PRESS:

Pittsburgh City Paper Interview
08/10/2006:

A Conversation with Harlan’s John Norris
Writer: AARON JENTZEN

Some are empty clothes sporting either boxing gloves or paper airplanes for heads. But you get the impression that, of all John Norris’ surrealistic paintings, the most autobiographical figure is a vulturish household spray-bottle clad in a hoodie. The Baton Rouge, La.-based artist and instructor is also a one-man band called Harlan, linking clusters of paintings to songs recalling the sly, literate pop of Nick Lowe with eccentric instrumentation that’s a little ’60s, a little ’70s, and fully stereophonic. What the paintings and songs share is a lapidary yet playful recklessness — and a fascination with concrete imagery. Norris took a few minutes to discuss shoes, ships and sealing-wax in his subtle Kentucky drawl.

Since this is a music article, we should obviously start by talking about your painting!

Right! I got my MFA at [Louisiana State University]. For my thesis, I proposed the idea of making a pop record and a series of paintings that were connected in some way. The reason I did that, is that one of the professors — her husband — is a recording engineer at the university’s recording studio. I managed to worm my way into using the studio there.

Free studio time’s always great.

It was amazing; I had access to things like harpsichords. I got to go in late at night when everyone had left the school, and that’s when I really recorded most of the album: when the school was sorta shut down and I was up there by myself. It felt very luxurious!

How do the paintings interact with your CD, The Still Beat?

It wasn’t sort of a conceptual thing where I specifically started out with an idea I wanted to pursue and tried to make the paintings and songs stick within that. I’m a still-life painter, so the paintings are full of references to different objects and places, and my lyrics … started to do that more as well, they were referring to inanimate objects more. As far as the music affecting the paintings, I was really listening to a lot of pop music and using the synthesizer a lot. And that affected color palette; the paintings were becoming more poppy, and a little bit more animated. Before, I used a more muted palette, and worked in a more traditional still-life mode.

What’s with the hooded spray-bottle?

In my studio I’d have lots of piles of clothes laying around, as well as lots of mundane household objects. I just put them together, and it seemed interesting to me — the hood almost has a monastic quality to it, it seems very contemplative. The spray-bottle emits some sort of vapor, like trying to put something forth. I’m not sure what it’s about, but I kept coming back to it … it’s like trying to get something that’s distilled, and put it out into the atmosphere.

When you were recording, did you plan to put it “into the atmosphere,” as a record, and assemble a band to play it live?

Once the record got done and I had my thesis show, I started to talk to some good local musicians in Baton Rouge. They kept encouraging me to take the record and put a band together from it. I’d always wanted to do that, but I’ve never had very good luck with bands in high school and college, so in a way I just kinda gave up and decided to start recording by myself. It’s been really fun to take a finished record and translate it into a band. Seems kinda backward in a way.

How would you characterize the art and music scenes in Baton Rouge?

It’s changing very fast because of Katrina — it’s kinda in flux. In a way, Baton Rouge has this reputation for being a sleepy college town, but there is a small, tight-knit group of people that are from there, or ended up in grad school there and stayed, making interesting art. It’s a small scene, but it’s good — there are a couple of pop bands that are along the lines as what I’m doing. One’s called the Eanes Era.

Are your band shows multimedia performances?

Right now, just for the first tour, we’re barely scraping by getting the band together, but I’d like to do that. A friend of mine in Baton Rouge is making a video for one of the songs where we’ve turned the spray-bottle guy into a real-life character. We’ve built the costume …

Press Excerpts:

"Bowie would be proud. And so would GBV, The Replacements, old school
Beck, and The Cure…. (The Still Beat) is original, brilliant, fun, and
smooth… This is perhaps the freshest collection of songs I've heard
since 69 Love Songs."
–Rockstatic

Selected as #1 most intriguing Baton Rouge album of the year: "Pop
Genius....Norris' complex arrangements and melody shifts make this
more of an ensemble piece than just one man pouring out his pathos
into a jambox."
–225 Magazine

"Harlan seems to cover a mini-spectrum from my travel case,
each song finding a referent in my late 80s music explorations....
(including) Charlatans UK, XTC, The Feelies"
-Music Spectrum