(This is part of the Selected Interviews series. More of these can be found in the Words section!)

Cannonball Statman interviewed by Aidan Watson for We Are In The Shop #2
(Summer 2023)

Aidan Watson: You’re currently on tour in Europe! What has been the highlight so far and how does it compare to your last tour? 

Cannonball Statman: So my last proper tour before this one was a completely different kind of thing; it was almost all solo/acoustic shows, and it lasted about 3 years, starting in mid-2016 and lasting until near the end of 2019, when I went to Mexico to visit my parents for Christmas, and then the pandemic happened, and I was basically stuck there for a couple years after that. About a year ago, I started doing one-off shows in the US, Mexico, and England again, and slowly building things back up to the point of doing tours in a sustainable way. 

That very long tour was a unique experience for me, since I’d spent my whole life in NYC, and the longest tour I’d been on at that point was about 3 weeks. And then, suddenly, I was living on tour in North America, Europe, and East Asia, with no foreseeable end to it, and I was making enough money to support myself doing it, but not enough to have a home base anywhere, so I just had to keep going; I’d spend a few days here and there on a friend’s couch to catch up on booking emails, sometimes a week somewhere to record an album, and then go back on the road again. It was funny, because most of my friends in NYC didn’t even realize I was doing this; a lot of them thought I had moved to Mexico at the time, I think because that’s where my parents were living, and probably also because I spent a fair amount of time there on tour (who wouldn’t?) But I only really lived in Mexico and became a resident of Mexico during the pandemic; and I don’t spend a ton of time there anymore, because it costs so much to fly there, and I’m doing a lot in Europe these days. 

This current tour in Europe has mostly been with the new Cannonball Statman trio, and it’s been a lot more practical and well-organized in terms of routing and compensation for shows and things like that; I used to route things in a very haphazard way, so I’d sometimes spend over 24 hours taking various buses to get from one show to the next, like Ternopil, Ukraine to Trnava, Slovakia, or Vienna, Austria to Northampton, England, barely getting paid enough to cover my costs for those days. Now, a lot of our journeys between shows are less than 3 hours. The audiences have been growing, too, and we’ve been getting booked on better lineups and with better promoters, just better things all around. And my health is a lot better I’d say, largely because I’ve been sleeping on someone’s spare bed at night after the shows instead of on someone’s floor. A good night’s sleep makes all the difference; people always say I look younger now. 

And the highlight of this tour so far must’ve been the whole incident with the car; for this tour, our drummer had enlisted a retired high school principal named Moon to drive us around in a used Mercedes-Benz, which broke down in France about a week into the tour. Moon had to take the car back to England to get it fixed, so we were stranded in Paris with all our gear, and needed someone to get us up to Gent, Belgium the next morning so we could play the show with my friend Jeffrey Lewis in the botanical garden there; it was the highest-selling show of both Jeffrey’s tour and ours, and his bandmates had to borrow our drums and amps for the show as well, so we couldn’t just take a train, we needed someone with a vehicle to transport all that stuff. But within a few hours, Albert Portavella, the agent who booked the Catalonia leg of the tour, got us in touch with a Belgian rock legend named Freddy Spaepen, who had no idea who we were or anything, but came down from Antwerp in the middle of the night with his van to drive us to the show the next morning, and then to the other Belgian date as well. It was pretty amazing, and everything since has worked out in a similar fashion. 

A: I understand you’re playing with a new group now, what are your bandmates like? 

C: They’re lovely people; they’re much more introverted than me, which makes for a good balance. Lethal Chu (the bassist and backing vocalist) is very grounded and practical, while Gem (the drummer) is mysterious and chaotic. They’re both very talented solo artists in their own right (their solo projects are called Gemini Eye and Chubaby), and they have distinct styles and personalities, which has made it easy for us to cross international borders and things like that without people thinking we’re a band (border guards are notorious for harassing bands, even when the bands are crossing the border legally). Gem isn’t new, we’ve been playing together at some shows and on some albums since 2017. But this specific trio with me and Gem and Chu is very new (I had never even met Chu until April this year), and it’s taken on a life of its own that’s completely different from the duo with just me and Gem. 

I’m hoping this lineup lasts awhile, but we’ll see what happens; the story of the Cannonball Statman band has always been that I somehow end up working with extremely talented musicians who can play my songs far better than I do with just a few practices (which is no easy feat since the songs are pretty complicated), but it’s always been kind of a revolving door, because people are constantly moving around, getting busy with other projects and sometimes quitting music altogether, and often the venues and promoters we work with on tour can afford to pay a fair wage to cover a solo artist or duo’s expenses, but not those of a full band, because people in underground music just don’t have a lot of money these days, especially in the US. 

