Heathen Harvest: Let’s kick off by talking about the tribute album, The Appeal Of Discarded Orthodoxy. Whose idea was it to put this album together?
 
David E. Williams: Frater Rodolfo Protti at Old Europa Café, of course.
 

HH: Did you have much, or any, involvement in the creation of it?
 
DW: Sure. I helped by inviting the artists with whom I had personal relationships (Naevus, Andrew King, Ernte, among others). I also had a hand in the final design, which is, of course, the greatest album cover in history. And, finally, the entire project was mastered in the U.S. by the inestimable Andrew Raison; he’s the guy who also handled the mastering on the ACTUAL David E. Williams CDs.
 

HH: What inspired your decision to appear on your own tribute album?
 
DW: Rodolfo actually asked me to. My original idea was to record a ‘20th Anniversary Spectacular’ of ‘Bad Day Anyway’, a quasi-orchestral rendition in a 48-track studio. A couple of personal circumstances, one very ridiculous and one very devastating, prevented this from happening, so I made a home recording, where I experimented with bizarre vocal harmonies while my world was collapsing around me. For a while there, I wasn’t sure when or how I would make this recording, but then I was ludicrously inspired by seeing the progressive rock group Yes sing ‘Leave It’ on VH-1 Classic. Ironically, several months later, Jerome Deppe and I now perform a live version of the song which is entirely different: acoustic piano with kind of a spy movie guitar part.
 

HH: Have you noticed an increase in interest in your work as a result of the album's appearance?

DW: Not particularly. Have YOU? I mean, I’m sure you read and hear a lot about what’s going on in this scene. Is anyone talking about me? From my side, I’ll say that the villagers are absent from my doorstep, with nary a pitchfork nor rose bouquet in sight.


HH: So, what's happening in the wacky world of David E. Williams right now - how soon might we expect a follow-up to the 2003 album Hope Springs A Turtle? It's been a while, right?

DW: I’m working on one right now, which is scheduled for release in early 2009. My psychological state was severely devastated by the death one year ago of my girlfriend of nine years. She suffered from leukemia for about 20 months, and I took care of her through all of it. As many of my new lyrics dwell on this situation, I originally thought that respect required me to record these songs in mono with vocal and piano only. Before you start panicking, though, I’ll confess that the usual over-orchestrated, ornamental Williams flapdoodle is definitely coming to the fore. One song remains piano and vocal, though: the ironically-titled ‘Here Comes The Cold Narrator’.


HH: Naturally, I’m very sorry to hear about your recent bereavement, but I’m also curious about how an experience like that affects a songwriter who’s noted for his sick humour and morbid interests in pathology and putrefaction. Has this tragic loss made you more or less likely to write songs like ‘Teddy Bear Laser Speculum’, ‘The Curious Pediatrician’ or ‘Nativity Of Skulls’?

DW: That’s a CRUEL question, but it’s also intelligent, fair and possibly even essential. Well, you know what they say about sociopaths. The only pain they feel is their own. Should the author of ‘Bad Day Anyway’ be allowed to cry? Or do I surrender that right? Some might say that I’m getting what I deserved. Some, even more corrupted by New Age hippie-dippy post-Christian guilt, might go so far as to say that I manifested all of this negativity. But would they say the same thing about every other wretched soul we saw all those months in all those cancer wards? Who’s being cruel now?
 
Others, in my defense, might say that this experience only validates everything I’ve ever illustrated about a cold, uncaring universe manipulated by a sadistic god. Poor Jennifer. She was far too wonderful to be just an element in some meta-analysis of my silly songs. I dreamed last night that she shot me in the throat with a dart, so maybe I’m not even supposed to be answering this question.
 
Either way, let me finish with some notes that answer your questions more practically and less metaphysically. Number one, ‘Teddy Bear Laser Speculum’ was in the first live set I did after Jennifer passed away. There was no real reason, other than musical, to include it; so obviously that means I felt no real reason to NOT include it. Number two, I am writing a lot of songs about cancer and grief, but I also have one new tune in particular that has nothing to do with the situation: it’s called ‘Petals Open, Quickly Close, Cops Say’ and it’s about forcing a little girl to watch me shoot myself in the mouth. I won’t give away the punchline. Number three, all of this has probably made me more aware, if only superstitiously, of the downside of conjuring lyrical demons and I think I’ve illustrated this in the irony of a song title like ‘Here Comes The Cold Narrator’, which will open the next CD, and includes revelations that are probably way too private and inappropriate. So there you are. Just some loudmouth sucked into his own circus of disease and depravity. Laugh, clown, laugh.


HH: Incidentally, I don’t know whether you’re already aware of it or not, but Lou Reed’s 1992 album Magic And Loss contains some fantastic songwriting about the experience of losing two close friends, including one who died of cancer. I commend it to your attention.

