Little Wings

Back around 2002 Dream Magazine contributor Ethan Gicker (who took the photo here), brought his friend Kyle Field over to my house to visit. Kyle's longish blonde hair held in place by a wooden clothespin, he exuded a sorta Huck Finn as surfer vibe and seemed like a genuinely nice guy. Later on I got to see Kyle with his acoustic guitar playing at local venue The Magic Theatre; and I realized I had been initiated into the Little Wings love cult. A crowd of sweet faced local kids sang along to Kyle's mystic/comic campfire songs, and one was swept up in the moment. I'm sure that many folks that see Little Wings share the experience, and want to share it with their friends; and thus the love cult grows. It's not really about pop star adulation; it's the warmth and universal stoned humanity of his insight and compassion that lifts a whole crowd up on their own little wings. He seems to combine the off-key emotional honesty of Will Oldham, with the childlike shared fun of Jonathan Richman; as his story songs meander along their rhyming, rhythmic way. There is also something of the wiser older brother in him as well; I like Kyle, and I like his music too.

G.P.: We're all familiar with the idea of various mixes being released; but you've taken this to another level with Light Green Leaves, with the CD, vinyl, and cassette versions of the album all quite different from one another. Would you explain what you did?
K.F.: I basically took several approaches to try to get these songs recorded, to allow myself some freedom and room for imperfections and just "release" in general. I am trying to have music act in the most natural way that is possible, trying to keep it as close to the original spark as I can. One way of doing this for me was to document different versions of the songs so that the songs weren't so tied up in one mold or form. I feel it lends the songs extra flexibility in a live setting as well, I am not afraid to really change everything about them that way. They can continue to grow and live. Technically, what I did,was to use different settings and different people, different time restrictions and different equipment so that everything about the experience for me was varied and a bit out of my control. I am really interested into environments take over the song so that I can get out of the way and just let it happen.the more I try to control the process I feel the more I veer away from the original instance of inspiration.
G.P.: Looking back at the Wonder Trilogy, how do you feel about it?
K.F.: I feel good about it. There are three albums and the "Wonder Trilogy" has a nice ring to it in the way that a painting I might have made still looks good hanging on the wall in the kitchen. It still seems to wear well. It feels like a good place to start the Little Wings world for me, to release three recordings that relate to one another so that there is a sort of broad platform for me to draw upon in my mind. Sort of like building a little model of a fictional city that you can leave on the dining room table and look at while you're talking on the phone. you see different things in there after a while that you never remembered building. That is my favorite thing about listening to old recordings, being surprised again.
G.P.: How long have you enjoyed wandering?
K.F.: I have been wandering off and on for about four years, that is, going in between the state of renting a place and not renting a place. At this point my attention span for any one geographical location seems to be around one month. One month and then I get itchy and go somewhere else. My wanderings are a bit more structured now than they used to be. The positive side to that is that it involves touring and actually making a living. The downside is that I am away from the ocean quite alot, and surfing is my main religion... I have lived out of three different vehicles for months and months and held jobs while living in a small camper shell. I worked at a liquor store and would park wherever I parked and sleep in the back. A few mornings I rolled out of bed and put on my shoes, walked right into the liquor store as I had parked in the back parking lot. My favorite spot to sleep is definitely in Big Sur or on the sand anywhere. I am based on the west coast.
G.P.: Would you tell me a bit about your family? Where your were born and raised?
K.F.: My family originated in the south. My father grew up in west Texas and my mother grew up in a tiny town in Arkansas. My dad was a college football coach in Alabama and Mississippi until I was five. He got a job coaching at UCLA at that point, so we moved from this three acre gravel driveway home in Starkville, Mississippi to southern California. It was shocking but wonderful. I had never had so many kids my age around. And that is when we found the ocean. I have two younger brothers, one is two years younger than I, and the other is eight years younger. They were more into sports and football earlier on, and I was the drawer or "artist" of the family. Now we are all doing our own thing, but we all play music now. I want to have them on tour with me sometime, they can both play guitar well and it would be a nice family outing. My dad actually played tambourine from the crowd at a show we did this summer in Los Angeles. And my mom has been to a few shows as well. They are really supportive.
