Afton Wolfe is Mississippi. Born in McComb, and growing up in Meridian, Hattiesburg, and Greenville, Mississippi, the roots of American music are in his DNA. Mississippi is the birthplace of at least three American art forms: country music, blues music, and rock and roll. Meridian is the birthplace of Jimmie Rodgers, while the Mississippi Delta is the birthplace of the blues, and the first rock n’ roll notes ever played according to intelligent music historians, came from Hattiesburg. Additionally, he spent his musically formative years in and around New Orleans, where the humidity of the Mississippi combined with the Creole seasonings, the jazz, zydeco, creole, and gospel music and his Mississippi roots coalesce to add that extra resonance and unpredictability to his blues/country/rock influences.
Much like his single “About My Falling” (featured on Adobe & Teardrops), Wolfe’s new song “Carpenter” is a diary-like entry that begins with a wry turn of phrase and unfolds into a meditation on what we owe to each other. In his interview, Wolfe describes his approach to songwriting as discovery rather than creation, and how that impacts his approach as a performer.
Name a perfect song and tell us why you feel that way.
I think the perfect song is “Life on Mars” by Bowie. Obviously the musicianship and Bowie’s voice are flawless, but the chord progression, weaving in and out of chromatic and dissonant notes, form a song that seemingly has no key but sounds as old as time melodically. The lyrics are obscure and poetic, and I feel as though sometimes I know exactly what he’s talking about in the song, but I never remember. Bowie called it a love song, but his love is not the same as the rest of ours. It’s a mystic experience.
Do you have any songwriting tips you can share?
In my view, songwriting is more about discovering than creating. All of the raw materials for songs already exists, so you’re not really creating anything. It’s like digging for gold – some of it is just right on the surface, and you just have to grab it and dust it off, and you have a good song. But sometimes you have to dig deep, and in that digging, you may “write” several songs that seem like what you’re searching for but aren’t quite there yet. That’s like the dirt you have to scoop out of the way to get to where your instincts are telling you the song you’re feeling is. I guess what works about this philosophy for me is that I don’t take it too hard when I write something I’m not crazy about. It’s usually just part of the dig – the discovery process.
Do you start off with the music or lyrics first? Why?
It depends on which I spot first. Sometimes a melody comes to me, and it leads me to the rest of the song. Sometimes it’s a lyric that guides me. I am a very verbal person, and I think I have more confidence with my lyrical ability than my musical, so I admit I get a little more excited when the lyric shows itself to me first, because then I get to flesh that out in a way that I understand probably a little bit more than when the melody or progression occurs to me.
Do you play covers at your shows? Why or Why not?
Yes. I think people get hung up a little too much on the sanctity of “original music” and I think that comes from people believing they “created” it rather than discovered it. I vibe with what Bob Dylan once said that he was a “song and dance man.” I feel more that way. I still want to surprise and delight people, more than just spoon feed them drunken entertainment; I’m not going to be a jukebox, and I don’t take fakebooks to shows. I try to never play the same cover song at different full-band shows, and have the covers be a treat to the audience. Recently, I’ve covered “Cure For Pain” by Morphine, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” by Nina Simone, and I’m planning on covering “Something On Your Mind” by Karen Dalton at my next show. So, I’m not covering “Mustang Sally,” “Maragritaville,” “Free Bird,” or “Brown-Eyed Girl.” And it’s probably worth noting that 3 of the 9 songs on Kings For Sale were not written by me, but I wouldn’t put a song I didn’t write on a record unless I was fairly sure that it wasn’t going to be heard much or at all otherwise, which I felt was the case with those 3.
How are you using your platform to support marginalized people?
I’ve never really thought about using my music to be a better ally, and I definitely still believe that my actions in my everyday life are much more important than things I say or do as a representative of my music/product. Woke capitalism is a pretty transparently disingenuous institution, and trying to interweave your own personal interests with the larger concepts of equality and justice always has a stench to me. That said, I have put a couple of songs on the new record which address some of these issues – “Mrs. Ernst’s Piano” written by the great Mike West is a fantastic song about a post-segregation Southern neighborhood where a white woman wants to teach a young black child piano lessons, but her racist husband won’t concede. He dies, and to me, the point (or one of the points) of that song is that sometimes people have to die for things to get better. And I wrote “O’ Magnolia” right before going into the studio about my home state of Mississippi changing the state flag to get rid of that loser Confederate flag. It’s a plea to Mississippi and Mississippians to admit their dreadful history and move forward into the future with an understanding of the past that will hopefully make a better now. And I think that is the most important thing I can do to be an ally – try to convince as many ignorant and uninformed people that racism/bigotry/intolerance is still a giant problem and to be mindful of my own privileges and advantages that I have taken for granted and that I never deserved any more than any other person on Earth.
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