Shawn Jones of the Lovely Sparrows

Listen to "The Department of Forseeable Outcomes" from Bury the Cynics

Through dint of their sheer prettiness and Bury the Cynics’ super-sized recording roster (Jones utilizes a variety of guest players), the Lovely Sparrows have been saddled with comparisons to the likes of Belle & Sebastian. Stuart Murdoch is far from shabby songwriting company but in truth Jones is the kind of songwriter that comes around to the delight of critics only rarely because there’s no real easy referent for what he’s doing. Pairing impeccable crystalline song structures with hazy dreamlike lyricism Jones high wire act makes the most of the juxtaposition between his clean compositional lines and frenzied fractured imagery. Particularly on stand out tracks like “Teenage Viking,” a creepy campfire sing along about mans preternatural tendency to destroy the environment (“Save me from the fires that I have lit. Oh it was exciting, but it stung like the whip”) - or maybe it really is about owls killing field mice - Jones isn’t the easiest guy around to decode, and that’s part of the fun. Shawn Jones talked with Reveille from his Austin home about his origins in jazz performance, embracing magical realism and falling victim to a TSA theft ring amongst other topics

Reveille: In doing a little prep work for this interview I stumbled across a piece mentioning that the recordings for the album you originally intended to release were accidentally lost. What’s the full story there?

Shawn Jones: We were actually up in Brooklyn last August and when I was going through airport security I stupidly decided to check my laptop. I had so much gear and random keyboards and stuff I was traveling with I had to kind of stupidly prioritize what I could bring as my carry-on. I thought my laptop would be safe under a bunch of clothes in my luggage but I was wrong – it got stolen. There actually ended up being a whole big investigation and it turned out that the TSA employees at JFK had some sort of theft ring going on. The first month after it happened I just kind of puttered around whining like, ‘oh man I don’t want to do it again’ because they were pretty fully realized demos. I just hadn’t gotten around to burning discs yet. The next couple of months I started working on songs again and I couldn’t remember any of those original ideas at all, none of the music, none of the lyrics. The only thing I could remember was the very end section of “The Year of the Dog.” I normally work on three songs at once when I write so that way if I get stuck I don’t go crazy. It sucked at the time but ultimately I do think the songs [that ended up on Bury the Cynics] are way better than what I had been working on anyway. It all came together in just a few months from start to finish.

Reveille: You’ve had extensive formal musical training. Does much of it carry over to your work in the Lovely Sparrows? Frequently I’ve talked with musicians with similar backgrounds who’ve claimed they had to “unlearn” what they were taught in order to pursue writing pop music of a sort.

Jones: My degree is in jazz performance and that’s my day job, I teach private lessons. I grew up on bands like Pavement and jagged rock stuff like that. I’ve never really got that whole “unlearn” thing. I feel like learning music theory and things like that only opened my ears further. Now that I’m out of school I’m definitely into much weirder stuff than I was before. I get excited about things like this Bill Frisell record I just discovered where he covers Aaron Copeland and Charles Ives pieces. I think my ear is much more expanded as far as accepting dissonance and stuff like that. I got burned out on playing jazz probably two years after moving to Austin and really dug into writing songs after leaving that behind. There are a lot of assholes in the Austin jazz scene, that’s not a revelation, that’s kind of common knowledge. My background academically was as a bassist, so I kind of wanted to push into new directions and that’s when I started working on the finger picked guitar style that I’m doing now, started writing songs more seriously. 

Watch the music video for "Year of the Dog" from Bury the Cynics 

Reveille: One of the things that really stands out to me about this record, particularly what separates it in my mind from some of the groups you’ve been compared to like Belle & Sebastian, is that emphasis on rhythmic swing. So I guess your degree served you well. [Laughs] Compared to most orchestral indie-pop I hear a greater focus on the rhythm section than usual.

Jones: Definitely, I was always really aware of tempos and experimenting with them, we recorded five different versions of a song sometimes just searching for that right tempo. The parts didn’t have to sound perfect, but they had to feel good. I always wanted this set of songs to have a certain bounce to them. 

Reveille: There’s also a lyrical cohesiveness, a willingness to dabble in the surreal, recurrences of certain nature imagery. Were you consciously toying with certain lyrical concepts for this record?

Jones: About halfway through writing the record I knew what kind of feel I wanted for it. I didn’t want it to be blatantly about relationships like the first record was. I knew I wanted to have some core imagery. I have friends that really turned me on to Spanish magical realist writers and I wanted to kind of bring that in. The challenge for me was to use all that imagery but still have some kind of emotional impact to it.

Reveille: Frequently when songwriters get into fantastic imagery and the like it’s usually some sort of “tasting rainbows” whimsy, Bury the Cynics does the fantasy thing while still being a pretty heavy record.

Jones: I’m definitely aware that I’m on the darker side but I’d like to think that if you really listen to the album as a whole there are little glimmers of hope here and there. In my personal life I feel like I’m doing fine as long as there’s that one little moment every couple of weeks where I find joy in everyday life. That’s a lot of where this record is coming from. “Bury the Cynics” is basically about learning to celebrate the mundane.

The Lovely Sparrows' MySpace