Letters & Numbers is not only a musician, he is the epitome of the literature major musician. AKA his lyrics are beautiful and complex. I enjoy the combination of his voice with the imagery in his lyrics. He is San Francisco-based and currently keeping it local now with performances, but check his website or his facebook page for tour updates. His album is also available on bandcamp for free download. His interview answers below are some of my favorite thus far, so I encourage you to read below!
Who is your favorite author?
I am influenced, mostly, by bards and poets. A few that come to mind are Eliot, John Donne, Berryman, Milton, Chaucer, and Billy Collins. I really dig the Greek Tragedians, too. In terms of prose, I would put David Foster Wallace and James Joyce at the top of the list. I also have a soft spot for the old New York hipsters like James Baldwin and Kerouac and Ginsberg.
Who is your favorite lyricist?
John Darnielle, or The Mountain Goats, is responsible for what I do today. I remember getting the album ‘Zopilote Machine’ in like 2005 at Rasputin’s and it had this promotional sticker that read ‘The Best Album from 1994 You Never Heard’. Needless to say, my interest was thoroughly piqued. So, when I got home I put it in my discman and walked around the streets of San Rafael until all the coffee shops closed down and I nearly ran out of cigarettes. Like listening to the thing on repeat. I didn’t know you could do that with a song. I mean, write like that. All the suffering and jubilance carried in each small detail of the lyrics. The power chords and acoustic guitar battling against his hedonic yip. And each word he sang, I mean, you knew he meant it. The one minute and thirty seconds of that first track changed me forever.
What are some of your musical influences?
I suppose I am influenced by the musicians of my youth. The ones that took up pages upon pages of those cd booklets you bought at Tower Records or Warehouse or Sam Goody or wherever. People like Fugazi, the Smiths, the Ramones, Jawbreaker, Operation Ivy, the Clash, the Beatles... I didn’t get into stuff like Neutral Milk Hotel and the Microphones until my twenties. I played jazz trumpet for a while so I ended up hearing a lot of Duke Ellington and Charlie Mingus and Dizzy Gillespie. Chet Baker’s label Enja put out this album right before he died called ‘My Favorite Songs’ that I remember listening to a lot as a kid. Something about the fragility in his voice stuck with me for a long time. And, all this stuff swirled around me as I grew up learning to write and play.
Top 5 desert island albums?
I find this subject somewhat paradoxical. I mean, the idea is to select the top five albums to sort of stave off insanity, right? But, really, I find it hard chew that anyone could pick five albums to listen to on the diamond beach in their tattered pants and shirt now functioning more as crude nemes, eating coconut flesh and fashioning spears out of bamboo, sharpened rocks, and overgrown hair while the tropical sun beat down on them without losing a bit of what we call ‘sanity’. If, given that I would almost certainly go nuts or fall off the deep end or lose my marbles, the question to which albums I would choose to listen to ad insanitum necessitates the answer: I’d rather have my guitar.
How did you choose your band name?
At first, I chose it arbitrarily. My housemates and I named this alley-cat that would hang out on the front porch of our old house in Oakland, because we couldn’t decide between one or the other, ‘letters and numbers’. But, as words that are part of one’s daily life tend to do, the name took on new meaning as I adopted it as my own. It became a statement about who I am, who we all are, in America. Where we are reduced to a series of letters and numbers. An email address. A social security number. A job title or paycheck amount. A name. These random, meaningless combinations of digits and glyphs come to define who we are as individuals. And, I felt that naming myself in such a way was to embrace this lost beauty of the American individual.
Who or what does Lorraine represent?
‘Lorraine’ represents the thing that you want or love but you cannot be with because of particular circumstantial elements. I was in a bar in Brooklyn talking with a friend and my attention deviated, as it admittedly does from time to time, to the phone conversation coming from behind me. The guy was talking to someone, earnestly it seemed, saying “you know I love you, baby, but I just can’t be with you tonight.” And, I thought what he was saying was beautiful. You know? Like, I can’t be with you right now but someday I will come for you and we will be together and everything will be alright. But, also, it struck me that this psychic pull of constant toil, of ‘things to do, people to see’ takes us over so entirely that we can’t sacrifice whatever it is we are perpetually moving towards to be with the ones we love. And, at this point, I’d realized that my friend had stopped talking for some time and was looking at me like ‘hey, man, where’d you go?’ So, I went back to catching up with my old friend who had moved back east.
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