Joe Jackson - Heaven and Hell Interview Page 2

Q. Can you say a bit about each of the tracks, and the guest performers on them?

THE PRELUDE is supposed to be a musical portrait of the Devil. I was fascinated by the fact that the violin has always been associated with the Devil or the figure of Death, in myths and folktales, in medieval engravings, and so on. Again, it's a paradox, because the violin can be the most Angelic instrument, too.

Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg

So, in my mind's eye, the album starts with clouds of smoke and fire and brimstone and the Devil appearing, sort of as the MC of the show, and first he's menacing, and then he's charming, in a sort of smarmy lounge-lizard sort of way. Then suddenly he turns the tables and he's mocking and menacing again.

I thought of Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg for the solo violin part because of her intensity - there's fire and brimstone in her playing for sure. She really seemed to respond to the piece. With most players you're always trying to coax more out of them, but with Nadja the problem, if anything, would be to get her to give you less! When she plays, it's like, 'whoa! Get out of the way!' I keep expecting broken strings and bits of violin to start flying everywhere.

FUGUE 1 / MORE IS MORE is about Gluttony. I think it starts with a fugue because I wanted to create a feeling of furious excess. You know in the movie 'Amadeus,' where the Archduke or whoever he is tells Mozart there are 'too many notes' in his music?! That's what I wanted: too many notes! So the fugue piles up more and more notes until you almost want to scream.

One image I had in my mind for the 'song' part was from Dante's Inferno. There's this great image of gluttons rolling around in the mud, being bombarded by pissing rain, sleet, and hail. In the song I imagine people in some sort of pub, stuffing themselves, while all around them there's this apocalyptic scene like Noah's Flood, the whole world is being destroyed, but they're just trying to shove as much food and drink down their throats as they can before they go to hell to burn forever. It takes place in the Last Pub Before Hell, I think. There's a lot of black humour in it.

ANGEL - Lust is everyone's favourite, isn't it?! I had the idea that it would be a sort of contest between stereotypes of purity on the one side and sleaze on the other. The two women's voices are the Virgin and the Whore, slugging it out. Of course, it's a battle that goes on forever, and neither side can win, because you can't be all black or all white, if you see what I mean. They're both right and they're both wrong.

The 'whore' voice was originally going to consist entirely of pickup lines which had actually been said by hookers. But in reality hookers generally just say things like, 'hey, wanna date?' which isn't very interesting! So I had to improvise a bit.

The 'virgin' part is based on a Latin hymn from the fourteenth century, which I came across in an archive of early vocal music. The text was perfect: 'Hail glorious queen of virgins, wash him clean of the filthy dregs of the flesh,' and so on - really intense. I kept the outline of the melody but added my own harmony.

Dawn Upshaw

Meanwhile the music has a lot of what I would call unresolved tension in it, both harmonically and rhythmically. There are bits of dance beats that sort of swirl around but never really coalesce for very long. I think there's a feeling of always reaching out but not quite touching.

I've known Suzanne Vega for years, I mean, we're not great pals or anything, but I played piano on one of her records. I had her voice in mind all along. I didn't want a sort of stereotypical 'sexy', heavy-breathing kind of voice. I wanted it to be very matter-of-fact. Suzanne is very good at a certain kind of half-spoken, casual, sort of I-don't-give-a-shit delivery, which is nevertheless still very compelling. I don't know who else could have done that part.

Also it was a real thrill to get Dawn Upshaw. Her voice is just stunningly beautiful. We just sat there with our mouths open in the studio when she sang. The only problem we had with her was trying to decide which take to use.

TUZLA - Avarice was the hardest one for me to relate to. I guess I'm not really interested in money and material things all that much. I struggled with a few different approaches to it. Then I read an article in the New York Times about people profiteering and smuggling in Bosnia. Also I was influenced by a really moving book called 'Sarajevo - A War Journal,' by Zlatko Dizdarevic, a Bosnian journalist. What struck me was how in the midst of the most horrible human suffering, there are always people who find ways to make a profit from it. But when you think about it, War is as much, or probably more, about Greed as it is about violence, or whatever.

So this piece turned into a sort of play, set in a war zone, with different voices playing different characters, commenting on the action from different points of view. There are the smugglers and profiteers, and there are ordinary people who are reading out lists of what they've got to sell or trade - that's pretty much what they've been reduced to. There's a cynical observer talking through a walkie-talkie; that's me. Then there's Joy Askew, who's the only moral voice, or voice of conscience - she's the woman in black who's lost her husband or her son. Her performance gives me chills every time I hear it. And Dawn Upshaw is in there again. Her voice is a sort of siren-song, telling you to close your eyes and forget and escape - but it doesn't work. At the end, a sort of brutal military march takes over and there are just wordless voices, and it becomes a kind of lament.

