Derek Webb

Forget what you thought you knew about Derek Webb musically. Then again, you’ve been doing that with nearly every release from the Nashville songwriter. She Must and Shall Go Free created some bluegrass foundations only to completely disregard those with the art rock release, I See Things Upside Down. Then came the straightforward, minimal acoustics of Mockingbird followed by the older rock sound of The Ringing Bell. So perhaps the only predictability with Derek Webb is his unpredictability.

Thus what else should you expect with Stockholm Syndrome but an electronically based effort. Replace the guitars with laptops and you have Webb’s new album – with bleeps and blips surrounding lyrics concerned with current Christian hot-button issues. We recently sat down with Derek for a talk about the change in sound and instruments and found a musician energized by the creative possibilities.

SSv: The new electronic base for Stockholm Syndrome – is that a byproduct of what you’re listening to at the time?

Derek: Yeah, I think it is. I definitely tend to be the type of artist that whatever I’m putting in is what will be coming out. That’s all the way around stylistically. I’m also just restless. I really want to check myself constantly that I’m putting out music that I’d want to listen to. And I’m really bored to tears with singer/songwriter music. I cannot listen – and no offense to any of my great friends who make acoustic music or singer/songwriter music – to another acoustic guitar. I just can’t.

So that said, I really love electronic music. And I don’t just love listening to it, but I love making it. That’s because of the unbelievable limitless possibilities that it affords you creatively. I mean, I’m not a bass player. I’m not a drummer. I’m not much of a keyboard player. But when you have this technology and these possibilities at your fingertips, you can literally sit and just make anything. There’s no sound that’s off limits. You can try anything.

It’s so much more efficient, too. I remember with The Ringing Bell, we spent three days trying different guitars through different amps on different volumes in different rooms with different mics on them with different placement at three or five feet just to get the guitar sound right for one song. It had to be exactly right. But with Stockholm Syndrome, my last thought was some of that stuff. I would just call up a synthesizer plug-in or some loop plug-in and I was away all of a sudden.

It’s just a totally different way of working that was fascinating and exciting to me. And also, I completely averted any kind of writer’s block this time around because the actual making of the music was so energizing. If I didn’t have any lyrical writing that I could do or it just wasn’t one of those days, I could sit there and make loops for an hour. I could just dig around to find great sounds that I really wanted to use or that were resonating with me or felt right for certain songs. There was suddenly so much work that I could do and it didn’t slow me down.

Josh Moore, who I made the record with, and we play everything on it. Well, we had a friend who came in and played drums on half the songs, but we played everything else ourselves. And we weren’t even in the same city for most of it. We would pass files back and forth and just experimented with stuff. That made it all possible and that’s what I enjoyed about this whole thing. I won’t go on a tangent of why I got into hip-hop, but that’s why it was more electronic. It was about the technology and just because I also love that kind of music.

SSv: So the song you’re most excited about on Stockholm?

Derek: I haven’t been living with it much lately. It’s like you obsess on a microscopic level about your record for so long that you have to get away from it. I haven’t looked at it since we finished it basically. But I like some songs because of what they say or the sounds we got. Others I like because of the experience of making it.

SSv: Sonically?

Derek: Well, there’s 14 tracks to think about. There were a lot of surprises. I mean, I feel like “The Spirit vs. The Kick Drum” was a big surprise. That’s one that I had mocked up completely myself. I’d play a bass line, program some drums and there was just nothing to it. I didn’t know if anything was really happening with it or not but we got to Austin where Josh’s studio is and we got in there and our friend MacKenzie who played the live drums on it… he came in and sat down with it and he was playing that track and it was a totally different song. It re-energized it for me and it became one of my favorites.

One of the things I was wanting on this record was energy. I love the energy of albums from Trent Reznor or Gnarls Barkley. The energy they can bottle up on those records is amazing. It’s unbelievable and I was really after that. That’s the thing that I miss in the singer/songwriter music is that energy, the evocative nature of some of the more electronic or hip-hop albums. As soon as the track comes on, it makes you feel something. You feel something immediately before the melody or lyric.

SSv: That’s a great notion about feeling something before the primary elements even hit. Did you aim for that?

Derek: Yeah, those tracks are doing their job before anything starts and I wanted these songs to do their job. I wanted the songs to take someone somewhere before anything else arrived and so we were searching for that energy on every song. We were looking for that ceiling. That’s also why we recorded the way that we did. We recorded 70% of the record before we were finished writing songs. We were just working up pieces of music that really did it for us. It made us feel something. Then when we had enough pieces, then we would work things together.

SSv: What about “Cobra Con?”

Derek: “Cobra Con” was the same way. The tune felt finished to me before I started writing any of the lyrics. It was a finished tune and Josh brought that one. It was this fantastic sound and a great feeling. Then “American Flag Umbrella” got recorded in the same day and even all in a few hours. That’s because of, again, this new technology. It was the last song I recorded for the record and I always know the last song by a feeling. It says whatever is remaining to say and there’s always that song.

SSv: That’s interesting that one song always feels like that…

Derek: Well, I almost wanted to put “American Flag Umbrella” in the middle of the record because it’s so obviously the last track and I always write those that way and so I wanted to rebel even against my own stupid patterns and predictability. But I wrote it within a few hours and I started pulling up some drum loops, pulling up some sounds and looking for a few things I liked. In the end, I had 12 verses and I knew I had to whittle it down. Then literally within a couple hours, I was done.

I saved it, sent the mp3 to Josh and just asked him what he thought. I told him I had just thrown it together today and he said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to mix it and then we’re done.’ That was really gratifying because Josh is more of the expert in terms of the tools and technology. He was teaching me as we went. So to be able to go from zero to be ready for mixing in a few hours was really gratifying. So that was another big victory.

*Illustration by Jason Horning.

Related posts:

1. Derek Webb – Stockholm Syndrome
2. Trent Dabbs

Tagged as: electronic, Nashville

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