May 10, 2005
Shearwater and the Striated Caracara
Interview by Monte Holman



Shearwater (Puffinus gravis) hail from Austin and are blood relatives of folk-rock band Okkervil River. Jonathan Meiburg and Will Sheff share song-writing duties in both bands, though lately it seems they've branched off from one another. Sheff assumed more of a lead role in Okkervil, and Meiburg claimed Shearwater, enlisting the help of Travis Weller (violin), Thor Harris (drums, thunder), Kim Burke (upright bass), and Howard Draper (everything), all of whom were present on past Shearwater recordings.

"Theives" (EP—Misra), their latest recording, explores dynamics. It's both delicately soft and surprisingly noisy, all the while haunting. Employing folksy standbys, such as banjos and lap-steels, the band attempts to build lush new backdrops for instrumental presentations listeners may expect from a Texas-based band. Meiburg's sober vocals ring out beautifully and ghostly.

Shearwater is currently on tour with the Mountain Goats, and Jonathan Meiburg (pictured front and center) was kind enough to speak with me before the show at North Six. The man loves birds.

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FREEwilliamsburg: I read on your website that you consider yourself, for the time being, "more of a musician than a scientist rather than the other way around." So you've been studying a while then?

JM:(laughs) I'm nearly finished with my Master's thesis, which I returned to with some vigor and determination a couple months ago and found that I still really loved it and was really interested in it. I'm going to finish it up in a month or two and stop there for now because while I'm interested in moving on and getting a Ph.D., it would mean six years of school and I'd have to quit music. I'm just not ready to quit music right now.

But today I went to the Natural History Museum. I spent time up in the collection there working with the guy I worked with in the Falklands, and it's so cool to get to go back in there. Today I just spent time in the exhibits, and ah, I love that place. It's like a maze — it's so alive — it's got this sort of scientific veneer but it's really all about art. It's all about the presentation, the beautiful and strange dioramas and the way everything is laid out—it's very whimsical, and some of it's almost nonsensical. There are parts of it that you get the feeling they're almost embarrassed are still there, but they can't get rid of them now; it's so permanent.

It's like a microcosm—parts of it are always sealed off with no explanation. Parts of it they're always working on. There are new things opening up; it's never going to be finished. Parts of it are becoming outdated just as new parts of it are coming online, you might say. Some incredible things are getting glossed over and left to get dusty. There are cabinets in the basement that haven't been looked at — I think some of them are albatross cabinets — and they have hundreds of thousands of birds in the collection, most of them in these big metal cabinets with these drawers you slide out. Some of them you pull out and think "nobody's looked at this in forty years."

FREEwilliamsburg: And you were able to go down and see some of those collections?

JM: Yeah, yeah. Some of them — well the building has shifted on its foundation since the cabinets were shut last, and they don't open. (laughs)

FREEwilliamsburg: They're trapped in there?

JM: Well, you'd have to get a welder down there—it's wild. There are probably about five people managing the entire bird collection. Most of the time the stuff just sits there.

FREEwilliamsburg: Who was the guy you studied with in the Falklands?

JM: Robin Woods — he's a British ornithologist who works for Falklands Conservation. He's retired, but you wouldn't know it from his schedule. He's a really incredible fellow, very patient with me. He introduced me to the world of birds. I met him in a boarding house down in the Falklands, and he needed an assistant for this bird survey he was about to do, so I said "take me." I pestered him enough that he took me along. It was a seven week trip to the outer islands of the Falklands to look at this one bird, which is the bird I ended up studying for my thesis.

FREEwilliamsburg: Which bird?

JM: The Striated Caracara — you know that picture of that weird — looking bird [on the Shearwater website]? That's it.

FREEwilliamsburg: Misra's site says you're the world's leading expert on the Striated Caracara.

JM: I don't like that tag. I'm not the world's leading expert on anything. I mean, I know about as much about it, I guess, as anybody, but expert is not the right word. It's just that nobody's really looking at it. I'm not an expert, though. It makes me nervous seeing that because I don't want Robin or any of those people seeing that and going "oh, ok..." I don't have a publication to my name about that thing. I should—I've got all the stuff, but... when I left the aboriginal settlement I lived in...

FREEwilliamsburg: When was that?

JM: The same year. It was that weird Watson fellowship thing. The guy I'd been staying with, one of the last things he said to me was "Don't become an expert!" (laughs)

FREEwilliamsburg: What's the Watson Fellowship?

