Shearwater

A conversation with Jonathan Meiburg

(May 2005)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

Few bands can boast a songwriting tandem as affecting as Shearwater's Jonathan Meiburg and Will Sheff (who also play together in Okkervil River).  Last year's Winged Life was a graceful, heartbreaking record, and the recently released EP, Thieves, is composed of songs taken from those same sessions, although showcasing a slightly wider spectrum of the band's sound.  Reaching out from a tour van in the Midwest, Meiburg chats about roads less traveled, both musically and geographically.

What had you been doing prior to forming Shearwater?

I was in a band with a group of friends from high school.  We had a band together in Austin.  I did this weird thing where I traveled around the world to remote places for a year, on a fellowship. 

Where did your travels take you? 

I went to Tierra del Fuego and the Falklands and an Aboriginal settlement in Australia and some little islands off New Zealand called the Chatham Islands and an Inuit settlement in the Arctic.

Wow.  This was an ornithological study?

Well, the idea was to look at human communities that were isolated at the so-called ends of the earth.  But that trip was when I got into birds, yeah.  I didn’t start out being into birds, but all these places had fantastic birds with people trying to study them, so I fell in with them and started learning about it.

Once you got back to Austin and started playing with Will [Sheff], how long was it until you realized that there was an actual band there?

The idea, I think, was for the first record to be a one-off, but we ended up really liking what happened with that record—we loved the feel of it and the energy of it.  Over time, it gradually evolved into a live band that was actually good (laughs) and has its own aesthetic approach that is different from Okkervil and certainly different from anything I’d done before.

How does the songwriting partnership work?  Do each of you bring in songs intact? 

Yeah, usually we’ll get into a pretty advanced stage before sharing them with each other, and then we’ll make suggestions and do arrangements together.

There’s a real sense of continuity on the albums, regardless of who is the primary songwriter, but there are also definite divergences.  What in your mind distinguishes the two styles?

Will tends to be much more narrative and concrete with his lyrics.  Not all of the time, but his songs often tell very specific stories.  Some of mine do, too, but I think I can be a little more abstract.  I’m actually getting more and more into that.  I’m writing more of the next Shearwater record and it’s going to go further into the territory of “Mountain Laurel” and “I Can’t Wait” from Thieves and veer away from the narratives.  You’re gonna get more elaborate arrangements and less conventional song structures.  I want it to be sort of darker and stranger and more unnerving.  (laughs)  I want to suggest things rather than say them outright.  I’m much more interested now in making music that’s really intimate but also really opaque at the same time.  You feel like it’s letting you in but also pushing you away.  We had a review of one of our shows at South by Southwest that said that despite it was a really intense performance, it didn’t reveal anything about my personality.  I could have kissed the reviewer.  That’s exactly what I want.  I don’t want you to know anything about me.  I want you to identify with the songs, but not because you think you identify with me. 

Some of Will’s songs, on the other hand, are almost more like short stories.

Yeah, you can completely follow it from beginning to end.  I love that.  I think “My Good Deed” from Winged Life is a wonderful story, and also especially “Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine.”

Is the “side project” tag still sticking around?

Oh, yeah.  I’m sick of that, but I think we’re starting to shed that.  It just isn’t so—it’s a whole different band with a whole different agenda.

It’s just the two of you who are common members?

Howard also plays with Okkervil sometimes.  But Will won’t be on our tour with the Mountain Goats because there’s an Okkervil tour happening at the same time.  It’s also evolved—when we started Shearwater, Will and I were frustrated with the things we were doing at the time, feeling unable to write the songs we wanted to write and play the things we wanted to play.  But things have changed.  I think Okkervil is really doing everything that Will wants it to do, and Shearwater has become more of my thing.

Meanwhile, what’s your status as a student?  Still working on that Master's?   

(laughs)  I can see the whites of its eyes, actually – I’m very nearly done with my master’s thesis.  I think I’m going to stop there for now.  I worked for a couple weeks intensively before this rabid touring started, and as soon as the touring is over, I’m going to go back to it.  I was really delighted to find that when I did go back to it, I was still interested in it, even years down the road.  It’s a fascinating study subject and I’m every bit as enthusiastic about it as when I started.  In fact, I may be going back to the Falklands for the first time since ’97.  Basically they’re going to redo the same survey that I worked on down there in the first place. 

What’s the program?

It’s in geography, concentrated in biogeography.  Biogeography is the study of the distribution of life on earth, basically.  My thesis, then, is on why this bird is where it is.  It has a very limited range, it’s only on the few islands in Tierra del Fuego and the Falklands.

You said once that the Holy Grail of indie rock was to be able to eke out a living doing it.  Have you achieved the Grail yet?

No, I’ve achieved a Styrofoam cup.  Definitely in some ways I’m living more hand to mouth than I ever have in my life.  At the same time, things seem like they’re on a pretty good trajectory. 

The songs on the Thieves EP have been around for awhile, right?

Yeah, that’s right.  I recorded them during the Winged Life sessions, but we didn’t want to have an hour-long record and ended up leaving them off after much hand-wringing.  In a lot of ways, it shows the entire range of what we do, or what we were doing at that point.  That wasn’t apparent to me until we sequenced it. 

Was it a conscious decision to put Shearwater on a different labelthan Okkervil?

No, it just worked out that way.  We had the demos for the second record and were getting them around to whoever might be interested.  Misra was looking to sign some new people and we really liked them.  It turned out nicely because then you have two separate teams working. 

Everyone knows all about the many splendors about Austin…  What’s the worst thing about it?

(laughs)  It’s so hard to say.  I love it more and more every time we go touring because I see all these other cities, and there are great things about all of them, but Austin is special.  It’s so relaxed and it’s a friendly place to have a home base and be able to decompress.  The summers are beastly hot, and it is in Texas—that’s an inescapable fact—and Texas has a lot of unappealing qualities.  I’m sorry, but I don’t have anything to tell you!  My rent keeps going down, what can I say?   

Well, I feel your love.  Your van is on its way right now to Madison—that’s my Austin.

I’ve always felt at home there.  I’ve always enjoyed playing in Madison—and Chicago, too. 

So “Wedding Bells” on Winged Life is a heartbreaker for me.  It’s my post-Madison song.

Aww!  That’s great to hear.  That song really communicates a thing that I don’t think I’ve heard in another song.  It’s not entirely autobiographical from Will’s point of view or anything, but it really resonates with me.  You find yourself getting older and older and without a lot of the securities that a lot of your friends with more conventional lives enjoy.  So you’re longing for that security, but at the same time feeling like you can’t be doing anything besides what you’re doing.