DW: I appreciate the advice, but yes, I bought that CD back when it first came out. There’s a clunker or two on there, but some of them, including ‘Sword of Damocles’ and ‘Dreamin’’ are quite spectacular and difficult to listen to these days. Another album of similar strength and theme is Patti Smith’s Gone Again. So, yeah, competing in the canon of cancer records is probably a much bigger challenge than competing in the canon of neo-folk records. If ‘The Death Of The West’ really upsets you, try dealing with the death of the wife. Of course, Goering did, and he went on to become, well, Goering.


HH: What about upcoming compilation appearances?

DW: Well, two compilation tracks have recently been released. OEC 100 is a 7-CD box set with 101 tracks released by Old Europa to celebrate the label’s 100th release and Frater Rodolfo’s 25th year in the lucrative business of underground music. Rodolfo specified that every track be related in some way to the general concept of ‘Europa’. I chose the most intellectually easy but musically difficult path – performing a piece of Western classical music, specifically German Romantic music and, even more specifically, Franz Schubert’s art song ‘Erlkönig’. This decision represents either sheer audacity (my throat remains the locus of the most vehement Williams controversies) or total and absolute valor in the face of my ability to be embarrassed. (I'm not sure what I mean by that, but...) The backing music was created with the help of an internet MIDI file. I changed the original piano accompaniment into kind of a driving electronica. The Schubert piece has always sounded like melodramatic synth-pop to me (and I mean that as a compliment), ever since I first heard it about 25 years ago. And now the dream is finally manifest. Time for ‘Die Kindertotenlieder’, I guess. Or, perhaps not.
 
As for the Nirvana tribute album Montage Of Heck, that’s a rather odd thing, available as a free download as well as on CD from about 50 different so-called ‘extreme’ music labels. My participation is the result of one of those wonderful MySpace miracles. I read a bulletin soliciting bands and I just wrote back, “I’ll do one!” Unlike what I assume to be many contributors to the release, I had just turned 30 when Kurt (OR SOMEONE ELSE!) pulled the trigger, and I was having a bit of a breakdown myself: every time I looked at another human being, I automatically envisioned them with their entrails exposed. Seriously. It was a real problem, and you can verify it with people who knew me at the time. I remember being slightly irritated when I read that a contributor to Kurt's depression was the fact that his loser punk rock friends in Seattle made fun of him for buying a Lexus with his newly earned dough. My advice would have been to drive over them – forward, back – then drive over them again.
 
I also recently contributed the 1987 demo version of ‘I’m In Love With The Ambulance Driver’ to an Easter-themed compilation (complete with bunnies) put out by Thomas Nöla’s Eskimo/Lapin label; and later this year, you’ll hear me on, believe it or not, a CD tribute to Savitri Devi, who, unless I’m horribly mistaken, absolutely DESPISED Kurt Cobain.


HH: And will you be appearing on the new Naevus album, Relatively Close To The Sea?

DW: Well, not that I’m aware of; that’s a good title, though.


HH: My introduction to your work came about through your work with Naevus, and their cover version of 'Less Than Queer', and I'd be interested in hearing about how your collaboration with Naevus originally came about.

DW: It’s very straightforward. Lloyd invited me to perform at a London gig with Naevus and Andrew King back in 2002. We’ve kept in touch ever since. Beyond even the mandate of our mutual admiration society, I have to comment that I think Lloyd is a really great songwriter -- a real poet in a milieu of sloganeers. And what a voice! I also think that Lloyd and I share SOME philosophical positions on that treacherous nexus of cultural pessimism and good old fashioned existentialism. Somebody throw us a life-raft built for two. Wow, these internet interviews are almost like songwriting!


HH: How about your death industrial collaborations with Jonathan Canady, Deathpile and The Urge Within? Is there anything happening on that front?

DW: Funny you should ask about this, as Jon just announced his "retirement" from music within the last couple of days. He's going to concentrate on his painting, which is quite good and which is actually attracting more attention. He had a great show recently at the Museum of Porn in Art in Switzerland.

I have a strange relationship with noise in general. I'm attracted to it and I've used it as a compositional element, but sometimes I find it to be quite mystifying. Like... how did human beings get to the point where a bunch of guys will stand in a room for three hours and listen to feedback? I've been in that room! But I'll go further than that even: what made someone decide one day to distort their guitar? I agree that it "sounds cool" but the question is why? I've read about "liberation of dissonance", Varese, Marinetti, even Mr. P-Orridge's old comment about industrial music being the blues of white people. It's still very weird to me, though. But you're born into the age you're born into. Sometimes when I'm engaged in noise, I feel like one of those right-wing actors who's forced into a left-wing movie because those are the only scripts that are floating around for him.


HH: Do you have any plans to re-release your earlier albums, A House For The Dead And A Porch For The Dying and I Have Forgotten How To Love You, which are currently only available as downloads, or have you considered producing a ‘Greatest Hits’ type compilation? Are you still interested in your earlier work, or do you feel like you've grown beyond it now?

