The set Ohtis played on the Talking Heads stage on the EOTR Sunday evening felt like a victory against the odds for singer Sam Swinson. The large crowd that gathered were witnessing a man clearly enduring some kind of internal battle; it was plain for all to see in the slow between-song utterances, the confessions to missing out verses of his best-known numbers and the way a beautiful piano ballad encore (of sorts) was played out of the blue, minutes after he had announced the end of the set and with half the audience shuffled off. But his determination to see this one through should be heartily applauded for the kind of day he had lived through would have pushed even the most chilled of artists into stress overdrive. Sam, travelling from Heathrow by taxi, was late on site, and an emergency trip to the medical tent on arrival delayed his eventual appearance on stage. To add to the anxiety, the rushed soundcheck revealed his DAT machine to be faulty. Given these circumstances, with an exhausted-looking Sam sitting at the stage edge doing his best to sign autographs on album covers, it would have been perfectly understandable had he declined the post-performance KLOF interview. I offered the chance to re-arrange, but Sam wanted to do this, for which I am very grateful, and clearly there could only really be one opening question:
I have heard that you are suffering today and had to visit the medical tent because of poisoning?
That was poison oak. That was on Monday. I was crawling around up in the hills behind my camper, basically just rolling around in the poison oak, but I had been kind of immune to it, or at least I thought I was, so I wasn’t that worried about it because it’s everywhere there. When I was a kid, I would get so bad, my face would be swollen out about half an inch, it would cover my entire body, and I would have to just wait it out because my parents didn’t ever take us to the doctor really. Sometimes maybe if it got really bad, but mostly it was just prayer and natural immunity.
Did it get bad on the flight to Heathrow today?
No, it takes a couple of days for it to start to come out, so like, Wednesday and Thursday…what’s today, Sunday?… so, I’ve had it for a couple of days, then the third day in I was so miserable and couldn’t sleep at all, I went to the doctor and got the prednisone so I’ve been taking that…
Have you ever been to the End Of The Road Festival before?
Yes, the other time we came here it was amazing; I think we played the main stage on the Sunday morning. It was the biggest show we ever played; it was incredible. That was a weird time because I had been sober for about seven years or something, and I had drank the night before, and I was drunk when we did that show. The band didn’t know it; we didn’t sound very good, and my voice was shot because I’d been up drinking the night before, so yeah, that’s part of it, that’s mixed in with it. It’s good to be back for sure.
I remember around that time, seven years ago, the talk around ‘Curve of Earth’ was about the positive improvement of previously strained relations with bandmates Adam Pressley and Nate Hahn. How have relations been from then to now?
Oh, they quit after that tour. We got home, and they were like, “If you’re going to drink, we don’t want to play with you”, so…
Oh, so who was the guy out there with you today?
That’s Ben, the singer from the Golden Dregs, and he also started Joy Of Life International record label. They’re putting out the Ohtis stuff now; he’s a really good bud.
I also see a thing called the MCP1000 listed as part of the Ohtis set-up. What is that, and is that what was giving you grief today?
Something happened to it, so we didn’t use it today; the hard drive’s messed up or something. I really hope I can fix it because I have put a shitload of time into making this really cool set, so hopefully I’ll get to do it on Tuesday in the London show. You’ve just got to roll with the punches.
I’ve been checking out your new album; can you tell me why ‘Virgos Are Honest’?
It’s from a coffee cup that was my friend Greg’s favourite cup. He was a Virgo, and it told me Virgos are honest, and he is very honest. And also, the song is the title track, and the song is all the stories that he told in his dementia period before he died, which he just told on repeat. He had a crazy life; he was kind of scary, he was a coral diver, he was a coke dealer to all these rock bands in the eighties, so they were always talking about how much they loved him because he had the best coke – all the stories about that and then he had all these prison stories that were crazy. But he was in love with his mother, a really interesting character, and he died mysteriously, falling down the stairs. He was 73 and in a really terrible state after his mother died. She was like 95, and they were very close and he said she was his soul mate which was kind of weird. But he was really devastated, and I moved in there, trying to help him, which was like the blind leading the blind a little bit, but he was telling all these stories from his life on repeat, and they just kind of sank in and turned into that song. It is one of the favourite songs that I have ever written; it’s like my wording of his stories, but it’s his life.
There are a lot of tracks on the new album. Have you been going through a particularly fertile period of writing, would you say?
There is a lot of stuff that was written twenty years ago, actually. We put songs on there that we recorded when we were like fourteen years old, stuff from our high school recording sessions; we put some covers on there; there’s a Guided By Voices cover that I think we’ve been playing since the really early days, ‘Smothered In Hugs.’ There is a song ‘Bob’ which is the opening track on an album by Kathy Heideman; I feel like it’s got to be a love song to Bob Dylan, but it might just be a love song for some other Bob. There’s ‘Little Boxes’-we did a spin-off from that- and the Kinks song ‘Nothing In This World Can Stop Me Worrying About That Girl.’
