Tobin Sprout
from Steve Albini Thinks We Suck #9

Interview by Mo Ryan

I didn't think it was possible to like anything more than I liked Guided by Voices. Bee Thousand will always be my favorite record of all time, for a lot of reasons, but close behind it is Carnival Boy, the first solo record by former GBV guitarist and songwriter Tobin Sprout. The quiet, unassuming George Harrison to Bob Pollard's one-man Lennon/McCartney, Sprout contributed some of GBV's most glorious, deliciously hummable favorites, like Little Whirl, Scenes from Esther's Day and It's Like Soul, Man. His consistently amazing solo work--Carnival Boy, several singles and the upcoming Moonflower Plastic (Welcome to My Wigwam)--provides proof, if it's needed, that Sprout wasn't just GBV's "other songwriter"--he's a genius in his own right.

This July, I spoke with Tobin about his years with GBV and about his new solo record, which will be released in August.

Mo: How long did it take you to put together the new album--did you work on it solidly for a few months or was it done here and there?

Tobin: It was mostly written over the winter. A couple of the songs--Hit Junky Dives and Curious Things--were written before the band disbanded . Kevin [Fennell--former GBV drummer] plays on Curious Things, and Little Bit of Dread was done around the same time as Jane of the Waking Universe. [The recording of Moonflower took place] from about that point until April, when I turned the record in.

Mo: From what I've heard, Carnival Boy wasn't recorded all at once--it was a collection of different songs from various eras.

Tobin: Some of it was stuff I had just lying around, so to speak, things I thought were good but which never ended up on an album for whatever reason. For Carnival Boy, we were touring at the same time, so I was recording some of the bigger stuff when I had the chance, and then going through tapes of stuff I had laying around, and compiled the whole thing in that way.

Mo: How did those Bevil Web singles fit in with that?

Tobin: I was thinking of having a side band, and it ended up just being pretty much me, so it seemed kind of ridiculous to have a "band" [made up of one person]. The band name came from Pete Jamison, who had had this fictitious band named Bevil Web forever, so I finally stole it from him. I think that's it for that band though, I gave the name back to him.

Mo: Moonflower Plastic seems like it has a more bittersweet or yearning quality than Carnival Boy did.

Tobin: This album is definitely melancholy. A lot of the songs I wrote on the piano, like Angels Hang Their Socks on the Moon and Water on the Boater's Back, and also some of the stuff from the Popstram single--I did all of that around the same time. I could always play the piano, but for some reason I had this mental block that I couldn't write on the piano. But I sat down to write with it and turned out some songs that way. That's why a lot of the sounds might relate to each other, because they're written at the same time. It was also written during kind of a tough time for my wife and I. We had a problem pregancy and my daughter was in the hospital for about three months, and she was premature, so it could have a lot to do with that. None of the songs are directly associated with that, but [that period] might have a lot to do with the melancholy sound.

Mo: When do you write--do you set aside time every day?

Tobin: Usually I like to write in the morning, before the kids get up, and it seems like in the morning I have more energy, or my mind is a little bit clearer. That's usually the time I get a lot of stuff done. Right now I'm kind of busy with the kids, so I've got to find time when they go down for naps, I'll run down to [the basement] try to get something down. Usually [inspiration strikes] when there's no way I can get down there [laughs].

Mo: Do you find your kids or how they look at the world are an inspiration for you?

Tobin: Yeah, definitely. The title for [my publishing company], I'm a Cowboy Songs came from my son. He had these little tiny cowboy boots that my wife found at a garage sale, and he was clomping around in those, and they called to say I needed a title for the publishing company, and so it became I'm a Cowboy. I don't mean to write about things that are happening directly, but I think a lot of times because of your life situation, you end up writing about it whether you want to or not.

Mo: Your lyrics seem to be pretty impressionistic--are you trying to convey a specific image or incident, or do you just let the images and word flow out?

Tobin: I think they kind of write themselves, and as I'm writing them, I can kind of visualize things that are happening, even though it's pretty vague, but I think there's enough information there that you get some impression or idea of what's going on. I might have a chorus or maybe a verse, but as I'm writing I'll come up with the next verse, but a lot of times it'll change as I get new ideas.

Mo: So you want people to be able draw their own conclusions and have their own imagery for the songs.

Tobin: Yeah, and actually, looking back at some of these songs, they sound different than when I first wrote them. I can find different meanings in them than [whatever was] my original intention.

