Revered Philadelphia songwriter JIM BOGGIA puts an imaginative spin on the history of pop
By Lavinia Jones Wright
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Jim Boggia |
All good artists who've been around the block know that it's only a matter of time before the cycle completes and your music comes back into style. For proof, look no further than Johnny Cash's heroic turn in the 90s. The always affable Jim Boggia, audiophile record lover and longtime favorite songwriter of "those in the know," has been waiting his turn for longer than he'd like us to print. His newest effort, the cleverly titled Misadventures in Stereo , is a beautifully simple and spontaneous piece of meticulously crafted pop that seems incredibly timely in this current resurgence of harmonic pop, and Boggia has some welldeveloped, and sometimes self-deprecatingly comical theories on why that's possible.
If I'm remembering correctly, when you started out, making pop music wasn't such a cool thing. Why do you think it's now starting to come back?
I think that in general a late 1960s, early 70s aesthetic in terms of song structure and melody and even arrangements is starting to come back. I remember a time when I first started playing that the idea of having harmony was considered, "Oh, harmony. How quaint." Now I think really young kids particularly, and this could be because everybody steals music and you can listen to everything - and also because it's been long enough that it's not directly their parents' music - are really starting to go back and listen to a lot of '60s and '70s music. So you're seeing it in a lot of the newer music that's coming out. I think the kind of pop music that I make is starting to come back. I don't think we're about to start sweeping the charts with "Yesterpop" as I like to call it, but it's nice to know that there's starting to be a space for it again.
My 16-year-old sister and her friends were downloading The Archies and all that 60s-era bubblegum pop. I couldn't believe they weren't kidding! They had it on their iPod Nanos right next to Jay-Z.
That's great! Can the Monkees be far behind? Walls were put up during that '60s and '70s hangover around the time that MTV came out - at the time we would look down on the Monkees - but now we realize how really incredibly well put-together those records were. And we know the back stories of all thosemusicians who played on those records and how great they were. I think that because we've gotten so far away fromthe fashion aspects of it, all those negative connotations that were placed on that music are gone, and you can actually just listen to the music.
When you were making Misadventures in Stereo, you recorded live to tape?
I was using sort of the old aesthetic or the old methodology of recording. Almost all the tracks on the album, the basic track that's there would be drums, bass, guitar, keys all cut live. And pretty much without exception we would use one complete take from beginning to end. No punching back in. So there's a lot of interaction between the musicians in the basic track that I realized was what make those records from back in the day so exciting. It's become so easy to make a perfect record. I like listening to the little clues on the old records, because it gives you a view into the process ofmaking a record. Theymake you think about what might have been going on in the studio, and they keep you listening to the record again and again. The hermetically sealed perfection of new records doesn't give you any mysteries to unravel.
On "Chalk One Up For Albert's Side" and "NRBQ" I hear a little bit of Elliott Smith's influence.
Yes, I definitely like him. I feel like a lot of those comparisons are probably more because we grew up with a lot of the same influences. With Elliott in particular, when you mentioned "Chalk One Up," I think of Elliot's work with Jon Brion. In terms of aesthetic, Jon and I are so well matched and intertwined; one of us has to be irrelevant! Putting allusions to older songs is something that I love to do, and something that Elliot has done. It's also sometimes nice to set the lyrics against the music.
You have a lot of talented friends in music. How do you feel about collaborating?
I worked with Tony Asher on "Chalk One Up." He's done a few good things (laughs), "God Only Knows," "Wouldn't It Be Nice," just Pet Sounds , no big deal! The last record I wrote with Aimee Mann. There's still a small part of me that feels like it's cheating, but there's such a practical aspect to it. This article is actually a classified ad for any songwriters on Tony Asher's level whomight want to work with a fabulous musician like me. Is Gilbert O' Sullivan ASCAP? He'll be on the next record.
