“Ah, man”
An afternoon conversation with American musician Jack Rose
by Brian Rademaekers

All photos via drragtime.com (click on photo for credit/story)

This interview was conducted at Jack Rose’s house on Ontario Street in the Port Richmond neighborhood of Philadelphia on July 17, 2009, about a week before Jack was set to play a show I had helped arrange at the riverside Penn Treaty Park in Philly’s Fishtown neighborhood. When he agreed to do the show, Jack didn’t even realize it was a paying gig. That’s just the kind of guy he was. The show, set for July 29, was rained out, but Jack and The Black Twigs did a smashing, rollicking set at Kung Fu Necktie that night. Later, he played the final show of the summer at Penn Treaty Park, in his splendid solo form. It also ended up being the last show he’d ever play in Philly, as he was busy finishing his upcoming LP Luck in the Valley for Thrill Jockey and toured Europe with the Black Twigs.

Jack said it was probably the longest interview he’d done, but he enjoyed it. We just sat there for about two hours and drank loads of tea. The transcript ends a bit abruptly, but the official interview ended when Jack asked if I’d like to join him to meet his wife Laurie at the Lost Bar in Kensington. We drank beers, ate kabobs from a street stand and talked about Jack London and David Goodis. It was a day I’ll never forget.

Rose grew up in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he lived until he was senior in high school. He then moved to Richmond, where he met Mike Gangloff and Patrick Best, fellow members of Pelt, and studied English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Later he moved to Blacksburg, where he met his wife, Laurie Sutherland…

Arthur: So, about when did you start playing?

Jack Rose: I started playing in high school, started playing classic rock.

Arthur: Did you have musicians in the family?

Jack Rose: No, no. I just picked up the guitar because I wanted to play “Stairway to Heaven,” like everyone else. I discovered blues right around the same time, too, and I started doing fingerpicking at about the same time that I was taking lessons for electric guitar…I was about 13. It was pretty early on.

Arthur: Do you think that had anything do with where you grew up?

Jack Rose: No, that was pure luck. I was sitting on my porch, and there was a kid next door to me and he was sitting on his porch, he was from New Jersey, visiting his parents. I guess he was about 17, and I heard this finger-pick guitar. I had heard some fingerpicking on some Zeppelin stuff, but this was something different, so I went over and asked him what he was doing. He was playing some Mance Lipscomb song, and he had this book…it had tunes by (Mississippi) John Hurt, Gary Davis, Mance Lipscomb, and I think there was a [John] Fahey tune in there as well. So what I did was, I borrowed the book until I could get a copy myself. Then I bought the records they suggested. I’d pick the tunes I wanted to play and then get the records.

Arthur: That was pretty lucky run-in. What year was that around?

Jack Rose: Yeah, it was totally by chance. I guess it was around 1985? 84? I showed my guitar teacher what I was doing, and he said, ‘Well, can you sing?’ I said no, and he told me to just forget about it and stick with the playing. And I did.

Arthur: Electric blues?

Jack Rose: Yeah, Howlin’ Wolf, and Buddy Guy … he was trying to make me into a jazz guitar musician … but I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

Arthur: So I guess your immediate attraction was to blues guitar?

Jack Rose: Yeah, I liked guys like Buddy Guy and Otis Rush and Link Wray and Muddy Waters, and I liked Howlin’ Wolf a lot. I had this electric blues band called The Mice. I was like 15.

Arthur: That was your first band?

Jack Rose: No, I had a band called Naked Lunch. Then there was Ugly Head with Patrick, before we joined Pelt. That was my first record I put out.

Pelt sounded like post-Sonic Youth, Husker Du and stuff like that before that. I started ordering all these records from Forced Exposure, and I turned Mike onto that and we started listening to all this stuff from them. Dead C, a lot of New Zealand stuff like Dadamah, Gate, some English stuff like Wiccan Smiths, Richard Youngs, and also Sun City Girls…

Arthur: Jumping from electric blues and more traditional stuff like Howlin Wolf and Buddy Guy, what attracted you to that?

