We were lucky enough to have the opportunity to ask Isakov a few questions to learn a bit more about what it’s like working with an orchestra and just how you take familiar songs and make them something new.

Hi Gregory, thanks for speaking to us. How’s life on tour treating you?

Hey! I am constantly staring up at the sky, thinking I am the luckiest person on earth to be touring with such an amazing group of people. The band and myself have brought along the Ghost Orchestra, an eight-person ensemble that we have been working out some arrangements to compliment our symphony release.

You’ve just made an album with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, featuring reworked takes on some of your catalogue’s best tracks. How did the experience differ from your regular recording process?

It was completely a new experience for me altogether. We played a few shows with the Colorado Symphony and then took the arrangements to the Seattle Symphony and the Oregon Symphony. We recorded those shows, but fell in love with the sound of the rehearsal tapes. You could really hear the space in the music. So we went back to Boettcher Hall in Denver last summer and recorded with the Colorado Symphony in front of nobody. Took those recordings back to the farm where our studio is, and mixed there.

And as a follow-on, how did you choose which songs to record? Was it your decision, or did the collaboration extend to designing the track list?

We recorded fifteen songs and eleven ended up making it on. The songs we had arranged are from my past three studio records, and a new song “Liars” that we have been playing out for a few years at shows. We chose the ones that sounded the best, while maintaining a sense of a good flow on a record, which is important to us.

I’d imagine recording and sharing songs is always a strange experience, in essence handing these personal things over to strangers, but was it even weirder to see them altered by other musicians? Did you feel protective of the original demos? Did the new versions still feel inherently yours?

I collaborated with the arrangers of the symphony scores (Tom Haggerman of DeVotchKa & Jay Clifford of Jump, Little Children). It was great working with them. So many hands made it into these songs. The weird thing about songs is that none of them really feel “mine.” I think when a song is finally recorded I sorta feel like I’m covering it. Always asking “Where did that song come from?” I love that about music.

Your current tour sees you play a number of dates with Colorado’s The Ghost Orchestra, as well as performances with local orchestra’s in several cities around the country (such as The National Orchestra in DC, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra). Is it exciting to play these grand music halls with full orchestral backing? And is the experience different depending on the orchestra?

It’s hard to put it to words—how full of awe I feel playing these shows.Has the experience changed the way you’ll write in the future? Can we expect more strings and lush instrumentation in future Gregory Alan Isakov releases?

You know, I’m not sure. I don’t think I could have this experience with it not affecting other work that I do. I am currently almost finished writing another record. It’s sparse like most records I put out, but who knows.

On your music more generally, what do you consider your biggest influences? Is it other musicians? Do things like art and literature play a part too?

I do love spending time with other musicians. I love going to shows. Gardening and working on the farm is in there. I like to read, yeah, Steinbeck has been a big one lately. I also like to watch cheesy sci-fi movies about sorcerers. Vampires. Wizards. They all probably make it in.

Finally, we always ask this: Could you name 4-5 artists you think we should hear? They can be old, new, popular or obscure, whatever you think is important and good.

Sure. SO MANY. Just to name a few: Johann Wagner, Ron Scott, Esme Patterson, Leif Vollebekk, Ramaya Soskin, Rachel Reis, Samantha Craine, Jeffrey Foucault, Andrea Gibson, Mandolin Orange, John Craigie, Shook Twins, Natalie Tate, Nathaniel Rateliff, Jeffrey Martin. Our guitar/banjo player, Steve Varney, has a new band called Kid Reverie. They are killer.Gregory Alan Isakov and the Colorado Symphony is available now from iTunes (or here if you’re Stateside). He has also just set off on a rather extensive tour, teaming up with different symphonies along the way, and you can find all the dates at the bottom of our preview post.

Photos by Blue Caleel

The post Interview: Gregory Alan Isakov appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

1) Evening Loving – Jenny Gillespie
2) Luxury – Patio
3) Low – Yours Are The Only Ears
4) Either Way – Sorority Noise
5) Home at Last – The Sports
6) Braver – Sally Fowler
7) Chow Chow – FAYE
8) Meant – Spartan Jet-Plex
9) Stained Glass Eye – The Dead Tongues
10) October – These Bashful Claws
11) Bad Vibrations – Naps
12) Baked Goods – Young Jesus
13) Heroine – BB Cream
14) Winona Death Ryder – Boy Problems (No Dice Tapes comp)
15) The Only Other Girl From Back Home – Advance Base
16) When it Feels – Soft Spell (STAY RAD SAV comp)
17) The Unnatural – Claire Cronin
18) Same Old Ocean – Crabapple
19) Diet Coke – Lake Michigan
20) Ferris Beuller – Flatsound
21) See Good – Jobless
22) Anything but Yourself – Tom Greenwood
23) Under the Mountain II – Mermaidens
24) Liars – Gregory Alan Isakov
25) Warning Sign – Mikko Joensuu
26) Candy – Fish Food
27) White Gold – Good Good Blood
28) We Bury Our Dead Alive – Coping Skills
29) Joke/Rope – Haybaby
30) Slacker – Will B & the Teen Creeps
31) Double Bacon Cheeseburger – Yikes
32) All I Have – Derek Ted
33) Try Hard – Hovvdy
34) Dark & Gloomy – Horse Teeth
35) Migratory Birds – Western Skies Motel
36) Endless Wave – Hanging Valleys

