Marcellus Hall Will Never Let You Down

At the peak of Matador Records mid-1990’s-era and indie rock heyday, Railroad Jerk stood atop the fray alongside Pavement, Guided by Voices and Yo La Tengo.

The year 1995 was certainly a seminal one in the underground annals: Stephen Malkmus and company unleashed idiosyncratic epic Wowee Zowee, Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, the pride of Hoboken, New Jersey, took yet another giant leap forward towards greatness with Electr-O-Pura and Uncle Bob offered the lo-fi all-timer of lo-fi all-timers, Alien Lanes.  

Then there was Railroad Jerk. Matador label OGs and Lower East Side DIY junkyard staples, the foursome — led by Dylanesque punk rock troubadour Marcellus Hall — cranked out the seminal One Track Mind, easily one of the best records of not only that year but the entire nineties. The jaw-dropping trifecta that opened up their third album, “Gun Problem,” “Bang The Drum” and “Rollerkoaster” (immortalized in a Beavis & Butthead episode) is as good as any three songs to kick off a record. A glorious mess of twang-damaged and bluesy rickety punk-meets-folk tunesmithery, One Track Mind secured Hall’s place as preeminent singer/songwriter outsider–even as his band was lumped into the noise-rock scene that ruled the downtown roost. 

 

 

Over the subsequent decades since Railroad Jerk’s dissolution (they broke up around 2000), Hall has enjoyed a fruitful yet sporadic solo career while holding down his day job as a renowned illustrator (he’s drawn numerous covers for The New Yorker, illustrated children’s books, is a graphic novelist and much more loads his CV). 

Ten years and change have passed since Hall’s last solo record but the wait for a new slab of tunes was well worth it, indeed. The just-released I Will Never Let You Down finds the ex-Railroad Jerk once again accompanied by longtime cohorts, bassist Damon Smith and drummer Mike Shapiro, on a set of killer songs that are classic Marcellus Hall: carefully-crafted, sprung-from-the-garage catchiness.   

Ragtag ditties that gush with melodic hooks and the idiosyncratic wordplay and bizarro-world rhymes that will have you singing or humming along from start to finish, Hall shows he hasn’t lost a step since declaring on “Gun Problem” nearly thirty years ago that he’s “hi-fi and low-brow.” In fact, his country-fried, folk-rockish songwriting chops have only gotten better with age. I Will Never Let You Down still bleeds with trademark downtown NYC grit (whatever’s left of it) but it is, without a doubt, Hall’s best sounding and sharpest album. Don’t worry, the Highway 61-like ramshackle remains alive and well in Hall’s world.   

Rock & Roll Globe had the pleasure of meeting up with Hall at a coffee joint on the LES (where else?) to talk his new record that was released that very day, life in Railroad Jerk, being a singer/songwriter in the noise-rock age, cover songs and more.  

Marcellus Hall plays The Owl Music Parlor in Brooklyn, New York on March 22nd

 

Today is actually the release date of your first new solo album in over a decade. That’s a long time coming. Congrats!

Thank you. We’ve been working towards it for months…or I could almost say years. But it’s funny because it’s kind of anticlimactic because it’s all social media, you know? Nothing’s happening today…just this [interview]. 

 

I Will Never Let You Down has been in the works for years?

Five years, yeah. We started recording it before the pandemic. 

 

And your record before this new one (Afterglow) came out over 10 years ago?

Before we started this, that’s true. It slips by fast and it seems alarming to me and maybe to everybody else, too. But, for me, the only explanation is that the music industry has changed and we got older and we have different responsibilities and all of a sudden, there’s nobody begging us to make a record, there’s no record labels and all that stuff. So, it’s on us. I came around to the idea that, if I want to make music, then I have to make it happen. 

 

There’s no doubt that the record industry has changed dramatically since your Railroad Jerk days and being on Matador. How have you adjusted to the sea change? Your last record was actually funded by a Kickstarter. 

It’s a hard thing and I’m skeptical of saying any one answer because we also got older and that gives one a lot of pause. You start asking yourself, “Well, what’s going on? Are my perceptions changing?” because you look at things differently than you did when you were younger. So, the whole music industry did turn upside down and suddenly we feel unsupported. I’m sure everybody does. I haven’t traded enough stories with other musicians to know. There’s some commiseration, I guess that’s true, but I haven’t been in the music “scene,” in the trenches, like touring or anything like that. 