Jack Rose: Well, there was no jump really. I mean, there wasn’t a jump from that to that. When I first went to college, I got into the Stooges, I got into Television, I got into Captain Beefheart, which was the next logical step into that stuff. But I guess for my age, it should have been hardcore from the beginning, but it wasn’t. From that, I got into the weirder shit.

Arthur: What was it that attracted you to that weirder stuff, things that weren’t as constructionist?

Jack Rose: It was just like everything that was being put out at the time, produced, was like very indie rock. Some of that I still like, like Pavement and all that sort of stuff. I think that out of the indie rock stuff, the only thing that really holds up is Pavement. You had all this stuff like Teen Beat, and Dischord…we were just kind of sick of it. When we got into the Sun City Girls and The Dead C, we wanted something that wasn’t going on, and you know, friends of ours were making that sort of music. My friend Jason Bill joined the band Charalambides, and through them I got into all the stuff on Siltbreeze, like Harry Pussy, and Brother JT and Strapping Fieldhands…

Arthur: During this period, were you still interested in playing fingerpicking style?

Jack Rose: Not really. Mike [Gangloff] had started playing banjo, and I still had a few blues records — I had sold a lot of it because I was broke all the time—so I played him some of those, and he asked me if I could [fingerpick]. I said, ‘Yeah, I can do a little bit.’ I was really out of practice, and I didn’t do anything too serious. Then, when I moved to Blacksburg, I started listening to Matt Valentine of Tower Recordings, and that turned me on to all the British folk stuff. So I started listening to Incredible String Band, and messing around with the guitar a little bit, and then Mike was like, ‘Ah, we should start doing this old time stuff,’ so we started up this first old time band called the Lick Mountain Ramblers, but we never put anything out. It was me and his wife Amy, on autoharp.

But it was a real tough time for me because I had cut my finger in a cuisinart and got eight stitches, so, it was really hard to play that stuff because you’ve gotta hold those chords down for a long time. I couldn’t do that, so I started doing things in open tunings and trying to figure out how to play those songs, but in open tunings.

I mean, I started doing open tunings with Pelt because I just wanted to try to do something different and it was good to get drones going. But when I was doing old time stuff with Mike, most of those older guys who had done that stuff played in standard tuning…but after a while, I would just stop playing in the middle of gigs because my finger would kill me and I couldn’t take the pain.

Arthur: Was this at the beginning of Pelt?

Jack Rose: Pelt started in Richmond in 1995, and in 96, I moved out to Blacksburg…Mike was already out that way, about 50 miles west. So when I got into town, he was getting really into the old time thing, and he drafts me into this ad hoc band [to do some fingerpicking]. It wasn’t that good, because I just wasn’t interested in doing that, you know.

But then I started doing the open tuning stuff to be able to keep up with the banjo playing. That was going on at the same time as Pelt. Patrick was still in Richmond.

Then, I moved to Philly, in 1998.

Arthur: Were you doing anything else besides Pelt at the time?

Jack Rose: When I moved to Philly, I knew I wanted to make some solo music, but I didn’t know what I wanted to make. In about, ’96, ’97 I got into John Fahey, and it just blew my mind wide open.

Arthur: How did you first come across Fahey?

Jack Rose: Well, I guess Byron Coley wrote that article in Spin in about ’94. But I never paid any attention to him when I was learning to play, even when I had those books. I looked at a picture of him and I saw that he was a white guy, and I was like, ‘I don’t care about that. I want to learn from these old black guys. He can’t be that good,’ I thought. So I never knew anything about him.

Which I would say, at that point, when you’re that young and in your teens, your musical development is really important, and I am going to say it was probably good that I didn’t hear him then. My taste hadn’t quite been fully formed yet, and I can imagine that if I had got into Fahey then, that would have led into Leo Kottke, and that would have led to other stupid bullshit like that. I wouldn’t have had any context for it, and I would have probably ended up going full on into that Kottke stuff because it was just hot guitar playing. Thankfully, I didn’t hear that. It wasn’t until my late 20s when I heard Fahey, and I was just like, ‘Aw, man!’

Arthur: You do just about all of your stuff in open tunings. Is that something you got from Fahey, or because you hurt your finger…?

