Richard Thomas: So, have you ever been pursued by wild animals while on tour?

David Grubbs: Um, never. I can’t even picture what that would look like. I’m imagining feral dogs, but... no...

In my case it was wildfowl. A flock of geese. I've just been on tour in the Netherlands, in a studio and doing live shows. Anyway, on arrival in Rotterdam my colleagues and I were chased by geese. It was quite alarming, it sounded fantastic as well.

Were they faster than you expected?

I guess so, but it was just the sheer mass of them. There were about 40 of them. That was my first time in Europe since the pandemic. I had forgotten just how much of, to use a pretentious term, an oneiric experience touring is and I think Goodnight The Pleasure Was Ours conveys that really well. Have you ever read A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne?

I never have.

There’s this thing of extended or distended time. There’s a strange moment where the protagonist stays at a tavern in France and the landlord’s daughter is tasked with showing the protagonist to his room and he’s immediately entranced by her. And Sterne describes that moment over many pages. It’s like [US comedian] Larry David, this spiralling vortex of thoughts and projections and possible outcomes triggered by this expanded yet brief comic moment. It also reminds me of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Reveries Of The Solitary Walker, too. There’s a hallucinatory charge to the text, I wonder if that is motivated by speed. As I said earlier, with touring everything is accelerated and that’s kind of psychedelic.

I tend to imagine touring often as hurtling forward and being somewhat off balance and then pulled along by deadlines, schedules, load-in times, soundcheck times, things like that. I guess there is space for reverie and reflection but there’s also the manner of being pulled through the day's events.

Have you ever kept tour diaries?

I did on a very early tour. The first tour that I did in Europe with the group Bastro in 1989. It was a six week long tour, usually playing ten or more nights in a row and maybe every two weeks there would be a night off. And on our nights off we would be really bored, thinking why aren't we playing? I did keep a diary then, but otherwise no I haven't kept a diary. It's an interesting question and even kind of a surprising question, because it really didn't occur to me. It's funny reflecting on it now, because with other kinds of writing obviously I do my research, I gather materials, I do archival work, things like that. And with these three books there was really nothing of the sort. I think that the goal really was just to put myself in the situation of writing, and it was all what came out in the process of writing, and to reduce the possibility of distractions, excursions into boxes full of stuff.

What do you think about travel writing?

It’s not really a genre that speaks to me so much. I was in the habit for years of buying things like Lonely Planet guides and Rough Guides and things like that. I was going to Portugal last summer and I thought, oh, my guide book to Portugal is ten years out of date, and I went to a bookstore in Brooklyn and there were almost no travel guides for sale, but they sent me to the Travel Writing section. Which I think to my surprise made me realise how little I ponder travel writing as a genre. I thought that was interesting how the travel writing section had supplanted the travel guide section. I will say one thing about travel writing, I find myself easily swayed in terms of my reading just by someone recommending a book. When touring, the travel writing that I indulge in is literature coming from an area that I'm travelling to. So travel writing for me is literature that's key to where I’m likely to be spending time.

I hooked on to the travel writing thing because I thought that Goodnight The Pleasure Was Ours was a travelogue. One thing I was going to mention is that given the scope of this book, 30 years, is that it’s always the same thing. There’s no Day One, it’s always Day One. You know what I mean? When I was touring recently, I kind of had a déjà vu, or a jamais vu, everyday. It was a strange space to be in.

Yes. What you were saying about Day One followed by Day One – in my experience that’s often the case within an individual tour, and with this book I did want to capture that quality of repetition, but also of irreversible change over the course of playing music in different milieux and different constellations and in front of different kinds of audiences. I wanted to give the sense of it not being Groundhog Day, of this uncanny repetition of the same, but of something slowly and irreversibly happening over the longer arc of the period.

Goodnight The Pleasure Was Ours is a kind of longform prose poem but it’s also a kind of anthropology isn't it? I don’t see why those two things should be oppositional.

I don’t think they are distinct from one another. I was invited to speak remotely, a few months into the pandemic, about my 2018 book Now That The Audience Is Assembled, to Benjamin Tausig’s ethnomusicology class. And they were coming at the book completely differently. His students were approaching the book not at all through the lens of literature or poetry, but rather as if it were an anthropological or ethnomusicological text about experimental and improvised music.

Do you know Letters From Iceland by WH Auden and Louis MacNeice? It fuses poetry, prose, reportage, travelogue and other stuff.

No, I don’t. I just finished reading The Songs We Knew Best by Karin Roffman which is a biography of John Ashbery in his early years. It ends around the time that he won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, which is something Auden judged for a number of years in the late 1950s. Auden gave Ashbery a lift early on by selecting Ashbery’s first book [Some Trees] for this prize. But there's this great fact in it. Frank O'Hara and Ashbery both submitted manuscripts the same year and there was a lot of chatter [about who would win], and that was the year Auden decided that there should be no prize winner, he rejected both manuscripts. Yale University told Auden he wouldn't get his full honorarium because part of the honorarium consisted of writing an introduction to the volume of the winner, so Auden reversed himself and selected Ashbery [laughs]. So I've been thinking about Auden a little bit, and also because Ashbery’s Three Poems is the work that made me think about contextualising certain kinds of writing as prose poetry.

I was thinking about us talking earlier about the continuity of the book, and I was curious if you had any thoughts or observations about the books as a sequence in particular, and maybe this is owing to my own commercial instincts as an author, assuring people that you can read the books in any sequence. But if you’ve read them in sequence I’m curious to know what your thoughts are about that.

