I was prepared to skewer Music for Writers, last summer’s album by the guitarist Steve Gunn. On first listen, I found the album slapdash and unfocused, like a lot of instrumental guitar music. Then I talked to Gunn about his upcoming album, Daylight Daylight. He offered a more nuanced view of his multi-pronged intent behind Music for Writers.
“It’s a few different things. I was taking a step out of using words, and I think that sometimes words can kind of take away from music,” Gunn told me. “I wanted to make a record that conjured thought without words.”
Gunn’s been on a two-tracked career since the mid-2000s. On one side, he makes singer-songwriter albums, and on the other, he makes instrumental guitar music. He credits the instrumental work with informing his songwriting.
“It helps me to be a bit more open to finding songs, to finding music, and it helps me think about things without too much structure. So when I made the instrumental record, it really coincided with the song record, because it helped me generate ideas.” Gunn said. “I think it’s a good practice for me.”
Gunn intended Music for Writers not just as muzak to fill the room during a writing session, but also as music to help him write. “A lot of people have different methods of working. People don’t listen to music when they work, when they write, or people listen to specific things. So I wouldn’t want to force it, but I had that in mind, to help make music that could help people work and think,” Gunn said. “That was the intention.”
It’s worked. Until this year, Gunn always collaborated on his instrumental albums. He’s tapped everyone from the sound artist Bill Nace to the indie darling Kurt Vile. Then he made Music for Writers, his first solo instrumental album.
Next month, Gunn is releasing a singer-songwriter album, Daylight Daylight. It marks his second record of the year, and it builds atop Music for Writers. On the instrumental album, Gunn occasionally loses focus. He buries the melody under whistling synthesizers on one track, “Slow Singers on the Hill.” On “Snow/Water,” he leaves some negative space in the mix, only to fill it with the sound of running water. He’s offers pretty sounds, but I can find pretty sounds anywhere. In retrospect, Gunn was making a transitional record, full of trial and error.
On his upcoming album, Gunn leaves some negative space in the mix. He allows instrumental breaks on multiple songs, including “A Walk” and “Morning on K Road.” On the latter, he lets the bassist get the attention during the song’s break, a lesson taken from old-school post-punk.
Daylight Daylight finds Gunn on the other side of a transition. He found a new label (No Quarter, instead of his frequent standby Matador Records). He recorded in a new city (Chicago, in addition to New York). He found a new set of influences (the artistic process of post-punk, the textural soundscapes of post-rock, and the sour strings from film soundtracks).
Granted, Gunn’s maintaining the same media diet as always. During our interview, he mentioned listening to the conceptual artist Alan Licht and playing live with the jazz guitarist Jeff Parker, best known from the Chicago band Tortoise. When asked about a contemporary artist, he mentioned Sonic Youth’s guitarist Lee Ranaldo, someone more than 40 years into his career. Still, Gunn’s expanding the scope of his outputs. He’s scoring a film for next year’s Vila do Conde International Film Festival in Portugal. He’ll perform the score live in Italy.
“It’s a live score to this film by this filmmaker named Stan Brakhage who was an American filmmaker, artist, and he made these silent movies that I’ll be playing the music to at a film festival” Gunn told me. “I’ve worked on different projects and documentaries and feature films and small things sometimes, but also hopefully something that’s more in-depth soon.”
The artist with a two-tracked career has demonstrated multimedia ambitions. “It’s just the way that I like to work. I don’t just like to do one thing,” Gunn said. “I went to film school, college, and studied filmmaking, and I still experiment with that, and I kind of dabble with photography and different things. I’m very consumed by music, and that’s usually what I’m doing, but often I like to tinker around with other avenues.”
Gunn went on to explain his interest in yet another medium, the written word. “I admire a lot of writers, and I think there’s a lot of parallels between the practice of being a musician and being a writer,” Gunn said. “I know it takes a lot of discipline and it takes a lot of work to complete things for writers, and there’s a certain routine that people get into that I respect. I found myself getting into a similar kind of scheduled routine with music.”