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Here’s the second part of my recent interview with Eric in which we delve deeper into his recording and songwriting process, recent European travels and his research into alternative food systems and collectives.

I and I: How do you generally start a new song? Is it an intellectual process of thinking what you’d like to do or is more jamming and experimenting to get ideas and then embellishing and refining those? Did you try any new songwriting techniques or processes on this one?
Eric: i guess i don’t have seem to start a song the same way twice, really, but generally i seem to start with a germ of an idea, which i’ll record on keyboard or guitar, and start messing around with. i think most of the tracks on ‘the friend’ were pretty well fleshed out musically before i added vocals. in most cases, once voices are added, i tend to go back and change certain aspects of the music, usually carving out more space and minimizing parts. things that sound good when there aren’t vocals on a track seem to compete with voices once they’re added. a couple of the tracks on this album — ‘strange power’ and ‘we waited for nothing’, i remember writing on piano and wurlitzer. as for lyric-writing, like i said before, much of the lyrics just kind of came to me at various times, in contrast to the way i’ve often written in the past, which was often about writing a ton of stuff and then paring down to essential lines or something.

I and I: Can you say anything about the title ‘The Friend Is This Animal’?
Eric: the title, ‘the friend is this animal’ is a direct nod to the amazing philosopher elizabeth grosz. i took a class with her on feminism and the animal, which basically looked at how western philosophers have understood the animal, how those understandings have been and are enmeshed with how we see the human. more than that, the class attempted to look at and think animals as not just something we ‘project’ our human notions onto, or a kind of ‘outside’ or opposite to ‘society’ or ‘culture’ and such, but as beings with their own worlds, cultures, creativity, and so on. in her great book ‘chaos, territory, art’, liz grosz argues that what we tend to think of as ‘nature,’ a thing we generally oppose to our supposedly more elevated human ‘culture’, is actually the basis from which all art and culture emerges. getting back to my album, i was really moved, while working on this record, by nietzsche’s way of talking about animals and the human animal, especially the relationship between zarathustra and ‘his animals,’ who restore zarathustra to health when he enters his convalescent periods…these animals, an eagle and a snake, tell him that to get over his nausea caused by the wretched ways that humans often treat each other he should learn from animals, especially songbirds, who sing and dance and affirm life to the fullest extent. it’s hard to do justice to these concepts in this short interview, but i found these ways of thinking about the animal to be quite helpful in my own life, for a number of reasons related to the deep changes and rich experiences of my recent years that i talked about earlier.

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