Mo: That's one of the great things about your lyrics and Bob Pollard's lyrics--there's enough information there to set up a mood and a feeling, but you can draw your own impressions of what it's about. Is that something you work toward?

Tobin: Well, I hope that people just don't think they're total crap, or off the cuff, which they kind of are, but I do work on them so that they make some kind of sense. A lot of [lyric writing for me] is how certain words work with certain moods--like the way the word "water" sounds. One of the reasons I chose the word wigwam is because I like the sound of it, I like the way it looks, it's a cool looking word.

Mo: When you record, is it mostly at home with a four- or eight-track?

Tobin: Most of the stuff is done on the eight-track originally, and if I feel like some of them, like Hit Junky Dives, need the bigger studio, I'll go into a studio to record it, and get a real drummer, instead of doing it myself. Some of them, like Water on the Boater's Back, there's no way I could go into a studio and get the same feel that I got on eight-track originally.

Mo: We were talking before about impressionistic lyrics, and I think you and GBV have perfected that art, as well as the art of creating intimate-sounding home recordings. Both are really easy to do badly, and both have been imitated a lot. Do you prefer home recording because it does sound so intimate and homey?

Tobin: Well, I think it's intimate because it's in your home. If I had access to a larger studio in my basement, I'd probably use it instead of the four-track. But I had the four-track around originally, and there was no one around to inhibit you from...whatever. You could be freer with yourself, and you got a chance to listen to it before anyone else heard it. But the four-track is like anything else, it's what you put into it that matters. How much technology you have doesn't really matter if you don't have anything [worthwhile] to put down.

Mo: I think some people get the wrong impression, though, that if they use the four-track they'll sound "authentic," whatever that is. But who cares if the songs aren't any good to begin with.

Tobin: Yeah, we get tapes where people try to make themselves sound as bad as they can, and that's so far from [our] idea, [which is that] you try to get the best sound you can from it, and a lot of times you use the nastier qualities that it has to give it more texture.

Mo: I talked to Bob about that and he said the same thing, "We weren't trying to sound like shit!"

Tobin: I know [laughs]. Like the opening song on Bee Thousand, Hardcore UFOs, after we finished recording it, I accidentally erased part of one of the tracks--you can hear it drop out. At first we were kind of pissed off about it, but after listening to it for so long, we thought it was kind of interesting.

Mo: If you were intentionally to try something like that, it wouldn't work.

Tobin: No, it wouldn't cut it.

Mo: Is it hard not to be officially in GBV anymore, or is it a relief?

Tobin: It's a little bit of both. In my situation, I wanted to do more painting, but [in the band] I wasn't able to do that, so now I can paint more. I'm glad that it's working out with Bob too, Cobra Verde is a great band and they seem to work well together.

Mo: And also, for you, musically speaking, you're not just "the other guy" in GBV, the other songwriter.

Tobin: Yeah, but that was a little scary too. For so long I had sort of been hiding behind Bob, you know, "I'm just the other guy."

Mo: People had always appreciated your stuff, but now it's kind of like you're getting the attention you deserve.

Tobin: Well, it's kind of nice to put the whole album [Moonflower Plastic] together. I had a lot of fun with the new one. The first one was kind of hurried, but I could take a lot of time on this record. I hadn't actually put a whole album together myself since Fig. 4 in the '80s.

Mo: You were speaking of your painting before--how did you get into that?

Tobin: [In the mid-'80s] I worked as graphic designer and an illustrator for a magazine called See in Sarasota, Fla, and I'd just come home and paint. I had painted all my life, but [got more into it in Florida]. Eventually I got into a gallery and the paintings started to sell. I was pretty much doing that--painting--when Guided by Voices took off, and for a while I put it aside.

Mo: So you were in Guided by Voices before you went to Florida, then you re-joined when you came back, right?

Tobin: Yeah, when I came back, they were getting ready to go into the studio to record Propellor. From about that point on, I was officially, or however it works, in GBV.

Mo: And you were sort of in charge of the recording once the band stopped using studios, right?

Tobin: Yeah, I pretty much became that because I had the four-track. There are a couple of four-track songs on Propellor, but most of that was recorded in a studio. We just liked the four-track stuff, and with Vampire on Titus we started using it more, and Bee Thousand was all four-track. It was just easy, Bob could call up and say, Let's do some stuff, and immediately we could put it down.