G.P.: In the past you have professed a fondness for the number three, would you elaborate?
K.F.: The number three sort of runs throughout my life in many ways. I am one of three boys, I was raised on three acres, it was my first number on a soccer team. when I see the number three it is the equivalent to seeing the word "yes." 3:33 is my favorite time of day, and I witness it alot. I will look at clocks at that time, and it makes me feel different. It is as if that minute means something, I don't know why. Something that needs no explaining. It allows me to live in a "waking sleep" sort of state that I am really into. Being awake but you feel like you're dreaming because everything seems strong and symbolic.
G.P.: You seem to travel pretty light. Do you ever have the feeling that all of the stuff people carry with themselves sort of gets in their way?
K.F.: I try to have one of everything, and try not to have any more than that. One sleeping bag, one flashlight, etc. I feel that once I neglect that philosophy, things get all sloppy and haywire. I think there is something to simplicity being potent and swift, and that the integrity of objects exists only when they are appreciated as essentials. Less is more certainly works for me. I give extras because there is only so much room in a station wagon.
G.P.: Tell me a bit about the band Rodriguez?
K.F.: Rodriguez was the band in which I learned how to play music. It was Matt Ward and I and a few different drummers. In order: Jake Hockel, Sanjeev Srinivas, and lastly, Mike Funk. It was the only band I will probably ever be in. It was much like a marriage and it was my life at the time. All of the songs were so specifically worked out amongst that band that there was no playing the songs without the other members. Matt Ward was this guy I barely knew but really liked when we first started playing together. The chemistry and the humor and the general feeling of Rodriguez was really special. We wrote so many songs but didn't record very often. We were a very energetic live band and played these really physically involved songs, akin to the Minutemen in many ways. I walked away from the breaking up of that band and realized I had no songs. They were all locked up in others. My approach since then has been a reaction to that loss and that feeling. There are many members in Little Wings, now. Several drummers, guitarists, etc., they are all scattered. I want an all inclusive experience now, where the music is the thing, and it can be played by many people.
G.P.: Any favorite poets?
K.F.: I like D.C. Berman a whole lot. Also, Scott Nairne, a friend from childhood and one of my first "writing friends". I have copy of Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations in my station wagon and read it from time to time and it always seems new. I actually draw a lot from Rimbaud subconsciously. I wrote a pamphlet called Fall Phantoms last year,and it was a sort of transplanted Californian living in the northwest through a fantasy hallucination filter sort of piece. Seemed awfully Rimbaud-like to me. I like anything that takes my mind somewhere that seems familiar enough to relate to it, but foreign enough to provide a profound experience. I like the writing and audio cassettes of Alan Watts and Ram Dass for this very reason.
G.P.: Can you tell us a bit about the mysterious figure known as Ethan Gicker?
K.F.: I lived at Gickerberg for two weeks this summer. The guy is an anomaly. He knows something about everything it seems, and I honestly felt like I was his student or his understudy or something. We went hiking and swimming, threw rocks through the windshield of an abandoned car,it was boyhood revisited. I don't know exactly what he will do, but I know he will do big things. We keep talking about making a "boyfort" on their property out there, a cross between the palace flophouse and a tipi or zendo. His mother, Carri, is all about it. She might have come up with the idea for all I remember. Anyhow, Ethan is a young prodigy living in the mountains outside Nevada City, California. He knows about engines and digging holes and following a single bug around without ever touching it, for like, an hour and a half while eating his lunch, all hunched over......
G.P.: A few of your favorite hip hop artists and songs?
K.F.: I am addicted to Missy Elliott's Work It. I have listened to that song at least one hundred times. I have it on a bootleg CD compilation i bought called Holla @ Yo Boy. I got it at a flea market in Augusta, Georgia for five dollars. It's a CDR but it has Work It on it and that is my favorite song in the world right now. That and Blue by Joni Mitchell. I like Eminem alot, too, though listening to it for too long makes my face hurt for some reason. I like the Marshall Mathers album the best. I heard We Gonna Get It On Tonight while driving through the central valley (of California) with Rob Kieswetter and Matt Gottschalk and we were going kind of crazy the first time we heard it. We wanted it to be describing our nightlife, though it ended up really missing the mark.
