Tuck Everlasting : Andy Tuck of The Greens (part one)
05/02/20090 Comment(s) Andy Tuck has played more gigs than you. He's also written more songs than you. Spend an afternoon with him, and you'll see a man that was clearly born to do both. While many songwriters wrangle with the muse for hours just to get a line, Andy's creative switch is stuck in the "on" position. Anything in his life can, and most likely will, get worked into song, and at the drop of a hat. For Andy, responding to everyday life through spontaneous song really is as natural as breathing.
Andy's band, The Greens, is fun to see live. You'll have no problem finding a date to check them out; They play almost non-stop throughout the East coast.
www.thegreensmusic.com
www.myspace.com/thegreens
How was the gig last night?
Oh, it was good, man. It got a little rowdy.
Did it?
Things were thrown. (laughs) It was good. We played well. We had Tony (Castillo) with us on second set. Always makes for a bigger, better sound. Tony’s a special dude, man.
I want to ask you about your songwriting ideas. How long have you been writing?
I began to write songs on guitar when I was 15, so about 15 years now.
Do you start out with a particular lyric, or a chord, riff, melody?
To me it is a mysterious process, because it’s never a formula, it’s always sort of a… simultaneous, or “not linear” process. Sometimes I’ll just put my hands on a guitar and come up with something. I have pages and pages of lyrics that have never been matched up to music. Other times I’ll come up with a melody. That’s where the work, the craft, comes in. You really work to get the phrasing of the words to the melody. You really have to hammer it out. Generally, it is music put to words rather than words put to music.
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Gibbie's, Morgantown, WVDo you feel your writing approach has changed over the years?
When I first started writing songs, it would be very self-involved. I’d write about how crappy probation was, and how bad it was to be a teenager... (laughs)
I think probably the approach to it has remained rather pure, in that I sit down, and have the guitar, and pencil, paper, a tape recorder, and just the joy of creation has remained the same. But I think that the method has gotten a little more sophisticated as I’ve gotten older and had more experiences to write about.
Do you tend to write a song in one fell swoop, or do you have to mull it over for a period of time?
That’s a good one, because a lot of the time, it will come in a flash of inspiration, or insight, or whatever you want to call it. I’ll get a verse and a chorus, and then the rest of it will pretty much write itself. That’s when you feel like you’re really doing the work of God -- He, or She, or It, or whatever -- is beaming inspiration to you and you’re just open to it. Those are rare. Otherwise, it’s more of a “catch as catch can” sort of approach. Lately, it’s taken me a lot longer to write a song that I’m happy with as a complete whole. I wrote a song called “Thunderwear!” (on Broken Science, Vol. II), and it totally wrote itself, then the songs I’ve been writing recently have been taking weeks or months to be done.
Do you ever give up on a song? Do you ever feel like a song just isn’t going anywhere and you just have to trash it or put it on the shelf?
All the time. I have far more unfinished songs than I do finished. A finished song is like a sculpture or a painting or something that you can hang up and be like “It’s done. Look at it, it’s great.” There are so many more songs that will never be finished, you know? You sit, and you hammer on your head for a while, and you try different angles, but you just have to let it go sometimes.
You’ve done a fair amount of recording. Does the red light scare you?
Absolutely not. I love being in the studio. I feel like that’s when, as an aspiring performing musician, that is really when you’re producing. You’re in the factory, so to speak. You’re making a product for people, and I love it. And that’s probably because we’ve never been forced to. It’s always been like “Okay, we finally rounded up a thousand dollars to get in the studio, let’s go do it.” It’s a joyful process to actually record, but the mixing and the mastering is a drag. But you have to do it.
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Wheelhouse, Parkersburg, WVHow many songs do you think you’ve written?
I used to have a master list, and I don’t know what happened to it. I’ve become less organized in these years. I would roughly estimate, in terms of complete songs, like stuff I could put on an album, close to 3 or 4 hundred songs.
That’s pretty impressive. A Prince-like work ethic.
He’s got more money, that’s for sure. (laughs)
Back to your songwriting, where do your ideas come from?
