The Nathan Salsburg Interview
Photo: Mickie Winters
Tell me about growing up and how you first connected to music, more specifically the guitar. Was music something that was relevant around your household during your formative years?
I was born in Northeastern Pennsylvania, and raised in Kentucky from age five. Child of divorced parents, who had split up the family record collection. I discovered Dave Van Ronk, Mississippi John Hurt, and Dylan through what was on my mom’s shelves; my dad played passable guitar and would sing me “Railroad Bill” and “Goodnight Irene” as lullabies. Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie came through him. I was always energized by that music; it worked on a deep seam in me from my earliest exposure to it. Then I discovered the Misfits, Minor Threat and Suicidal Tendencies, and labored to reconcile my love for and desire to participate in these two disparate aesthetic universes. It was a lot for a preteen to try to make sense of, especially one heavily motivated by a quest for identity and belonging.
Photo: Mickie Winters
What would you and your friends do for fun, and who would you say were some of your earliest influences?
I was lucky to spend my teenage in Louisville in the early 1990s, where there was a huge and vibrant hardcore/punk/post-rock scene. A local headliner could bring out 800–1000 kids on a good night, and I got involved in the DIY scene: booking shows, playing in bands, opening a record store with some friends in the back of a skateboard shop. My middle and high school years were devoted to this world. On the flip side, I was also a summer-camp kid, first on a Quaker farm in NE Pennsylvania, then at a Jewish camp in Indiana. I cut my teeth playing acoustic guitar, learning folk songs, dipping my toes into writing music in these places. These disparate inputs, while sometimes hard to reconcile—as above: aesthetically, personally, as I labored hard to figure out who I thought I was—were a powerful combination whose effects, of course, made me who I am and the music I make what it is.
Did you participate in any groups or projects prior to your solo career? Tell me about writing and recording your debut album “Affirmed” back in 2011. How did the deal with No Quarter, a label that's very familiar with your work, come about, and what was the overall approach to this album?
I played in a very mediocre folk-rock band in college, and a slightly less mediocre folk-rock band when I moved to New York City after college—was one of two guitarists/singers in the former; one of three guitarists in the latter. I learned a lot as a player and composer from both experiences, particularly the latter, as the musicianship was of a fairly high caliber, but making music took a back seat for a few years while I deepened my skills as a listener, working for the Alan Lomax Archive. This was circa 2002–2005; when I started playing guitar again in earnest, I was surprised to find how much I had improved, I think, by not giving a shit about outcomes, recordings, and releases. I was especially surprised to discover something that sounded like a style of my own. I wrote and recorded a little tune called “Bold Ruler’s Joys” and gave it to the Tompkins Square label for inclusion on one of their “Imaginational Anthem” comps. That was the beginning of a 10-12 year focus on solo guitar, and was the first tune that ultimately appeared on “Affirmed”.
You’ve collaborated with a spellbinding number of folks, such as James Elkington, your talented wife Joan Shelley and the great Will Oldham. What have some of these experiences been like for you sharing a space with these musicians compared to working on material on your own? I'm dying to know more about your most recent effort with Oldham and Tyler Trotter covering Lungfish material, “Hear The Children Sing The Evidence”. I have to say this was my favorite album of the year!
Collaborations with good friends — including a good friend who’s also my wife — are one of the great joys of my life, not least because they take so much less out of me than solo projects do. Having something/someone to work off with, loosens up creative capacities that often take a long time and a lot of effort to access on my own. The rewards are different, naturally, but they’re still very rewarding. The impetus for the thing was a several-month period in which I sang Daniel Higgs’ “The Evidence” for my baby daughter as a lullaby. Tuned to DADGAD I could play the guitar part with one hand while I rocked her with the other and sang. If we had to go on like that for 30–40 minutes till sleep came, we did - I never got sick of the song, and in fact it reawakened my love and awe of Lungfish, with whom I hadn’t deeply engaged with since I was a teenager (I remember learning “The Evidence” the summer I turned 17).
I’ve discovered, as I’m sure many parents before me have, that long pieces of music are mind-savers in the midst of the chaos of parenting young kids - there may be no capacity for focus or involvement with any particular activity or experience for more than a minute or two, but soundtracking this tumult with long performances provides a semblance of consistency that I came to rely on passionately: there was lots of the Dead, Pharoah Sanders, Sarasehan Karawitan Surakarta, Fela. Lungfish songs are, paradoxically, both epic and short, and I wanted to capture my and my daughter’s experience of the open-ended performance of “The Evidence” in a form that other folks, parents or not, might like to stretch out and luxuriate in. Knowing Will is a Higgs fan, and guessing he’d likely be up for such an experiment of drastic extension, I asked him to join in, along with one of my oldest friends, Tyler Trotter, who is also a Lungfish fan and a synthesizer savant. “Hear the Children Sing” was an obvious addition to the project, and I’m especially satisfied to have gotten Will’s daughter and my own to sing on it.