DW: Well, one would hope that I'm a different person than I was 15 years ago. To paraphrase Vonnegut in Mother Night, "if wars don't change people, what good are they?" But I still like those songs. Whoever wrote them may not be me, but he's an awful lot like me, you know? If you analyze our live set from May 24, the second song and the third song both come from A House For The Dead And A Porch For The Dying. In fact, five of the sixteen songs that night came off the first two records. This was not done intentionally; we don't have a big enough audience to merit playing "all the hits, all the time". It's just that Jerome and I obviously enjoy playing those tunes.
 
There is some talk of re-releasing those first two CDs, but not before I release a CD of new material. They are in fact available for download at both my myspace site and at davidewilliams.com. Get both and it will be the best 20 bucks you'll ever spend.


HH: Could you say something about how you perceive your work in relation to goth culture? On the one hand, it seems evident that there’s a discernible influence on your work from 80s bands such as The Cure, Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees. But the darkness and misanthropy in your songs reaches depths seldom, if ever, plumbed within what could be considered the gothic mainstream. And there’s also a level of social realism and detailed narrative reportage in your work which stands in stark contrast to shadowy visions of dungeons, graveyards, forests and the like.

DW:  This seems a bit less of a question and more of a statement. And I happily accept the compliment! I was certainly influenced by those three groups musically-- particularly the chord progressions and rhythms of the Cure, whose releases I continued to buy long after most reasonable people would deem such purchases sensible. But I had a whole history of music listening long before those bands: the melodramatic 70s pop of my mom and my sister, the progressive and classic rock of my high school days... even eight years of piano lessons should count for something.

My lyrical influences were what one might vaguely refer to as all those 20th century angsty existentialist absurdist people: it's a big and variegated lump but it definitely includes Ionesco, Nabokov, Bukowski, Vonnegut, Plath, Brautigan, Snodgrass and this one really obscure poet named Russell Edson. Yes, I've indeed been corrupted by "modernism." You could go on forever with this sort of thing, but I guess David Lynch and Martin Scorsese should be mentioned as well, and even Edward Gorey had an obvious influence on all of those songs of mine with omniscient narrators. You know, not too many things are better than ‘The Loathsome Couple’ or ‘The Hapless Child’.

Although I welcomed the scintilla of recognition, I never really felt at home in goth culture. And frankly, I don't really feel at home in whatever neo-folk is supposed to be. It's probably hard for people to imagine, but when Pseudo Erotica first came out in 1988, the initial critical frames of reference were Robyn Hitchcock, Syd Barrett and Warren Zevon. God knows where I'll be classified next. Dead, most likely.


]HH: Another massive influence on your work is Catholicism – your lyrics abound in references to Jesus Christ, Mary Magdalene, saints, paedophile priests, altar boys, martyrs, prayers, angels, the Bible, and all the other appurtenances of the Church of Rome. I feel safe in assuming that you were raised as a Catholic. Tell us about it!

DW: Your assumption (no pun intended) is correct. I have been all of those things on your list at one time or another: altar boy, martyr, angel and even-- some might say-- a physical manifestation of the bible itself. The more I denied Catholicism in day-to-day life, the more this iconography crept to the surface. Either that, or I was just plying one more goth conceit as elemental as the heavily reverbed drums and the baritone falsettos.


HH: We’re heading into deep and treacherous waters here, but even the most casual listener to your work can’t fail to notice a large number of references to Nazism and the Second World War. What’s that all about? Is it just one aspect of your general interest in morbid, taboo subjects?

DW: I'm not going to sit here and do the math, but if you go through my four and one half official CDs, I think you'd find that "a large number of references to Nazism" is a bit of an overstatement. Which only goes to prove the old maxim that a little bit of Nazism goes a long, long way.
 
In fact, on Hope Springs A Turtle, I DELIBERATELY self-censored (yes, self-censored!) any mention of the subject because it was getting a bit old for me, and I thought it would be nice to try an album that DID NOT make such references (unless you count the song about Hogan's Heroes). Besides, it had gotten a little too easy to peak the laughometer by rhyming "shit on my tongue" with "die Verniggerung". Of course, the real Shitzkrieg hit das Fan when the vaults opened for Pseudo Erotica And Beyond and out came ‘Wotan Rains On A Plutocrat Parade’ and ‘Portrait Of Doktor Goebbels’.
 
But I digress... you asked me a question and I'm not going to evade or backpedal (much as I did with the Catholic question!)
 
The crux of it is this: I'm not a political songwriter; I'm not a philosophical songwriter; I'm not a religious songwriter. I'm not offering advice, opinions or dissent. I write lyrics about specific emotional states, and there are a lot of people in urban America who feel like the guy in ‘Wotan Rains…’ whenever they ride on public transit. That doesn't mean they feel that way ALL the time, or even think that way ANY of the time. By the same token, that song admittedly DOES kind of work as an anthem, and the last time I performed it, the audience sang along, and I know I could have filled the room with Roman salutes if I had raised one first. But I didn't. And both sides of the barricade can now pass judgement on me.
 
Ah, subversion most sublime! The artist himself is not even aware of what he is doing. Poor little artist... cast about like flotsam by the collective unconscious! Oh Europa... you wacky continent, you.