So, there's a lot of layers in this one.

PASSACAGLIA / A BUD AND A SLICE - This is about Sloth. A Passacaglia is a musical form that goes back to the Baroque era. It's a sort of Variation form in which the theme is repeated over and over again with other parts changing around it. In this case it starts in the bass, then it's in the middle, then on top with completely different harmonies underneath, and it ends up on the bottom again. But it keeps coming back, every twenty bars, back to square one. With a Passacaglia there's a feeling that it never really goes anywhere, and I thought that was really appropriate for Sloth.

Brad Roberts

I was originally going to sing it myself, in a deep lugubrious voice, but I felt I wasn't really cutting it. So I asked myself, who has an interesting, deep voice? And I thought of Brad Roberts. Who else, right? I mean, he's Mister Lugubrious! I didn't know him, but as it turned out, he was a fan of mine and he was really keen to do it. So once again I got what I wanted. I did pretty much throughout the project, and I still can't quite believe it. It's incredibly flattering.

Anyway, I sing a bit in the middle. Basically the idea is that the scene shifts to the other side of the Atlantic, but it's still the same story, the same old Sloth. The tempo picks up and it's like I'm trying to get some energy going but it doesn't work, the thing collapses back into lethargy again.

The ending has one of the recurring themes of the cycle, which is two chords alternating over and over again without resolving to one key or another. In my mind it represents ambivalence. Here I think it has a feeling of a sort of endless, numbed, staring into space.

RIGHT - for Anger I created this character who I think of as the Angry Young Man. People used to call me that back in 1979, and I always thought it was very funny. It conjured up this image of a guy who was permanently furious, at everyone and everything! So that's the character in the song, and I find him a comic figure, but underneath, quite scary too. There's a lot of smashing the keyboard with fists and elbows, I was thinking of little kids getting mad at the piano. Childish temper tantrums.

This one sounds more 'rock'n'roll' than the others, because I think rock'n'roll is very good at Anger! There are two drummers, Kenny Aronoff and Dan Hickey, thrashing like maniacs, like gladiators, trying to outdo each other. The structure of the piece isn't rock'n'roll at all, though. It's an arch form, or a palindrome: ABCBA.

The middle section was recorded in the middle of Times Square, with a portable tape machine. I wanted to capture the way the city sometimes feels like a great seething mass of hostility, everyone's angry, the lights are angry, the cars are angry. The guy playing the plastic buckets is Jared Crawford, who used to play on the street, but he's a star now, he's on Broadway in 'Bring In Da Noise, Bring In Da Funk.'

THE BRIDGE - I had problems with Envy, too, because I didn't think I was an envious person. But then I decided to write it from the point of view of the person who's being envied. That's actually a very destructive place to be, too.

Jane Siberry

It's about Envy between sisters, and there are a few references to the story of Cinderella, which is the classic tale of Envy. I like how this piece sits in the cycle, it brings in a melancholy note which isn't really there so much in the rest of it. Part of the melody comes from the Prelude - it's like the Devil is lurking in the background.

I knew Jane Siberry slightly - she opened for me once in Toronto and her car broke down on the way to the gig! I had a long list of contenders to sing this song, but then I went to see Jane's show at the Bottom Line in New York and she just blew me away. She's a real one-off, there's no-one else like her!

Jane's voice has a very appealing quality which I think is both strong and vulnerable without sounding 'little - girly.' She was perfect for the character in this song, who is supposed to be wounded but in the process of rising above it.

FUGUE 2 / SONG OF DAEDALUS - This might just be my favourite track, I mean, if you tied me up and tortured me and I had to pick a favourite, this would probably be it. It's just my voice and strings. Daedalus was the inventor in Greek mythology; he made wings so that he and his son, Icarus, could escape from their enemies. For the Greeks that was a symbol of Hubris, which later on became the Deadly Sin of Pride. I made him into a modern-day Daedalus, who says terrible things like, 'hey, call me, let's do lunch.'

I tried to show someone's ego getting more and more grotesquely inflamed. It starts with a fugue, very different from the first one, this one is very calm and dignified. I see it as a building up of serene self-confidence which sort of sets the stage. Then, as the piece goes along, the strings get more and more twisted and dissonant, as though they're contradicting what the voice is saying; they're telling the true story that lies underneath.

At the end, the narrator has gone practically insane, he thinks he's God. And at that point, the Devil reappears - Nadja's violin again. The Devil's got him where he wants him.

I think the ending is ambiguous, though. Maybe this guy is damned, or maybe he realises he's gone too far. The whole thing ends with those two chords alternating but never resolving, fading away.

All photos from the PBS broadcast "Sessions at W. 54th St." Caroline MacNamara, photographer.