G.P.: You do your own cover art, and I’ve seen your drawings elsewhere. What is your art background?
K.F.: I have been drawing for my entire life. I started playing music ten years ago. So, I have been drawing for a bit less than thirty years. I studied it in college at UCLA as well. I don't do any comics with strict story lines, but I make drawings and create characters, build models and scenes, action figures. I am attempting a book of drawings that I hope to have published. Painting
and that. That is actually my main practice in a sense, it is more consistently in my life than making music or writing songs.
G.P.: What's the best thing about music?
K.F.: I enjoy being transported by music, I enjoy the combination of certain music with specific places or seasons or smells. I feel like music combined with the other senses works to create our own personal microcosms that can be revisited and experienced again. I think that music has magic to it, it is impossible for it not to.t That is my feeling about music, that if music is actually being made, it does something to the soul.
G.P.: Can or does art improve our lives?
K.F.: I know it improves mine, and there seem to be others that agree about their own.i If taken in, it seems like an effective tool for documenting your life. I know that recordings and drawings serve as postcards to "future Kyle" like, "Hey, remember that feeling? that was you,too."
G.P.: How important are dreaming or dreams to your work?
K.F.: I have had dreams predict events and futures and all of those things that can't be explained. Dreams are what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing. That seems like a valuable time to me. The topic of dreams is like the topic of God. It is infinite and can't be touched or really described. When I get my head around things so abstract and everlasting, that is when I am mostly spirit and not much body anymore. That is where I am trying to spend more time, all alone like that. That is when the "work" happens for me, when I am detached enough to be a channel or a vessel and not be scared, lose fear. That's when I make my favorite things.
G.P.: Do you pray?
K.F.: I talk to something or someone and call it praying. I believe in the idea of there being something other than what we can all see. I talk to it. I have faith that everything happens for reasons not always be knownst to us. Call it chaos or whatnot, I trust this life and this universe. I think it is good.
G.P.: Tell me something about surfing?
K.F.: It is, for me, about gliding on the water and getting exercise. It feels amazing to be linked up to an actual energy source and relying on it to generate speed and momentum. It is one of my favorite activities in the world when it is right.
G.P.: What inspires you?
K.F.: Too many things to name, or, everything. The idea of limitlessness and that when you create you are merely sampling one point of reference on the larger projection of the idea or "thing". Other music, drawings, something that started out very private and small and then got out into the world without being too changed or touched up. I enjoy raggedly made folk art that comes out of people's houses and campershells. The notebooks of other people inspire me. I like looking at the quality or shape of other people's handwriting. I remember really liking this one guys handwriting in high school. When he was writing in black, so was I. When he was writing in blue, I would switch. I was the oldest brother and so had to go outside of the family to find someone to copy, a surrogate older brother if you will.

G.P.: What are your favorite songs from Light Green Leaves, and why?
K.F.: I enjoy What Wonder the most because it is an anthem or directions to someone or to everyone, in how to live, to observe certain things in the nature of all things and try to apply that message to your own life. I like it for the uplifting message and the objective message. It feels like a reggae tinged spiritual to be sung in the woods about the trees. It feels "hard" to me, like how a hip hop song feels hard. But in this case, there are hard looking troll or woodnymph figures, burly beards and things growing on them made of moss and springy, twiggy things in their hats. I also like Boom! because it evolved over a few different "slang exchanges" between friends and I. Tim Bluhm (Mother Hips, Ball Point Birds), was using the word "boom" for alot of different purposes. Like,"hey Tim, do you have a pocketknife?" and he would go "BOOM" and present the knife. I lifted it and used it with friend Phil Elvrum (Microphones, Mount Eerie) and he wrote the line,"BOOM! my voice says make room!" into a song that might have disappearred. That happened and I wrote my song using his line. It is one of the latest in Phil and I's continual thievery/homage collaboration. It is a good way to work.
G.P.: Do you believe in magic?
K.F.: I believe in everything and think that every idea that anyone has ever had is a truth. so magic fits into that.
G.P.: Any favorite films or directors?
K.F.: I like The Shining almost the most of any movie for a certain feeling. I like The Endless Summer for another feeling. And I like The Big Lebowski for quite another feeling. These are probably my favorite films of all time.
