Swans’ Michael Gira Seeks Out Ghost Notes and Offers Supplication For ‘The Beggar’ (INTERVIEW)

Swans have announced their sixteenth studio album, The Beggar, coming up from Mute / Young God Records (North America) on June 23, 2023 as well as revealing their first track “Paradise Is Mine.” There is also extensive touring planned across the UK, Europe, and North America beginning May 20^th and extending through September. While the songs for The Beggar were written by founder Michael Gira during strained and uncertain times, the album was recorded with many of his key collaborators, including Swan members past and present, at Candy Bomber Studio in Berlin in person. The Beggar will be released in a number of interesting physical formats alongside digital. 

While the songs on the album are quite disparate in terms of the ideas they pursue, they continue to follow an intriguing trend to delve into the underlying components of musicality and human responses to music and would probably be as recognizable as emotive communication across cultures and time periods as they might be to modern Western audiences. Some of the themes evoked by the tracks are strikingly universal, posing questions about the origins of life, the role and value of rejection, and supplication towards the things or beings who we worship. I interviewed Michael Gira via e-mail about the development of The Beggar, and also about his publication of his complete written works as The Knot. 

Hannah Means-Shannon: Do you think that the feeling that writing these songs “could be my last” impacted what you chose to write about and the way the songs sounded?

Michael Gira: In a way, that’s a mental trick I play on myself in order force myself to finally make good work. No more bullshit. God’s watching and is about to eat my face. An acute awareness of death, the feeling that it infuses your lungs with each breath, is in my view the healthiest way to live. Of course, like everyone else I push it away and avoid the issue as much as possible in daily life, but I find that if I sit and stare at the air intently enough and allow everything inessential and distracting to fall away, the true nature of things is sometimes revealed. Only at that point, in that place, can I make honest work. 

HMS: When you went to Berlin to work on the recording of the songs, what kind of materials did you take with you? Were there demos with instrumentation or would some of that evolve in the studio?

MG: I arrived, as always, with just my acoustic guitar, and my words, and my voice. I think more about the people with whom I’ll be working than I do about the specific instrumentation. Often at home I’ll play the open chords of a song over and over with my ear down close to the guitar, listening for overtones and the notes I’m not actually playing, and when I hear these ghost notes they sometimes evoke images of myself sitting in a space with my friends and collaborators, and I can sense or feel in some inchoate way how the song should ultimately sound. 

Everything, all the arduous rehearsals and then the layers of instrumentation and orchestration involved in recording and mixing are just a journey backwards to that initial private moment of revelation. I’m the most pleased when the final recorded version of a song takes a shape that I never would have imagined before the interaction with other people, and their intuition, and contributions to the sound, but I can still hear the reverberations of what was hidden in the chords of the guitar and my voice when I first played it repeatedly, alone in my room. 

HMS: Did the experience of working on the album and seeing it to completion help you come to terms with the state of the world in recent years?

MG: Well, I don’t really exist unless I’m working, doing what I do best, so yes. But I’m a tiny person, just a molecule among trillions of other swarming molecules. At its best, the work is an act of love and it’s freed and released from my self and its stupid delusions, and hopefully the sound and the atmosphere that the music creates is ultimately nurturing in some way that others can use. The “state of the world” is beyond my comprehension. I’m an uneducated slob, but I read a lot, in particular, recently about the era from 1933 to 1945, and I think that each generation has its own apocalypse. Hopefully, this current time is not the final one. It does nothing to diffuse the sense that we’re currently sliding like mud into a sinkhole, but if one reads Antony Beevor’s exhaustive and compassionate history The Second World War, a sense of what apocalypse on earth really looks like is possible to glimpse.  

HMS: When you worked on your book, The Knot, was your goal to simply include everything, or was there a selection process that you had to go through?

MG: The first objective was to include the words to every song I’ve ever written, from official albums to obscure releases, and also worthwhile lyrics I’d written that were never used. Then it became obvious to me that I had to include most of my short fiction, published and unpublished. From that flowed the imperative to include segments from my journals from over the years, which also contained a great deal of fiction, or ruminative writing. Then I decided it had to include some artwork from my early years as a visual artist. So it became a huge undertaking. 

Up until 2000 or so I didn’t have a computer, so the journals were in physical notebooks that had traveled in closed plastic tubs from basement to basement over the decades. I hadn’t opened these containers in years and was horrified to discover that they were now hidden gardens of mold. I was forced to wear a respirator, goggles and surgical gloves as I worked, in order to avoid a devastating asthma attack, transcribing relevant contents. Going through the journals was somewhat traumatic. I hadn’t read them, in most cases, since the time they were written, ages ago. I discovered what I consider to be lots of very good writing, but also detailed chronicles of disappointment, hardship, and failure – too much of that, and it was painful to recollect. 