Jack Rose: No, I didn’t get it from Fahey. I got it from that book I read when I was kid that had that “Frankie and Johnny” song, and I was like, what the hell is that? I would look at it for like two weeks before I would try it, because I only knew how to do standard tuning. So I would look at that and think it was really cool, but I was really scared. As a kid I would be really paranoid that I would never get it back in tune again. But I got over that. Then in college, I would hear experimental tunings in the Sun City Girls stuff and I wanted to try it.

I got my open C tuning from this guy Christian, a chef in Fredericksburg, Va., a really great jazz guitarist that plays gospel jazz. I was sitting in Apple Music, owned by Mike Chaffin, and I was playing in the tuning that I used for most of my Pelt stuff, and he noticed that I was in open tuning, and he showed me the open C. That’s my favorite tuning. Then I heard it in Fahey and recognized it. It’s real low.

Arthur: Do you think listening to bands like Sonic Youth, and some of the more abstract bands with drone elements, helped give context to Fahey?

Jack Rose: Yep. Because, like I said, Fahey is this icon amongst so many types of people, people who are into drone music…all sorts of people, all walks of life. People who I think, you know, are horrible players and make horrible music, but they still make that connection with Fahey.

He himself wrote off all his later work, and he wanted stuff to move forward…he was definitely against all that Windham Hill, Leo Kottke bullshit.

But if I had heard Fahey when I was in my young teens, I would have moved on to the other guys, and who knows what would have happened. I may have dropped Fahey altogether, because I would have associated him with these other guys. If I had heard it when I was 15 or 14, I wouldn’t have any idea what to think of it other than it was good guitar playing. I wouldn’t have any idea of who the man was.

Instead, hearing him when I did, it all made a lot more sense to me, and it made all the difference.

Arthur: So when you heard Fahey, how did that impact what you were doing?

Jack Rose: The first record I heard by him was Fare Forward Voyagers, and that is an incredibly droney record. So, I was already doing that kind of stuff. Hearing him do that stuff, with the kind of drone background that I already had, and of course, also at that point I was already heavily influenced by the Bishop brothers, Rick and Alan, so all of that just kind of came together and just kind of made sense. And, of course, I was listening to [minimalist composer] Terry Riley, and I just made all these connections between these different types of music.

Arthur: How did you bring that into Pelt on albums like Ayahuasca?

Jack Rose: Well, we recorded that in about 1999, and we were making our first attempts at that stuff, and I also heard Robbie Basho at that time. When I first moved to Philly, after about six or seven months, I got some Basho records, and that helped too. So we were starting to incorporate that stuff, and I was incredibly frustrated with it, because what I was hearing in my head, I wasn’t getting on my fingers.

Arthur: I imagine it is pretty hard to get to that level.

Jack Rose: Yeah. I knew that if I was going to be any good at it, I couldn’t have a dayjob. And then luckily, I got unemployed, and when that happened, I was able to take advantage of that…that’s when I got really, really serious in trying to develop a way of playing. So it was about late 1999 that I started getting really serious about the guitar.

Arthur: Your music has the feeling of being played by somebody who is really dedicated to learning, and to learning not just that style, but to developing your own style. What was it that pushed you to take it to that level?

Jack Rose: When I first started getting back into that stuff, I was getting really into Fahey, but I don’t think I ever fully digested all his music. And the way I kind of heard my playing at the time was kind of like second- or third-rate Fahey. So I took more cues from Basho back then, because he had such a freer way of playing, and it was a lot more interpretive, so I would listen to him a lot. And then from there, I kind of got my stuff. If you listen to my first record (Red Horse, White Mule, 2002), you’ll notice that I’m not doing much double-thumbing in the Fahey-type style. On my first two records I was trying to make something that really can be clear cut when compared to Fahey. For somebody who is really into the music and gets into the guts of the records, they would see that it really doesn’t sound much like Fahey because I’m intentionally not doing some of that double-thumbing. On Opium Musick, I do. But on those two records, I am intentionally staying away from doing any sort of Fahey-isms. Just because there is no point in it. You have to have your own style of playing. Yeah, you have to copy people in the beginning because you have to learn from it, but at a certain point, you have to break with that and just go for your own thing.

