Steve Swallow Quotations

I don't meditate before I play or compose, but I see playing and composing as meditative acts.

Occasionally, when I run into a great bass backstage at a festival I'll play a few notes on the low E string, just to feel the instrument vibrate against my belly.

I found it liberating of necessity to devise my own style and my own tactics and to look for a voice on the instrument because there weren't really any that impacted strongly on me.

If a commission comes in for tuba and gorilla, she'll write a piece for tuba and gorilla, and it'll come out sounding like her. I think the humor in her music is ... like her thumbprint. And I would have to say that extends into her life away from music as well. I think it would be impossible for her to remain somber for more than a few minutes at a stretch.

I go about composing like a factory worker. I punch in. I believe it's written somewhere "Steve Swallow has to sit uneasily at the piano for ten hours before receiving his next idea," so I sit there as patiently as possible. Eventually, an idea always comes, and then the rest is science.

Composing is as important to me as playing. My feeling is that playing and composing support and nourish each other. I'd be a lesser player if I didn't write, and a lesser writer if I didn't play. Composing is tremendously difficult and painful for me, and I often go to great lengths to avoid it.

Producing is a great deal more stressful than playing for me, and for this reason I've been doing less of it lately. But it's a service I like to perform. I certainly see producing as a service to the artist who's asked for help. What the producer does is entirely a response to what the artist needs. It can be very gratifying work. The trick is to do as little as possible, only what the artist can't or won't do for himself.

As for the Beatles: I was very taken by them during their brief career. I was impressed most by the quality of their songwriting, and by George Martin's production. But their importance to me faded fairly quickly after they broke up, as my interests shifted. I think in the end I was much more decisively influenced by some of their influences, most particularly Motown.

The Beatles seem to me to be very much of their time (although I realize they do enjoy a remarkable enduring popularity). But I, and most of my friends with whom I've discussed this, associate them strongly with the sixties, and with the intense societal changes of that time.

Partisans present some of the most refreshing music I've heard in a long while, uncompromising, very well written and very well played. It demands serious attention. I hear in these players a sense of common purpose and resolve, and a strong command of a dialect uniquely suited to this music. It's heartening to hear music that looks to find its own particular place.