 
Since Kids, the two have been busy with other projects, leaving a few hectic days per month to work on a new record. With Dare to be Surprised (Communion) finally in stores, 26-year-old John had time to chat from his Cambridge home about folk music and the aftermath of sudden fame. You graduated from Brown with a comparative literature degree. Do you do much reading? My life is pretty consumed by music now. But I still read poetry, like Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, which influences the way I started writing lyrics and recording. Reworking a song is a lot like writing different drafts. Describe the dynamic between Lou and yourself. We get along well enough that we can criticize and we improve what we're doing from that. There's a lot of back and forth to it. I guess one thing I've learned from Folk Implosion is that at a certain point I knew who I was well enough that I could let other people into the writing process. It helps you define yourself, like having a coach when running a race. Writing is something I like to pursue on my own, but writing with Lou is a complete collaboration, which is a really rare situation. Is it frustrating when your partner is also in an incredibly successful band? Yes. It's frustrating when you work a lot on something and it's credited to someone else. There's a certain way that we write together and it's often misrepresented. But it makes me get off my butt, like "I can't sit around the house, I've got to play more shows." Logistically it makes things harder. We may lose some of the focus, but it makes it healthy. By not touring and recording all the time, there's a certain freshness in what we do. How did the Kids experience change your life? It made me more confident in dealing with people that weren't just like me; it made me less of a snob. It was interesting going in there as an indie rocker with all these preconceptions about major labels all being out to screw us. I've learned that some people who work at majors are really interested in the creative aspect. I think it can be creatively compromising, but we made compromises being on an indie label. There are reasons to be concerned, but you can't just reject majors out of hand. Being on a major doesn't necessarily mean creative compromises. We were lucky that we were successful enough that [London was] willing to take the time to understand us. What does the name Folk Implosion mean? It's a name that I resented at first because it started as a joke. We played a show and Lou said jokingly "Oh, this is The John Davis Folk Implosion," because Jon Spencer [of the Blues Explosion] went to Brown. Rock music is sort of this collapsed version of folk music and now I think [the name] conveys the way in which we have a certain romantic notion about pop music as modern folk song. If there's any sense in which this country has folk music, it's like Michael Jackson or the Bee Gees. Do you ever get confused with the Blues Explosion? No, although Russell Simins [of the Blues Explosion] told Lou the name was a cheap shot, but Lou said it was a tribute. The two bands are sort of opposites - they're a kickass live band and we're this studio concoction. On the song "Fall into November" from the new album, you incorporate a "round" structure which is a traditional folk device. Yeah, I was listening to a lot of Moondog. I had this record of his called Rounds and Madrigals and I really liked it and wanted to do something similar. I hadn't really thought of it as a folk music statement, but it is. What was in your first letter to Lou and how did the collaboration come into being from there? It was a simple letter. I told him that I really fell for that tape. I sent him a tape of stuff which I had started recording after hearing Weed Forestin'. It was nice; he seemed to pay a lot of attention to the tapes and commented on them. The first time we recorded we did six songs in one day and we were like "Holy shit this is really good." We didn't know if we were going to be a band, we just knew we had to keep recording. |