Really, to give a somewhat far-out answer, just the universe. (laughs) It’s almost when your mind is quiet, and you’re not really singing about anything, and you’ll get an insight into something, or an experience that you’ve gone through. The ideas themselves just materialize sometimes. Like just last night, I was driving home after the gig, I just happened to have on a Christian radio program, and the preacher was talking about how the Christian missionaries would go into the jungles of South America and try to convert the so-called primitive “savage” tribes, and he talked about how one of the savages stabbed and killed and one the missionaries. I was just thinking about how absurd it is for these missionaries to judge so harshly these tribes, where they’re just trying to live their lives. Here come these strange Christian missionaries that are like “Listen, you’re all wrong, your whole life is wrong, and we’re going to show you how to have a good life.” But he got stabbed! (laughs)
But this was about four o’clock last night. I guess where my ideas come from is just awareness of life and things to write songs about, you know, having a frame of mind as a songwriter. “Ah man, this traffic’s really bad, I could write a song about it.” Or, “Man, my girlfriend and I are having a fight”, you know, it could be anything. I guess it’s a frame of mind, you know? It’s a receptivity.
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The Ordinary, Clarksburg, WVDo you need a certain ideal environment to get into that frame of mind?
Well, to an extent. You create the frame of mind and say “Okay, I’m going sit down here and I’m going to hammer out a song.” But other times, you know, the dogs are barking, and my mind is distracted by whatever else is going on, it’s not going to happen. It’s almost like I’m just the receiver. For the most part, I don’t have to have an environment. Right now, I don’t really have a good place to work, I just kind of sit down on the couch with a guitar. I don’t really have a “songwriting room”. In terms of environment, the emptiest environment would be the best, just no distractions.
I want to dig way, way back, when you first started getting into music. What were some of your earliest musical influences?
When I first started playing guitar, it was definitely Nirvana. Before that, I was definitely into heavy metal. I remember “…And Justice For All”. Metallica was the greatest thing I had ever heard. It was just perfectly heavy metal. I think I was in seventh grade at that point, and I realized that there’s no way mortal humans could do this kind of stuff. You know, Angus Young (of AC/DC) would be playing these solos, and I’d play the tennis racket and pretend I was playing guitar. I thought these guys were rock and roll gods. When Nirvana came along I could really hear what he was doing with his guitar was not finger-tapping, explosive guitar solos, but it was still very powerful. It was rocking just as hard as Metallica, but I could tell it wasn’t like intricate guitar work. He was just playing guitar for the sake of the song, rather than “see how badass my chops are”. That was really what got me into playing guitar.
Hendrix remains my favorite sonic carver. And the blues I’ve always felt strongly, with just the raw presentation of emotion. I’ve been into the blues probably since I was 15, 16. And I could tell that the blues sort of mutated or evolved into the Jimi Hendrix psychedelic rock and roll thing. You can trace it 100% back to the blues.
Definitely. What’s your earliest musical memory?
That’s a great question. I can remember hearing John Prine. My Dad played guitar, and continues to play. He never got into bar chords, you know, he just stays pretty much G,C,D, Am, Em. Which is what he showed me, and that’s in terms of the only actual training that I ever got. Everything else was just playing with tapes.
But I would say acoustic folk music, John Prine, Bob Dylan. You know, I just remember John Prine’s familiar voice. To this day it still sounds like “Uncle” John Prine, it’s very familiar to me.
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Gibbie'sI know your musical interests and influences are all over the place, and just with my own experience listening to you, I never know exactly what to expect, and that’s something I admire. But I’m wondering, what are you listening to these days, like songwriters, styles?
That's another good question. For instance, I’ll go to a record store, and they’ve got the listening booths now, you can listen to 30-second clips. For me it’s discovering new things. That’s what I’m really turned on by, just newness. There’s still sort of a paradox between newness and “lastingness”. It’s a sound, I can’t really describe it, other than it’s a certain sound, a sort of a depth, or rawness, honesty. To give some names, definitely Tom Waits. The sound of Tom Waits is really something that really turns me on. Mars Volta really does it for me. You can kind of tell their influences. There’s definitely a Frank Zappa, to Mars Volta, and definitely a Miles Davis, sort of electric funk, influence with the percussion and the Afro-type beats. But they’re definitely doing their own thing with it, which is sort of a dark, evil… I call Mars Volta a "heavy metal jam band! (laughs)
That’s a good way to put it.
Yeah. There songs are very long and intricate, but it’s really sort of evil, you know. The subject matter is not flowers and kindness, it’s bugs and guts. (laughs)
Did you get a chance to hear them live?
Yes, I sure have, and it’s one of the best concerts I’ve seen in a long time, probably since seeing Tom Waits.
Another thing that I’ve always really liked is jazz guitar. I really like Grant Green, Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, John McLaughlin. Some of the more virtuoso players I really like, just the sound really appeals to me. If I could take lessons in one style of music, I think it would be jazz guitar, because it really just sounds like they’re free of all constraint, you know?
All text ©2009 Daniel Hornbeck. No reproduction without consent by the author. All photos used
