Over the past decade, Joe Pernice has established himself as one of the most reliably great songwriters of his generation. From his days in the not-so-alt-country collective, the Scud Mountain Boys, to side-trips into the Chappaquiddick Skyline, to his ongoing role as frontman for the Pernice Brothers, Joe's stirring storytelling skills and his distinctive way with a gorgeous melody have remained firmly in place. The Pernice Brothers began life as an orch-pop project, but the band's last two records, 2003's Yours, Mine & Ours and this year's Discover A Lovelier You, see them taking their cues from such '80s luminaries as the Smiths, New Order and Echo & the Bunnymen. Whatever direction Pernice takes his music in, the results are always worth hearing. He chatted with Junkmedia from his hometown of Holbrook, Mass.

At your recent show in Denver, you encored with "Doll On A Music Box," a song from [the semi-obscure mid-60s flying car movie starring Dick Van Dyke] "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang." I was curious as to how you chose that song to cover.

On the tour for the last record, we used that soundtrack as opening music, and we decided to work it into our set. We're just fans of it. We actually recorded a version of it in Europe a little while ago. We had been doing these kind of heavier covers - stuff like New Order and the Pretenders - and we thought we should do something a little more low-key. James [Walbourne] my piano player, was going through a heavy spell of listening to that soundtrack, as well as the "Willie Wonka" soundtrack. Those records are just unbelievable-there's no irony there in our covering that song.

I was surprised to see that Thom Monahan (bassist/co-producer) was missing from your touring lineup. Where'd he go?

He's taking a leave. We've been together for 10 years now, but he recently moved out to L.A., got married and has been working on a bunch of different recording projects. He just needed a break. We haven't made any big decisions, it's just that he had been working with some other bands, and it turned out that if he came out on tour with us, he'd have something like a single day off in between.

Like you said, you and Thom have been making records together for ten years. Why is he such a good collaborator for you?

[Pause] I don't know. [Laughs] We just hit it off. We've been working together since the second Scud Mountain Boys record in 1994, I think. We're both pretty headstrong guys, but we've learned how to not let things escalate if there are arguments in the studio. And there are arguments. But all of the guys I work with, we like working long hours. It's just fun for us. [Guitarist] Peyton [Pinkerton] and James, those guys would stay in the studio forever if they could. Time goes by so quick in there - it'll feel like two hours and it'll actually be nine hours. Even when it's a pain in the ass, it's still fun.

Can you imagine making a record without Thom?

Oh, sure. It would be different, but I think different can be good. There are a lot of good people to record with out there. The more musicians I meet, I find that there are more people who are like us - people who love to spend a lot of time in the studio. I haven't given it too much thought, but a change could be good. As a songwriter, it might be a good thing to have a little change.

From the liners, it looks as though you recorded the new album all over the place.

Yeah, we did some tracking in New York when Thom and I were both living there and then I did some on my own in Boston and Toronto and then we finished it up in Los Angeles.

Was it challenging to make a record in such a piecemeal fashion?

It wasn't a problem. It's good to get away from it sometimes. I think if we had done it all in one place, I still would've wanted to have the breaks that we had because of moving. Having some time off from a record can give you some space, some perspective on it.

The other mainstay in the band is Peyton Pinkerton, who's played on all the Pernice Brothers records. How'd you originally hook up with him?

We were all living in Northampton at the time. I was in grad school and Peyton had his band the New Radiant Storm Kings. It's really a kind of small town, so everybody sort of knows everybody. When I was putting together the first Pernice Brothers record, I asked him to come along and it's evolved from there.

It seems as though he's taken a more prominent role on the last two records. Do you pretty much give him free reign in the studio, in terms of guitar parts?

Sometimes. It's both. Sometimes there'll be a set idea I have for a guitar part. I'm a hack at best on guitar - no matter how much I practice, I'll just never be that good at guitar. I can hear guitar parts, but I can't play 'em. So I'll hum a part to Peyton, or I'll say "Can you do something like this?" And he can play it and change it a little and make it better. But he'll show up with a lot of ideas, too, so it's both. There's a lot of editing and forming that goes on in the studio.

Is it safe to say that a song on the new record like "Amazing Glow" - with its mentions of changing cities and lifestyles - is autobiographical? Or do you shy away from that sort of songwriting?

Oh no. Most everything that I've ever written comes from a real event or thing. But I try to step back from it at some point. I try to see what's the better story I can tell, even if it's not necessarily true. It's fun to see where a song can go, just to step back and let it take a left turn, regardless of what really happened or not.

Personally, I think it'd be pretty boring if I was just up there spouting the truth all the time. But that particular song did come out of something real and true. And it probably is true.

Another song from the new record, "My So-Called Celibate Life" - is that your commentary on Los Angeles? (Sample lyric: "All the stars out in disguise / Look at all the money that money buys.")

Yeah, it's something I finished while I was out there. It's crazy, you go out to eat at a diner or something there and literally everyone there is working on a script or a project or something. I don't know if I was just going to places that were script workshop places, or what?

Have you caught some of that bug yourself? I was just reading that you're working on a script based on your novella (Meat Is Murder, a fictionalized memoir centered around the titular Smiths album).

Yeah, I've been working on a script for that with someone for about a year. It's getting pretty close to finished. But I'm not interested in selling the script. The plan is to produce it in a real DIY kind of way. It's almost done, and the hope is that early next year, we'll turn up the heat in terms of organizing the whole thing.

So you've got a book of poetry, a novella and now a film script. Can you foresee a time when these concerns might take precedence over music?

If I start to enjoy those things more, sure. I really take the path of least resistance. If sitting around alone in my house writing a book is more fulfilling than making music with people, than that's what I'll do. I just have to go with what I love.

We mentioned the Scud Mountain Boys earlier. It's been a decade since you put out those records. How do you view that band and that era?

I haven't listened to the records in a long time. The last time I did, I remember thinking they sounded pretty good. It was a really brief burst, when I think about it now. We put out three records in about two and a half years, maybe less than that. More like 15 months. But I think we made three good albums, we made our stamp. It was an exciting period. I felt I had hit upon something really good in terms of songwriting. I wrote most of those songs really quickly, in a matter of months, I think, with a few exceptions. I was writing a ton of songs back then, because I had just started really writing and taking time with it. It was just a really inspiring time. And everything started happening really quickly.

What's funny is that back then I was going through a heavy Jimmy Webb thing, and I had just started listening to Nick Drake and Burt Bacharach, too. So even though those early records have some undeniably country elements, that had a little more to do with the set up of the band, with pedal steel and mandolin taking such prominent roles. In fact, I remember the two records I listened to the most around that time might have been Dinosaur Jr's Green Mind and [Guided By Voices'] Bee Thousand.

Yeah, I was listening to Massachusetts recently and though the knee jerk reaction to that record would be to label it "alt-country," there were a lot of songs that didn't really fit into that category at all.

Yeah, I mean, going back to Jimmy Webb - he's known for his country hits with Glen Campbell, like "Wichita Lineman" and "By The Time I Get To Phoenix." But you listen to those songs, and they're not country at all. They just happen to be set in Texas or something. They're insane. They don't really have any of the trappings that we think of as "country." They're so damn complex and a lot of times they don't have any choruses! They just go on and on without choruses. And they're amazing.

By Tyler Wilcox.
August 22, 2005