Ill Lit Interview
by Josh Tyson

This is one of those rare musical outfits that strive for empathy and insight without a nod or a wink—or an embarrassing blast of obviousness. Born of an artist collective founded in Los Angeles—known as We Are Country Music—Ill Lit took their name from a book of poetry by Pulitzer Prize winner, Franz Wright (Ill Lit: New and Selected Poems). Much like Wright’s poetry, their output seethes rugged, heartfelt inquisition into the—absolve me—human condition.

With only two records of their low-fidelity electro-country on the racks, the band present a remarkable level of honesty and wisdom through ardent, lissome songwriting. While their albums sound somewhat sparse and distant, their live shows are fleshier, but still effectively wiry.

The band has a distending and shrinking lineup, but central to the operation are Jens Fleming (drums), Benjamin Provo (bass) and Daniel Ahearn (guitars, vocals). [And David J. has just joined the band on guitar. –ed.] Ahearn is a writer first and foremost, and Ill Lit’s music is unmistakably born of poetry.


Was Wright fairly receptive to you borrowing your name from his poetry?
Yeah, and he’s been very, very helpful. He lent us a very complimentary quote for the cover of our last record, and he’s gone out of his way to mention us and plug us. He just wrote me this evening, and he was talking to a man who’s writing a book on music history, and he said, “They’re much better than Wilco, you should look into it.”

That’s a pretty good plug.
Yeah, I know. I mean they’re probably fighting words to somebody else, but I really appreciate his support. I couldn’t thank him enough.

Can you remember at all the first book you read that really caught you?
God, no. I remember reading a lot of S.E. Hinton as a kid, because I hung out with a bunch of kids who were ruffians. They had kind of a rocky childhood, and they were a big source of support. I guess you’d call it support. Like they were people I could go and get in trouble with, but there was a real family and community there. I was always drawn to the idea of trying to document life as it went on around you. Either to make a map, or leave a record, and I remember really relating to those stories. When I was a kid, I was like, “Oh you can write about what’s going on around you.” I think the twist of that is that S.E. Hinton was a woman, but at the time I just assumed that she was just another kid who grew up with all these other kids who were constantly going out to perform larceny and other crude acts of suburban vandalism. That really moved me a lot. I tried to read everything when I was younger, although my memory is so fractured for some reason, that I can’t recall that much. I was really into Steinbeck and Hemingway in high school, and gravitated towards reading the Beats. Again, they all seemed to have this common ethic of writing about what was immediately around them. I wasn’t drawn to fantastical writing … I read a lot of poetry when I was younger. When I was really young, I read a book called, The Day After Tomorrow. It wasn’t the movie, but it was about nuclear war. When I was a kid I was terrified, and I’d have recurring, haunting, very detailed nightmares about nuclear war.

I had the same thing.
I think we all did. I think our parents had this belief that the world was going to end tomorrow. I don’t know if it was a belief or hope or superstition that every day is potentially your last.

I remember a lot of my fear stemming from a rather bad movie called, Amazing Grace and Chuck. It was about a basketball player who joined some kid in protesting nuclear weapons. At one point, when the kid asks how a nuclear bomb kills people, somebody explains to him that if his mother were to drop a fork in the kitchen at the moment a nuclear bomb went off, the fork would never even hit the floor.
Oh, God.

It’s one of those strange passages that has stuck with me.
As a child, I was terrified of just about everything, and like third, fourth, fifth grade, and maybe even later into junior high, I would stay up all night, until I heard my parents getting up in the morning, and then I would try and go to sleep. I would read and talk to myself and kind of dip in and out of these dreams. But somewhere in that span between like third and sixth grade, I had this one dream where the door to my room opened, and down the hallway I could see into my brother’s room. Through his window I saw this orange horizon and I knew it was a nuclear war. And there was a record playing in his room, I could hear it down the hall, and the music started to slowly grind to a discombobulated drone, like when you slow a record down, and there was this feeling of terror as if it was the first time it had ever arrived in my body. That dream has always stayed with me.