It was tough to relive that stuff and some tears were shed, but as it happens, I decided to leave out the personal bits and concentrate for the most part on forgotten lyrics and fiction writing. It seemed vain to include too much of a personal nature and I also wanted to spare the feelings of the people that sometimes appeared in these private writings, so I concentrated on the work itself.  

HMS: What were some choices that you had to make in terms of presentation for The Knot? How did you think the lyrics and journal materials would best reach readers?

MG: I never think about “reaching” people, and in fact I rigorously avoid projecting how a reader or an audience will respond to what I do. The work has to be strong and realized on its own terms and what people make of it is their business. 

HMS: Working on The Beggar, did you already have a clear idea of who the other contributors would be? I see that contributors live all over the world, so did you all communicate remotely about tracks before going into the studio?

MG: I knew as I was writing the songs that I’d be working with these people: Larry Mullins plays drums, orchestral percussion, vibraphone, keyboards and sings. Dana Schechter plays bass guitar, lap steel guitar, keyboards and sings. Christopher Pravdica plays bass guitar, and electric guitar, and sings. Phil Puleo plays drums, and hammer dulcimer, and some Asian flute and sings. Kristof Hahn plays lap steel guitar, and electric and acoustic guitar, and sings. I also knew that Ben Frost would be contributing synthesizers and electric guitar. 

All these people had heard the fundraiser demo I made of the songs but we didn’t begin to develop the material until we met in Berlin to rehearse, which we did for a month before recording. We played each song repeatedly and stretched them out and dissected them until their true nature was revealed.  

HMS: Do you feel there are features that make official Swans albums the right candidates to be Swans albums? Are there sonic elements or attitudes that you think need to be present, or particular modes of collaboration?

MG: Swans is just a name I use for the work I do. The contributions of the people I work with are crucial, and their creativity, and musicianship, and force of personality make the music possible and worthwhile, but at this point I could bang two stones together in some haphazard rhythm and recite a 12 year old girl’s poetry over it and call that Swans if I wanted to. In fact, that’s a good idea. I think I’ll do that!

HMS: Can you share anything about the development of the heart imagery for the cover of the album and the choice of the title, The Beggar?

MG: I’m always searching for an appropriate icon to use for Swans cover art. I chose 4 icons for this release – a set of lungs, a liver, a prostate, and a heart – one for each panel of a double LP or CD. I asked my friend Nicole Boitos to make an image of each of these things. Nicole was a medical illustrator at one time and is an extremely skilled draftsperson. I asked her to make sure that the images weren’t in any way macabre and just looked matter-of-fact and neutral. She did a great job. 

The initial idea for the front cover of the LP/CD was the set of lungs, but for some reason that didn’t seem strong enough as an image, so I chose the heart as the front cover…The choice of the title because it was the one song title that made sense as a title for the album. I think a lot about abjection, and shame, and humiliation, and I’ve come to the conclusion that they are ultimately healthy states of mind, in that they act as a scalpel on one’s illusory sense of self. One could view the act of releasing an artwork into the world as an act of supplication.  

HMS: You have extensive touring coming up. Are there songs from this album that have been played live already or are there any you are particularly looking forward to presenting live for fans?

MG: We’re in the midst of a month of rehearsals in preparation for the tour right now. It turns out that all the material that made sense for us to perform is from the last 2 albums, Leaving Meaning and The Beggar. There’s also a new song I wrote specifically for this tour. The biggest struggle is to find a new shape and approach for each song that feels urgent and alive and can also lead to new possibilities each time we play it. There’s zero interest in replicating a recorded version. In some cases, the songs are now barely recognizable to what was released on record. Hopefully they will also continue to transform themselves through the course of the tours.

HMS: Do you have any personal feelings about physical media like vinyl and CD in terms of wanting Swans albums to arrive in those formats? Do you think the physical aspects of music are part of the experience?

MG: I’m committed to the physical fact of an LP or CD that one can hold in their hands, and peruse, and touch while listening. It’s inevitable and there’s nothing I can do about it, but I’m not fond of the idea of the songs floating out in the digital ether unmoored from their home on an album. The images used in the album art, and even in our case, the tactile quality of the raw cardboard the art is printed on, are part of the experience and inform the listening process, back and forth. The art should both point towards the content of the music and simultaneously deflect away from it, if it’s successful. 

HMS: What motivates you to continue writing songs on a personal level, whether or not they are released publicly?

MG: As I said a long time ago, that’s like asking a butcher why he or she cuts meat. There’s no alternative. It’s what I do. There’s no “me” otherwise.  

HMS: The song ”Paradise Is Mine” has a particular feeling like a calling up of primordial elements, which reminds me of some of the early functions of music in the ancient world, trying to encourage the elements of nature, or of the universe, to be sympathetic or to avert disasters. Was any of this on your mind when working on the song? 