Of course, later, now, I have no qualms about stealing from Fahey, at all, just because I think now I am a much more comfortable player, more comfortable in my own skin, than I was back then. So stealing from him, and being more, I guess, blatantly American-sounding, is fine by me.

Arthur: Do you think what you’ve developed then is a sort of homage to players of the past as well something that is your own style and moving forward?

Jack Rose: You have to look to the past — that’s what you do…you have to look at the past in order to move forward.

Arthur: When you started to bring that stuff into Pelt, things like the ragas, were they into that?

Jack Rose: Yeah they were into it, but it was really Mike that dragged me into it, I didn’t go into it willingly for the Ayahuasca sessions. I felt like I was kind of forced into it, and I am sort of thankful, in a way, that I was. If I didn’t have someone like Mike riding my ass, I probably wouldn’t have done anything. He was always getting on me about really learning how to play, and we had lots and lots and lots of fights. We got pretty angry at each other during those years.

Arthur: Because he wanted you to go in a sort of Fahey direction?

Jack Rose: Well, [towards] Fahey, or even just completely acoustic. And I wasn’t ready to do that, and Patrick wasn’t either. This was when we were making Ayahuasca, and there was a mix of electric and acoustic. But Patrick and I were not ready to make that leap yet. Because, listening to some of the tapes from live gigs, I thought that it just sounded terrible. It was really difficult to try and reconcile that drone sound with the old-time. For a while, it seemed like the old-time was pasted onto this drone aesthetic that we developed. Because we all lived in different places, we couldn’t practice six times a week and develop this old-time/drone sound, and so it took a while for it grow.

Arthur: Do think that the blend of old-time and drone hit its peak on Ayahuasca?

Jack Rose: That is my favorite Pelt record, and acoustically, my favorite is Pearls From the River (VHF, 2003). We finally incorporated all of that, and that was our first record that was entirely acoustic. When I finished Opium Musick, I went right to work on Pearls From the River.

Arthur: So you were already doing solo stuff at that point?

Jack Rose: Yeah, I was doing solo stuff and Pelt concurrently for a little while.

Arthur: What pushed you to really start focusing on the solo career?

Jack Rose: Well, I put out those first two records, and did a couple little tours around that. I was still playing to nobody and for no money, which is what you gotta do. So, Raag Manifestos (2004, VHF) came out, and then the interest from Europe started coming in. In 2004 I did couple of tours, a couple of East Coasters and a couple of West Coasters…and they actually went okay. I wasn’t making a lot of money, but I wasn’t going broke either. I was still coming home with a little cash. Mike had kids, and he couldn’t really tour, but for me, it was easy.

Arthur: Is that in part what led to the dissolution of Pelt?

Jack Rose: Kind of, yeah. The last tour Pelt did, we went over to Europe in late 2006 and…at that time I was really happy playing the Pearls From the River-type music, but those guys went in a totally different direction I just wasn’t ready to go into. And it is really odd, because early on in Pelt, Patrick and I were like the drone keepers—that was what we did. And Mike, he would play melody on top of that.

Then, when I started getting into the fingerpicking thing, I started to get into the melody as well. But then Mike went even further into drone, which I would have been into years ago, but at that point I had no interest in hitting gongs or anything like that.

So when we tried to do these songs and play raga pieces, Mike and I would be stepping all over each other and it was getting really frustrating. We weren’t communicating that well at all. And it was mainly due to distance. We were trying to do these interweaving call-and-response lines, but you can only really develop that if you’re doing that stuff everyday. So I was kind of getting frustrated with that, and the solo thing was going really well, so I began to think it would be best if I just went and did that and not really worry about Pelt.

Arthur: At want point did you go from really liking the American stuff to digging more Eastern influences and ragas?

Jack Rose: I liked the Eastern stuff in college, and I got turned onto it by the Sun City Girls. And my really good friend Jason [Bill], lived in Houston and Houston has a really huge Indian population. And I would go there in like ’92 and 94, and go to these Indian shops and buy these tapes with sitar music and listen to them.

Arthur: And I guess Fahey did some raga-type songs too.

Jack Rose: Yeah, sort of. He Americanized them, more or less. Which is cool. “Fare Forward Voyagers,” I think, was probably his most raga-esque.

