“In practical reality it’s spoken word with music behind it. But I really don’t have a description for it.” – Trudell on his work.
“We’re of a generation that didn’t have any poets. The only poets that were dangled in front of us were dead, and we didn’t have our own, because the ones who were became rock stars—so they’re not recognized as poets but [as] singer/songwriters. But there’s a place for spoken word in our reality.”
[Words are] “the source of feeling and then the music becomes part of that feeling and carries it. The way it usually starts is that I get lines in my head, as in’Carry the Stone,’ where I was walking through airport security in London a few years ago and they were being unnecessarily rude, and I remarked to one of them, ‘The more evil the empire, the more paranoid the society’—which became a lyric in the song. It was just something I flipped off to them and then said, ‘Hey, that makes sense.’ It wasn’t something I was consciously thinking.”
“But every song I’ve ever written always starts with the words, because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.”
“You know, ‘No meat, down to the bone.’ The average human being in America is going through some sort of hard times—physical, emotional, psychological. Everybody’s carrying a bit of bone days in them.”
“They’re also about the great search for truth. So I didn’t want the music to just have a depressed or defeated feeling, but if nothing else, that resigned feeling that has to be dealt with…I gave no further direction because everybody interprets things differently with their own perception, and I want poetry to pull out of them their own feelings. And I want it to come from them, because in a way it’s almost like a mixing of natural energy—my feelings and the musicians’ feelings—and I like that better than being in a situation where I micro-manage every aspect of the songwriting process. If you’re going to collaborate, collaborate. Otherwise, quit wasting your damn time.”
“I always try to go back somewhere for the time frame of the first couple of years when I started writing.”
“I started with Quiltman to put spoken word with the oldest musical form—Native American music—and he was willing to go for it, though we had no experience…then I wanted to put it with the newest musical form—electric guitar—and I met Jesse Ed Davis, and he was the only one who knew what I was talking about.”
“Everybody was going to be incorporated into the next album, but Jesse died and Mark picked up his guitar, so to speak, and carried on. Then Quiltman came in, and it was quite an evolution, adjusting traditional Native American songs to where he just makes his own harmonies to go with contemporary songs. Because the whole point is to take from our native culture and from contemporary culture without using one art form to mimic the other, so our native identity remains the native identity, the contemporary identity remains the contemporary identity, and the mixing of these two musical identities creates a third musical identity. In my mind, at least, that’s how it plays. But I don’t know about the rest of the world.” ~