Jakob Battick has a half-groomed beard and wavy brown hair that hangs below his ears. He is very tall and very intelligent. He loves playing the guitar and spending time with his family. He doesn’t like playing Frisbee. He is my friend.
We met in the fall of 2007 when we lived on the same floor of Robie-Andrews Hall. Both of us were obsessed with music, and we hit it off instantly. Sometimes, I’d recommend a band to him but he often didn’t like my suggestions. He always had good reasons though. He usually does.
He’s been carefully honing his song writing since he was a kid. Every time I see him play, the music is faster or slower than the last time. Or he’s added an instrument. Or reworked an arrangement, transforming a jagged sound experiment into a dreamy folk song. Through it all, his cousin Milo Moyer-Battick and his friend Mark Dennis have jammed beside him, supporting him on a wide variety of musical instruments.
Last Thursday, we met up to talk about his evolution as a songwriter and as a human. Below is an excerpt of that conversation. (Full interview to be posted soon)
Dylan Martin: What were some of the first bands or musicians you listened to that really got you into music?
Jakob Battick: The Clash. Ever since I was 7, I used to dance to “Rock the Casbah” in front of the sliding glass door in my kitchen in my underwear after we ate dinner. And Neutral Milk Hotel was always huge. When I heard their record “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” I always say it was like hearing the music I was made to make but somebody else made it before me. The Pixies got me into really playing instruments, but Neutral Milk got me into songwriting.
And then there’s Leonard Cohen. He got me to take songwriting really seriously. In the beginning, it was noisier things-noisier, crazier things-and then, I didn’t really mellow out, but I turned toward more focused, really practiced, really written sorts of things.
DM: The noisier stuff…lets talk about 1800s Sea Monster a bit (his recently disbanded noise project). What made you want to do such a crazy experiment?
JK: I was-I’m still young – but I was younger then. I wanted to write really (expletive deleted) crazy music. And I wanted to put on a good-ass show. And I wanted to scream and holler and make noise and sometimes annoy people and sometimes impress people. I wanted to roll around on the floor. That was my impulse. That was my first experience with the spirit of what most people call rock and roll, which I’ve since sort of abandoned for the most part.
DM: You said the last 1800s Sea Monster show was a joke.
JK: Yeah. That was a performance piece. It was arranged to be simplistic. It was very conceptual. I’m not proud of that so much any more, but at the time I was very much into it. There was one segment of the show where I hid under a blanket, and there was complete silence for a minute.
DM: Yeah, it’s almost like Andy Kaufman.
JK: Yeah! It was performance art basically. And, I think I had to work that sort of stuff out in order to see that concepts and novelty have their place, but really taking your time and doing something you really care about and really trying to make something really powerful and really emotional has its place too. And that’s where I’ve kind of been ever since. I got really dissatisfied with detached aesthetics and formalism and things like that. “Confrontational” wasn’t what I wanted to be anymore. But, interestingly enough, I’m coming back around to that.
DM: Really? Did transitioning from high school to college make you a more focused musician or give you a clearer vision of what you wanted to do?
JK: Well, I had always done folk recordings; but, when I went to college, I started to want to pursue that more seriously. And I don’t really know. I vividly remember playing 1800s Sea Monster for my family members. It just didn’t translate at all, and it occurred to me: maybe this music is cool when you’re playing it for 15 minutes in front of 30 sweaty people in Bangor, but on the greater scale it doesn’t really move anyone or have anything to say. It doesn’t really mean anything to anyone beyond the performance.
It sounds stupid, but I wanted to write songs that could impress your grandmother. Songs that I could be proud of, that spoke from the heart and had real feeling as opposed to just me rolling around on the floor.
I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I didn’t have a band anymore; I just had an acoustic guitar. That was a really lonely time for me. So, I had to work. I had real feeling. Real, intense feeling. For one of the first times in my life. Not just like, floating around doing your homework and “Hey, my first girlfriend,” but like real “You’re on your own.” You have this emotional conflict and struggle of finding your way, even if you’re still just a college kid. I think those are huge influences on my starting to write more – I wouldn’t say traditional, and I wouldn’t say serious, I think that’s condescending – but more melodic, folk-oriented songs.