 

I wouldn’t say you fell off but…

I would. 

(Laughing)

 

I mean you stayed fairly active in the scene. Railroad Jerk broke up in the late ’90s then you had White Hassle before you ventured into a solo career…

Railroad Jerk broke up in 2000 and White Hassle went from ‘97 to 2007–that’s ten years and Railroad Jerk was ‘89-99 and that’s ten years, too. They overlapped. 

Many of your former Matador labelmates have trudged on. Jon Spencer, Yo La Tengo…

Still kicking. Cat Power and Pavement…they’re experiencing a certain renaissance, too. That’s true and that’s by luck of their own popularity. I think. We (Railroad Jerk) had our own shtick. It didn’t catch on in the same way but as you can see, none of my enthusiasm has waned or confidence in what we’re doing. We just keep doing it and I think I dug in my heels even more in 2023 and said to myself that, number one, you’re not getting any younger, and number two, this is what life is about. Believing in something and doing it. Period. 

 

You also continued to do music…

The whole time. 

 

…and you also juggle a day job as an illustrator. 

That’s another thing that I love to do so I’m lucky in both respects. 

 

I suppose that also contributed to your not putting out a new record for several years, that having a day job put music on the backburner?

I think so. And also that Kickstarter effort was a massive effort, it was really hard. I wouldn’t wish it upon anybody (laughs)! You’ll see this in the video, if you look it up. It was hard to put myself in the position of asking people for money because in the past Matador came asking us first for the music. So it was a reversal. And part of me said, well, if you have to ask then it’s not valid or it’s not worth doing it because nobody wants to hear it. But I’ve since changed around a little bit on that.

 

Railroad Jerk, White Hassle and your solo material has been boxed under a lo-fi, ramshackle junkyard blues-type umbrella. It’s a tag that seems to have followed you around for decades. I’ve visualized you recording in a very DIY way and not necessarily in a studio. Like you can record on-the-cheap, at least to me, the outsider looking in – if that makes sense.

No, it does. That’s the other thing about the music industry is that we should have been rejoicing because everything came into our hands and we could finally DIY like we wanted to. We got what we wanted (laughs). That was our battle cry, DIY, as far as even the late 80’s. But, we also had to suddenly take on the role of everything like production and promotion and distribution, blah, blah, blah. 

I always valued what I could get done in a real studio and I also feel I never embraced technology enough to know how to achieve what I wanted to in the studio, even GarageBand at home and stuff. I’m sorry to say that that’s the case. I mean, whatever, I can record on my phone, it’s silly. I have friends who have educated themselves about recording. In fact, my bass player, Damon Smith, contributed a lot. He contributed a lot to this new record with his home recording console–meaning his computer. But we rented mics and did stuff. 

 

With all the technology today, one can record at home but totally capture the huge sound of the studio. 

I think you’re right, but at the same time I totally appreciate what we achieved in the studio that we went to and the guys who helped us record it (Jeff Fettig and Chris Maxwell). I give them a lot of credit. I don’t think we could have got it at home what they achieved. 

 

VIDEO: Marcellus Hall “Behind the Stadium”

I Will Never Let You Down sounds particularly great. 

I feel like it does, too. I’m really proud of the production. Anything that I do, I look back on it and I see missteps and things like mistakes or things that I want to change but that would bore you if I went through those (laughs).

 

What were you under the influence of while writing the songs on I Will Never Let You Down, musically speaking, of course. Or it doesn’t need to be something you were listening to per se. 

The usual romantic turmoil. I guess, is one. No, I shouldn’t say the usual but we all have ups and downs emotionally–those play into it. Musically, I was a little hermetic and not keeping abreast of the newest trends and I may have regressed a little bit and started learning chord progressions and things from classic rock, things that I grew up on. Stuff that maybe my 25- year-old self would have despised–not the music that my 25-year-old self would despise but my 25-year-old-self might despise my methods.

 

One thing that caught my ear on “Behind The Stadium,” a song off the new record, is you name-drop two Railroad Jerk songs, “Bang The Drum” and “Rollerkoaster.” 

That’s true, I did. 

 

What was behind that?