There’s one, not sure how you’d pronounce the title ‘Bb’s Bb,’ that is certainly broadening the Ohits musical palate beyond anything I’ve heard you do before.
That’s ‘Baby’s Baby’; it’s another one that I literally have only ever played that song one time when I recorded the demo. Adam and Nate tracked the upright bass, guitar and whatever else they put on it. I might [play it again], but I just haven’t got around to it. If I keep touring this record, which I hope to do, I want to play more shows.
‘Blankets On The Blinds’ is almost funky in its tempo; is balancing darker subject matter with music that has a lift to it a deliberate ploy of yours?
Yeah, it must be. I think it’s making light of the depression, you know? What’s that phrase: ‘if you can’t laugh… you cry’
You have written about personal traumas and depression, but do you worry about revealing too much of your personal life when you do that?
Yes, I guess so; I do worry about that.
So, would you push a lyric into the mythic or symbolic realm to avoid this?
No, I don’t think I’m that smart. I have been thinking about that a little bit because, like tonight, with that song ‘Pervert Blood’, somebody told me that was confessional poetry, which is not something to aspire to really, I don’t think. But I’ve done a lot of it in the past; I don’t know if I want to keep doing it. Hopefully I will continue to become a lot more well-adjusted person who is not having terrible crises over the rest of my life and writing songs about them; we’ll see.
I have read that you were brought up in a fundamentalist, evangelical cult. Has that been an experience that was hard to move away from?
Cult is kind of a strong word – although I think it was my word – but in hindsight, they’re just hardcore right-wing evangelical Pentecostals, which is a very super subculture kind of thing. They believed in healing and prayer; that’s through a lot of cultures throughout time, including indigenous cultures, so it’s not really unique to them, but it was a very insular group of people and environment. Did you ever see that documentary, ‘Jesus Freaks’ or something like that? Well, that was it; that was my childhood. We had this thing we went to called CTC where we’d be five-year-old kids, crying at the altar every night, begging for forgiveness for our sins because we didn’t want to go to hell. And we’d be trying to get slain in this spirit, just stuff that eventually, when I grew up, I was like “man, how the hell did we fall for this? Did my parents fall for this and then raise me to believe this?” It was a tough pill to swallow, but then as you get older, you realise that everybody’s got their own crazy, you know? It was just our crazy.
Can you bring any religious influence into your own music?
That last song, ‘When He Returns,’ was a Bob Dylan song from the (Christian) album ‘Slow Train Coming’; that’s one of my favourite Dylan songs. I guess Bob Dylan really did believe at one time that people were going to burn in hell for eternity.
When you write, are you writing for the Ohtis identity, or is it the other way around, you make your music become the Ohtis identity?
Well, I have been a very dysfunctional songwriter; I have been very periodical and inconsistent. There has only been one time in my life when I wrote more than four songs in a month. For most of those years I was writing four songs a year. [Historically] Ohtis had always been me and Adam and then Nate was the third member when we were actually kind of busy before covid, but it’s always been since we were kids; Adam was my producer.
What is currently inspiring you musically?
I’ve been listening to a lot of old gospel actually: ‘Goodbye Babylon’ [a Dust-to-Digital Boxset] – it’s like an Alan Lomax recording, although I don’t think it is Alan Lomax; it’s like the Smithsonian recordings of the early gospel, including sacred harp choirs, a lot of black gospel and just a lot of stuff that’s incredible, but it’s hard to listen to because of the recording quality.
I stumbled upon hours and hours of gospel that I’ve been listening to a lot lately. I have an idea because I live in this canyon, this really picturesque part of central California. There’s this wheat field and a creek right next to my house, and then the mountains in the background. The sun comes up over the mountains and then sets on the ocean behind me every day – I listen to this music out there, and I think, not that I’m religious, but I feel like if I had a religion, it would be just gospel music. So, I think it would be really amazing to put together a kick-ass gospel band true to that era.
And finally, what is the future holding for Ohtis?
Well, I really like having Ben involved; I hope he becomes a mainstay. He’s really busy; he works really hard. I just found out he’s got like eight other bands; I had no idea. I don’t know how he does it, but I think if he’s motivated, that’s going to help me. And Adam’s around still; he just wants to pick and choose when he does stuff. ‘Virgos Are Honest,’ that was all him. I wrote the words that I got from Greg, but he did the upright bass, the piano and the arrangement, and then Nate came in and shredded that lap steel solo on it, so they kind of came back out of retirement for that, and I think they’ll keep doing that, but I don’t know if they’re going to want to tour. But it’s cool that I have this MCP thing as a backup because it actually works really well; it can’t threaten to quit on me!
Virgos Are Honest is out now on Joy of Life International