For someone with so many famous heads stuck on poles outside his jungle hut, you’d expect he’d put a little more “brag” into it. But the soft-spoken Eric Drew Feldman lets his keyboard playing do the talking for him. When you’ve recorded and played live with a twisted array of musical talent that includes Captain Beefheart, the Residents, Snakefinger, Pere Ubu, the Pixies, PJ Harvey and Polyphonic Spree, you don’t have to blow any hot air into your own balloon. Speaking from his San Francisco home, Feldman touched on the high points of a marvelous career like a flat stone skipping over the surface of a mountain lake. His latest project, kNIFE & fORK’s The Higher You Get The Rarer The Vegetation, is out now via Frank Black’s The Bureau label. Feldman will be also guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
Feldman: Laurie Hall, my collaborator in kNIFE & fORK, really quite blows my mind. Her activities seem to be fairly balanced. She works as a pilates instructor/massage therapist/body manipulator. (I don’t really know a single term to describe what she does.) She does these things extremely well, and her services are in high demand. She also keeps a garden and knows the scientific names for many plants. When I get around to presenting her with a new piece of music, I used to say something like, “I think lyrics should go here, here and here, and not here, and it should be about blah blah blah.” She then takes the song home and puts the lyrics in different places and writes about something completely different. I’m quite sure that as a child she didn’t stay between the lines in the coloring book and spent a lot of time at school standing in the corner.
And what she comes up with is always great.
Video after the jump.
