A blessed Good Friday to you!

For this edition, I am thrilled to introduce you to a Very Special Guest: Harrison Lemke, a Catholic folk musician hailing from Texas by way of Idaho. His new album, Forever Only Idaho, is a concept album of sorts chronicling

the Coeur d’Alene High School graduating class of 2006 in 2018, wherever they ended up — just turned thirty or about to, in and out of hospitals, in and out of jail, in or out of debt, trying to make it in New York or L.A. or still living at home, but above all wondering what happened to each other and wondering what might’ve been if things had been different (different how? no one knows).

Harrison graciously agreed to talk with me on the phone about his new album for my newsletter...even after I told him my subscriber count. Our conversation touched on Sufjan Stevens and the Mountain Goats, the influence of his faith on his songwriting, and a song lyric in his new album that may or may not have been outdated by the time of its release.

This interview has been lightly edited, mostly for purposes of clarity.

On writing songs about fictional characters

Reading the liner notes and lyrics for Forever Only Idaho, I made the common mistake of assuming that everything in it must have happened more-or-less as described. Harrison quickly disillusioned me of this idea.

Benjamin Wesley: The description on Bandcamp says that your album is about the 2006 graduating class of Coeur D'Alene High School.

Harrison Lemke: It's not really a correct French pronunciation, but that's what people say.

BW (hesitantly): Are you part of the 2006 graduating class of Coeur D'Alene High School?

HL: No.

BW: So how did you come across that concept?

HL: I write fiction, essentially. I wanted to take something that was familiar but had just enough distance for it to be an imaginative exercise and not writing about specific people who I know.

So I lived there, but that's not the high school I went to, and that's not the year I graduated high school either. But it's close enough for the necessary effect, in terms of having the right generational context. It's close, but far enough off that it's purely an exercise in imagination. ... Some of it is stuff that is real, but the names are changed — but some of it is just things I made up. I'm sure it's all happened to somebody.

On spirituality in his songs

Lemke is Roman Catholic, and his songs often have overtly religious themes — such as his album Fertile Crescent Blues, which retells nine stories from the Biblical Genesis from a first-person perspective. Forever Only Idaho displays a less markedly Christian influence, despite a singular reference to "blood flowing from Christ's own side." I asked Harrison to address this perceived change.

HL: I've written what you would call devotional material before. And it's not the only thing that I'm interested in writing, but I don't necessarily see clean separations between these things. There's music that exists for a liturgical context, and essentially nothing I do is within that realm. It's all just writing about subject matter that concerns me in one way or another. I wouldn't say that this album is any more or less spiritual in nature than anything else I've written. It's perhaps more approachable from outside that context. ... I think the struggle of the characters in the songs are the same struggles, in a way, as the characters in any of my other songs, up to and including myself.

BW: I was thinking of asking if there are any songs, or characters, that is identified more strongly with you.

HL: It can't really be denied that all of the characters have some relationship to me. ... The mere fact that someone is writing something, says something about them. With writing fiction, it's maybe more obscure what that might be. But in a way, it can actually go deeper. Because it can be personal in ways that I myself am not even aware of as I'm writing it. Whereas when someone is writing to express themselves, they are inevitably self-conscious.

On collaboration and the new sound of Forever Only Idaho

BW: You have kept your traditional "Harrison Lemke sound" on Forever Only Idaho, but you obviously have a lot more pronounced rock elements. Was that something you knew was going to be there from the inception of the idea? Or is that something that came about more gradually, maybe later in the process?

HL: Well, these songs were written over quite a long period of time. ... And so it was not, at the inception, something I was intending to do. But I've always wanted to work in that way: having more complex arrangements. And a lot of times the things that have held me back are not having other people to work with, not having spaces to record in, things like that.

And so it was really just that I had the opportunity in that I made some friends in Steubenville. When I say I made some friends, I mean they invited me to play a concert there in 2017. I didn't know who they were, and I went up there to play because they offered to pay for my travel expenses, and I became friends with a number of people there as a result of that. They have a band called Dear Other. My friend Marc who played the drums on the album is someone who has a lot of energy for things like coordinating groups of people to make things happen, which is really not my talent. And so it gradually came to seem realistic that we could record an album together. I was up there for a couple weeks recording with them. We didn't finish the album or anything, but most of the full band-sounding things were recorded together like that. Later I had to fake some of it with drum machines and things like that to make it all fit together.

On releasing music under other names

While Forever Only Idaho and Harrison's other folk-sounding music has been released under his own name, Harrison has dabbled in other genres, releasing albums of electronic music as both "Brother Android" and "Dragon Warrior." I asked Harrison why he chooses to release these "projects," as he called them, under different names.

HL: The separation between the projects is a separation of genre, I guess. The other stuff I've done is instrumental. People typically don't like it when they have no clue what to expect from a release from an artist that they're familiar with, I find. So the separations are helpful in that way: if I'm releasing something under my own name, it's focused on songwriting in a way that these other projects aren't. But the other thing is that I think there's something freeing about having a project that released under an assumed name and having this idea of a band or project that has some kind of ethos you're pursuing.