I’m doing a lot of solo touring this year as well, and I’ve been working with other musicians in addition to Gem and Chu, like the duo Toque de Azafrán and the accordionist Negrita Yani, all 3 of whom play on some songs on our upcoming album Hard to Break and at my shows when I play in Mexico these days. My partner is a classical singer from London, and he does additional vocals on every song on Hard to Break. And my friend Jason Trachtenburg will be joining me on keys at some of the shows in Europe at the end of this year, so that’s exciting. 

A: You’re performing now with a more stripped back accompaniment of just bass and drums. Were your songs written with this in mind or have you found the songs changing shape? 

C: It was Gem’s idea to have a power trio for the Miracle on Neon Clown Avenue tour; I’d been thinking of having a 4 or 5 piece band, since the way we recorded the album, we had 2 or more guitars in addition to bass (all played by me) and drums and synths (all played by Gem). The other albums we’ve done together are similar, with me and Gem playing all those parts and sometimes having guest musicians on additional instruments.

I was resistant to the idea at first, since I knew it would change the shape of the songs considerably, and the idea of this tour has always been to play the songs from our new album Miracle on Neon Clown Avenue along with some from our 2017 album Playing Dead and our upcoming album Hard to Break, all of which would sound very different with just guitar, drums, and bass; but I’ve really come to love the way the songs have been sounding with the stripped down group, it’s really raw and has such a cool dynamic to it. There have even been a lot of noisy, doomy extended improvised parts we’ve been adding to the songs live without even rehearsing any of it, and the chemistry with this band has been amazing, so those parts have been working beautifully; it went down especially well in Portugal. There’s a playlist on YouTube now with a lot of footage from the dates in May where we were doing all that stuff. The dates I’m doing in July are just solo performances, as my bandmates are very busy this time of year. 

A: In footage from your recent tour you’re seen playing what I think is an Epiphone Les Paul Special-II E1. Is there anything that drew you to that guitar/is there any story behind it? 

C: Ha, that’s because I don’t have a working electric guitar of my own at the moment, and I haven’t saved up the money to get my old one fixed or buy a new one yet. It’s my drummer’s partner’s dad’s guitar that they’ve been lending me for the shows, and it works perfectly for what we’re doing. And the studios we’ve been recording the albums at always have their own guitars and other instruments that are really high quality, so I just haven’t had the need for my own in awhile. A lot of my acoustic guitars I end up sharing with other musicians anyway too, since I leave them all with friends in different parts of the world to pick up and use when I’m touring there again; it’s cheaper than paying to fly with them after awhile. 

A: How long did it take for you to develop your stage presence? Were there any previous phases of your performance that don’t coincide with what you’re doing now? 

C: It was always kinda the way it is now. There was one big shift though, which happened when I realized I could get away with jumping around and barking like a dog and bringing more of that rowdy, chaotic energy into what I do; for about a decade or so after I started making music and performing on stage, I had genuinely believed I would run into trouble with the law or something like that if I did that kind of thing, because even though I saw other people doing it all the time, the climate of NYC was just so paranoid and weird when I was growing up that I had this sense I just wouldn’t get away with something like that. So I was much less high-energy and more reserved on stage when I was a kid and teenager. But then, there was a guy who came up to me after a show in the East Village in maybe late 2012 and said something like “that anger that came out in that one part of that song, that madness, that danger; we need that, we need more of that, please do more of that,” and I thought, “ok, I guess I can get away with this then.” No one had really noticed it before; but ever since then, I’ve really been bringing it out.

A: What are the names of all your past bands and what did they sound like? 

C: The Band Of The Land was my first band, I was 8 years old and we sounded like pure joy. We recorded a ton of albums on cassette and some on CD, but we rarely played live. 

Caution Tape was a band I played in around the same time, we played some of my original songs and we also played covers of blues, grunge, metal, and classic rock songs, mostly at block parties in Brooklyn. Some people from that band later formed a band called Fiasco that toured around quite a bit, they were great.

Jesse and the Statmans was a band I played in at my high school that defaulted to playing my songs, because no one else in it wanted to write songs, and the bassist decided to call it Jesse and the Statmans as a way of mocking me, basically. It was a bit like what I do now, but a lot more downtempo, the drummer was really into hip-hop beats, and the bassist deliberately played the wrong notes because he didn’t like me very much. 

The Great Indoors was another band I played in at my high school that mostly played my songs and my friend Gani’s songs. Gani’s songs were more influenced by metal and sometimes pop-punkish stuff, and we played a lot of my darker and screamier stuff in this one. 

I played bass and melodica in Jane LeCroy’s TRANSMITTING (now known as The Icebergs) for some shows in 2011 and 2012, with the legendary beatrhyming pioneer Terry Lewis aka Kid Lucky / King Luck (R.I.P.), which was sort of like an avant-garde jazz post-punk performance poetry situation with some hip-hop influence. 