The reason why was because I needed to rhyme something with “stadium” and I thought “drum” and then I thought, “Oh, I know what I can do.” This is too revealing maybe but I just always loved the way John Lennon did that in the song “Glass Onion,” referencing “Strawberry Fields.” So I just thought, “Okay, art is about creating a mythology so I’m just going to milk it.” 

 

I was curious if that was maybe a nostalgia trip or something.

Nah, it was a rhyme. But it’s also just self-referential and I don’t feel anything is wrong with that. I also feel like it could pique some interest, like a person who has no reference would listen to it and go, “What the fuck is that.” 

 

I wonder if I’m the only person so far who’s noticed that. 

I don’t know. There’s all these little things lyrically that I like to play with that I feel like for me they’re fun but the wider audience doesn’t even hear them so it’s nice. 

 

This may be off the mark but it sounds like the songs on I Will Never Let You Down seem on the personal side?

(Laughs) It’s funny because I don’t…like, yeah, I do use my life as a reference point. But, I also, and I said this to another interviewer, for example, I love old time country music and songs about sadness and heartbreak, right? And I can just listen to it forever. So, I just feel like as a musician, you have carte blanche–to use that motif so that’s all I do. But I think there’s a chance that one can overdo it or a chance that it can become…there’s some songs that make people think that it was real, that it happened to the singer and there are other songs that nobody would even imagine that it happened to the singer, even though they’re both singing about a similar heavy emotion. 

 

I’m not really one to dissect lyrics but your words struck me as being personal but it could just be in the abstract. I’m not sitting there with a lyric sheet or anything 

Well, so then that tells me something that I went too far. But I will cop to the fact that I did have some emotional upheavals in the last five years so that’s all and then I would just grab a hold of some kind of line that expressed a certain emotional, romantic thing and then I just used it–that’s all. But I don’t attach myself to the songs in that way. I can go line by line and say, “Oh, this line right here, I’m referring to so-and-so but this other line, I grabbed it from The Beatles.” 

 

So it’s not exactly autobiographical. 

Yeah, I guess that’s what I’m saying. 

 

Do you riff around on your guitar at home then come up with melodies and lyrics and that’s how your songwriting process comes together?

Yeah…or sometimes a melody will come to me into my head or a lyric then I’ll sing it into my phone and then go home and put some chords around it. 

Is that how you wrote for Railroad Jerk, too?

I think the biggest difference between me now and then is that back then I was really eager to orchestrate a sound around these songs. I was proud at the time of being a singer/songwriter but being a singer/songwriter wasn’t cool at all –at least in my mind. There are plenty of singer/ songwriters at that time who were cool, right? Looking back, Mary Lou Lord. Wasn’t she a singer/songwriter? I’m just saying I ignored that in the 90s and I thought I needed to be a rock band and so I cloaked all of my songs in this orchestration that was, as you were saying earlier, “ramshackle.”

 

(Laughing)

Sorry about that!

No, no, no, I know those adjectives and we accepted them. So, anyways, I missed that. It was difficult to sort of say to my band, “Oh, I really think the bass should do this and the drums should do this” and they felt like I was too controlling. 

 

Oh, really. 

Yeah. Any musician hates that, but I had a vision, sonically, and I still could do that. But I got tired of being a dictator like that. I never was a dictator – let’s be clear. But I got tired of playing that role: Orchestrating from on high. I decided at one point when I started doing solo stuff that I can let my lyrics stand on top of more traditional song structures. 

 

How do you think you’ve evolved as a songwriter from Railroad Jerk to the present with the new record?  

I’m more confident but I’m sure I lost some things, too, some brashness, maybe (laughs). I know my voice and my instrument better than I did back then. But then I will qualify everything I say by also mentioning, like I said a second ago, that you lose something. Some of that ignorance I had back then was valuable because it allowed me to…like I could do things on the guitar that maybe were forbidden or something because I didn’t know any better but now I know all the rules (laughs). 

 

You mentioned earlier about being a singer/songwriter and back in the 90’s when Railroad Jerk were being lumped into the noise-rock scene alongside Unsane, Blues Explosion and others, did you feel like you were an…

Outlier?

 

Exactly.  