Arthur: Do you think Fahey was heavily borrowing from stuff that came before him? The American Primitive style, where did it come from? How do you think it developed?

Jack Rose: Well, he was stealing from early American guitar and banjo players and that sort of stuff. And he was also stealing from classical music, Tin Pan Alley songs and just anything he liked. He put it all together into one big thing, you know.

Glenn Jones brought up something really interesting when he said that nearly every acoustic guitar fingerpicker he ever met has been an Orientophile. All of them are into this Eastern stuff, because if you listen to these ragas, there is a lot in common with American blues because of some of the rhythm cycles and the kind of notes and the scales.

Arthur: Do you share the opinion that the guitar is the ultimate American instrument?

Jack Rose: Sure, yeah. I’ll be the millionth guy to say this, but it is a limited instrument and a limitless instrument at the same time. You’ve got a limited range, and on a fretted guitar you’ve got 12 notes to work with and it is such a small range. On sitar, you can’t really tune it up at will all the time because there are a lot of strings. But when you are tuning a six-string, man… you can use a lot of different tunings and combinations, and you are playing all these neat chords and melodic patterns. You can’t do that with a piano or a wind instrument.

So, I would say that with the ability to put the guitar into so many different types of tuning, you are offered so many different possibilities for different types of structures and chords and melody. And of course, when you throw a slide into that, it’s a whole other thing…it’s a much more vocal-type sound.

Plus, rhythmically, the way the guitar is built, the way it is set up with the strings…it’s like a band in a box. Listen to Blind Blake recordings. He sounds like an orchestra.

And it’s portable. I would say that the only instrument that could top it might be the harmonica, because that’s the ultimate portable instrument.

Arthur: You ever try the harmonica?

Jack Rose: I tried it, but you know, I’m terrible at it. I’d never be as good as Harmonica Dan, so why bother trying?

Arthur: Banjo?

Jack Rose: When I was out in Virginia with the Twigs recently, I did record this one song with them on the banjo because I found this easy picking pattern … and I wasn’t able to play it on the guitar, so I tried it on the banjo to get some kind of rhythm going on it and it sounded a pretty cool. Nathan plays banjos on it, so we’ll have two banjos on it and it’s pretty good.

Arthur: At what point were you in your development when you hit “Kensington Blues”? What were you trying to do with it?

Jack Rose: It was November 2005…A lot of that record was developed from this idea I had of being able to incorporate all sorts of different elements of guitar music that I had figured out. I wanted to put it all right there — everything. A lot of those ideas were developed on Raag Manifestos, and you can hear an early version of “Now That I’m a Man Full Grown” on that triple-LP compilation that I did with Six Organs of Admittance, MV & EE, Dredd Fool, Fursaxa…I was also working on an early CD-R of Dr. Ragtime (Tequila Sunrise, 2002). So with those and Raag Manifestos, I was trying to combine all those elements.

At that time, I was starting to get more comfortable with Fahey-esque playing because I discovered that on a couple of those songs, like “Kensington Blues,” I played them a couple of times and they never sounded right to me. And that’s because I had the rhythm wrong. I had been accenting the four strings, which is the upbeat. But I noticed that on a song like “The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick,” Fahey was accenting the downbeat. I was like, ‘Wow, I’ve been playing that wrong this whole time.’

When he was accenting the downbeat, I realized that’s where the jug is in jug band music, that’s where the rhythm is. So then I started playing all that on the downbeat, and all that stuff—the Fahey stuff, the ragtime stuff, all the blues—it all came into place.

For the first three records, probably the reason I never did any of that stuff, and I certainly attempted it, was because I was playing it wrong [laughs] for like two or three years. So I had to fuckin’ relearn the way I was playing to make sure I was emphasizing the downbeat. Once that happened, it was clear.

Arthur: So you think that discovery is what showed up on Kensington Blues?

Jack Rose: Yep, and from all the records there on out. Yep, because, well, I figured out it was all in the downbeat. I was like ‘Wow, okay, now I can really play all this stuff.’

Arthur: The actual song “Kensington Blues,” was that something you wrote after the fact, or was that something you wrote to reflect where you were living?

