Interview with a Reatard

Jay Reatard talks about Atlanta, writing songs and his upcoming third full-length, Watch Me Fall.

Photo credit:
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“See Saw” mp3-

“Always Wanting More” mp3-

Jay Reatard plays a free show at Emory Performing Arts Studio, 1804 N. Decatur Rd. 8 p.m. Fri., April 10. On Sat., April 11 Jay Reatard plays at Lenny’s with Gentleman Jesse, GG King and the Stolen Hearts. 9 p.m. $10. 486 Decatur St. 404-577-7721.-

Chad Radford: Your MySpace headline says &-;New record almost finished.” Do you have a name for it yet?-

Jay Reatard: Yeah, it’s Watch Me Fall. Pretty positive title ... unless I change my mind in the next three days, that’s what it’s going to be called.-

Is the line-up on the record the same one that you’ve been working with for a while?-

Yeah, on the recording itself the majority of the songs are just acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass and drums. And then on a few other songs there is Farfisa and a little bit of piano and on two other songs there’s some cello and a couple mandolin parts. I’m not really going into like R.E.M. and &-;Losing My Religion” territory just yet, but I wanted to use some different kind of non typical rock instruments in the context of a rock song.-

Is it going to be in the same kind of tone as Blood Visions?-

No, it’s a drastically different record. On the surface it might appear really different. The content of the songs and the general aesthetics of the songs are the same, but the way that they are delivered is different. The songs are a lot longer, there are only 12 songs and I didn’t even know it until I threw it on the computer to start sequencing it and I was like ‘wow man, there are quite a few songs on here that are like four minutes long,’ which is twice the length of most of my songs, but there are still a lot of songs on there that are really short. I’d like to say that in theory it’s a punk record but it’s really not. It’s kind of like a dark pop record I think.