Mo: How did you and Bob actually meet?

Tobin: Fig. 4 was playing at a club called the 1001 Club, the only club in Dayton at the time where you could play your own music. For the most part no one paid a whole lot of attention to us, except Bob and Jimmy [Pollard] and Pete [Jamison, GBV's manager for life]. They'd come in and just stand right in front of us and were into it, and after a while I started talking to Bob a little bit, and he was really excited about getting together, and from that point on, we hit it off because we were into the same kind of music.

Mo: And at that point in Dayton, the rock scene was mostly metal cover bands, right?

Tobin: Yeah, it was pretty much spandex all the way. There were a couple punk bands, but for the most part, there weren't a lot of bands that did their own material. Out of that 1001 Club, about 7 or 8 really good bands came out of that. It started this little underground thing going for a little bit, but then it closed and all the bands went back underground.

Mo: Did GBV play out in those days? Were they much of a draw?

Tobin: Yeah, they did pretty well. I remember they were in this band playoff, that's when I went to see them. They were playing out when I joined them, and then after a while I went to Florida.

Mo: Did you record much with them before you went to Florida?

Tobin: I recorded the Fig. 4 album at around the same time that Bob did the first albums, Devil Between My Toes and Forever Since Breakfast. I was on Devil, on one or two songs, I might have been on a couple other things, then I was gone, and back for Propellor.

Mo: To go back even further, when did you first start playing music?

Tobin: I probably started playing guitar when I was around 8.

Mo: What motivated you to start then?

Tobin: Probably the Beatles and the Monkees. And I was a big Byrds fan, I love d the 12-string. So my parents bought me a $25 Silvertone guitar from Sears. So I pounded on that for a while. We had some garage bands and thrashed around for a while, but I didn't really get into playing out until I was about 20. I would play out with this guy, we were Tim and Toby, we would play VFWs playing Neil Young songs. I put together Fig. 4 after that.

Mo: I've never heard that Fig. 4 record, are there any left?

Tobin: There were only 300 made, and I probably still have 50 of them. Todd Robinson from Luna [a music store and GBV-merch distributor in Indianapolis] is going to re-release it on CD with a bonus track after Christmas.

Mo: Was Fig. 4 pretty different from GBV when they were both around?

Tobin: They probably both had that Wire influence, that same '60s/'70s pop influence, but it seems we were a little more instrumental. It kind of had a surf-punk sound to it--the drummer was just hyper and play everything twice as fast as it should be, and the bass player could keep up with him--the bass player was Dan Toohey, who's been on some GBV stuff. He could play a fretless bass and was just all over that thing, and all I had to do was pound out these chords and it sounded pretty amazing.

Mo: But you played all the instruments on your own records. How long have you been playing all those instruments?

Tobin: I've been playing piano since I was a kid, but with a lot of the [other] instruments I'm self taught. Drums are probably my weakest point, but I'm trying to work on it--I bought a set of drums a while ago, so I'm starting to pound on them. [Playing all the instruments] is something that I wanted to be able to do, because it was hard to get all the people together, it was easier just to write all the parts myself than to get someone else to come over and teach them to do it.

Mo: How do you go about the process of recording songs?

Tobin: A lot of times I'll start with just scratch guitar, and I'll put some sort of rhythm to it, a tambourine or something, and go back and play the drums to it, then bass, maybe another guitar, piano, whatever. It just depends on the mood I'm trying to get. Carnival Boy and Hit Junky Dives I started with just a keyboard note, and that kind of set the mood, and then I played guitar and add drums. But for the most part the way I write is that I'll get most of the music down and then I'll let it sit for a while so I forget the chord structure, then I go back and set up a mike [for vocals] and run it through and see what happens. I think that kind of keeps it more fresh.

Mo: So do you make music and do your painting full time these days?

Tobin: Well, before Guided by Voices took off I was doing a lot of illustration work, and so [since then] I've just been doing a lot of painting and music. Every day I get up and I can't believe I'm doing it. I keep saying to myself, I'm going to have to go back to work one of these days. But it seems to be working out okay.

M: Do you miss touring with GBV at all?

T: I miss playing out a lot, I don't miss the traveling around. Guided by Voices took off around the time that I got married, and then my son was born when I was in Seattle. He was five weeks early. We were on stage, and it was probably about 2 am there, and as soon as I got offstage, the promotor came up to us and said, Which one of you is Toby Sprout, and I said, I am, and he said, Your wife is delivering right now. So I turned into a zombie and they got me on an airplane. [Not being there] is something I'm sure I'll always regret. It's one of those things that's very special, and I would have rather have been there.