Jack Rose: Well, I called it “Kensington Blues” because it sounded better than “Fishtown Blues.” But, that song took me about a year and a half to write. In my old house on Cedar Street, that’s where pretty much all those songs were conceived…that’s where I refined all that material, in that house. Right before I went to Europe and all that jazz, that was when we moved to Fishtown.

Arthur: Would you consider Kensington Blues to be a blues album?

Jack Rose: Nope. I would consider it to be an American album, but not a blues record. There’s not any real blues on it, I’m not playing any 12-bar blues. “Rappahannock River Rag” is about as close to blues as I get on that one.

Arthur: Sometimes it seems like you went straight from Pelt into your solo career, and now you are just working your way back into playing with a full band, but it’s not really that cut and dried, is it?

Jack Rose: No. But after that European tour in 2006, I pretty much quit the band…but I have an invitation to come back. It was pretty hard, you know, Mike [Gangloff] and I were pretty mad at each other.

Arthur: At one point, you said that Kensington Blues was a hard album to live up to, but with this latest release, Jack Rose and The Black Twig Pickers (Klang, 2009), you said this album is the closest to your heart.

Jack Rose: Oh yeah. On this, I am playing the music that I fell in love with when I was a kid, and I’m getting to play all these tunes that I’ve always liked since I was a young kid and I’ve loved for most of my life. That music is the most important music to me, and I love all of it. All those songs are old songs, except for “Kensington Blues” and “Revolt.” A number of those were picked by Mike and the Twigs, and I picked a lot of them.

Arthur: Who picked “Little Sadie”?

Jack Rose: I picked that one, but I knew that was a song that Mike has played on banjo for a long time. I was doing some weird recording gig for a friend…one of them was “Little Sadie.” I knew the tuning it was in, and I basically was trying to do the banjo part, but then I switched to different tuning and it worked out really well.

The part I came up with for “Little Sadie,” I was really proud of that, and I was like, ‘Well shit, I gotta use that again.’ So I showed those guys, and Mike has become a really amazing fiddle player over the years. I said to Mike, ‘I’ve got this down on the banjo part, you should play fiddle on it.’ And so he is playing fiddle and Nate (Bowles) is playing fiddlesticks, an old Hammons family trick.

Arthur: What brought you from really developing the solo stuff to doing albums like Dr. Ragtime & His Pals (Tequila Sunrise, 2008) and bringing in the accompaniment?

Jack Rose: Well, I always wanted to do that. I mean, starting with Opium Musick I had accompaniment with the tamboura on one track and Glenn Jones on guitar on another. I always liked that stuff, and a lot of my favorite tracks from Fahey were the ones where he had accompaniment. I like guitar duets, I like jug band music, and I like early jazz and string band stuff. I always have.

The earliest Fahey recordings were 78s on the Fonotone label, and there was this one where he is playing with this ad hoc jug band, and that is one of my favorite recordings he has ever done. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s Fahey and he’s playing in a fucking jug band!’ I think there were only like one or two tracks where he ever did stuff like that, and I guess I’ve always been obsessed with that track because you don’t hear a lot of fingerpicking on old-time string band records. You hear a lot of the guys doing the pluck-strum thing, but not a lot of the intricate fingerpicking in a group context.

Another reason [Jack Rose & The Black Twigs] is really close to me is that, we do all these old songs, but we’re not copying anyone. These are our arrangements, but they’re not stupid and shitty like a lot of those crust punk old-time dudes who can’t fuckin’ play and they’re strummin’ around and shit…there is no subtlety to the music. But all those, those are our own arrangements, man. Probably the closest to anyone else’s arrangement is when we’re doing “Sail Away Ladies,” because I got that from a Fahey record. But all the other stuff, those are our own arrangements.

Arthur: As far as a style or a genre or an ancestral heritage, is there a way that you would identify that stuff? Is it blues, bluegrass?

Jack Rose: What we’re doing? No. If you read a lot of blues biographies and stuff like that, one thing that has been brought to light is that, in the 1920s and ‘30s, there were no ‘bluesmen.’ You played what people wanted you to play, and everybody knew all different types of music. Somebody like Robert Johnson, he knew the hits of the day, he knew how to play country and western, he knew jazz and he knew how to play blues. They all did, because you know, they’re on the street playing a song and somebody would say, “Play ‘Three Coins in The Fountain.” Well, they’re not gonna say no.

