Someone gave me an MP3 of the song on which the band is performing live and several explosions can be heard in the background. "We played a festival in Portugal and they'd organized fireworks to go off at the end of the evening," Halstead recalls. "But because we came back onstage and did an encore, a signal had already gone out to a guy at the other end of town to set off the fireworks. It just so happened that we'd already started the song when they went off." The singer agrees that the result is aurally breathtaking. "I'm really glad we managed to capture it on tape. It was a happy accident that is so brilliantly timed that it looked like we planned it."
When Mojave 3 played the Crocodile in 2001, the crystal clarity of Halstead's voice rang memorably as he sang "In Love With a View," a song from 2000's Excuses for Travellers that nails the recipe for sadness that offers hope: "So I stood at the station/With a plan and a pocket of poems/ Heroically tragic/Bearded and blind with obsession/I'm a car without hope/Too close to the ditch to go far." After an instrumental wave came a moment of silence, and then Halstead's voice broke a bit as he sang, "Oh my heart/It just fell apart." I still get a catch in my throat whenever I think of that beautiful delivery. Songs like that are like gifts, I tell him, and he responds thoughtfully: "I suppose some people might prefer it if the songs were more ugly, and in some ways I can understand that. It's kind of like reading Bukowski--you're repelled by it and at the same time really into it. But that's the way I saw it when I looked back and wrote the song." I wonder aloud if songwriters who pen such personal lyrics feel differently about them after the album is in the public's hands. "It's hard to look at them in retrospect," he answers, "because you hear them again and you think, 'Well, maybe you shouldn't have done that one, it's not your best.' In some ways it's best to keep from making comparisons after it's finished. You can't do anything about it anyway." Kind of like the guy with the rose in "Return to Sender": "She says thank you but this flower/It will die within the hour/Return to sender."
I don't know about you, but for me the sound of a glockenspiel can make all the difference between an abysmally sad song and one that sounds like the sunrise following a tormented night. Halstead laughs when I tell him I love the instrument so much that I have one in my office. "It's a great instrument, and there is glockenspiel all over this record," he enthuses. I also ask him if he minds when audience members shout out requests during the set. "I don't mind that," he says. "I kind of prefer it if people are more vocal. It cuts the tension that comes from the audience's expectancy. I prefer it if the audience is more raucous. The last tour I did in America [backing his solo album Sleeping on Roads], I would play for shots. If someone wanted me to play a particular tune I'd say, 'Well, if you go buy me a shot I'll do the song.' Everyone's happy that way."
Mojave 3 plays Mon Nov 3 at Chop Suey.
