Delicate Steve strives to defy categorization
A nine-year-old Delicate Steve 2
once took a leak next to Paul Simon at a Yankees World Series game. Since then, he’s viewed the elder statesman of music as a “core spirit guide”, and an influence on his eclectic instrumental compositions. Recently chosen to play slide guitar on Simon’s latest album, Stranger to Stranger, Delicate Steve—or Steve Marion, to his mom—gained some new inspiration for his own longanticipated record.
“There was a very high level of focus when me and Paul were working on the music, but also in a way that was very carefree,” Marion tells the Straight on the line from South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. “It was like nothing I’ve ever done before. I didn’t have to force myself to get to that point—the vibe was just created in that way. It was deeply satisfying. The take we used was actually the first one we played, and that’s something that I’ve been trying to work on in my own music—that kind of spontaneity, and trying not to be too precious about what I’m writing.”
Marion is true to his word. Creating his latest album, This Is Steve, in just 11 days, the multi-instrumentalist has proved himself a master of efficiency on his third full-length offering, designed to re-introduce him to his fans.
“I made this LP at home,” he says. “I wrote, recorded, produced, and mixed the whole thing myself. The setup was all centred around my little stool. I had my computer in front of me, amps to the left, guitars to the right, pedals by my feet, and my drum set behind me. The reason that I managed to get it done so fast was that I felt like I knew myself well enough in that particular moment to understand everything I had to do to create this album. It was important to me not to get too fixated on a particular part—just to make a song and finish it, and listen back to it later.”
Marion’s confidence is testament to the strength of his songwriting. Famed for textured and diverse earworms like “Butterfly” and “Tallest Heights” on previous albums Wondervisions and Positive Force, Marion has perfected the art of penning instrumental, guitar-led music with lead lines that sound like vocal melodies.
“I consciously don’t want to have a sound,” he says of his music, which first found a place on David Byrne’s world-music-centric label Luaka Bop, and now resides on Anti- records, the home of Tom Waits. “No two songs are alike. I’m always trying not to repeat myself, because in some way I’m already boxed into a category because I don’t have a singer. Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, and Michael Jackson all really shaped how I create music—and though I draw my inspiration from their phrasing, my tracks sound nothing like any of them.
“This is what I predict for the future,” he continues. “Wes Anderson is going to give me a call, and ask me to write a song sometime pretty soon, because he’ll realize that my tracks would be perfect for his movies. And then another song is going to be licensed for a sick Super Bowl commercial. So this weird strain of music is going to transfer to normal culture, and then it will set us up to be the next Talking Heads for the next 15 years. And all we have to do is keep playing these shows.” > KATE WILSON Delicate Steve plays Fortune Sound Club on Sunday (March 26).
Alcorn takes pedal steel into uncharted territory
She’s not alone: in California, 2
Chas Smith uses his mutant pedal-steel guitars to evoke the expansive weirdness of the high-desert landscape, while in the U.K. BJ Cole has brought shimmering steelguitar atmospherics into the realm of ambient music. But no other musician has done more to liberate the pedal steel from its countryand-western straitjacket than Susan Alcorn—and she’s done it by expanding in all directions at once.
On her most recent album, Soledad, she plays the haunting melodies of tango master Astor Piazzolla. On Youtube, she can be seen performing O Sacrum Convivium, by the influential French composer Olivier Messiaen. And when she comes to Vancouver for the annual Improvised Music Meeting, she’ll likely go completely freeform, as she has already done with such luminaries as saxophonist Evan Parker and guitarist Mary Halvorson.
Perhaps even more remarkably, she’s accomplished all this without turning her back on the music that paid her bills for 20 years: honkytonk country. Although she no longer plays roadhouses “eight nights a week”, Alcorn still understands the beauty of the twang.
“With country music, I liked the immediacy of it,” she explains in a telephone interview from her Baltimore, Maryland, home. “You’ve got maybe two bars, at most, to state what you’re going to do in a solo. It’s like haiku, you know. There’s a certain rigid form, and if you go outside of that form it’s not haiku anymore—but within that form there’s a universe.”
Alcorn has enjoyed a diverse musical education. Her mother sang in the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, under the direction of legendary maestro George Szell, and played piano at home. Psychedelic rock and Muddy Waters’s microtonal blues slide were influential, she adds, while encountering Messiaen’s Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum on her car radio proved a watershed moment.
“I was on my way to a gig, and I just had to pull over,” she recalls. “With my little ‘I can do anything’ hubris, I thought, ‘Well, I can do this!’ So I ordered the score, and it’s for, like, 35 instruments, and they’re all playing a half-step apart… I couldn’t do it, obviously, but I felt ‘Never give up!’ ”
Messiaen’s music inspired Alcorn to add two extra strings to her guitar—she now plays an idiosyncratic 12-string steel—and alter her tuning to accommodate low bass notes. But the real key to developing a voice on any instrument, she stresses, lies in realizing that it’s essentially a device that converts vibration into sound.
“I’ve always thought that all instruments are basically alike.…and that each instrument has unlimited potential,” she explains. “The bagpipes, banjo, the jaw harp, what have you—if it’s played right, and if it’s played with attention to minute detail, there are no limits.” > ALEXANDER VARTY Susan Alcorn performs at the Western Front on Friday and Saturday (March 24 and 25), as part of the Vancouver Improvised Music Meeting. For more info, visit www.barkingsphinx.com/.