Yeah, I did. I felt it was like a dirty secret that I liked Bob Dylan and I liked Woody Guthrie or Randy Newman or something like that. It felt like a dirty secret and I was camouflaging…

 

But you were all friends with those other bands and played on bills together? 

Oh, yeah. I’m sort of exaggerating when I say camouflaging but I appreciated sonically the avant-garde or whatever we were doing. 

When I look back on some of those records in the ’90s, we all thought, and maybe you, too, but we all thought we were distinct and unique and separate. But now I look back and I hear the same bass sound and the same riffs and things that were happening at the time. It’s weird, like Chavez or Helium or Guided by Voices or Railroad Jerk or whatever, we were all doing similar things but we didn’t think so at the time at all. 

 

Getting back to the new record, you cover a Carole King song (“You’ve Got A Friend”) and you put your trademark “ramshackle” stamp on it. 

Yeah. In White Hassle, we constantly covered songs. I took delight in taking songs that everybody thought couldn’t be converted into our vision. Like we covered “Tell Me Something Good” by Chaka Khan and Rufus. Maybe that was Railroad Jerk, actually. Anyway, I always thought it would be funny to do the songs that you would least expect. So we covered PJ Harvey in White Hassle and some other songs. 

 

Also old obscure covers?

We did a lot of country songs and stuff…that’s true. That made more sense. But I’m saying live, we did a bunch of covers, like we even covered “MMMBop,” that song by…remember who that band was? 

 

Hanson!

Yeah, Hanson. We covered that because we thought, here we are, this stripped down, of-the-earth real band playing this saccharine pop. I just wanted to show that every song can be made in our image (laughs). So, anyway, Carole King was the same and the only thing about that is that I always loved the song. Who doesn’t? And if you don’t, then you better listen to it again. 

 

Classic song. 

Like I was saying earlier, I started learning the chord structures of earlier classic rock and so that one is a complicated song and I learned how to play it. So I said, “Okay, guys, let’s do it.” So we did it. 

 

What are you referring to when you say earlier classic rock?

I mean the stuff we grew up on in the ’60s and the ’70s; I don’t mean the ’80s, nothing against the ’80s. I’m just saying that’s what we grew up on and that has a certain look and feel and we couldn’t deny it. 

 

VIDEO: Marcellus Hall “One Night”

Do you generally listen to older music?

(Laughs) Now, you mean?

 

Even back then during the Railroad Jerk days, you seemed to be way into old blues and folk records. 

Oh, yeah, I love that old stuff. I listen to all that stuff and folk. I remember pushing George Jones on Steve Malkmus: “You gotta check this guy out, he’s amazing!”. Obviously it didn’t work. I don’t know. Maybe he did listen to it. But, yeah, I ate all that stuff up. 

 

How does your art inform your music, or vice-versa, if, in fact it does at all?

I think it does; I think there’s an interchange. For, example. I was talking about my…it’s like a phobia of technology and by the same token, I paint with watercolor and ink; I don’t have a digital tablet. This may say more about how old we are but I just have this attachment to tactile and traditional stuff. There’s an overlap, I think. So hitting a key on a keyboard to make a drum is the same as drawing on an iPad with a stylus using Procreate. And I’m not making a judgment. I’m just saying they are similar. 

 

You’ve lived in New York City for decades and Railroad Jerk certainly fit the mold as a “New York band.” How did that sort of ethos translate into the aesthetic of the band?

At the time, I think we did take a lot of pride in the fact that we were a New York band, especially when we went on the road. I don’t know about how it informs me now, except for the fact that it’s seeped into me over the years. There’s a plurality about the way we see the world probably because we’re New Yorkers. We don’t bat an eye about seeing so many cultures and languages. So, hopefully that informs my music. 

 

Lastly and back to the new record. The rapport you have with bassist Damon Smith and drummer Mike Shapiro is topnotch. 

Any chance I get I want to say how great they are and I’m lucky to play with them. Mike is an educated musician; he went to school for it so he knows everything. One thing I’ve learned over the years, too, is that the camaraderie that we get as a band is really valuable. Back when we were younger, it was just a means to an end, like, “Okay, we’re hanging out, we’re making music because we want to make music.” But now, I know (laughs), I don’t have the expectations about the music. I’m just putting it out there and enjoying making it. I’m valuing more the making of it and the camaraderie, because we hang out and it’s, you know, friends.