The post May 2016 Roundup – A Mixtape appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Anyway, Isakov is back with a new album to be released early this summer, Gregory Alan Isakov with the Colorado Symphony. The perspicacious amongst you might be able to guess just what the record entails, but we’ll expand for the sake of clarity. After performing with the symphony in 2013, Isakov has enlisted their help to record eleven old compositions, transforming his humble folk songs into large, sweeping things. ‘Liars’, the first song from the album, was written by Ron Scott and the arrangement is from Jay Clifford, with the Colorado Symphony conducted by Scott O’Neil. Check out the video below, directed and edited by Sarah Megyesy:

Gregory Alan Isakov with the Colorado Symphony is due out on the 10th June and you can pre-order it now via iTunes. He is also taking the record onto the road, teaming up with a variety of other orchestras across a multitude of states:

The post Gregory Alan Isakov unveils ‘Liars’ from new album with The Colorado Symphony appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life is, on the face of things, a relatively simple story. Girl meets boy under less than perfect circumstances and they struggle to make something of it. A classic love tale. But that’s where simplicity, or even any semblance of understanding, ends. This is a novel about post-9/11 New York, a tale of immense confusion, mistrust and paranoia, about poverty in a city smothered by it, about millions of people trying to make a life out of nothing.

Zou Lei is an illegal immigrant from China, a Muslim of the Uighur tribe, Skinner a PTSD-suffering Iraq vet who scraped through three tours of a war that’s followed him home in more ways than one. Queens is bursting at the seams with people looking for something better, or else ways to distract themselves from the present, a roiling, screaming sea of humanity. Lei and Skinner end up together, bonding through a common sadness and a shared appreciation of discipline and exercise. Their unsentimental yet gentle relationship serves as a recognisable, familiar way-in to a recognisable but wholly unfamiliar place. All of this is written in some of the best prose I’ve read in a long while. Beautiful and terrifying and sad, it captures New York as a gritty, humming place that’s crumbling in time with America’s perception of greatness.

Just like the characters, the reader is in alien territory. The overwhelming majority of us cannot fully understand the positions in which these protagonists find themselves. The fringes of society swamped by an overwhelming Lack Of. A lack of money and respect, of kinship and trust, as well as lack of material stuff (Zou Lei has a bed to sleep in but is essentially homeless, Skinner renting a basement with decidedly finite savings). But both are still subject to the American bombardment of dreams and nightmares that constitute the consumerist culture. They see shop-fronts and billboards, they see mistrust in the media and the faces of passers-by. The paradox of feeling isolated and lonely in a crowd of people seems designed specifically to torture them.

But the confusion is deeper than that, one that might impinge on Lei and Skinner more than most but hangs over us all. Not only are there no answers here, there are barely any questions. If 9/11 provided the West with a new narrative, a renewed sense of moral importance and superiority , then events like those at Abu Ghraib snatched away the veil. Technology has made it impossible to ignore that the ‘Bad Guys’ are mostly innocent, scared people like us, that our dirty secrets in exotic wars will not be buried. Everyone lives in this grey area but Skinner personifies it, pining for the purpose and friendship of war while being eaten alive by the truth of it.

“He took a drink from a flask of Bacardi Scorched Cherry and watched an execution on his laptop”

Here’s a collection of songs which we feel are somehow relevant to the themes and feel of the novel.

Tracklisting:

1. I’m New Here – Gil Scott Heron
2. Wish it Was True – White Buffalo
3. Drinking at the Dam – Smog
4. There I was in the pouring rain again, but this time I was at the drive-thru at Mac Donalds’ – Talons’
5. Beacon Hill – Damien Jurado
6. Heartbreaker – Noah Gundersen
7. Cold Apartment Floors – Vagabon
8. Travel Map – Hip Hatchet
9. Death By Dust – Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson
10. Linens – Water Liars
11. The Modern Leper – Frightened Rabbit
12. No Future (Pt. I) – Titus Andronicus
13. Shitty City – Moonface
14. The Whip – Jesse Marchant
15. Third of Life – A Weather
16. Bloodkin Push (Forget the Ones) – Will Johnson
17. Wall Around Your Heart – Huck Notari
18. The Trapeze Swinger (Iron & Wine Cover) – Gregory Alan Isakov
19. I Could Only Stand By – The Weather Station
20. Fake Empire – The National

Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish is out now on Tyrant Books (US) and Oneworld (UK + Aus). Quiet, Constant Friends is available digitally and on cassette via the Wake The Deaf Bandcamp page.

The post Lit Links: Atticus Lish – Preparation for the Next Life appeared first on Various Small Flames.