G.P.: Who is Will Oldham?
K.F.: A singer and writer and actor from Louisville, KY. He has been an inspiration to me and many others and performs under the name Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. I like his music a lot and talk to him every once in a while. He is very good at what he does, maybe the best.
G.P.: What's the best antidote to fear?
K.F.: Remembering in that moment that the only thing to fear is pain or certain death. Pain doesn't last forever and death will cure the pain. Not being afraid to die is the first step in conquering fear.
G.P.: Any favorite painters/artists?
K.F.: I like Cy Twombly, Jason McClean, Chris Johansonn, Khaela Maricich, Phil Elverum, Paul Klee, Mike Kelly, Raymond Pettibon, Francis Stark, Chris Burden, Luce Cupery, Jonathan Wilson, Tim Bluhm and Rob Kieswetter.
G.P.: Were you athletic in school?
K.F.: I played a year of water polo. It was good. I played a year of football, I stood on the sidelines hoping not to be called into the game. I never scored any points. I deflected a pass with amazing vigor once, slamming the ball to the ground because if I had caught it, someone would have tackled me really hard, probably.
G.P.: What do you think about the consciousness of animals?
K.F.: I like to think that everything is sharing the same grand pool of consciousness, but being filtered through different physical entities. I like the illustration of a ladle and a lake. Every living thing is a ladle of a different shape. All are dipped into the lake when the being is alive. They are all sharing the same water but shaping it differently because they are shaped differently. When the ladle is removed, it ceases to be a vessel for the water. That seems like a very simple way of looking at existence. Consciousness is the feeling of being this or that ladle. Some might even have holes in them, but they still serve their function.
G.P.: What's your favorite time of day?
K.F.: I enjoy the evening time almost the best.
G.P.: How would you describe the music of Little Wings?
K.F.: I would say that it is the sound of my
notebooks and moments of singing coming together, that my drawings and feelings about things get to know each other. I am constantly changing as a person and so feel that the music is constantly changing and drafts behind me (or precedes me) as a running subconscious commentary or record keeper of my life. I incorporate those around me from album to album and have girlfriends singing for the first time on my records. So the music to me is raw and as fresh as the original inspiration was in some cases. I like it that way. I love a recorded mistake that acts like a hair out of place. I like messy hair. My dad used to cut my hair when it would get right about where I liked it. It was this sense of impending doom,"my hair is actually getting long!" I would think to myself, and it would be flipping out on the sides. And sooner or later, I would get the soft tap on the shoulder from Bob the barber, "son,i think it's time for a haircut" (because he's from the south and they weren't used to the California hippie inspired things) and so we would get out the towel and spread newspaper on the floor and I would lose my little wings. Now as an adult, I have decided to grow them and name my band after them in an homage to freedom and independence.
G.P.: Do you feel any connection to the work of Jonathan Richman?
K.F.: I am not so familiar with the work itself but met him a few months ago when Adam Selzer and I played in San Francisco. Adam's cousin Nicole is married to Jonathan so they came to the show and we met. It was really nice to be around him. He was genuine and a genuinely good freak, very inspiring.
G.P.: What do you learn about your songs when you sing them live?
K.F.: Sometimes I find out what they mean, if they were written very abstractly or written from a character. That is a profound feeling for me. I learn about their grain and pace as well,but often times I am simply singing along to the recorded version in my mind. It is like I have burned a copy of it into my brain and can pour attention over it in order to replay it, as if my focused consciousness were a needle or a laser, and that synapse in my brain were the copy. The way anyone can conjure their favorite songs. When I was in fourth grade, for instance, I had a glitch in that department. I had trouble for a while humming the tune to the television show The A Team because I would get it confused with the theme to The Raiders of the Lost Ark. I developed a trick of some sort to separate the two songs, and I think that sort of learning might be in the same neighborhood of thought or recollection as song writing. It has to do with memory.
G.P.: How important is the audience to the performance?
K.F.: Anyone that is intentionally there to hear some music is very important in my mind.
G.P.: Reasons to be cheerful?
K.F.: I am enjoying eating well and becoming more useful of my time, I want to keep growing as a person, and so the idea that I am only getting better makes me really happy and inspired.
