William Eggleston, at 78, in a new key
William Eggleston is widely considered one of modern photography’s most influential artists. The prolific piano playing that’s been his other lifelong passion, however, has remained more of an insiders’ secret.
“People know my photographs because they’re published in books and shown in galleries and museums and so forth, and yet I don’t perform music in public, ever — only in front of good friends who really want to hear it and who really listen,” Eggleston, who is 78, said in a recent phone interview from his Memphis, Tennessee, apartment.
Until now, there also haven’t been any albums of his compositions. “Musik,” to be released Oct. 20 by Secretly Canadian, will change that. The collection consists of instrumentals performed by Eggleston on an 88-key Korg synthesizer in his home over the course of several years in the 1990s, recorded using the machine’s internal memory. The keyboard can simulate many instruments, so the album includes suggestions of a majestic organ, a moody oboe, myriad string instruments and an acoustic piano. The moods of “Musik” are alternately dark, festive, pensive, regal and melancholy.
The title’s spelling is a nod to Johann Sebastian Bach, who Eggleston called “my great hero in music.” It’s not exactly classical music, but “Musik” does have a Bachian sense of grandeur; the album is assertive and confident, with a swagger that might well be linked to the unpressured way it was recorded, to document impromptu playing.
That sense of expressive, unrestrained spontaneity is, of course, a crucial component of Eggleston’s quickly shot, uncontrived photographs as well. “I think there’s absolutely a link between music in general and what I do in photography,” he said. “I don’t know what it really is, but it’s there.” Even on the album’s two recognizable tracks — dramatic takes on songs by Lerner and Loewe and Gilbert and Sullivan — there is the feeling of listening to arrangements and performances that have been captured in a passing moment.
Comprising mostly selfcompositions that, like many of Eggleston’s photographs, are untitled, “Musik” was entirely improvised. “Sometimes I play for friends and they’ll say, ‘I just that love that — would you play it over?’ And I say, ‘I can’t.’ I’m not able to record it in some part of my memory, so I’m not able to do it again.”
The album was put together by the producer Tom Lunt, a longtime fan of Eggleston’s photography who became aware of the artist’s musicianship through the 2005 documentary film “William Eggleston in the Real World.” About a decade ago, a Memphis-based friend introduced him to Winston Eggleston, the photographer’s son and the director of the Eggleston Artistic Trust. With
the to methodicallyfamily’s blessings, Lunt begango through the Korg recordings, stored on 10 digital audiotapes, a handful of digital com49 pact cassettes and 4 floppy disks.
Deep into the project, Lunt was chatting over drinks a few years ago
with Chris Swanson, a founder of Secretly Canadian and an admirer of Eggleston’s photography. Having seen the documentary, he was interested in his music. As Swanson recalled, “We were talking about left-field dream projects, and I mentioned Eggleston, thinking he’d be like, ‘Huh?’ That’s usually the response I’d get. Tom was like, ‘I’ve cataloged hours and hours and hours of Bill’s keyboard playing.’ It was like, ‘We need to do this together.’”
Although “Musik” is Eggleston’s debut album, it’s not his first time on record: About 40 years ago, he played piano on a somber version of “Nature Boy,” on the third album by the influential alternative band Big Star. (The song was written in 1947 by Eden Ahbez.) Eggleston had been friends with the band’s lead singer, Alex Chilton, who died in 2010. “Our parents were best friends, and I knew him as a child,” said the photographer, who also socialized with the band’s other members.
“Even at that point, he seemed to be an old soul playing piano,” said Jody Stephens, Big Star’s drummer, who is now vice president of production at Ardent Studios, a Memphis recording facility. “I was always intrigued by him because he played by feel. You could see his imagination kind of turning with every note he played.”
Eggleston’s most famous image — of a red ceiling anchored with a cross of white cable leading to a light bulb — adorns the cover of Big Star’s “Radio City” album, released two years before his groundbreaking solo exhibition show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976. Since then, quite a few alternative rock musicians have been drawn to his photographs; Eggleston’s work appears on the sleeves of releases by groups such as Primal Scream, Silver Jews, Spoon and Joanna Newsom & the Ys Street Band.
“He finds beauty in what other people find ugly, which is why people like me can relate to him, because it’s a very punk thing to do,” said Bobby Gillespie, Primal Scream’s Scottish-born lead singer.
Although Eggleston frequently plays a Bösendorfer piano that is also in his home, the album consists solely of his performances on the Korg. “They’re two completely different animals, each of which I adore,” he said. “I’ve been playing the piano since I was 4 years old, and when I started playing the Korg keyboard, I fell in love with it too.”
Future records are planned, but, at age 78, Eggleston has no intention to start playing in front of large audiences. “I wouldn’t be afraid to do it,” he said. “I just don’t happen to be a professional public performer, or I would be a concert musician.”