Violent Paint was a band I played in around 2012, it was very influenced by jazz, noise, hardcore, hip-hop, and performance art, but also had some classic rock and folk influence in some songs. People were mostly terrified of us. Some people who became fans of Cannonball Statman later on confessed to me that they really didn’t like Violent Paint. I did, though! 

I started the Cannonball Statman band in 2012, right after the dissolution of Violent Paint; I’d had a bizarre hand injury, and I started writing songs in open D5/sitar tuning so I could play guitar with one finger while my hand was in a splint, and that became this whole evolution of my music that I wanted to have a new name for, so I named the project after my childhood dog, Cannonball Statman. At first, it was a duo with me and a drummer, then it became a duo with me and a harmonica player, then it became a 7 piece band, then 5 piece, 3 piece, and 5 piece again, and then it became a solo project for awhile, and I think that was when people started referring to me, the person, as Cannonball Statman, when that had originally just been the name of my band. Around that time of me being exclusively a solo performer, I was on tour in Europe a lot, and I started making albums with a drummer in London, who later moved to Norwich after the pandemic started, where they met a bassist who recently decided to join in, making it a trio once again; we may change the lineup again soon, as I’ve been talking with other musicians about getting involved as well. But I still play solo a lot, and it can get a bit confusing, because when we do things as a band, everyone collaborates on the composition, arrangement, and production decisions, and we split all earnings equally and decide everything democratically, the only real difference being that I write all the lyrics and act as the front man; so in that case, I’m Jesse, and Cannonball Statman refers to the band, not me – but when I’m solo, I’m Cannonball Statman, because then I do everything. 

Ria Boss was a neo-Soul band I played in and composed and arranged the songs for from 2012-2013. Jon from Fiasco ended up being the drummer for awhile; I hadn’t seen him since we were kids, and we didn’t remember each other at first, but then at one of the rehearsals he was like “hey, I think we played a show at a block party together like a decade ago” and I was like “oh wow, yeah.” Small world! 

Nicki Minaj’s Big Boobs was a duo of me and a guy named K-WAK the Nomad who played drums in the Cannonball Statman band for awhile. We mostly played 1am secret shows and things like that, and I would brush my teeth on stage while K-WAK read bedtime stories, but sometimes we also did songs. 

Around the same time, I also played lead guitar in Obed Morales’s band, which K-WAK also played drums in. This was like a lo-fi indie folk-rock kind of sound, with some experimental/noisy bits because I was in it. 

There was also this mysterious musician who knew Lach, the guy who was kind of the ringleader of the NYC antifolk scene from the 1980s till he moved to Edinburgh in 2011, and from what I was told, he kind of sent her to NYC and connected her with a bunch of people in the scene at some point, but no one was really sure why; she enlisted me to play bass in her band when she was living there, after her original NYC bassist stole a lot of her money and personal belongings. We did some rehearsals and various things where there was supposedly going to be a drummer at all of them, but he never turned up until maybe 3 hours into maybe the 5th rehearsal he said he was going to be at, after missing everything until then. We practiced with him for a couple minutes, and then he was like “you know, I don’t like this bassist”; so she decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to have me in the band anymore. 

Green Fluff Green Fluff was a band I started with a friend who has very similar hair to me; I don’t remember if we actually did anything, but I was always really happy we came up with that name! 

The Dick Jokes is a band I played drums in from 2013-2016, fronted by Chicken Leg who played drums, piano, and lead guitar in the Cannonball Statman band at various points. It had Ronnie Wheeler on bass, who played bass in two other bands I played drums in around that time as well, but is also a great guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter who was originally part of the Albuquerque underground in the ’90s. We were like a psychedelic glam punk band, we wore crazy outfits and had this mini-rock opera called “One More Singularity” about 7 friends creating the universe while on ‘shrooms. 

Crimshaw was a metal band I played in for a bit with Vince from Violent Paint, but I had to quit pretty early on, because I was super busy at the time.

The Doobie Sisters was another band with Chicken Leg, where we performed in drag at secret 2am concerts in parks in Brooklyn that surprisingly a lot of people would actually come to. I don’t remember what we sounded like, though. 

Skitzopolis was a band I played drums in for a bit around the same time, that one was like a thrash metal band, also with Ronnie from The Dick Jokes on bass. 

I played drums on one of Zack Daniel’s albums, which was sort of an indie rock sound, but he decided not to have a full band when performing the songs live after that. 

Mischief Night was a band I played lead guitar in for about a year; this band mostly consisted of members of the Grasping Straws, but in different roles, with their front woman Mallory playing drums and her husband Marcus singing and playing guitar, and it had kind of an indie rock mixed with horror vibe to it. 

