A Brief Philosophy on Songwriting with Kyle Field of Little Wings
Chicken, or the egg question: What comes first for you, the music, or the poetry? What do you like most about recording your music vs. performing your music?
Lyrics first then make music to fit. What is the third way? Ummm, improvising (recording it) with vowel sounds and fake words and listening back to that and creating words to clothe the sounds. When I was a kid I felt bad about, like, My hair getting cut off and the weather turning foul and a Pet Shop Boys coming on the radio on the way home from basketball practice, there was a lonely feeling in the air around fall. But I absorbed a lot of that, the top 40 British dance music, the Melancholy and it suffused into my musical DNA. One of my heavens on earth is a quiet house with the windows open on a cool day, sardines and crackers and three hour old Coffee crowding a newspaper with too many folds in it on the plywood desk top, timelessness is my ultimate goal. The audience is unknown when recording so maybe it’s like being covered in a blanket and surrounded by people watching you. It’s a bit scary the way that hiding under your covers is… It is a childish notion that “because I can’t see you you can’t see me” it takes some kids a while to grasp the concept that by closing your eyes the world doesn’t simply disappear. Performing live is an altered state, a supernatural state that I am still learning to understand. There is a significant part of my being that is totally introverted and hidden and non attention seeking and this is the part I believe that works on the music. Then there is the face first self that cracks through the glass and melts into the surroundings and feels at one with everything through songs. I try to maintain a steady relationship with both of those selves and more.
How much does your environment impact your writing and approach to songwriting? How much does the guitar and/or instrument play a role in the channeling of the music for you as a songwriter and performer?
I can’t tell, I have written in a diner in New York City all by myself on a long ago Halloween and a song called “Whale Mountain” came out. If anything, the writing doesn’t necessarily reflect the environment. I have no real goal either per say when writing besides finishing the song. Line by line the thing goes towards it’s own end and I think the skill that I have developed over time is being able to read the grain of the first sentence and make the rest of the lines seem native or like extensions of that first thought. It is still one of my favorite things in this world to do, to shape a song from start to finish. I realized the other year that I rhymed “sock” with “rock” in 2003 and had heard that rhyme originally circa 1981 when I was eight years old, in a Kenny Rogers song called “Tennessee Bottle”. Have you seen the Steve Martin film “All Of Me” ? In coexistence it is tough to tell where one thing ends and the other begins. Just as the eye cannot see itself and the finger cannot touch it’s own tip, you cannot separate me from my guitar. They will pry it from my lap and fingers when I go. Lately I just play the same song over and over at home. I wrote it on Thanksgiving 2021 and it’s called “Think I’ll hide out in the jungle see you tomorrow” and I think it’s going to be a hit? I have nothing to say about Lil Wayne.
With every release you make, what are some things that are most important to you when starting a new project? What is your favorite Grateful Dead song/album/live performance and/or band moment?
I think that because I make drawings I have a thread running throughout the albums at least in my mind’s eye, that it is this landscape, and I treat each album like a number on the face of a clock in some sense… or that they all build on or against one another I guess. And I go rail to rail in a way, Trying for something on the new platter that I didn’t get around to getting done on the last one. The record in the works has a real human flatulation on it and that’s a first, you can’t edit things like that out you know?Oh hard to pick one, but I am born in ’72 and when I see the year 1972 written out it looks like my name printed on a page… So I like Europe ’72 and stuff around that time a lot. Someone left a dead bootleg on my windshield and it had a teal J card I believe it’s the Universal Amphitheatre show 1973 and the first time I heard the “Eyes Of The World” on it I was very emphatic about it and then some people said that version is widely regarded as one of the best renditions and I was all, yeah I guess so! That band has been a candlelight for me for my own music in some way because they have never really peaked and aren’t afraid to sincerely play a 20 year old song anew. Being too reliant on the music industry is creative suicide. It takes a certain level of commitment as a person to never give up.
Do you have a set of themes, or familiarness you like to touch on throughout each album that is often found across all your work? I know you're an illustrator and have a love for comics. Who do you think would have been a better band back in the day if they were one: Marvel, or DC?
Yes! When I was 16 I got a 1984 Chevy Chevette and I believe it cost $2000, but maybe I am mistaken. It came with a built in speaker on the passenger side and an AM/FM radio that played through said speaker. When I saved up some money I bought a cassette deck to replace the sock sound system. I believe it was a “pull-out” tape deck which were popular at the time. You would see kids at high school wearing mirrored sunglasses wearing a backpack and carrying their Alpine pull-out with them to stow in their locker for the day. Mine was no doubt a lower rung of quality haha. Anyhow, little did I know but my new stereo, being wired only to the one speaker was actually only playing the right stereo channel. My brother Brian and I carpooled to highschool for about two years before he could drive and we mostly listened to the same tape every single day for those two years which was “Yellowman - King Yellowman”, which we loved and thought was so unique and funny as well. Long story longer, eventually I got two speakers installed into the Chevette, (I needed more hertz to compete with the buzz of the four speed engine which sounded like a mosquito by the time we hit 50 mph) and was shocked when I realized that we had only been hearing half of this album for two years.
All of a sudden there were parts and information coming in the left speaker channel that we had never heard before and that made the songs rounder and make more sense. Here’s the caviat: It was safer. We had gotten used to the oddness and that was part of the fun, but it was a double blind survey in some sense. We didn’t know we were missing the left channel, Ignorance truly was bliss. The themes in my albums I will not name because they are personal and like a spell of sorts, but I hope that they are universal enough that the listener can find their own meanings and interpretations? This is what I absorb from the music of others and what I value, and this is what helps make songs a soundtrack to my day to day and ultimately my life. I would lean way towards Marvel, the imagination of the characters and three dimensionality of the possibilities in that world were always exciting whereas D.C. can feel overly didactic or just like U.S.A. Shoot ‘em up in a square John way. Nothing against Superman though!
What is your particular process and approach when readying for a new album and/or recording project? How would you compare surfing to songwriting?
I like to have an album title and quite often an album cover picked out before I start recording. Both can change and sometimes do but I honestly feel that lame album covers are the fault of deadlines and poor planning. An album cover exists forever so pick well? Also I’ve changed a few over the years. I also rarely put the date on the actual album! I want them to live on the same plane physically one and all. I think I’ve thought of this before that the guitar was the surfboard and the song was the wave itself, temporary. It is so tricky for me to do an interview. The most interesting insights I have no way of putting into words and then I think that the insights are already there in the songs. People ask me why more people don’t know about my music sometimes. Why are more people supposed to know about it? Compared to who or what? Did I get into this to become a famous well known person that couldn’t walk down the street without getting flagged down?
I don’t think that’s why… I don’t put my face on the covers of the albums (yet! But LQQKOUT!), etc. I love songs and they affect me so much and have since I was very young. I fell for that spirit of music and absorbed it to the point where I had to learn to make it myself and become a vessel or conduit for that big overwhelming uncontainable thing. I think that so many people that get into making music professionally become so distracted by the things that make it a “job” that the music suffers. My ultimate goal is to stay as relatively unknown as possible while still being able to survive because I feel there is some fine line that I am trying to walk. I want to write about things that the most amount of people can understand while letting the least amount of people access to them because at the end of the day I love when people ask me “why haven’t more people heard about you?”
https://www.instagram.com/regularlittlewings/
Mushroom book : https://store.perpetualdoom.com/mushroom
Zephyr LP on Sun Cru : https://linktr.ee/suncru
Froggy’s LP on Astral Spirits : https://astrallittlewings.bandcamp.com/album/froggys