I have read them in sequence, but actually I also reread them all simultaneously. So I would jump between them and so on. That’s probably why my interview is so unfocused. I think it’s a triptych, really, rather than a trilogy. In the sense that a trilogy implies some sort of chronological development whereas with a triptych we know it’s three things that we perceive simultaneously that form a whole. I feel that Goodnight The Pleasure Was Ours is sensitive to the reader. I guess it’s the prose poetry dimension and the element of the space it gives to the reader to reflect on things.

It’s funny when you were talking about the space on the page. Where my mind went was thinking about the space on the page as a space for reflection and then you said precisely that and that resonated with me.

Do you think you make much of a distinction when you’re writing words which will interact with music, lyrics, or do you have the same modus operandi?

It used to be that song lyrics fulfilled whatever impulse I had to write, and in writing these books I feel like I have switched off the songwriter in me. That as a songwriter the lyrics that I’ve written have been so dense and compressed and compacted, and the altogether different sense of scale of writing these book length poems has made it very difficult for me to think about returning to writing song lyrics.

Thinking about writing, I quite like to use my phone for writing. Sometimes I like to take a photograph or video and that enables me to write a description of a place or situation in forensic detail. Detail that I wouldn’t be able to achieve if I were just doing it from memory. Do you ever use other sources for catalysing text?

I was thinking about this after saying earlier that I didn’t do much in the way of research, because I felt like it was in my head or I would stumble upon it during the process of writing. And yet the only research I did really was collecting photos. So for instance in The Voice In The Headphones there is a particular recording studio that much of it was modelled on. It was a studio that I hadn’t been in since the mid-1990s, and I found it extremely useful to dig up as many images from that studio as I could find online and compare those to my recollections. So some of the finer details do definitely come from describing photos. My mother was a professional photographer, and I spent time in the darkroom with her when I was really young. At a certain point I realised that my love of being in recording studios, the oceanic feeling of the recording studio, at a certain point, reminded me of being in the darkroom with my mother.

You talk about the oceanic feeling of the studio. I was going to mention the hermetic aspect of the studio which takes us to Hermes... fate, destiny, Hermes guiding you to the afterlife and the studio as a transformational, transportational space. I worked as a tape op/engineer in a studio when I was younger and the thing I always remember is, I’d end up recording lots of people that had never been in a studio before, and when they’d walk into the control room they would say, ‘Wow! This is like a 747...’, because the console and the lights and meters and so on reminded them of the flight console in a jet aircraft. One of the things I like about studios is their formality and that, to an extent, they’re a theatrical space.

When I started writing The Voice In The Headphones I thought, oh, this is a more difficult task than writing about a concert in Now That The Audience Is Assembled because there’s a certain lack of intensity and drama to the studio. There’s a line in The Voice In The Headphones, “Studio is the absence of push back”, because so much of Now That The Audience Has Assembled is about the confrontation between audience and performer, or among audience members. And the studio seemed relatively mellow and undramatic by comparison. Yet, I think over the course of writing it a lot of the intensities to do with deadlines and expense and, as you say, the formality of working in the studio, a lot of that became apparent to me, that the studio had its own particular intensity.

We talked in an email about my idea that Goodnight The Pleasure Was Ours is about fate – the fate of a band of musicians, and what could and could not happen to them on tour. You dismissed that angle, but I also talked about the various ideas of intimacy in each of the three books. Is that something you were actively thinking about when writing these books?

Can I go back a couple of steps to the word fate? I’m not sure it’s so much the idea or the concept of fate that I dismissed as the word itself. I think that I had a kind of allergic reaction to the word. I was also thinking after that, the one time I could recall the time I used ‘fate’ recently in my own writings, I was trying to describe, around the time that Now That The Audience Is Assembled was published, the difference between writing song lyrics and writing these books, and I said that one of the things that had struck me is that song lyrics have this strange fate that they have to be sung. That’s a primary demand of the song lyric, or there’s a dual demand perhaps that they work in written form as well as being sung. I guess inevitability is a word that I could work with a little bit better than fate.

I guess fate is a little bit portentous. Serendipity I guess is something.

I’m also thinking about how we pivoted away from talking about intimacy and that probably seems significant [laughs]. I think with these books I describe the intimacy of the listening experience and the intimacy of concentration and of thought and things like that, but they are about performance and not much of the intimacy between the people in these books. In particular, Goodnight The Pleasure Was Ours describes the distance among people who are living in a very intimate, close setting on the road. Primarily I have played in bands populated by men who aren’t always the best at addressing intimacy and speaking of intimate things. It’s usually, in my experience, ten years after you have stopped playing music with someone that you get to know that person much better.

A lot of the van life that’s described in Goodnight The Pleasure Was Ours is of men in their twenties who are reluctant to become too close to one another. I am 54 years old now and if I were in a van with people, male or female, I think that I would be having very different conversation with them than I did 30 years ago when I was in my twenties. Then, I wasn’t asking people about their families or their relationships, and I wasn't expecting people to be open or critical about their backgrounds.

David Grubbs’s Now That The Audience Is Assembled, The Voice In The Headphones and Goodnight The Pleasure Was Ours are all published by Duke University Press. You can read a review of the most recent in The Wire 458 via Exact Editions and keep up to date with his latest reading events over at twitter.com/blackfaurest.