Part 1

Names: Wes Tirey, Shane Parish
Nationality: American
Occupations: Singer, songwriter
Current release: Wes Tirey's No Winners in the Blues, which features him in a duo with Shane Parish, is out via Full Spectrum.
Recommendations:
Shane Parish: I read this book by a British writer named John Higgs. It's called The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band who burned a million Pounds. Great book.
John Higgs also wrote a book about William Blake called William Blake against the world. And I read that right after the KLF book because I was so into that one. He's a current British essayist, historian, cultural critic, and both books are a total thrill ride. He just wrote another book about James Bond and the Beatles and the creation of a British identity.

Wes Tirey: I've been reading a bunch of short stories by Lucia Berlin, who I got turned on to a few years ago, maybe back in 2019. There's a short story collection called A Manual for Cleaning Women. Just staggering short stories. Amazing, amazing writer. And then I also got another book of hers, I think called Evening in Paradise. Those two books are pretty much everything she wrote. She's got a memoir, short memoirs or vignettes that I'm gonna pick up next, just because I'm I'm so fascinated by her as an individual and a writer - she was just the real deal. Critics put her in the dirty realism movement, people like Raymond Carver and Richard Ford, and she is kind of a titan among all of them.
Also the movie Wanda by Barbara Loden. I think that should be required viewing for anybody interested in American films. It is the only movie that she did. She wrote the script, directed it and starred in it and it's kind of a cult film. There's a song on my last album, the The Midwest Book of the Dead reissue called called “Wanda” that I wrote after watching it. It's kind of a tribute to the character Wanda.

If you enjoyed this interview with Wes Tirey and Shane Parish and would like to keep up to date with their music, visit Shane's official homepage, and Wes on Facebook.

We also have an earlier Wes Tirey interview with a different generation of the 15 Questions.  



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

Wes Tirey: That seems like, like very an intentional way of listening to music - almost like a session of listening. I used to do that when I was probably in my early 20s. And, and even up into my late 20s, I would have days where I would just plan on listening to music.

I just don't do that like I used to. More often than not, I'm listening to music while I'm walking. So I definitely have my eyes open.

What were your very first steps in music and how do you rate games made through experience versus the naivety of those first steps?

Shane Parish: I got an electric guitar. All the other kids were doing it and it seemed cool. You learn some chords with some parts of riffs, from songs from friends, and then immediately start moving your fingers around and seeing what sounds cool. And then remembering that and structuring that out.

I had a buddy, who sang and wrote lyrics pretty prolifically. And so we formed a band called Union Prayer Book. I wrote all the music and he wrote all the words and sang. We started playing open mic nights, all over South Florida pretty immediately.

When I look back at the confidence with which I went out there, when I totally didn't know what the hell I was doing at all, it's kind of funny. But I guess that's the answer to the naivety portion of the question, right? I was just just so pulled along by this thing.

But then coming up against limitations within the reality of trying to play music with other people and trying to just push beyond what you've already done. And then realising that minor pentatonic scales are not going to sound good, over what this guy is playing … it just doesn't work. So I just realised I needed to learn more.

I had this book called The guitar handbook and it was an introduction to all these great guitar players. That's where I learned about Robert Fripp, Frank Zappa, and Django Reinhardt and Wes Montgomery. The book has a section on jazz, and it was saying that if you learn jazz, you can play anything because it encapsulates everything you have to know. That intrigued me and I was really self taught and just kind of plodding along and asking questions. I saw really great jazz musicians like Dr. Lion Smith every week as a teenager in South Florida, and I went to see people play and just try and pick their brain.

I don't really think I started making gains to become a professional player until I was really in my 20s. That's when I said to myself, hey, I'm gonna need to learn to read music. I'm gonna stop working in restaurants - I'm going to be the person playing in the restaurant. I wanted to play John Coltrane songs, I wanted to be hireable you know. I wanted someone to be like, Yo, I want you to play on my record, which doesn't happen too often.

So I just wanted to gain as much knowledge as I could, but not sacrifice my first motivations and still get excited about every discovery. And I think I maintain that to this day, and I continue to try to learn as much as I can. I'm always just captivated by the wonder, and the fact that I know nothing.

