Extreme Listening Mode!

Rock stars these days are, not to put too fine a point on it, dull. They come from nice homes and do Business Studies at the local ex-poly before getting on the Radio 2 playlist and starting to pretend to care about Fair Trade farmers. Their uniform blandness is offensive.

Thankfully, the odd few still exist who don’t quite fit into the box. Step forward Franz Nicolay. Franz is, undoubtedly, the only piano/guitar/accordion and banjo-playing artist with a Jimmy Durrante tattoo currently out there. An unholy mixture of punk rock attitude, Doris Day movies and dapper 30s socialite looks, his CV includes a spell in an adult circus (where peers included an act called Pisspuddles the Clown) and various bands before becoming the secret weapon multi-instrumentalist for possibly the best American band of the last decade, the Hold Steady.

Last year he released a really rather splendid album called Major General and toured along with Mark Eitzel, putting on a show which was less conventional rock than avant-cabaret. It was funny, moving and bloody entertaining. In short, we love him. And were therefore delighted to catch up with him for a chat about last year, this year and what he’s up to….

You’ve been touring Major General and generally being a solo artist lately – how’s that been?

Lots of fun. Obviously it’s easier and more lucrative to tour by myself, and frankly I like the solitude. I saw Sage Francis doing that when World/Inferno was on tour with him and Against Me! – doing his own driving, merch, and shows – and I really respected that work ethic. Also I can be more flexible on stage, switch up the set list on the spot if I feel like the crowd needs it, talk more if I want to, and sleep on anyone’s floor or couch. I never pay for hotel rooms.

No, and I’m always confused by that, since of course it all sounds of a piece to me since it all came from my head. I guess I listen to, and play, a lot of different kinds of music and they come out of the blender in unpredictable ways. But really, I think Major General is pretty conventional – it’s a rock band, all the songs have choruses and bridges – I could have made a much stranger album. And have.

It really depends – some of the songs, like “Jeff Penalty” or “Hey Dad!”, begin with a particular story I want to tell, usually with some kind of moral twist. Two of them – “Dead Sailors” and “Note On A Subway Wall” – were settings of someone else’s lyrics, in this case Jack Terricloth from World/Inferno. Other times, especially in the more jazz-inflected songs, I’ll write a complete melody first and then set lyrics to that. That is, in many ways, the hardest way to work, because there are specific, existing syllabic and rhythmic parameters to meet, while still trying to say something meaningful. It becomes like a Mad Lib.

It solves the existential question. That is – if every day, I feel uneasy, a little cranky, feel like I don’t belong, feel like I don’t understand what’s happening to me and why – well, being on tour provides an easy answer: Ah, I’m travelling, I’m far from home, I’m underslept and maybe broke. Having solved the problem of my angst, I can turn to more productive pursuits. Also, one is only really responsible for one thing every day.

Being away from home, if you still have a home. Many people, when they start touring full-time, think they can get away with giving up their apartment and crashing with friends when they’re not on the road. This is a mistake. After a month of socializing with strangers and close quarters with bandmates, you’ll want nothing more than a door to shut behind you to be strictly alone. This is worth continuing to pay rent on a place you’re never at.

And of course, it’s no secret that it’s a real strain on even the strongest relationships, Skype or no.

There’s a language-barrier issue with the lyrics and the stage banter, which are a big part of what I do solo. It takes a few shows to get a feel for what isn’t going to work – I usually end up being a little broader, a little more theatrical, if the subtler jokes or wordplay is getting lost. I will say, there is no way to get the attention of a Spanish audience. You just have to shut up and power through.

In January, I’m producing The Debutante Hour, a trio of women from New York doing “new-fangled old-fashioned music” – a sort of anti-folk Andrews Sisters. I’m demoing a new record next month that I’m hoping to record in May, and I’m supposed to be doing solo tours of the UK in March and the US in April. My first collection of stories, “Complicated Gardening Techniques,” is out on Julius Singer Press in February, and I’m doing two more chapbooks with them in May and September, then collecting the three in hardcover at the end of the year. There’s a World/Inferno side project 7″ coming out next month, an a capella project some of us did some years ago called “Vox Inferne,” modelled on the Weimar-era German vocal group the Comedian Harmonists.

The new Demander record, “Future Brite”, is getting an official release in January, and I think it’s fantastic. I don’t necessarily know who’s in the studio right now, but I’d love to hear a new Jens Lekman record; and I hope Mark Eitzel records the piano-vocal material he was touring in 2009.

Both, in equal measure. I remember vividly the expense and frustration that came with booking shows and tours in the pre-internet age: Xeroxing one-sheets, dubbing cassettes, shooting and duplicating press photos, and packing and mailing hundreds of padded envelopes — at costs in total of well over $5 per package — which usually piled up in club offices while we spent hundreds of dollars on long-distance calls trying to convince agents to listen to a band they’d heard of.

These days, it’s a painless process of emailing a MySpace link (which, by the way, say what you will about the decline of MySpace but it’s still the best place for a musician to quickly and cheaply get a web presence), and the virtually cost-free matter of sending emails. For all the revenue lost in physical sales due to filesharing technology, we are saving hundreds and thousands of dollars in postage and phone bills.

There’s the word-of-mouth, obviously. The Hold Steady had two critically-acclaimed albums and three years of touring under our belts before we went to the UK for the first time. Neither of our records had been released there, so we had no idea whether people would come to the shows. But the first night of the tour in Manchester was sold out, with hundreds of people who knew all the words to even the B-sides and deep cuts. The internet made cult bands like World/Inferno into under-the-radar sensations. That sort of thing is the visible, more glamorous side of it. The more mundane, but also more useful, side has to do with the practical details of touring: booking shows via email and MySpace sites, getting driving directions from Google Maps, finding cheap hotels on Travelocity, keeping on track with phone GPS, finding couches and floors to sleep on through Facebook pleas and couch-surfing networks. And maintaining a continuity in our personal lives by keeping up with email correspondence, day jobs and freelance work on club and hotel WiFi networks and talking to significant others and children via Skype from across the country or around the world. A travelling musician is a travelling small business.

OK, filesharing. There’s the side of me that’s a musician and there’s the side of me that’s a music fan, and the fan side thinks it’s amazing that the average teenager can have Afrobeat and Bartok string quartets and hardcore 7″s on one iPod. The musician side says there is an entirely valid debate on the merits and morality of filesharing, but on a gut level, it’s crushingly discouraging to see anonymous posters on a messageboard asking for, and getting, the entire discography of one of my bands, or of someone I know. The cost of making a record doesn’t drop relative to the cost of acquiring it – it still costs money for studio time, it still costs to pay musicians, it still costs to master, make artwork and all the other things that make recorded music a tangible and emotionally meaningful artifact. Sorry to bore you with economics, but there it is.

Oh hell, probably me. That’s why I don’t keep guns around.

Franz’s album Major General is out now on Fistolo Records. Keep your eyes on ELM for tor dates.