JM: The Watson Fellowship sends about sixty students a year from different small liberal arts colleges to do projects you design yourself in one or more foreign countries. For a year. You can't come back until the year's over.

It was called Community Life at the Ends of the Earth. I'd never really left the United States before that. So the first thing I did was get on a plane to Tiera del Fuego when I was twenty-one years old. (laughs) It was a different experience, really wild. But I lived. I came back with an interest in birds and with my mind thoroughly blown by that experience. It was really hard to settle back down in the U.S. I was living at my parents' house in suburban Atlanta for a little while working at Mailboxes, Etc., and I would just come home and cry. I couldn't believe out of all the things I had just witnessed, out of all these wonders I just saw — I can barely communicate them to you — it doesn't matter at all unless you have some artful way to communicate it.

Let me tell you one more thing about the Natural History Museum, sorry. The thing I really wanted to see, and which was right where I saw it last when I was working with Robin there. I say working — I was really just tagging along and helping him out. They have this case on the third floor, or maybe the fourth floor. It's at the end of one of those long L-shaped corridors. There's nothing leading to it. It's just a couple of glass display cases. There's another case pressed up against them, so you can't even see part of it. But it's a little bird exhibit. They have all these mounted birds from all over the world completely out of context. They're listed by their family and their range, but not in any habitat context. I think they've been trying to rearrange it so you see things more in the context of a habitat rather than just a bunch of birds together. One of the cases is woodpeckers, and they have just right there in this little thing an Imperial Woodpecker, which is THE largest woodpecker on earth. It's probably extinct, very likely extinct.

FREEwilliamsburg: Where is its natural habitat?

JM: Pine forests of northwestern Mexico in a very poorly known region. It's really backwoods. But I don't think that bird's been sighted in a very long time. The other ones they've got at the museum are up in a vault, basically, in the rare bird room. I wouldn't want to speculate about the value of it — it's an extinct species. It's this giant fucking woodpecker! (laughs) Looking at it is like looking at a holy relic. It's the size of a raven. It's huge. It's very closely related to the Ivory-Billed, which was just rediscovered last week in Arkansas, praise be.

FREEwilliamsburg: Really?

JM: You didn't know about this? It's been missing for fifty years, and they'd written it off. They published sightings of at least one in this area in Arkansas. I have an Ivory-Billed woodpeckers on my banjo. I'm obsessed with them. We were going to write a whole album about the ivory-bill woodpecker, which now I don't know if I can do since it's been found. (laughs) I didn't want to do a dirge for it. I like the mystery of it-people would see it every now and again.

FREEwilliamsburg: Who finally found it again?

JM: This is for real — the Nature Conservancy. They'd been sitting on it for fourteen months, and then they published it in Science, and there's some video of it, and it's for real. It was a Campephilus woodpecker-Campephilus is a genus. It was Campephilus principalis, the ivory-billed woodpecker. The imperial woodpecker is the Campephilus imperialis (laughs), and it looks just like the ivory-bill, just a size larger. So it's a spectacular bird. And it was just sitting there right in the case. I mean you could've shown me the bones of St. Peter, and I wouldn't have been more impressed. I'm just in awe of this thing. It's right next to some of my other favorites like the Crimson Fruit Crow, which is still alive. It's a South American species. And a couple of extinct birds from North America — the Heath Hen, which is sort of an eastern grouse-and an extinct bird from New Zealand called the Huia that had, well the male had this big curved beak, and the female had this little stubby beak. They've been extinct since like the forties, I think.

FREEwilliamsburg: So this has been a very productive trip to New York for you?

JM: Well, that's where I get my jollies. It doesn't do anybody any good, but god, it sends me — I'm still buzzing from that. I can't see it anywhere else. I had a friend with me, and I was like, "Look, look, look at this!" It was like a secret that was hidden in the Natural History Museum. All this other stuff is there to distract you, like the dinosaurs and everything, but look at this!

But we can move on now, or else we'll stay here forever.

FREEwilliamsburg: What about the new EP? Wasn't it recorded in the same session as the last album, Winged Life?

JM: Oh Thieves. It was recorded at the same time and same place as Winged Life at the Echo Lab with Matt Pence. We didn't want to do a seventy-minute record; I don't like seventy-minute records. I thought Winged Life was almost a little long as it was because the previous two records had been thirty-three minutes. That's what I'm aiming for, the perfect thirty-five minute record. I actually like "Thieves" a little more than Winged Life. I thought it was a little more cohesive, and I think it swings between extremes more. It shows a little more somehow what the band is doing more now.