For years, you're searching for some kind of breakthrough. You get years into feeling attached to your instrument. And then you want to go back to the beginner's mind, if that makes sense, the innocence of how exciting the guitar was when you first start playing.

There's a book called Zen guitar, that's a pretty good read. It talks about this cycle of going from the white belt to the black belt back to the white belt – first, the white belt gets dirty from all the work you do, and becomes a black belt. But then, in your practice, it gets frayed, and the dirt starts to kind of rub away and it becomes a white belt again.

I think I wrote the best song ever yesterday and recorded it, in a four hour span. It was a naive approach and I was listening to it today and couldn't believe where the hell it come from.

According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13 and 16. What did music mean to you at that age? And what's changed since then?

Wes Tirey: I grew up in Farmersville, Ohio, so you can only only imagine what kind of art and culture - or lack thereof - was circulating. Especially at those ages.That was the heyday of of new metal. I started playing guitar at 14 and a buddy of mine started playing bass. We started talking talking about starting a band and I convinced my mom to buy me my first lectric guitar.

It was a right handed guitar that I had to convert to lefty because they didn't have any left handed guitars at the the guitar shop and I refused to learn how to play right handed. Which was one of the best decisions I've ever made in my life. But yeah, I was listening to Linkin Park, Papa Roach, and I loved it.



When I was like 12, my favourite band was Bone Thugs n Harmony. I love that. All of that stuff was intriguing to me and appealing. And it was dramatic. It attracted me to the guitar and attracted me to writing and it attracted me to production and all of those things. Some of my favourite music to listen to is still Dwight Yoakam.



You know, when I was a kid, I was obsessed with his songs, and his image, and his voice. It's this strange amalgam of country and new metal and whatever other shit I was listening to at the time. And it just kind of all coalesced into picking up the guitar.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools and how have they shape your perspective on music?

Shane Parish: The other day I was doing an interview for reverb.com and I am what one might call “gear ambivalent.” And that's a very gear centric platform. So it was funny. I played a Stratocaster for a while, I played some crappy acoustic guitars when I was a teenager … well, they weren't crappy. there are some Yamahas which are great guitars. Early on, I started accruing lots of effects pedals, this was when I was around 15/16.

And then one day I was at the warehouse space that my friends ran and I looked at all this stuff and we were we just kind of like tripping out and doing acid and jamming into the night … you know, making some psychedelic abstractions in th vein of early Pink Floyd.

But then I looked at it all one day and I said to myself: I have to get rid of all this and teach myself how to make the sounds that I want with the instrument itself. I used to be pretty militant about it: No reverb, no nothing. That was a good period. I've moved a little bit back towards that - I just kind of get into it and start hacking away and and try to make them what some sound good

Wes Tirey: I remember reading an interview with somebody talking about seeing Loren Connors live and how he wasn't even playing his own guitar or playing his own amp. He just plugged into somebody's amp and didn't change any of the settings and his guitar sounded the same that it does on record. You reach a point where your style translates.

What would you say are the key ideas behind your approach to music and what motivates you to create?

Wes Tirey:  Simplicity is the grand arbiter. Simplicity, beauty. Stuff that cuts to the bone, direct and clear. I like space. I think that you don't have to tell the whole story, that in between verses the story can continue. And when the song is over I have just given a sketch of something and the colours still need to be filled in.

For what motivates me to create, that would take me probably a longer time to answer. I've been doing it for so long. I don't know how to not create. It's just a part of how I live. I do get a long periods without creating. I haven't written anything new for a few weeks or about a month. But it's just part of my process - the impulse to externalise something that you're experiencing internally.

My songs aren't super personal, or confessional. No Winners is obviously a more personal sounding record, but those songs are still character driven. pieces. Songwriting is creative writing. I don't sit down and think, “Oh, Jesus, I have to pour my soul out.” It's more interesting to twist and manipulate and make characters and stories and narrators and multiple voices.

Usually when you let go of your own feelings and think outside of your own voice, what you end up writing is something that allows people to make their own interpretations of it. And then when you when you look at it yourself, then you can kind of see what drove you to kind of write that narrative in the first place.