G.P.: What's next?
K.F.: Singing and writing and drawing and surfing alot. All of the things I did when I was thirteen basically, my life hasn't changed much. College and school in general was the strange bump in the road. Now I am back to this child that laid on the kitchen floor in Starkville, Mississippi drawing pictures. I always love making pictures and now I know how to make songs whereas then, I would listen to music while I drew. So, I am just continuing on with my practice that I developed soon after I came into the world. But now there is the internet.
G.P.: Do you believe in luck?
K.F.: Yes. I feel like success in life is recognizing and using your luck, and not feeling self conscious or egotistical when doing it. To be able to realize a situation that you have been trying to manifest, and when it is right in front of you, having the presence to flick the switch.
G.P.: I just saw Whysp play at the 3rd floor of St. Josephs and was very impressed, you've played with these guys what do you think of them?
K.F.: They are one of my favorite bands right now, they are so loose and tongue in cheek in some ways, but the songs are well written, I love it. Hugh and Josh are these brilliant Fluxus style pranksters who always have something new and usually funny up their sleeve, and Tom is wonderful and Jeff Manson is this Danish looking surfer kid from Santa Cruz who has a secret driftwood shack. It is a good group of people, plenty interesting for me.
G.P.: Tell us a bit about Harvest Joy, and Discover Worlds of Wonder?
K.F.: Harvest Joy is a new recording of songs that was made and was released in the fall of 2003. It is a quietly loud record if that makes sense. It is noisy in some ways and ragged, but all as if it were happening in a place in the woods where you can't make too much noise or the woods witches will hear you and look at you with poisonous stares. The fall wind will creep up and bite you with teeth made of dried leaves. It is a fall record in some ways. In the way that Light Green Leaves was sort of a seasonal feeling record, maybe for summer turning into fall, this on was recorded in october and feels very fally to me. I am a fall birthday so I romanticize the fall to no end. It is my favorite victorious and solemn season. I experience this vibration between those two states of being that really does something for me creatively. The Harvest Joy album will see two different versions: the vinyl record version (put out by K) includes a B side drum and word piece called Field Trip where the drums got recorded first outside near this wooded area, so they echo and all, it sounds neat to me, and me reading notes and ideas and things from my notebook and from a booklet I wrote called Fall Phantoms which is a vicodin induced piece of nonfiction psychedelia. My girlfriend got her wisdom teeth pulled and got alot of pain-killers, so I took some with her and relaxed in the apartment in Portland, and wrote alot. I wrote this booklet in a few days, and it is about imaginary transformations that happen to me and these characters that are projected onto me by myself. Lots of fangs and nanny goats and such. Laurels of flowers and beauty and city snow, imaginary fawn footsteps early in the morning, contrasted with fictitious cobblestone roads in modern day Portland. A lot of transparencies. The CD version comes out on a new label from Spokane, WA called The Invisible City and is actually two albums on one disc. It includes my album and an album by a friend of mine called Lee Be's Octember Sketches. Lee has been a guitar player for many years and has played in lots of bands, and has just recently started to document his songs and the album is wonderful. Both albums were recorded fall 2002 so to have them on the same record feels right... that way people get to hear Lee and get two recordings for the price of one, etc. It feels unique and progressive and positive to be doing it that way. Discover Worlds of Wonder is an older recording that was all locked up in boxes in a warehouse, and K has recently liberated it so they are rereleasing it along with Harvest Joy. It was recorded in 1999 in Portland with Adam Selzer and is part two in the Wonder Trilogy. As far as songs go and albums go I feel good about it being a nice work, but it is pretty old and my mind has changed alot since then, so I haven't heard it in a while. I still stand behind it, though, like I would for any of my children.
G.P.: What's new?
K.F.: I am beginning to show some art, mostly in Los Angeles at this point, but that is opening up new experiences and I have been meaning to get into it for a long time, but have been focused on the music more for the last five years. I played an art opening the other night and my youngest brother, Michael, played guitar with me and that was really fun. I spent ten days in the sequoias away from electricity and found it very rejuvenating and want to get out there more, away from the grid.

http://www.krecs.com/

Interviews

HOME