Where Weird and Pop Converge

An e-mail duet with Cracker's David Lowery.

By Cynthia Joyce

Apr 6, 1996 | Cracker's David Lowery has made a career of going against the musical grain, and as a result has come to sit at the center of a certain universe that connects musicians as stylistically diverse as Jane's Addiction and Wynonna Judd. With Camper Van Beethoven in the early '80s, Lowery's unlikely fusion of acoustic folk and punk rock offered an alternative to the relentless synthesized beat of the dark British dance music that dominated that era. A decade later, when the pendulum began to swing away from the folk renaissance towards a much harder edge, Cracker released its eponymous first LP, a roots-rock answer to the catcall of grunge. As Lowery put it, "What the world needs now is another folk singer/ like I need a hole in my head." Now Lowery is finally comfortable going for a decidedly more pop sound. He does this unabashedly on "The Golden Age," Cracker's follow-up to the 1993 million-selling sleeper "Kerosene Hat," which was driven by heavy air play of the singles "Low," "Get Off This" and "Eurotrash Girl." "We were more interested in making something slightly pretentious and big-time," he says about "The Golden Age," without apology. "To take our weird songs so far they'd start to sound like pop songs, and to take our pop songs so far they'd start to sound weird."

Last week, Lowery logged into SALON from his home in Richmond, Virginia to chat electronically about the new album, his literary leanings, and his life in the South.

"The Golden Age" is filled with violent mood swings. You seem to vacillate between severe cynicism on songs like "I Hate My Generation" and "King of Useless Stuff" to unbridled enthusiasm on the title track. Why is that?

Truthfully, I think we were trying to do our equivalent (at least with the melancholy songs) of Frank Sinatra's "September of My Years." Of course, it doesn't sound anything like that, but we are not young anymore. I've made nine albums now and well, yes, I'm 35. But really I can't say why the record goes to such extremes. Possibly it's because we had a lot of time to make this record, and we were most interested and intrigued by the songs that had the strongest, shall we say, personalities.

With Cracker, and earlier with Camper Van Beethoven, you have always cut through the curve of musical trends. Has this been a conscious choice on your part?

I'm a bit of a reactionary, but also our fans have come to expect this of us now. I react to what I'm hearing, and I burn out on stuff. I listen to the radio and records all day long. I find my songwriting begins to reflect what I'm not hearing and what it is I would like to hear. I would worry about this more, if it didn't seem to come from a good healthy place inside. A lot of my songs -- probably the majority -- are not me talking but a character that I will invent, and then I just let he or she tell the story. It's actually because I don't feel that I always have anything to say. Sure "Kerosene Hat" was a huge success compared to the other records, but I think we didn't sell enough records in the eyes of the industry to be treated as a big success, so we still felt like we had something to prove with this record. Mostly people were surprised that we could be considered cool by teenagers when we didn't really belong to the worlds of Lollapalooza or the H.O.R.D.E.

Next Page: "A little stodginess seems exciting"

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