MG: Like all the songs I guess, the words finally appeared after playing the chords over and over, listening intently and falling into the world the music creates, and praying for guidance. Finally, the words arrive, sometimes in a flood, sometimes incrementally. I realized while writing this one that it was, in a way, the story of creation, or conversely, human evolution, from crawling out of the muck at the bottom of the sea onto the beach to ultimately developing consciousness, and then of course questioning one’s consciousness, whether or not it actually exists. I have no idea! 

HMS: The song “The Beggar” uses monolog and a subject and that brings a story feeling to the experience. The beings and objects that the speaker identifies with remind me of an essential “other” and all the things that humans push away from themselves. Is there something needed or necessary in realizing that we are also each all the things that we have rejected? 

The development of the song, where the speaker seems to emerge “polished, golden” suggests a further stage of transformation that may be possible, and I was wondering what you think could prompt or contribute to that transformation. 

MG: I sometimes use autobiography as an initial source for a song. Other times, I’ll write a song thinking about another person, or a book, or a movie I find important, or a moment in history I find compelling. In this case the initial impetus was autobiographical, though I’m indifferent to the fact that I’m personally involved – it’s just source material, like anything else. But anyway, I suppose I was questioning my self-debasement and self-loathing at the moment the song began and was wondering what the consequences were of that state of mind, what could ultimately flow from that. But I stress that I don’t give a shit about myself, the lies I tell myself, being the dubious first inspiration for the song. It’s just fodder for writing, like anything else. I suppose there’s redemption in there somewhere, but that could be a delusory as everything else. I have no lessons to teach, just questions, and questions about the questions until ultimately there’s nothing left.   

HMS: The song “Los Angeles: City of Death” has a faster pace of many of the other songs. Was that something intrinsic to your early writing phase? The choral affect really gives a sense of glamor or glory regarding this expected being, which very early on made me think of sun-worship, but then words like “rising” seemed to fit right in with that idea. 

This idea of brightness and light associated with deadly things is not totally unheard of, but less common in the West. How does this tie into how you might feel about Los Angeles? 

MG: Well, I had way too much time on my hands during the pandemic, so I spent far too much time sitting at my desk with guitar in hand, thinking and drifting. At some point I obsessed for a while on my childhood and early adulthood in Los Angeles. My youth was less than ideal, infused as it was from the age of 12 or so with a heavy use of drugs and alcohol, ranging from inhaling glue, and spot remover, and gasoline, to ingesting large quantities of LSD and other hallucinogens, as well as various amphetamines and barbiturates, whatever I could put my hands on. I was completely unsupervised as a child. 

In a way, my mind was like a powder poured into a glass of water, just diffusing into everything. My formative years were spent un-forming. So it was a psychedelic youth I suppose, and though I had my first beautiful oceanic and transcendent experiences as a nascent human, underlying that was also a sense of violence, and decay, and even depravity based on what I witnessed and experienced. And all this beneath the persistent penetrating sun, a source of nurture but also of malevolence, in the ever-expanding sprawl and cancerous artifice of L.A. – with Disneyland at its center, the original simulacrum, with a tumor hidden in its heart. 

I guess I conjoined my personal apocalypse with a more generalized sense of disaster and destruction, perhaps romanticized by the book and movie Day of the Locust and others like it, set to the music of The Doors, in my mind, which is the music I most associate with my somewhat deranged youth…In any event, I was playing a series of open chords for this song and implicit in the overtones created by them was a choir of voices, so that’s what I went with when producing the song.    

HMS: The song “Why Can’t I Have What I Want” really openly conveys the instability of time and present experiences as a fleeting thing. Use of multiple vocal layers have a big impact on the tone of different parts of the song, both in an ethereal way and in an emphatic way. What about the song suggested this more layered approach to you? 

On the thematic side, this reminds me of different universal ideas of asking higher powers for help or for greater affluence. Were you thinking more of religious contexts, relationships, or worldly gains in terms of supplication?

MG: In rehearsals before the recording, this song was a tough one. It’s fairly conventional with its 4 chord structure – though there’s no chorus per se – so it seemed the agenda needed to be to diffuse the structure, though I’m not convinced we accomplished that ultimately. At some point, Larry Mullins was singing along with a snaking Mellotron line he developed and when I heard that, I saw that it needed to be the thread that lead through everything, since it was so evocative, so we layered that accordingly. My goal, at which I failed miserably, was to sing like Chris Isaac in the song “Wicked Game.” No chance in hell! I hate my voice, but I’m stuck with it and I do the best I can… 

Thematically, since it seems no one is ever going to notice, I’ll reveal here that the song was written in the thrall of a tremendous yearning for the release and romance of alcohol surging through my blood and being. Those days are long gone, but it still lives inside me like a holy spirit, or conversely like a hidden and seductive monster that wants to devour me from the inside out. So this was a love song to that creature, looking it straight in the face and worshipping it.