And Caroline Cotto is a jazz and blues singer I played drums for (with Ronnie on bass yet again!) on her debut EP The Devil In Me, and at some shows and festivals before she moved to New Orleans. 

A: What were your first songs about? 

C: I was 8 years old and obsessed with The Beatles when I started writing songs, so I wrote a lot of very heterosexual love songs back then. It was more a way of making fun of myself and the world, because I already kinda knew I was gay; but it was also a sincere homage to The Beatles and to love in general. I also wrote a lot of songs about being in middle school, being in a band, and going on vacation with my parents. My big hit for awhile was a song about airline food, called “Plane Service”. I also wrote a lot of songs about depression and more serious topics, since it was a very serious time and I was going through a lot; I think pretty much everyone was around then. 

A: What current bands or artists are you most excited about? 

C: I get really excited about bands and artists I meet on tour. There’s a sick band from Portugal called dUASsEMIcOLCHEIASiNVERTIDAS that we met on this tour, we stayed at their guitarist’s apartment in Lisbon. Mandus Berg is a Swedish musician, skater, and actor I met on tour in 2018 who does some really good stuff and is starting to get a lot of buzz in Sweden; we’re doing a show together in Gothenburg in December, and one of my guitars has been living in his apartment since I was last there. T-Bitch is a great punk band from Southend-on-Sea, UK that I’ve recently fallen in love with. VICE VERA is a new post-punk adjacent project from Manchester, UK, she opened for us on our shows in the North of England in May and she’s amazing. Un Toque de Azafrán is a new duo from Oaxaca, Mexico that does really cool experimental jazz-ish stuff, and they’re both playing wind instruments on my next album. 

A: You’re often associated with the antifolk movement. Especially your solo acoustic shows. You previously did an interview with Livetrigger.com that they titled “the kind of modern antifolk”. Do you embrace this classification or find it reductive? 

C: That’s a great question! I think it completely depends on what someone thinks antifolk is, because people always have wildly different ideas about that. Jason Trachtenburg, for instance, who I’m touring with in Europe at the end of this year, has been involved with antifolk for a long time, and people like him have this understanding that antifolk can be pretty much anything, it could be a noise rock band, it could be a comedian, it could be a swing jazz band, it could be someone who writes a cookbook – there’s an antifolk person who doesn’t make music or perform or anything like that, she just wrote a cookbook. So Jason often says I’m antifolk in that sense, even though my music is all over the map stylistically. 

But when we played in rural Portugal in May, for instance, there were some people who refused to go to the show, because they didn’t know what antifolk was, and they thought we might be doing something “against folk music”, which was deeply offensive to them because they really like folk music; that kind of thing has happened a lot. And I’d say most people in the music world generally see antifolk as a very specific sound and style; they think of someone like Jeffrey Lewis, who I’ve done a lot of shows with over the years and tend to go well on a lineup with, but am also very different from. 

But even in music, a lot of people have never heard of it. Antifolk has been around since the 1980s, it comes from NYC originally, and I grew up in NYC, so you’d think I’d have known about it right away when I started making music; but I was making my own music there for about a decade before I’d even heard of it. One of the biggest fans of my first band in 2002-’03 was an NYC antifolk musician, but even then, I still had never heard the word antifolk until around 2012, when a drunken poet saw one of my performances and told me I had to get involved in the antifolk scene. So as one does, I followed the instructions of the drunken poet; I befriended a lot of antifolk people from different eras, learned a lot about that scene, played a lot of antifolk shows and festivals, even organized some myself. It’s a great thing. The antifolk label itself is something no one really knows what to do about, though; a lot of artists labeled antifolk have mixed feelings about it because no one really knows what it means, ourselves included. 

And the “king of modern antifolk” title is a funny one, because of course, it’s very tongue-in-cheek; very few people in the NYC underground are monarchists, and a lot of different people have been titled the king, queen, inventor, ringleader, etc of antifolk. I was part of a new wave of artists associated with that movement in the 2010s, with some great acts like The Grasping Straws, Phoebe Novak, Becca Florence Moon, Ben Pagano, and Robot Princess, and I was one of the more active ones in terms of touring internationally and organizing and performing at antifolk-adjacent events in NYC. 

My friend Brian Kelly was the one who used the word “king” to describe me specifically, and he’s not even an antifolk guy, he’s more into the former CBGBs/1970s NYC punk scene that would come to Dick Jokes shows sometimes; since I was the drummer in The Dick Jokes, and our front man Chicken Leg was my drummer for awhile, there was some crossover with that crowd as well. So Brian started coming to the Cannonball Statman shows, and saw the enthusiasm people had about me in the antifolk scene, and he was like, “oh, I guess Cannonball is the king of modern antifolk.” And now it’s just something people say about me, especially in Europe. But I still have no idea what it means.