MUSIC

Jayhawks founders back with subtle, sparse production

By Brian T. Atkinson
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Monday, April 13, 2009

Mark Olson and Gary Louris clearly adhere to Guy Clark's most abiding philosophy: The best songs leave holes to fill. Last year, more than a decade after the original Jayhawks disbanded, its reunited songwriters deftly executed the approach on "Ready for the Flood." Hushed presentation redoubled impact. "The problem when you have a band is you can't really go sparse," Olson says. "Space is half the battle, if you can find it." Olson and Louris wrap their current U.S. tour Saturday night at Antone's.

Austin American-Statesman: You and Gary were just here.

Mark Olson: Yeah, we played at the (Hotel) San Jose outdoor party before Alejandro (Escovedo). It was really fun, and they had good sound there. South By Southwest is fun to a point, but then it's like fun is a full-time job.

Originally, we'd written all the songs with two guitars and a cassette box, and we'd saved some of those. We went back to that as far as recording, without headphones or click tracks. We did everything – vocals and guitars – live and added a few touches and put it out. You get how we wrote the songs that day and recorded them.

What I enjoy about it is when you perform the songs like that – just the two of us sitting there singing away – that's what you end up working on and putting out, rather than saying, "All right, we did that, now let's go back and really sing it two weeks from now." It's like you're capturing that moment.

Oh yeah. Well, there's some of the class struggle with "The Rose Society" and "Bicycle," as far as economic situations in people's personal lives. I've always tried to think about that and live it, so to speak. That's just the way it is.

I don't really sit around listening to pretty love songs. What gets me is somebody who's taken the world as they see it and turned it a little bit upside down.

We admired his enthusiasm and knowledge of music. When we were writing the songs, he actually happened to be there. Then he came to California with us and we rehearsed for four days and picked which songs we were gonna do. When we were recording them, he was always right on with his picks as far as which version to do. He didn't push us to use the drum kit. I appreciated that he was going with our flow and he wanted to make (the album) the best it could be.

(Chris) listens to a lot of types of music. With his own band, he gets into a situation where there are four different people in the band, so he can't parse it out very easily. Music is funny that way. A lot of space is really good. Having a really big band is good, too, but it's hard to meet in the middle.

Mark Olson and Gary Louris perform at 9 p.m. Saturday at Antone's. 213 W. 5th St. Advance tickets are $18-$20. 888-512-7469; frontgatetickets.com. They also perform earlier in the day at Waterloo Records, 600 N. Lamar Blvd. 5 p.m. Free.