An Interview With Les Shelleys

What is folk?
Tom: It’s pretty simple stuff. It’ll be what’s happening right here right now.
Angela: I think of a song that I always have in my head that someone sang to me.
Tom: Like “Scarborough Fair?”
Angela: No! Like Elizabeth Cotton. I think of people who just picked up an instrument and started playing and singing because they wanted to. You sing because you can’t help yourself. You write something because it’s in your heart. It doesn’t matter if it’s perfect. It doesn’t matter if it follows the rules or if it’s what people expect it to be. It can be what you want it to be. It doesn’t have to be crunchy feel-good Topanga Cayon goodness.
Tom: ‘Topanga Canyon goodness.’
Angela: I don’t know, I think folk gets a bad rap sometimes, like it’s all crunchy and whatever but I just think it’s a song that means something to someone. That translates to a lot of songs. And it doesn’t have to be an acoustic guitar or songs about trains.
Tom: But maybe folk music doesn’t mean what it used to mean. It’s like singer songwriter is such a loose term people throw around. People call me a singer-songwriter. I consider myself more folk. Elizabeth Cotton, Mississippi John Hurt, Woodie Guthrie, he travelled the world and saw things. He wrote about what he saw and had something to say. A lot of that is present in folk. Mia Doi Todd is commenting on what’s happening today. It’s pretty inspiring, putting the folk back in folk music.
Angela: There’s many expressions of folk music in terms of production. It’s really varied across the board what people consider folk music. The sounds people are coming up with, the way they arrange songs, blending instruments. I love Richard Buckner.
Tom: And Iris Dement. Richard Buckner took the Spoon River Anthology and he put music to it. It’s a really great record called The Hill.

Should a live show be the same as a recording?
Angela: Shouldn’t it be allowed to breathe and change and evolve? I change the melodies in my songs a lot. I get yelled at by my friends. “Don’t change your melodies!” “But I’m bored, I want to sing something differnt.” The recorded version and the live version are going to be different. One is in a box with sealed walls.
Tom: Coldplay does a pretty good job.
Angela: With a hundred million dollars behind him.

So if you had a hundred million dollars…
Angela: I’d sound fucking rad every single night. Press play, not even sing…
Tom: What would you do, a hundred million bucks?
Angie: Shit, I’d have fireworks. Costumes, acrobats. No, I would probably put it in the bank and save it for the next record.
Tom: I’d give it away. I would give it to the humane society.
Angela: Ugh, he’s such a good person. I said I’d keep it, what am I? I’m an asshole.

Describe the experience of singing with Angela:
Tom: Her voice and my voice work well together. She’s easy going. Sometimes I feel like a teacher and other times I feel like I’m getting schooled. She’s got no boundaries. She makes me sound good.

How about you, singing with Tom?
Tom: Don’t say anything nice. I don’t want this to be all nice.
Angela: I love Tom, too! But when we first started working together I would cry. I’m very emotional and really outspoken. There is a song on the album that my voice is really gentle and soft because I had just being crying. I wasn’t hitting the notes and ‘someone’ told me.

Singing songs that have been sung before, are there infinite ways that one can be interpreted or is there an endpoint?
Angela: I think it’s interesting to try to find a way to make a song feel different. But then there’s a song like “Hallelujah” where it’s like, people, just pick a new song. There are other Leonard Cohen songs. Most sing it like Jeff Buckley and it’s pathetic and sad.
Tom: But those people love that song.
Angela: Goddamit, find a new song!

What’s the story behind the recordings you’re releasing that you did in 2003?
Angela: We use to get together and sing songs in Tom’s apartment in Angeleno Heights.  We had a minidisc recorder that had a great condenser battery-operated mic. We just started to see what we sounded like when we sang together and recorded the songs that we had learned at the time.
Tom: Angie and I got together and I had these old folk songs floating around in my head and Angie did too so we brought them to the table, quite literally, with the mic. We wouldn’t worry if we got the lyrics right. It was just primarily to see what we sounded like on a recording device. It wasn’t anything we we ever planned to put out. The recordings are not really that good but the spirit and tone is kind of interesting and Fat Cat was interested in that. It sounded really intimate and cool like you’re sitting right there with us.
Angie: And they’re imperfect. Sometimes we may have learned a song two hours before and figured out the arrangements and harmonies and just pressed record. It’s kind of strange to put out your beginning efforts at recording yourself, seven years after.
Tom: It is but then it isn’t. We’re fans of the Lomax and Smith anthologies and such, so that made sense about it. It doesn’t need to be studio.

Did these songs influence your songwriting and singing?
Tom: All of them were great tools. Most of them it was the style or genre we were interested in. That’s how I got into writing songs, pattern songs like that. A lot of them are very common, most of the Guthrie and Leadbelly catalogue. Then we developed our own style with it and got interested in songs form the 1940s and 50s and that’s when I really started having fun with Angie. Those songs sound great when you put harmonies on them. Some I don’t know if they’d been duetted before.
Angie: A lot of the songs feel really familiar. Maybe you’ve heard them growing up, songs with similar songwriting from old movies. There’s a familiarity that made us want to learn other songs that people have been singing forever. When you listen to a song a lot you start hearing it in your head and you make it your own. Then that song belongs to you in a special way. By taking a song and breaking it up or rearranging it or adding harmonies lets it become your own in a different way. Those songs last for a reason. There’s something really special about the melody or the songwriting or the lyrics. There’s just something that speaks to people. Now we talk about new songs we want to try. They’re more often songs from the 1970s.
Tom: I like breaking it down to acoustic guitar and hand slaps.

—Daiana Feuer