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Tom Marshall: The Amfibian Comes Up For Air
interview Page 2
Page 1 of interview
Page 3 of interview
mt: I received a copy of the Amfibian Tales album recently, and I like the mood that you set for the project. I zoned out to it a great deal. I found it relaxing.
TM: It is definitely a mellow mood. I like to think that that mellow feel came from the fact that it was recorded…my parents inherited a little farm from my grandmother. It is getting renovated and fixed all the time. I just found this old room in the farmhouse to move my studio equipment into. It gave it a whole new feel, a whole new experience. When you are recording, you are looking out the window at beautiful fields, vultures hunting, and deer. It is just a beautiful place to hang out. I basically had an open door policy, and my friends would just show up. We didn't know we were writing for a project, we were just writing songs. No concrete project was in mind, so it was laid back. We could do everything at our own leisure. Because there was nothing concrete and no deadlines, it kind of turned everything into this really open project. The album idea had been tossed out the window by the other guys, so it was really good that all this happened.
mt: You can't say that you didn't think you were going to do anything with that material?
TM: It was in the back of my mind that this stuff was going to be on an album. I really did think that if we still had been together as a band, then we would have taken this stuff as demos and really gone into the studio and done it right, but instead, we just left it in its native eight-track format, with no producer or real refinement.
mt: It kind of has the feel like you are playing in my living room when I listen to it. As the group you are now, do you feel any pressure to come out and do something similar to what Phish does, or perform in that fashion to their audience, that you will, in turn, inherit?
TM: The old Amfibian felt that kind of pressure, because we didn't know what to do, because we were playing in front of a bunch of Phish fans. This time around, I feel like our product is original, different, and good enough that Phish fans that only came to see what I was up to will notice that it is a more legit thing. I don't feel any guilt or pressure. We do play a few Phish songs, which gets the recognition of the crowd, but they are the more off-kilter, off-the-beaten-score Phish songs.
mt: Thomas Mann said that the plight of an artist is that no one will truly understand their work—any artist. You being a lyricist, a lot of people don't really listen to the music for the lyrics (especially in large stadium settings with mediocre acoustics). You put special emphasis on the lyrics on Amfibian Tales, but do you attempt to bring those to the forefront of your mix in live performances, as well?
TM: That quote might be particularly apt for me, first and foremost, because of my Phish stuff. Some of the frequent reviews that Phish would get would be, "Great music, silly lyrics." That was the old days of Phish. I made an effort to wising up with what I am saying and putting a little more of my thought into it. Trey usually took the songwriting burden, so I didn't really have a say in where lyrics were put in a song. Trey always put them in the forefront and gave them their due. I never really put forth an effort to be understood through the lyrics. I think it is certainly a combination of the music and the lyrics. If you get it, you get it, if you don't, you don't. I like it when my lyrics are interpreted in a different way than they were intended. I write in an open-ended fashion, not necessarily to be understood as a writer, like Thomas Mann. I think he was more interested in people forming an insight into what he was doing than I do when I write. I write to evoke a feeling, and not so much a concrete idea. The lyrics are not like a window into my soul.
mt: No deep secrets about yourself hidden in there?
TM: I might be, just because it does come from the self. Essentially, by sheer repetition of certain themes, I may be revealing something. But, on a song-by-song basis, that is not what I am setting out to do.
mt: My perception, from listening to your lyrics, is that you tend to build a mental picture with your words so that a listener could close her eyes and try to see what you are saying. How important is that mental picture to the word you put on the paper?
TM: That is what I am striving for—the picture, the feeling. I often write floating or drifting type imagery. I am more into someone going there with me, instead of someone recognizing that I am writing about some kid I met in high school. I much more prefer bringing someone to a state of mind, and one way of doing that is by creating a visual image.
mt: Are you into any other kinds of visual arts?
TM: Not personally. I have never really tried painting, myself, but I do like looking at it, especially some French artists. Chagal is one of my favorites, I like him a lot. I am no art connoisseur by any means. I am definitely a movie connoisseur. I love movies of all kinds.
mt: You have a top ten list?
TM: I think it is much more commercial than someone might think.
mt: It takes some talented people to get to a commercial level sometimes.
TM: Yeah, and I agree. I am totally into the Godfather, and Apocalypse Now. I loved The Matrix, and Fight Club. I just really like things that give me a strong emotion.
mt: Have you ever written any short stories to help expand on your taste for imagery?
TM: I gave these lyrics to Trey called "Kissed by Mist." It is a story about a man who gets led into a forest glade by a woman, and it turns out that she is tricking him there, and if he stays there too long then his feet become rooted into the ground and he becomes a tree and can't leave. When he looks around, he realizes that all the trees in the glade are men that had been lured there. Trey turned it into a song that just happened to work for him. We changed it around a little bit when he came up with this idea to give it to this woman Julia Butterfly Hill, who climbed up into a great Redwood tree in California to save it and stayed up there for two years. We gave that to her. It was an honor that she liked it. They played it a few times on the Phish circuit. It was definitely not a Phish-style song, because it had this long moody melody. Aside from that, I really don't write stories.
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