M: Are you going to play any solo shows?

T: Not from this album. We're going to be moving, so it's kind of hard to plan anything. I hope to do stuff with the next album, which I've already got some songs together for.

M: What was it like when GBV did start to take off?

T: Well, we'd been together so long that in a way, it was about time, and in another way, it all happened so fast. We did our first show in New York, and from that point on, things were happening for us. One of the things I liked about [the attention] was that it made all the time that we had put in legitimate.

M: Wasn't it dispiriting to put out all the records that are now in the boxed set and get no response?

T: Well, a lot of that was our own fault. The only person that sent the records out was Greg Demos [former GBV bassist and the owner of the Striped White Pants]. I think that's how Scat found out about us. When we signed with Scat, it was like, that was the top, we had broken out, we had done it. Vampire on Titus [the first Scat release], I think it's a great album. I think there are a couple on there that I would have liked to have hear in a big studio, like Wished I Was a Giant.

M: I'd like to ask you a little more about your painting, if I could. Your work has been described as photo-realist--does that mean you work from actual photographs?

T: Yeah, usually, I'll go out and shoot two or three rolls of 35-mm film. The stuff I'm working on now, I went over to a junkyard and took pictures of this old bus and a big group of motorcycle gas tanks that were all different colors. I usually take a couple rolls of film and go through them and see which ones look best to paint. I can usually get one or two paintings per roll. There's some other stuff I do that's more hand drawn, a little more surreal. Every once in a while I try to get away from the photorealism, but I end up going back to it, there's just something about it I can't get enough of.

M: Could it be something about playing with surfaces, making objects a little bit strange yet familiar?

T: Yeah, because you can make things surreal or beyond real by playing with textures or the contrast or the color. You can punch up color and really contrast shadow so it looks very rich, where photographs are usually a little more washed out.

M: I sometimes think that there might be a connection between your paintings and your songs--with both there's often an exuberant, hyperreal surface, but underneath, it's more equivocal--not quite weird but not quite normal. Is that the most half-assed art theory you've ever heard or what?

T: No, that's very interesting. I think with paintings and with music, I won't allow my feelings to come to the surface. My true, deep feelings I kind of keep at arm's length--by using certain words, I'll keep an arm's length from actually spilling my guts.

M: But not wanting to spill your guts, so to speak, can challenge you to say those things in a more creative way. I usually don't like songs that are so obvious and direct--that's very hard to do well.

T: Yeah, I don't want to hear how bad things are for other people. Okay, so it's bad, what are you going to do about it? Especially with love songs, where the person just can't get it together. It's kind of pathetic.

M: That's why I like songs where you can draw your own meaning--it could be about love, or it could be about...whatever. The best love songs don't have that word in it. I mean, "Oh, I love you baby"--give me a break.

T: Yeah, I mean, that's the best that you can do?

M: Are there any songwriters or lyricists that you admire?

T: Bob, I've just always been amazed by his stuff. The first time I heard Devil Between My Toes--he played it for me at the kitchen table--I was just floored. I thought, why bother [writing my own songs?] It's been great to be around him, as long as I was I definitely learned a lot about writing songs and what rock is.

M: What kinds of things did you learn from him?

T: The way he writes lyrics, the way he approaches songwriting, there's a stream of consciousness even with the melody, where you try to experiment with it. It's kind of surreal to even try to put it into words what you learn from each other. It took me 12 years to learn it.

M: Are you still going to work with Bob in the future?

T: Yeah, we've talked about it. He's busy right now and so is he, but down the line, we both want to. We've talked about doing an acoustic thing, kind of a Simon and Garfunkel thing.

M: But right now you're concentrating on the art...

T: And also on moving, we're getting ready to move up to Michigan. It's where my wife is from, and I've spent a lot of time up there, my parents live up there in the summer. And one of the galleries I show at is up there. [The move is] something my wife and I have talked about since we got married.

M: So are your paintings only available at the gallery in Michigan?

T: There are also a couple of paintings down in Sarasota. This fall I might have a show in New York, it's something Matador might be putting together. But that's not a sure thing yet.

-- from Steve Albini Thinks We Suck zine (July 1997), $1 from PO Box 578190, Chicago IL 60657