Grammy award-winner Charlie Hall is the longtime drummer of The War on Drugs and The Silver Ages, but has also spent many years as a Producer and mentor to other musicians, bringing things full circle from the mentorship that he feels has contributed so much to his life. He has now released his first ever collection of original solo work, Invisible Ink, that also spreads quite a canvas of collaboration as each track features musicians who Hall has called friend over the years. These instrumental Rock songs are also themed on a place that’s been key to Hall’s life in some way, reflected in the song titles. That place may also tie into a specific memory or a time he most associates with that location. In that way, Hall found his muse to venture into creating his own compositions.
With Hall taking a song-by-song approach, contributors included Chris Walla from Death Cab for Cutie, Thomas Elklund of Phoenix, James Elkington from Tweedy, and members of The War On Drugs, including Dave Hartley, Robbie Bennett, and Eliza Hardy Jones, amongst others. I spoke with Charlie Hall about the role of places in his life, his love for layers of history, and how he was coaxed by Quinn Lamont Luke of El Triángulo Records into composing his own work and starting the conversation.
Hannah Means-Shannon: I saw that you’re having a listening party to launch your record. That’s a fun way to mark a milestone.
Charlie Hall: Yes, it’s going to be in a “Jazz-adjacent” place, Solar Myth, run by the Ars Nova Workshop folks. They put on mostly experimental music there. They’ve done a really great job sprucing up the place and that’s what’s great about venues. They have other lives before this one. For example, The Boot & Saddle in Philly, has an historically preserved awning, so they’ll always have this marker of when it was this honky-tonk place for sailors and a Punk club. In the 2000s, it was an indie Rock venue, and now it’s in a new iteration.
HMS: I can hear, in the way that you’re speaking, how important places are to you. I really like the history of venues, too. But this links to your album, where each track is dedicated to a special place in your life.
CH: I guess so! Places are where things happen, however silly that sounds. The things that happen become part of the place’s history, and your own.
HMS: The layers of peoples’ experiences definitely feel like the fabric of certain locations.
CH: We’ve been in our current house for almost 20 years and we’re raising a family. It’s undeniably our home. But sometimes I think to myself, “Oh, wait, someone else was crawling up those stairs a hundred years ago.” You forget that. It was definitely on my mind when we first moved in, wondering what went on there. There were rumors of someone being shot there. However many generations have called this house their home, too. There were so many chapters to this story outside of my own.
HMS: When I was looking at these different places in the song titles, I was wondering if there has ever been a place were you were an outsider and first starting to get to know a place.
CH: Yes, everywhere you go, at some point it’s new. For a lot of these places, I did have that experience. “Montcalm Street” is in San Francisco and my now wife Ann and I moved there when we were just out of college. The place is so significant because I feel like my most formative adult years, from 22 to 30, were spent there. I learned everything about life, practically, working in a restaurant, teaching high school, learned what a hook was, learned things from other people like “Always fill somebody else’s line first.”
Having people that were older around me left me with little nuggets of knowledge and life-stuff. That’s part of why mentorship has always been so important to me. There are countless people who I consider to be mentors and I try to be that person for somebody when I can. I also felt, “This is where I’m supposed to be.” I had gone out there to visit before I finished college and I kind of knew that I wanted to land there.
When we moved to Philadelphia about eight years later, I remember that feeling of being an outsider. I didn’t really know the city very well, but my brother had a Vespa. I just took that Vespa and I must have cruised every street there is, just soaking it in, and hearing the sounds of Philadelphia. I was looking at the different neighborhoods and cultures and I felt like that was such a great way to get to know a new place. You can just swim in it.
HMS: Is it ever hard for you to make a choice to leave a place that’s become important to you?
CH: Oh, yes, I’m a creature of habit. My wife is much more forward-thinking. I want to watch that same movie that makes me feel good a million times. I’m that way. I was actually on tour in Japan when the move was happening, so my wife was handling the move, and unbeknownst to me, she was even looking at musicians on Craigslist. On my behalf! I probably never would have even done that for myself. But she said, “You should call this guy. He says that he liked Fleetwood Mac and The Velvet Underground and Blondie.” That was Joey Sweeney. We hung out that first night in town and he’s still a dear friend. So many of the musical connections I’ve made were because of that, because Ann happened to think this guy sounded cool.
HMS: I don’t know that this is true for everyone, but often if you end up in the right place somehow, you find your community in a surprising way.
CH: You just have to be open to it.
HMS: I was wondering about your relationship with Quinn Lamont Luke, who nudged you to make this album. I take it that he’s someone you’ve known for quite a while?
CH: I was in Japan with Quinn 20 years ago when all that moving happened! Quinn and I were both in Tommy Guerrero’s band. Going back to what we were just talking about, he has always kind of been a mentor to me even though we’re peers. Sometimes now, after 20 years, I’m his mentor in certain ways. I love that constant updating of relationships. I even look at my sons and learn from life from them, like about empathy. I have to learn to be more like them.