... Even when it comes to stuff released under my own name, there eventually comes to be something a little bit limiting about this at the same time as there's some freedom in it. Because there's stuff that people come to expect of you when you do a certain amount of work, and you can play into those expectations without really even realizing it. So making up a new project is a great way to say, well, this is a blank slate as far as what the artistic goals that I'm pursuing are. So that's why that keeps happening even though it's quite quixotic to be a guy who nobody listens to, who then has multiple projects that also no one listens to.

On the influence of the Mountain Goats

BW: You got the Twitter endorsement from the Mountain Goats himself. And I believe you said that their work was an influence on you, at least something that might have been an early guiding light.

HL: When I was in college, I started listening to the album All Hail West Texas, and it was revelatory to me in that — first of all, it came along at the right time. It came along at a time when I was starting to really feel this pull to write songs with lyrics in them. And it was something that I latched onto as someone who was writing songs in a way that intuitively made sense to me. I think there's a simplicity to those songs that make them seem like — you hear them and you're like, Oh, maybe I could do this. Maybe not everyone's like that, but I heard them and I was like, this doesn't seem out-of-reach. Especially on the early albums, it's just such simplicity in terms of, it's just a guitar and a voice.

But also there's a mixture of strong interiority, a very strong emotion ... whatever situation the character is in is very strongly conveyed, but then they're set in very concrete circumstances. So there's this sense that you're only seeing a scene. It's not really a story, but you have kind of a context around this character. And you have their internal landscape and their external landscape, that mirror each other or are in dialogue in some way. It's a very powerful setup for writing simple and effective songs, I think, and that's what I took from his songwriting.

I still listen to a lot of his early stuff when I'm really feeling like I've overcomplicated it and I've forgotten how to write something really simple. But his more recent albums are really good examples of more complex songwriting, which is more what I aspire to when I'm pushing myself.

"I don't trust anyone who talks like any president."

BW: I laugh at the line [in "Burn Down the Title Loan"] that says "they're always talking like the president". I wonder if that's a bit of an outdated line based on when the song was written.

HL: Well, I thought about that. I wrote that song last year. And I was like, I know there's quite a good chance that the president we have will no longer be president when this song sees the light of day. Anything like that, whether Trump got reelected last year or not, eventually he would no longer be the president. But I think it's a sort of multivalent line. I mean, I don't trust anyone who talks like any president.

BW: I just remembered, the Bandcamp description might have said specifically that it's about the class of 2006 in 2018.

HL: That's right. That is the context. Partly, those numbers were chosen because it's, like, I want these people to be the same age as me but set in a specific time in the past that is knowable.

On the album art and the prose poem in the liner notes

BW: I just got my copy of your CD in the mail yesterday, so I'm excited to finally have that and to read — I think you described it as free verse poetry?

HL: A prose poem. That's sort of what liner notes are, at least in my mind: that kind of old-school 1960s style of liner notes where someone just writes a weird piece of prose, that's always been appealing to me.

BW: Did you type [the liner notes] out on an actual typewriter?

HL: No. I spent a very long time adjusting the kerning of individual letters to create the illusion. I don't have a typewriter.

... I was looking at these old postcards that I had used for the cover art, and the text on the back is set irregularly because they're from the 60s or 50s. And I was originally going to use the font that's on the back of those, and then I realized that Sufjan Stevens did the exact same thing on his Michigan album. I was like, This font feels familiar somehow. So I went and looked, and not only did he use the font, but he manually messed with the letter spacing to make it have that same appearance! He beat me, but that's OK.

BW: You've also done some other pieces of collage art, is that right?

HL: That's right.

BW: How much of your artistic life does that take up?

HL: It's sort of a diversion from other things most of the time. I've done some commissioned work, and it is important to me; but I think I value having a few different media that I work in, because it's easy to get burnt out on a single thing. When I'm not working on music, for example, I still feel the desire to work on something, but I do get burnt out on any individual thing fairly regularly. I wanted to make art for my albums, so I tried it out and found that I actually really liked doing it.

BW: What did you use to write out the letters on the front [of the album]?

HL: I used a calligraphy pen, but I used digital editing to invert the colors and make it transparent. It's not as cool as it might seem.

"there aren't any songs that I consider to be me giving less than my best"

BW: Is there any one particular song on the album that is your favorite?

HL: I have favorites. But I would say that I'm really happy with this album in a unique way, in that I really think it stays strong all the way through and that there aren't any songs on it that I consider to be me giving less than my best. On any of my other albums, there's some point or other where maybe I compromised or gave less than my best. But I don't really feel that way about this one.

BW: I think I told you already that, for some reason, I've latched onto "Local Business."

HL: That was actually the one that I felt the worst about, mostly because after a while the lyrics stopped having any impact on me, because I wrote them and I've heard them a million times. So I'm left with, well, this song is the most repetitive song on the album musically. But it seems like a lot of people have enjoyed that one.

BW: It is "a bop," as they say.

HL: Thank you.

Forever Only Idaho is streaming on Spotify and Bandcamp, where it is also available for purchase as a CD and digital download.