Some artists play music but some artists live it. They inject their passion for art into every aspect of their lives, strangling their day-to-day life with creation and grace. Music grabs these people at a young age and never releases them, constantly reminding them that their purpose is to make magic out of the simplest sounds and share those sounds with the world. Barrett Martin not only emulates this sentiment, he defines it. The multi-faceted musician has touched on just about every corner of music to his time as the drummer of Screaming Trees during their most successful period, to playing with Mike McCready and Laye Stayley in Mad Season and his work with Skin Yard, Tuatara, and Walking Papers, Martin has established himself as one of the hardest-working musicians today in more ways than one.
Glide caught up with Martin to discuss his storied career, what he has planned next, and the unquenchable drive to create. Check out our full conversation below.
When we last caught up with you in 2021, you were recording an album with the Gwich’in people in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to bring attention to the environmental crisis there. Can you give us an update on how the Gwich’in people are currently doing and the effect the album had on the area?
I finished the album I recorded for the Gwich’in on location in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, about 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska. The album is titled, “A Message To The World” and it is on all the streaming platforms. It features a combination of short stories from Gwich’in elders talking about the climate crisis and how it is affecting their lives and the wildlife in the Arctic. In between the stories are some of their traditional songs that use the fiddle and acoustic guitar to create this really cool dance music that is uniquely Gwich’in. I ended up playing upright bass on their songs, which is one of the other instruments I play besides drums. So the album is a series of short stories and music and it’s really fun to listen to. In general, the Gwich’in seem to be in good spirits, because the Arctic Wildlife Refuge is one of the most beautiful places on Earth, kind of like an “Arctic Amazon.” And so far, they have been able to keep the oil companies off their lands so they aren’t able to destroy the landscape any further. Everything comes in small victories, so let’s hope we can keep it that way.

You studied ethnomusicology and have used your knowledge in many musical projects in the last ten years. What have you been working on lately in that realm that you would like to share with our readers?
Lately, I’ve been working with the Shipibo Shamans in the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest, which is where I did the fieldwork for my master’s degree back in 2004. It’s really been about 20 years since I started doing real ethnomusicology work. Right now I am finishing up the Shipibo Shamans 3rd album, which was also recorded on location in the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest, and for their new album, they asked me to bring in a bunch of my musical friends to play on the songs with them. It sounds really different and quite beautiful, and it will come out later this summer when I start releasing these short films for my new music series titled, “Singing Earth with Barrett Martin.” Like the Gwich’in the Alaskan Arctic, the Shipibo in the Peruvian Amazon are also directly affected by severe climate change, so hopefully, their new album and this new music series will help raise more awareness around those things.
What sort of music was played around your house when you were younger? Do you remember the album/single you bought based on your own taste and really helped you develop your style as a drummer?
I grew up on a small farm in the forests south of Olympia, WA. We had one of those old player-pianos that played paper piano rolls with old-timey songs like Ragtime, Big Band, and popular songs of the early 1900s. My dad also had a small record player with Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash records, which every American dad from the 1970s had. So that was the first music I really heard – jazz and outlaw country. I also inherited my grandparents’ collection of 78 albums with Big Band and Swing from the 1930s and 1940s, so I was really a jazz head as a kid, which lasted well into high school and college. In fact, I didn’t really get into rock music until I was in college when I was supposed to be studying my jazz charts! There wasn’t really one single album that made me want to play drums, but jazz drummers like Max Roach and Buddy Rich, and rock drummers like Keith Moon and John Bonham had big influences on me. I suppose all of it soaked into my young mind, so by the time I started recording albums in the early 1990s, I had absorbed all of those styles.
How has your playing style changed over the years? When people first get introduced to you and your passion for various regional music, they would be surprised to hear you were the drummer in a rock band like The Screaming Trees.
The Screaming Trees were just one of many bands that I played with in the 1990s. I was also in the experimental jazz group, Tuatara, which formed in the mid-1990s and lasted until about 2014, and I was a session drummer in Los Angeles in the late 1990s, where I played with a lot of singer-songwriters. As I got older and more experienced, I became more efficient in how I played the drums, in that I learned to play only what was essentially needed on a song, and I really tried to never overplay. I am a strong believer in the ethos that you can play much better on every instrument if you emphasize feel and tastefulness, rather than playing something that is unnecessarily complex. I think it’s always better to play with your soul, rather than your math skills.
Is it difficult for you to play rock music after all the musical “maturation” you have gone through or do you think rock serves its only real purpose of maturity if you get to the root of the influence?
I think rock is ultimately just one more extension of the blues, which is the foundation of almost all American popular music. So I think if you can understand the blues, you can come to understand jazz, rock, soul, rhythm and blues, and even hip hop. It’s not hard to play rock & roll, but I think it’s somewhat similar to what they say about the blues: it’s the easiest form to play, but the hardest to get right. So I feel like I am always learning how to play rock & roll, and jazz for that matter, and even after extended trips and recording sessions in the Mississippi Delta, I still feel like I just barely understand the blues. It’s humbling, but that’s how you learn.
Did practicing Zen influence your playing at all? What first drew you to the practice and what was the process like becoming ordained?
I think Zen was always there in me, it is a natural extension of my personality, in that I was always sort of “Zen” before I formally studied Zen and became ordained as a Zen monk. But yes, when I think about my maturation as a musician, it is directly parallel with my spiritual maturation as a human being. Those two things – music and your spiritual practice, are inseparable things. And I think you can hear that spiritual expression in the music of the great master musicians, people like John Coltrane, Max Roach, Philip Glass, Patti Smith, Stevie Wonder, Ravi Shankar, George Harrison, and many of the great Arabic classical musicians. A truly spiritual musician naturally conveys that inner world to their audience.
