DADGAD Coffeehouse - Interviews

Paul Riechmann
by Janyce Boynton

Lund

During childhood in Evansville, Indiana, Paul Riechmann took piano lessons and sang in a choir. Later he learned trombone in high school and then guitar after graduation. While working on a masters degree, he took a year of classical guitar lessons at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. During the nineties, he learned to play the stand-up bass, joined a church choir, bought a steel string guitar, and began performing in public. He also started to write songs at this time. The events of September, 11 2001, brought him out of a songwriting lull as he explains.

I wrote a sad song about dignity in the face of death following the attacks. A lot of people came to me with tears in their eyes, showing me exactly how they felt. I actually moved them and that felt like permission to write other sad songs. Several said I should record it, but I just blew it off because people are always saying nice things about my songs. They hardly ever say anything critical. I learned to ignore that. Kay Gardner said, "No, Paul, you really do need to record this." That was affirming! Kay wasn’t nice for the sake of being nice--part of her appeal. She could be sort of grouchy, but always in a loving way. It changed my self-perception. She hooked me up with the John Dyer studio in Blue Hill. I took a drummer and back-up singer there and recorded that song. That just got me going. I thought, "I’m a song-writer, now. I’m recording, so it’s okay to write more."

How would you describe yourself as a musician?
I have a soft spot for African-American music. I grew up in a southern Indiana town. I won’t say that Black people were my friends, because that didn’t happen in Evansville, Indiana. Their music was around and I saw their plight. There were uprisings and riots. I always liked the blues for how it helps you deal with feelings. Somehow I never


	I want at least one of my songs to be recorded by a national recording artist.

think of blues as sad. It has a rhythm, it can swing, and you can dance to it. I like to feel my body moving when I play. Did I use the word dignity, yet? Watching Black people work around us--around us White people in Indiana--there were some great people. They were so mistreated and looked down upon—patronized. You could just look in their eyes. I think I knew what they were feeling. They carried themselves with such dignity. That’s always impressed me. Somehow that’s just all part of the music attraction. The older I get, the more I feel that life is hard, unfair, and ends too soon. To face all that with dignity is a real challenge. Music helps—especially the music of Black people. I’m not much for happy tin-pan alley songs. Nor am I attracted to most of what you’d hear on the radio. The other element is Appalachian music. I grew up on the Mason-Dixon line. My mom’s from Kentucky. I wasn’t conscious of being a fan of that music as a child, but certainly hillbilly music was all around me. The recent popularity of people like Gillian Welch has really tickled me. I say, "Oh, yeah, I grew up with a lot this stuff."

Have there been other musical experiences that inspired you?
A few years ago, I bought a stand up acoustic bass, thinking that people would ask me to play with them--which is true. You’ve got to know music theory to play bass. Usually, if you’re playing jazz or popular music, you don’t have a bass line written out--just chords or, maybe not even that. I think about theory when I’m writing a song. It helps me think about what other chords I can throw in there or where this chord progression might resolve. For one and half seasons, I played with the University of Maine orchestra. I was over my head, but it certainly helped me get better at bowing, and it helped me appreciate what it would mean to be a really good bass player. Orchestra music doesn’t swing, it’s beautiful music, but I almost found it hard to get back into the popular, folky, bluesy music I like to do. Jazz on the other hand, that does influence my other playing and writing in a way that I like, because jazz swings and jazz is Black.

What are your aspirations as a musician?
I want at least one of my songs to be recorded by a national recording artist. I’d like to hear my song in an elevator. I started writing one of my clever songs about this, but it sort of self-destructed. I want to have a CD, but It’s not an aspiration to sell these. Every once in a while several of us going somewhere together to play a set of music for one night is appealing to me. You’d have to rehearse and you’d have to get together and that’s community.

How do you make music a priority?
What I’ve found helps a lot is having something like the DADGAD Coffeehouse where I can write one song and maybe get one person to rehearse it with me and perform it once. Doing that sometimes feels really difficult, but at least that helps me step in the direction of what I aspire to. I’m performance motivated. It would be hard for me to write songs if I didn’t know that I was going to sing them. That helps keep me going. If there’s no gig coming up in the next two or three months, I start to get irritable. I haven’t been very good at motivating myself to practice or write or get people together. I’m hoping that the recording studio will help when there’s no gig coming up, at least we can polish everything up and get it on a CD.