The only performer that could remotely be considered a ‘bluesman’ would be Skip James. But, that’s because he is so fucked up and weird. But he still knew how to play string band music, and all those guys did, every single one of them. That’s because the notion of a ‘bluesman’ is nothing but a fuckin’ construct by white blues scholars. Even these collectors, as great as they are because they rescued so much American music from the garbage can, they’d say “Well, that’s the purer sounding blues, the stuff from Mississippi,” or whatever. And now we know that’s bullshit.

So on [Jack Rose & The Black Twigs] we had that mindset, that American music, for me, and you’ll see it if you look at my record collection, country and blues and all that shit is together, because it is American music. Like blues, old-time, bluegrass, jazz, jug band, Cajun…it’s all the same continuum. And that’s the kind of mindset that we were all in, that it is all there.

Arthur: Do you feel like that you’ve sort of swung away from the Eastern influence, and you’re more heavily into making strongly American music? Is that a groove you want to keep in?

Jack Rose: Oh yeah, definitely. The one I’m working on now is like that. There will be some more raga-esque stuff on the next record too, we’ll see where that is going to go. There are five tracks already recorded, ready to go.

Arthur: Where do you go from here? How do you feel like you can continue to develop and grow as a musician on the guitar?

Jack Rose: I don’t know. It’s really weird…I always think the last record I make is going to be the last one, but there is always something that comes along that piques my interest. Like the one I am working on right now (Luck in The Valley, due out February, 2010 via Thrill Jockey), I got back from the second session, and I was like, ‘Wow, shit I’ve got a lot of work to do.’ And I’m sort of thinking like, ‘Ah god, I gotta come up with some songs.’ But the other day I came up with this one I think is really great, and when the Twigs get up here I’m going to play it with them, and it is probably one we are going to record.

But yeah, sometimes after every record I finish… with the exception of the one I did with the Twigs, because making that record was one of the most relaxed experiences I’ve ever had.

Arthur: Where was the Jack Rose & The Black Twigs LP recorded?

Jack Rose: It was all recorded in Virginia, at Mike’s house in a shed at the back of his house. We had an 8-track and few mikes that we put in this shed that had amazing reverb, so what you’re hearing on that record is that there was barely any EQ and mixing, it’s all that room sound. There was a little tweaking here and there, but not much. We’d sit down one day, work on the tunes and play them, and then the next day, record them.

Arthur: How many takes did you normally need to get it down?

Jack Rose: It depends. Like on “Goodbye Booze,” that was about 10 takes, but that was because the shed was freezing cold. That was in the winter of 2008. But then in the summer, we did two tracks down there for my new record, and it was hot as hell, and it took about three takes and they were all really good. But I think we took the second takes for both of those tracks.

Arthur: Do you have a favorite from the Jack Rose & The Black Twigs LP?

Jack Rose: Ah man, it’s tough because I like them all. But I’d probably pick “Goodbye Booze” because that is a side of sentimentality you don’t ever see from me. That’s about as sentimental as I’ll ever get. And it is a great song to end a set with, you know. Because, when we did that song, I’d never played anything like that on slide guitar before, and that’s like the most country I’ve ever sounded with the slide. I have to pick one more, and that would probably be “Special Rider” because I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone doing a version of that on the slide guitar. I can play it in regular six-string tuning and it does all these kind of choked octaves and stuff like that. But when I was playing it like that, it just didn’t sound right to me.

But we were able to translate it into slide really well, and that is my arrangement.

You know, I took a lot from the Skip James version, obviously, of course, but that is still my arrangement. It’s mine, you know. Mine. And I’m really proud of it.

Arthur: On Luck in the Valley, are you going solo or are you going for more accompaniment?

Jack Rose: Some of both. I just recorded up at Black Dirt Studios with Nathan [Bowles], Harmonica Dan, Glenn [Jones] and Hans Chew. There was this spontaneous jam that happened between Hans, Nathan and Dan, and I was upstairs with Jason (Meagher) talking. We came down and fucking Hans was banging the shit out of the piano, and Nathan was into it too, and Dan is blowing the shit out of the harmonica and luckily Jason had the mike set up and we recorded it. It was really raw and awesome.

