man, sometimes I hear myself talk about this, and you can sound really precious really quickly. And it’s still only rock n’ roll. But for me, I do know there is a way that I feel after a really good session, seeing a good show, hearing a song you immediately love without having the think about it, there is a way I feel that is unlike any other feeling. There is a basic, floor, gut-level optimism that is shot-through that feeling.
I don’t want to sound like we’re like overstating the importance of what goes on at any given show, but there is—if you just ask somebody, what are the actual possible avenues or venues or moments where people who see things very differently politically, religiously, et cetera, could actually be together in a shared space and have a common human experience? I think we can all acknowledge, those are few and far between, but I think music is still one of those territories.
This is a crazy-good album, my friends. It’ll keep you good company as this long winter gives way to birds and flowers and sun. Pick it up on Friday (direct from the label who is offering Cds and vinyl at a discount on release day.. for one day only), turn it up over the weekend, and get out to a Birds of Chicago show. Tour info is here.
Photo Credit: Yve Assad