The songs on Marshall Crenshaw’s new Jaggedland (released in June 2009 on 429 Records) work as a cohesive whole; while Crenshaw can always be counted on to turn in a quality set of songs, there’s a unity about this group of twelve compositions. “I knew that I was crafting an album, you know what I mean? Of course I gave great attention to detail on each individual song, but I had an agenda: there was this group of songs that hang together and complement one another.” This approach has served him well over the course of his thirty-plus year career. Prior to his first album (1982’s Marshall Crenshaw), he says that he “just had a bunch of songs. So I grabbed some from that group, the ones that would fit nicely into an album. But ever since then, I’ve pretty much thought in terms of albums.” There’s an old axiom that a new artist has his whole life up to that point to compose material for a first album and then a mere months to create material for the follow-up. In Crenshaw’s case, “I guess I did and I didn’t. I wrote all those songs (for 1983’s Field Day) and maybe ten more in a really short period of time. But the two or three years leading up to that time, I had been traveling all around the country…seeing it up close, and seeing a lot of it. I was gathering up of all these impressions of different places, soaking up whatever I was soaking up.” Crenshaw believes that it was during that period that he truly became a songwriter.

In our previous (2007) interview, Crenshaw characterized his solo gigs as “kind of the singer/songwriter circuit, the ‘NPR circuit.’” He’s less willing to pigeonhole the music on Jaggedland: “I just think anybody who would hear it might like it, you know?” When comparing the new album to his past efforts, Crenshaw insists that “this record is on another level; it’s really outstanding.” Yet he does his best to keep commercial considerations — the success of the album in the marketplace — out of mind. “There are so many trains of thought you can get lost on if you start thinking about ‘the marketplace.’ When I’m creating songs, I don’t want anything to cloud my thinking.” He believes that a songwriter’s goal should be to “keep your focus where it belongs: on the thing that you’re crafting, the thing you’re creating, the thing that you’re trying to express.” Crenshaw admits that mundane outside concerns “do intervene, but I was lucky to find enough of those moments to create. I was able to stay on the righteous path and think clearly about what I was doing. I tried to keep all the extraneous b.s. out.”

Marshall Crenshaw produced the tracks that make up Jaggedland with co-producers Jerry Boys (Buena Vista Social Club, Richard Thomson, Vashti Bunyan) and Stewart Lerman (the Roches, Dar Williams, Jules Shear), and went for a “live” ambience. When an artist opts for a live-in-the-studio approach, motivation can often be traced to specific place: economic concerns (as in, get it done quickly to save money). But in Crenshaw’s case — this time at least — “mostly it was an artistic call. It’s just more musical this way. I’ve done the ’solitary genius’ thing a lot,” he laughs. “But I’d much rather be in a room with a bunch of great musicians, where we can get that communication happening.” He says that when he does go the solo recording route, “I just play. I’m not one to cut and paste. But on this album it was just incredible to be sitting in a circle with Jim Keltner, Greg Leisz and all those guys. It was amazing to get kind of a vote of confidence on the songs, and on the direction I had in mind for them.”

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Tags: interview, jaggedland, marshall crenshaw, powerpop

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