The 2008 general election season is in full swing, and here in the Smoke-Filled Room, we’ve been doing our best to bring you interesting political conversations from a diverse and outspoken group of musicians. But indie songwriters Christian Kiefer, Matthew Gerken, and Jefferson Pitcher have done more than just talk about the highest office in the land—they’ve gone and written 43 songs, one for each President of the United States. And they’re promising a fall download to cover whoever will be number 44. It’s a tremendously ambitious project and, against all odds, they’ve succeeded in crafting a wonderful record that’s timeless, intelligent, and entertaining. The trio’s three-CD set features some impressive collaborators, including Califone, Rosie Thomas, Bill Callahan of Smog, and Mark Kozelek. But Kiefer, Gerken, and Pitcher are the stars of the show—imparting history lessons and political commentary along with jangling guitars and killer hooks. Crawdaddy! spoke with the three armchair historians about Reagan’s Casio tribute, the obligatory presidential penis, and why it’s about damn time that Scarlett Johansson gets tapped for a campaign theme song.

Crawdaddy!: Your forthcoming record, a triple CD titled Of Great and Mortal Men: 43 Songs for 43 US Presidencies, is set to hit stores in September. It features a song for each of the 43 presidents. How did the project come about? Have you always been politically and historically-minded?

Jefferson Pitcher: The year previous to writing these songs, I was living in a small town in Ontario, Canada, experiencing more snow and less sun than I knew was possible. Kiefer turned me on to www.fawm.org, which stands for February Album Writing Month. The idea for FAWM is that one writes and records an album in the month of February, posting the songs on a community website as they are ‘finished.’ I suppose the idea here is to abandon to some degree one’s inner critic and to develop a sense of community. In short, I was ripe for both. I’ve had a longstanding interest in both songwriting and improvisation, so this seemed an interesting way to let them leak together a bit. I enjoyed the process immensely. The following year I had moved back to California and, as February was approaching, found myself longing to do the exercise again. The problem was I felt completely dry in terms of songwriting material. My work often explored themes or even direct plot lines in fiction, and while the autobiographical spills in here and there, I was really looking for something else to work with. I don’t remember exactly how the idea came about, but I pretty quickly decided that it could be a really interesting project. So I asked Kiefer if he wanted to join, he asked Gerken, and we were on our way. 

Matthew Gerken: As for the typical connotation of the term “political,” actually, we wanted to ensure the timelessness of this project by avoiding (as much as possible) overtly biased commentary. For me, this was a great challenge. The decisions made by any particular US administration, after all, have life-and-death consequences. Not only in the military sense, but when it comes to arsenic regulations in water quality, determining the breadth of the Clean Air Act, and rulemaking in the various agencies, for example. Given the enormous consequences of presidential actions, it is impossible to remain objective. My songs on this project are replete with strong opinions. However, to the extent that the lyrics included this sort of angle, we really tried to set within an interesting historical context or tell a story with it; we strenuously try to avoid anything sounding like a rant. I became fascinated with politics during the Reagan administration, when I was 10 or 12 years old. I became increasingly more interested in federal-level policymaking in particular throughout high school and college, studying political science and urban geography during my undergraduate education at the University of Iowa. Also, during my last two years of high school and throughout my undergraduate and graduate work, I delved deeply into a particularly rich and obtuse brand of economic and historical study known as historical materialism. So, I have some background in politics and history, in the arm’s length sort of academic sense. But I have always had an unusually emotional reaction to political-economic decisions, too. I think this project is interesting from both of these perspectives.

Crawdaddy!: You’ve managed to pack an immense amount of political and historical information (some might even say minutiae) into this boxed set. What kind of research went into the project? It seems like it was a tremendous amount of work.

Gerken: You are right in assuming that this project represents a lot of work. You are also right to observe that the boxed set is brimming with politics and history. One thing I like about observing the whole of the project at once is its diversity. Relative to the lyrical content, Jefferson, Christian, and I have pretty different backgrounds, and took varied approaches in tackling each of our presidents. What you might be referring to in terms of minutiae could be the little personality flaw that in some cases became the basis for a song. Whereas I mostly chose to try to understand each of my presidents in terms of their historic position and then create a personal story or personified version of the US itself from this context, Christian and Jefferson oftentimes started with the personal and set to music a colorful (and many times humorous) tale that started and ended with these presidents as people, rather than larger-than-life figures or symbols of their time. The project, in this way, is as much literary as it is political or historical.

Crawdaddy!: For a project that’s the product of three songwriters, your record is remarkably cohesive. How did you manage that? What was the method for your writing?

Kiefer: We all worked independently of each other and didn’t really share information or ideas until the demos actually appeared on the fawm.org site. Actually, the process of writing so many songs in a month more or less dictated the writing process; there was no time to slow down or ponder or have writer’s block. It was a mad sprint. What made it interesting is writing a song like Abraham Lincoln and wondering what the preceding (Buchanan) and subsequent (Johnson) songs would sound like. Often we found we had created conversations between presidents and between songs—some purposeful and some accidental. Those are magic moments for us as songwriters.

Pitcher: As there was little time, I would generally spend the better part of an afternoon or evening reading about whatever president I was working on. Once I had some idea of what I was writing about, I would begin playing guitar or piano to see what came out. There are a few tracks of mine on this record that were the third or fourth song I wrote in an evening, before I found something that I was happy with. I was also leaning more and more in the direction of improvised and experimental music at this time, so it was important for me to push myself in my songwriting. While I don’t feel that my songs came out feeling all that experimental, I did try very hard to keep from repeating myself, which is something I have done in the past. I forced myself to do things I might not normally have done. That same year for Christmas I received a set of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategy cards from my friend Ron Guensche (who incidentally plays bass on a few tracks on the record) and I used those rather heavily. It was certainly a blinding rush, and I am still surprised that I like what I wrote so much.

Crawdaddy!: You managed to enlist some impressive guests for the set, including Califone, Rosie Thomas, Bill Callahan of Smog, and Mark Kozelek. What did the guests bring to the project? Did anyone have any president in particular they wanted to focus on?