Can you remember the particular moment in your life when you knew you wanted to be a writer?
No. I’ve always been plagued with a healthy degree of insecurity and lack of confidence, and a fear of not relating, as I think everyone does. Nothing stood out, I just kept notes. I remember being very moved by things that I read, and I took to that idea, that you could really explain your experience a lot better by writing about it. I was torn, though, because I wanted to live as radically and excited as possible. I wanted to drink the most, and scream the loudest. I think that being inside my insecurity, I just kept notes about what I would do, or what I was incapable of, or uncomfortable doing, rather than what I actually did do. I wish I had a defining moment. I’m actually waiting for it to arrive.

You think it will bubble up? Are you waiting for it to hit you?
After our shows, when we we’re finally done, Jens said, “It would be good for you to take this next month-and-a-half and sit and relearn all your songs, so if someone asks you to play one, you can.” In my head, I’m thinking, I haven’t written any songs yet. It’s just that weird self-loathing, that some of us develop, where you want to negate everything you’ve done. I don’t know if it’s lack of commitment, because I’m very committed to trying to write as much as I can, and as well as I can.

It’s almost a self-defense mechanism in creative, sensitive people. By saying that something you did sucks, you can take less responsibility for it. Even though you still know it’s you, it’s your work.
It’s true. I had this amazing experience where this man wanted me to play this one song and I was so moved, because it was so clear that the song was his now. It wasn’t mine any longer. And I really like that idea, that something we’ve done could help someone make it through a day or two.

So do you find it difficult to appreciate your output?
I think you always want to do better. I’ve been trying to get myself over to learning about music more. Learning how to play the piano more, and improve my rudimentary skills on the guitar, and studying ideas of melody and harmony. When I look back over the brief three or four years we’ve been trying to do this, I’m proud of what we’ve done, and I look forward to doing more. It’s strange because the timeframe for a musician is illusive. If you look at rock and roll, it’s like in your twenties is when everything would happen, in jazz, it’s your thirties and forties. I don’t know what it is for classical music, although country music singers can do it for a lot longer. It may be why I’m secretly drawn to trying to make a more country style of music.

To have Loretta Lynn’s longevity, or something like that?
Yeah, she’s like seventy. Fuck. Or like George Jones. I think with writers, they tend to develop stronger much later on in life, so I’m trying to be comfortable with the fact that I think we’ll be a much better band in five years. I think I’ll be able to write better songs, and perform them better, and have more comfort in the delivery of them in a few years. A lot of changes are going on in my life, personally, that throw me to my own wolves of discomfort. I’m trying to settle them. Being back in New York is definitely a stomping ground for old ghosts of a life that I no longer live, nor desire to live, fuckin’, to be quite honest. It’s a developmental process. It’s humbling when I see the work of someone like Franz who’s in his fifties and just keeps getting better. In music you tend to watch bands get worse, which is an uncomfortable possibility.

Especially when they start getting famous, even many bands that you think might fare well despite the fame, end up getting overtaken.
It’s distracting, I’m sure. I’m friends with a band here in Brooklyn that became huge, almost overnight. It was good to hear that they’re maintaining their sense of humor and their humility, because I’m sure it’s very off-putting. When someone says that they like something that you do, impulsively maybe, you’re drawn to replicate it. Then it loses its luster. Part of the situation with art, as a general concept, is that you have to be committed to experiencing everything as it comes, rather than trying to re-fabricate something that you’ve already gone through.

[As a writer], is singing what you write a trial by fire?
Incredibly. It’s really tough. I don’t want it to sound like a romantically painful experience. It’s not romantic. It’s usually kind of awkward. When you’re put in front of people, your impulse, when you’re trying to be honest, is to be smug or sarcastic. I really don’t want that. I don’t have any aspiration to be known, or to do that type of work.

Has performing expedited your development in that sense? I mean, do you think it‘s given you an advantage as opposed to, say, someone who is strictly writing?
I don’t know, because you find yourself on some level in search of melody or creating melody out of writing, where free verse and prose poetry you don’t really necessarily have those specifics or limitations, depending on how you want to look at it. It’s an interesting process. Again, with country music, there’s a big form in the song, and I’m really drawn to that, to try and say what I’m out to say, and sing what I’m to sing within that form. You kind of want to drift, and I think a lot of my writing tends to spill over into song, like it can’t stay confined to the chords. I don’t think anything that I’m going through as a songwriter is any different than anyone else. Although I’m just kind of a bookish person … my heroes are poets and not rock stars.

for more info: www.illlit.com or
order records: www.badmanrecordingco.com