FEW PEOPLE MAKE ALBUMS ABOUT isolation and loneliness sound as appealing as John Doe does. That’s what Doe has achieved with his latest solo release, Fables in a Foreign Land (LP, Fat Possum FP 18001). Set as a song cycle in the 1890s, the album’s 13 songs reflect Doe’s penchant for dust-and-diesel storytelling, within an acoustic-trio format. It’s “telling stories and playing music around the modern campfire,” Doe said in an interview.
Doe’s mining of what some call the “dark folk” vein during the latter portion of his solo career hearkens back to his roots in X, the Los Angeles–bred iconoclast punk band he co-founded in 1977. Though X could be raw and confrontational, the band had killer vocal harmonies and a rockabilly-tinged sonic edge. X caught the eye and ear of Ray Manzarek, cofounding keyboardist of the Doors and long-established LA rock royalty, who produced the band’s first four albums,1 providing some recording lessons in the process.
“What Ray brought to us was validation,” Doe reflected, as we chatted before our recent interview. “He was a bona fide rock star with one of the coolest bands I thought ever was, especially as a teenager. He also taught us what’s most important in a recording: a good performance! If you don’t have a good performance, even if you add all kinds of bells and whistles, it’s still gonna sound bad. It’s not gonna sound convincing, because you’re really just making a record of what you did in the moment.”
What Doe has been doing for nearly six decades of recording has been, in essence, to extrapolate the title of a 1986 documentary about the band: to take un-heard music and make it be heard. When I suggested that, Doe answered, “I’ll take that compliment, but that title was probably inspired by T. S. Eliot.”
Doe is, comes from Eliot’s . A passage from “The Dry Salvages,” part of Quartet No.3, ends with “music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts.” Under his own name and under the rubric of the still-vibrant X, Doe is making music to last a lifetime at least. In our interview, Doe explained his use, in , of an acoustic-trio format, the relationship between vocalists and microphones, and a change to the wording in the X classic “Los Angeles.” The interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