Arthur: What were you looking to do with I Do Play Rock and Roll (Three Lobed, 2008)?

Jack Rose: My friend Cory from Three Lobed got in touch with me to see if I wanted to do something for this series [Oscillation III], and when he called me I was really hung over and I just said yes. A couple days later I realized I agreed to something, and I was like ‘Fuck, man what am I going to do?’

So I went through my archives, and found the stuff for the first side, which I thought was really good… I found this 12-string raga (“Calais to Dover”) that was really good, “Sundog” was recorded out in Western Pennsylvania, and the six-string track (“Cathedral et Chartres”) was originally on A Raga for Peter Walker (Tompkins Square, 2006), so it was basically a live album.

On “Sundogs,” it’s played with a bar, and you rest it on the guitar and scrape it. When you’re playing with a Stevens Bar, that’s what it’s called, and it’s got all these little nicks and scrapes and you just drag it along the strings to create these harmonic frequencies. There is no picking, it’s just that, and that’s all it is. And it is only a very small fret radius. It was recorded at this place near Kutztown, and when I finished, nobody clapped, nobody. They were just looking at me. [laughs]

I think a lot of people were expecting fingerpicking, but they didn’t get any of it. That was the only piece I played.

Arthur: Who named the album?

Jack Rose: I did. It’s after (Mississippi) Fred McDowell: I Do Not Play Rock ‘N’ Roll (1969, Capitol).

Arthur: Do you think “Kensington Blues” is your most poplar song?

Jack Rose: Yeah, I guess. I mean people seem to like it, and I play it at almost every set I do. It feels like a theme song. We did a version of “Kensington” on [Jack Rose & The Black Twigs LP] and I think it turned out really nice. On that song, I’m playing it the same, and (the Twigs) just kind of jump in. But with the exception of “Revolt” and “Kensington Blues,” all those tunes we came up with together. A lot of people have mentioned, and I think it’s cool, that it doesn’t sound like Jack Rose, it sounds like a different unit. On a lot of songs, I really just lay back which is great to do because I get to play these like cool, old-time, more bluesy parts that I don’t get to do that much when I’m playing solo.

Arthur: What are you listening to now, as far as contemporary music?

Jack Rose: Well, I just got the new Sylvester Anfang II double LP (Aurora Borealis), which I think is really great…Glenn Jones’ new record, which hasn’t come out yet, I really like a lot…the new No Neck Blues Band record, and also Cian Nugent’s live record from last year I’ve been listening to a lot. He’s one of my favorite new guitar players. I think the new Why We Love single is good. Birds of Maya: I think they’re the best band in Philly right now. I saw those guys for the first time when they opened for Endless Boogie, and man those guys are just like masters of the blues, it was just fucking great. I was fuckin’ blown away.

Arthur: Have you ever thought about doing something electric, like the new Richard Bishop Freak of Araby project?

Jack Rose: I did a collaboration with D. Charles Speer last summer, and that was fun. It’s not out yet… We did four tunes. I played electric on three tracks and acoustic on one. It was fun, but I don’t feel the need to plug back in. The reason why I did play electric was because I wanted to record live, and that was the only way everyone can hear you is if you play electric.

Arthur: Are you able to completely support yourself through music these days?

Jack Rose: Yeah, it’s been tough this summer because we just bought this house, and I haven’t toured this year yet, so there hasn’t been a lot of money coming in.

Arthur: Tell me about that tiny pressing of 78s you did.

Jack Rose: Well, it was James Twig Harper and Carly Ptak from Baltimore, and they had some roof problems at their warehouse, and I played at the True Vine bookstore. And they said, ‘Hey, mind if we bootleg ya?’ And I was like, yeah sure, why the hell not. They said, ‘We’re gonna bootleg you, and press six 78s out of it. We’ll take three, and we’ll give you three’ Well, three showed up in the mail. I sold the first one when I had to go on tour. I was going out to ArthurFest on the West Coast, and I needed a plane ticket, so I sold the first one online for like $500. The second one I sold for around $200 because I had played it a couple times…