FREEwilliamsburg: And how would you characterize that? Here's a quote from your website, "otherworldly, lovely, and a little bit evil."

JM: (laughs) Yeah, that's the idea.

FREEwilliamsburg: How so compared to Winged Life?

JM: Well it's a little less poppy, little less folky, and a little more of its own thing. I like strange textures and more abstract songwriting and song forms, and we're going to be working with that a little more on the next record, which we'll be playing a couple songs from tonight.

FREEwilliamsburg: Have you started recording that yet?

JM: Haven't started yet, but we're going to start in August.

FREEwilliamsburg: Will it be with the same lineup as the folks touring with you right now?

JM: Yep, this is the lineup.

FREEwilliamsburg: No Will Sheff?

JM: I'm sure Will will be involved in some capacity. He's not on this tour because Okkervil is touring right now as well.

FREEwilliamsburg: I know you play the keys in Okkervil River, and you and Will are the primary songwriters in both Okkervil and Shearwater. How does it work with both of you playing significant roles in both bands?

JM: At the time we started Shearwater, neither Will nor I had any outlet. Okkervil was a little bit stuck for some reason right then-Will had more songs than they were doing, and I was in a band that didn't quite fit with what I wanted. So we seized on Shearwater as an opportunity to do that, and since that time, Okkervil has really taken off for Will as his expressive outlet. It does pretty much everything that he wants it to do. I think the new Okkervil record is great. I'm really proud of it, Black Sheep Boy. I'm representing (laughs and points to his Okkervil River t-shirt), partly as a kind of "I still like Okkervil" thing (laughs). I got up and played with them a little last night at the show (they played at the Bowery the previous night). It was weird because it was the first time I had seen an Okkervil River show since 1999 before I joined the band.

It's been really friendly, and they're really supportive of Shearwater and what we're doing. It was too bad we couldn't all be on the tours, but at the same time, it's kind of a good problem to have. Okkervil's on a great tour; we're on an amazing tour. This is like a dream come true, to get to play to these audiences. Bear in mind, we're used to playing for like five, ten people. To play for two hundred, three hundred, four hundred people is incredible for us. But I also think we're finally ready to do it. We had a great SXSW, we've honed the set a lot over the tours and have really gotten it tighter.

With Okkervil and Shearwater, there sort of is a split happening, but it's an incredibly amicable split. I mean to keep playing with Okkervil. Will's going to keep playing with Shearwater when he can. In general, though, Shearwater's become more of my thing, and Okkervil's Will's.

FREEwilliamsburg: Austin is a big place for music, obviously. You've got all kinds of music there, from bands like Trail of Dead to a large Tejano presence to country. How do you feel Shearwater fits into all that?

JM: There are a lot of different ways to be a musician in Austin. For us, it's sort of like Austin is home base. We live there; we like being there. We don't play there all the time, a couple times a year.

FREEwilliamsburg: Do you feel a part of a community?

JM: I feel like I know a lot of musicians. And we don't have to worry too much about that "are people going to come to my party?" feeling when we play a show. There will be at least some people that you know are going to come and see you, and you feel ok about playing on a Friday night. So it's a little less fraught with anxiety. Now that's displaced to other places. It's like "are people going to come see us in St. Louis?"

FREEwilliamsburg: Here's our favorite question: what was the first concert you went to?

JM: It was in North Carolina. Man, it was James Taylor. It was in the UNC Dean Dome.

FREEwilliamsburg: How old were you?

JM: Fourteen? I thought it was awesome. I was so into it. Even then, I thought this is a little bit slick or something. And I loved Pink Floyd then too, but you couldn't go see them. They had come through Raleigh a couple years previous, but they weren't coming through again anytime soon. I was learning to play acoustic guitar at the time, so I liked James Taylor. It was funny-I remember seeing the guitarist doing volume swells and thinking "how's he doing that?" It all seemed very miraculous in a way. I was like "wow, look at all those purple and green lights!" (laughs)

FREEwilliamsburg: What's next for Shearwater?

JM: Shearwater is almost ready to make a new record. We're going to start in August, and hopefully it will come out in the winter.

FREEwilliamsburg: Are you recording at the Echo Lab again?

JM: I don't think so this time. I think we're going to be working with a guy Craig Ross in Austin, who Thor used to play with. He's done records for Lisa Germano. He's got a really good ear, and he lives right across the street from me. So we won't have to decamp to another part of the state. But I loved working at the Echo Lab — those guys are great, and we'd definitely work with them again.

May 09, 2005