Cracker set to bring extensive discography to the Ocean Mist
This year marks a couple different anniversaries for Cracker with it being the 30th anniversary of the band’s third studio album “The Golden Age” and 20 years since the release of the band’s seventh album “Greenland.” Formed by lead vocalist and guitarist David Lowery and lead guitarist Johnny Hickman in 1990 with bassist Bryan Howard and drummer Carlton Owens currently making up the rhythm section, the band has intertwined elements of country and punk with classic alternative.
RD: Outside of Cracker, you just mentioned your other band Camper Van Beethoven and you also have a prolific solo discography as well as recently touring… how do you manage all of these creative outlets so you don’t get overwhelmed? Does one project have priority over the others or do you structure your artistic output in a different way?
DL: Nowadays, some of it has to do with economics due to the fact that there is not enough revenue in recorded music and royalties to really justify the kind of studio albums that we used to make. A lot of people still do it because they view the album as basically an advertisement for our tour, but part of the reason that I do solo records is that I’m able to do this stuff at home with a few remote collaborators. I do a lot of stuff with Megan Slankard, who’s in San Francisco and records in her home studio, or Luke Moller, who does string arrangements for me from Australia and stuff like that. Really in a lot of ways, the solo record stuff is more stripped down, but it’s also the kind of stuff that I can collaborate online remotely with other musicians, so I’m just honestly trying to adapt to the economics of the business. That said, choosing who you’re collaborating with on a song-by-song basis is another kind of creativity and it’s another style of record that people make.
It’s more of the modern way where most modern pop, country, and indie musicians actually record the way I make my solo records. Now, that’s the dominant way of recording, so you’re usually working up stuff in the home studio and then you bring it into a pro studio with an engineer to finish some things up and largely it’s just mixing the arrangement. I feel like my solo stuff is an adaptation of the modern way of recording things now, so that’s really all that’s about.
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