Elizabeth Weinberg

“Let’s See ... There’s Ceaucescu ... Comaneci ... Nastase ...” | John Vanderslice attempts to think up a few more examples of Romanian Names.

Back in February, the music website Stereogum interviewed John Vanderslice about the progress he was making on his forthcoming album Romanian Names. At the time, Vanderslice said one of his big goals for the record — his seventh — was to make a complex but swift-moving pop record on which every song was less than three minutes long. (The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour was one of the reference points he kept coming back to.) Well, Romanian Names arrived in stores this Tuesday, and of the 12 tracks on the album only five of them come in under 180 seconds. What happened, John?

“I fucked up,” he says over the phone from his home base of San Francisco. “I think I’m just too much in love with intros and outros. If I’d just cut those, I’d have been safe. And the thing is, I really did want everything to be under three minutes! It was one of those constraints that you put yourself under as an artist to shake up your usual way of doing things and change the way you work.”

And it’s not like Romanian Names wound up as some sprawling exercise in self-indulgence either. If it’s not quite Magical Mystery Tour, there certainly aren’t any “Revolution 9”s on the album either. The lyrics are focused, the sound somehow full of texture but clean at the same time — when I tell Vanderslice it reminds me of Midlake’s The Trials of Van Occupanther, he agrees enthusiastically and goes me one better by comparing the track “C&O Canal” to Steely Dan. “I wanted to have that sense of very accomplished players playing very simple music,” he says.

Vanderslice has some of the most sensitive ears in indie rock — his San Francisco recording studio Tiny Telephone has hosted such bands as Okkervil River and Beulah, and he’s helped produce records for Spoon and The Mountain Goats. (He was the guy, in fact, who helped The Mountain Goats make the transition from their raw, primitively recorded early albums to more polished but no less urgent discs like We Shall All Be Healed and The Sunset Tree.)

“I definitely go into each record with strong ideas of how I want it to sound,” he says, “especially when it comes to the role of distortion. That’s almost the key designator of rock ’n’ roll energy: distorted instruments, distorted guitars. Distortion is almost a smearing device that changes the balance of every single instrument; it’s a very powerful tool as long as you know what you’re doing. Emerald City, the record I made before Romanian Names, was very, very distorted — we didn’t have to do many overdubs on it because the distortion kind of knocked out everything else. The record before that, Pixel Revolt, we set out to make a very harmonious, baroque orchestral pop record. And on this one, we knew we wanted to make it a very hi-fi recording. We wanted it to sound really precise.”

Ironically, though, the songs themselves are about disharmony, about pieces not fitting together: if Vanderslice had to slap a label on it, he’d call Romanian Names an album about the difficulties of being in love. “And not just in love,” he says. “It’s about the difficulties of being in human relationships in general. There are songs like ‘D.I.A.L.O.’ which is about a sort of disturbing mentor-like relationship. I do think it’s difficult to be in love, though. It’s a very valuable and sweet human construct, but it’s very problematic too!”

If people find love in Romanian Names, it’s a fleeting thing — the title track is a short, heartbreaking tale of an Olympic gymnast too dedicated to her training to allow romance into her life. Instead, music itself seems like a more reliable source of joy as far as Vanderslice is concerned: the harsh pulse of the nyckelharpa that runs through “Hard Times” or the West African-inspired percussion on “C&O Canal.”
“It’s like that Art Deco lamp you scored at the antique store,” he says, “and which makes you so happy every time you look at it — you think, ‘I’m so lucky to have found that.’ There are only so many chords to choose from and a finite number of melodic progressions you can make, but sometimes you find just the right combination, and it’s so easy, you didn’t suffer over them, you didn’t have to re-record them, it just happened. Those songs are maybe one out of 10. For some reason, on this record, ‘Oblivion’ really makes me happy.”

“Oblivion makes me happy”: in some ways, it’s the perfect Vanderslice lyric. Hell, I half-expect to see it inscribed on the family crest.

Romanian Names (Dead Oceans) is in stores now.