But Quinn put me up to this whole album. This was all his idea. I would honestly never have even tried to do this if it was for Quinn. He said, “You’ve been helping people make records for your whole life. I want to hear what your music sounds like.” I said, “I don’t know what that means.” He said he didn’t care what it turned out to be, but he asked me to come up to the studio in New York. That forced me to take stock of what had been floating around in my head for over 20 years.
HMS: You really had never written music just for yourself?
CH: Whenever I’m playing music alone, I like to get inside other peoples’ songs, but I never really thought about how it is to start from within.
HMS: So before, it was more like improvising based on other peoples’ starting points, whereas for your own music, you had to start from scratch?
CH: Right. I’d write a choral arrangement for someone, or some chords that would fit with their song, or a tuning that might help unlock something. That’s a thing that I really appreciate about musicians is that they are often generous with their knowledge and training, and this whole record was a complete exercise in generosity. My friends kept encouraging me to plug away at it, and when they added their voice to it, it became a conversation.
The solitary aspect of it was great, because I’d never done that. I started out building all these tracks up, playing all the rhythm section stuff. I figured out what landscape I wanted to build, sonically, for a particular tune. Once it becomes a conversation with other people, though, that’s what it’s all about. Music is a language. It’s probably our earliest form of communication, banging on a log to signify something. Having that conversation with people I love was part of what made it special.
HMS: I think this album has a special story to it, because on one level, if people are wondering, “What does Charlie Hall sound like?”, they can look at this album. But on another level, it’s you in conversation with all these people who you care about.
CH: I promise it’s not a record of drum solos! That’s interesting to think about, the conversation.
HMS: How did you work on your songs?
CH: For me, the beautiful part was the process of self-discovery. I didn’t really have a very specific plan. I just went with the flow. Sometimes an instrument would inspire me, like a specific instrument. I’d realize I hadn’t touched a particular guitar in ages, and I’d wonder what was in there. It may sound cliché, but the inspiration may be waiting in there.
I have this piano that belonged to my father and my stepmother that I always loved as a kid. My stepmother was a crooner and she’d play Ray Charles songs. It was the equivalent of an engagement ring to my stepmother, and it’s a big fucking piano. It’s a little bigger than a Baby Grand. We had to move a lot of stuff around to fit it in the house. Here’s the thing, I kind of hate it! I am sentimental about it, about many objects, going back to the history of things.
HMS: You’re the custodian now! There’s no way out.
CH: Yes, but it’s so hard to play. My stepmother used to hammer the thing. I like a piano with light action. Someone put the wrong hammers on it at some point, it’s wacky. But I did find a way to lean into this piano and I put a cheap-ass microphone inside it. Then I found a way to send it through this signal chain to create something that sounds like a piano but also something else. It’s doing something for me now. You can hear it, especially on the first and last tracks of the album, where there’s a conversation between three instruments. On the last song, you can really hear that two-chord piano thing, on “Tamarama.” It was inspired by Harold Budd, a piano player that I love.
HMS: I actually thought that there was a relationship between the first and the last songs, but I wondered if I was reading too much into it.
CH: That’s the connective tissue! That song was the last thing that I did before wrapping this up and that felt like the right post-script. It was meditative. Frally did all that beautiful, textured singing, too. It gives it such a nice lift.
HMS: I felt that had more pointed contrasting elements but it was really satisfying how they interacted. I know that for that one, you felt like you could have kept going.
CH: Yes. [Laughs] I felt like I could have made a whole record based on that song! I’m sure whoever owned that piano before my stepmother would be horrified what I’ve done to it.
HMS: Is there a jumping around in time for you, in terms of the places on this album, or an ordering principle? I know that “First & First” is much more recent in time, so to speak.
CH: Yes, that’s where Quinn’s studio is, where this all started, so it went first. Tromso, Norway, in “Midas Bus to Tromso”, was where Chris Walla lived at the time, and that song is a conversation between the two of us. Mystic, Connecticut in “Mystic, CT” is where my wife’s family is from, and that’s been my home away from home for over 20 years. I’m from Connecticut, too, but my family moved away, so I have adopted Mystic as my hometown.
HMS: I’ve never known anyone who didn’t fall in love with Mystic after visiting. I love that song, too.
CH: That was the song where I thought, “Oh, I can do this.” That was the main motif that just happened and then I could build the track up. Jim Elkington asked if I minded if he put some pedal steel on it. He’s an incredible guitar player, but was interested in playing more steel. I said, “Do whatever you want with it.” And it came back to me as a true gift. That gave me the confidence to keep doing it and keep writing more. That song is really special to me.
HMS: Something I like about that song is that it’s dreamy, but not sleepy.
CH: I should put that on the hype sticker! “You won’t fall asleep, I promise. Except that maybe, P.S. You will.”