Do you have any performance tips or practice tips?
Stand up. You move more and it probably opens up your lungs or chest. I think it’s more compelling to the audience. When I’m getting ready for a performance, I put a microphone or something like a microphone in my face to give me that feeling of what it’s going to be like while I’m singing and trying to play guitar. Where am I going to put the music? Where am I going to put the microphone? How am I going to see? If there’s someone else on stage, how are we going to


It makes me happy to write sad songs.

communicate? If I’m going to sing with other people, practice with them. Stand like you’re going to stand on stage. I think about whether I’m going to say anything about the song on stage. Things that other people do that I wish I did: smile, have a good time. I think it’s a good thing to think about. As I listen to music lately, I’ve been thinking, "How important to this song are the words?" In most songs, the words aren’t very important. In my songs the words are always very important. I’ve been complimented on that, and it makes me feel like every song should just be chock full of meaningful words. I’m listening to the music I like and sometimes I don’t even know what the words are. It’s music, and the voice is just another instrument. I’ve been thinking, can I write songs like that? Or am I eternally in this rut of only writing songs where everything revolves around the lyrics? I like to listen to songs that are not like the songs I write. What moves me is the feeling of the music and the way the words are sung, but not necessarily the words themselves. The words of a Ricky Lee Jones song are important, but Ricky Lee Jones is an instrument, she’s not a lyricist. The words in a Gillian Welch song are extremely important, but what’s much more important is the interplay between her, the harmony vocal and their two guitars and the whole feeling they create and maintain for a whole album one album after another.

When you're composing a song, which comes first, the lyrics or the music?
Usually what comes first for me is a phrase, a single sentence. That usually becomes the lead line of the chorus or the lead line of the first verse. Very soon thereafter, there’s a melody that’s informed by just the syllables and the feeling of that one phrase. It is my kernel and the pearl grows around that. Once I have that, a lot of chord progressions quickly fall into place, usually too quickly. Then I go back and try to make it more interesting--do things that aren’t as predictable. Every song instantly turns into a three chord song. Can I add a bridge or something where I change key or add a couple of chords? There are some real basic tips, like, make sure your song has a wide enough range in the notes. If you’re only going up and down three or four notes in the melody, then try to add a chorus or bridge where you start jumping as much as an octave. Beatles songs almost all have a range of over an octave. I aspire to that and, amazingly, very few of my songs even get up to an octave. It’s more difficult than I thought it would be. I mean you can do it, but it sounds silly if you just do it artificially. It doesn’t work. The good ones (the September 11th song, the song I wrote after my friends Kay and Bill died, and the song I wrote after my Dad’s funeral) are where I had feelings and all of a sudden this song comes out and I just start writing. Usually the music follows very quickly or it is right there with the words. My clever songs tend not to be as good. Some of them are okay, but they are harder to write--the cleverness takes over, the metaphor takes over. I have a hard time putting them to music.

You write interesting and complex harmony parts.
There’s something about my harmonies. I don’t know enough about musicology to say exactly what the influences are, but again, it’s that Appalachian thing. It’s that having notes pretty close together. I like harmonies that create a bit of tension. Like a spiritual I wrote to the Maya Angelou lyrics "Shine on Me Sunshine." I knew the melody was going to be three-part harmony and wrote the harmonies as triads. I wrote the score and played it through a computer and thought, "That’s dull" and not at all what I wanted, but nothing’s wrong. It sounded like church music. I want this to be a spiritual, to hear pain, to hear tension, and to hear this wail. I took one part and move a note. I could also just listen to it or play it on the guitar and figure it out. I wish I had the language. I know what I like when I hear it, aesthetically pleasing, but not a pretty sound. Usually, it’s a bluesy, spiritual sound there that reflects some sort of pain in life. I like that. It makes me happy. It makes me happy to write sad songs. [laughing] It makes me sad to write happy songs.