Collaboration plays a big part in a lot of your work, what is your approach to collaboration, and what has been your most fulfilling collaboration to date?
Almost all musicians must learn to collaborate, it is an essential skill you must have unless you are determined to only play solo, by yourself, with no additional accompaniment. That is extremely rare, so I generally try to attract people who have the same skill level (or higher) with a shared aesthetic that we have about a musical style or form. So at this point in my life, I generally look for people who have a skill that I want to feature on an album that I might be producing for someone else, or sometimes it’s for an album I am writing and producing for myself. I was just talking to Peter Buck (founding guitarist of R.E.M.) and we added up a total of 35 albums (so far) that he and I have played on together as the backing band for either a singer-songwriter or sometimes it was one of our own projects. I mean, 35 albums just between Peter and I are a lot of albums, and I’ve played on about 150 albums to date. So I collaborate constantly, it’s just a natural thing, and it really gives me great joy to see what I might come up with when I am inspired by another great musician who pushes me to a higher level. I guess that’s the secret too: find musicians who are better than you, and surround yourself with exceptional talent. That’s how you get better and grow.
What was it like transitioning from drumming in grunge bands to leading a jazz ensemble with Barrett Martin Group? When did jazz first enter your life and what inspired you to dive into it with this project?
A. Well, this is somewhat related to one of your previous questions about my earliest musical influences, which was that old-time jazz. So jazz was always there inside of me, even when I played in the Screaming Trees – I would swing on the ride cymbal on several of the Trees songs. But the whole grunge thing was really only about 10 years of my life when I was in my early 20s, and it was fun to play rock & roll during that time. But I was always looking for more than that in the music I wanted to play, so I kept exploring and trying new sounds with new groups that I would form, even when rock & roll was my day job. I also started making my first solo albums in 2004, the same year I did that big ethnomusicology project in the Peruvian Amazon, so I think the Barrett Martin Group is just a natural extension of all the music I have played in my life. We’re not even just a jazz band anymore, because I have people like Alain Johannes and Matt Cameron playing on my new album, and we just jam and experiment with all kinds of musical ideas. Somehow, it all comes through in the songs, and the Barrett Martin Group evolves and changes with each album we make.
You’ve been in bands with two revered lead singers who are no longer with us – Mark Lanegan and Layne Staley. What can you share with our readers about their struggles and triumphs and what do you most fondly remember about making music with them?
It’s such a huge question, I can’t really answer it in a few sentences except to say that Mark Lanegan, Layne Staley, and the two other singers I got to work with briefly (Chris Cornell and Michael Stipe), were some of the greatest singers of my generation. Very few modern singers have the talent those guys did, in fact, most modern rock singers either copy them or use autotune to sing (which is computer singing). So when you work with real singers of such immense talent and magnitude as those guys, and especially as a drummer who was creating the rhythmic foundation for them to stand upon, that is a really powerful experience to have, and there isn’t anything I can really compare it to. It was just pure magic to play with those guys, so that is the standard I bring when I play in a band with any singer.
How did film scoring first come into your life? What is a studio session for a film like compared to recording something like Barrett Martin Group?
I scored some small indie films and some documentaries in the early 2000s when I was living in Hollywood working as a session musician. But to be honest, I didn’t really find it terribly interesting, and I learned that most soundtrack work is really quite pedantic and formulaic because the music can’t be too adventurous or the director or producers won’t like it. I think it was different in the old days of classic Hollywood, but now most soundtracks are done in a sound lab and they are more like “sound design” than music. And you don’t really hear great composers anymore like Lalo Schifrin or Mychael Danna or John Williams, it’s just some guy in a sound lab making sound effects. So I decided I didn’t want to pursue that as a musical form anymore. That being said, I have written music that I recorded for my solo albums that got licensed for TV and film soundtracks, and that is much more rewarding when a great piece of music is fitted into a great scene to make it stand out as special.
You’re also an author, what was it like diving back into the history books to write your Screaming Trees biography The Greatest Band That Ever Wasn’t?
I’ve written 4 books now, and the Screaming Trees book was written purely from my first-person perspective as the drummer of the Screaming Trees for most of the 1990s. I didn’t read any history books or any other books during the time that I was writing it, because I didn’t want to be pulled away from the pure transmission of the storytelling I was channeling. I would occasionally look up something in my collection of music books, or sometimes a website that had historical data just to get a fact correct, or a historical event that I wanted to reference. But mostly I just used my mind to time travel back to the 1990s and that’s where the stories came from. However, if I am writing any kind of ethnomusicology story, then yes, I totally use my book collection for references and citations and things like that.
Where is the best place for fans to keep up with what you’re doing next? Can you give us any hints about upcoming projects?
Well, I don’t spend a lot of time on social media for the obvious reason that I spend most of my time working in recording studios and performing or speaking around the world. But I do take the time to post photos and short videos on my Facebook and Instagram pages, which are under the banner of: @BarrettMartinOfficial. That’s about all I can stomach in the Internet world, and it’s an effort to do that. But I am very excited about my new music series about music around the world, which is titled, “Singing Earth with Barrett Martin.” We will start airing the first few episodes this spring on my VEVO channel and YouTube channel with the same name, “Singing Earth.”