John: I went to work on the book right away after I got home, and spent several months working on it, thinking the whole time that it was such a different type of writing from songwriting that the one should have no effect on the other.   Color me chagrined to discover that I worked on the book feverishly, having a blast, and then didn't write a new song for over a year. I guess the two things draw from the same well.

Squid: It would've been easy to simply release a compendium of the emails you sent while you were on your walk and call it a day. What sort of framework were you aiming to add to your original writings by expanding on them?

John: The emails I sent home were colored by the times. I was all by myself for many months and understandably lonely, plus I was struggling with several different layers of meaning at the time, so the letters I sent home are uneven and occasionally hysterical.  But more importantly, there were so many things I wanted to delve more deeply into, I didn't think I could cover it all in a 200 page book. I think it has to be 500 pages to fit it all in.

Squid: Sitting in front of a computer is obviously light years away from the fear of being lost, or the pangs of starvation, or the adrenalin of nearly falling off a cliff. Was it a challenge to re-immerse yourself into such an intense experience outside of its' original context and write about it?

John: It's a little brutal. There's the remembering of events, which is easy, and the remembering of "states" which is hard. The adventures can be retold in a fairly straight way: "There I was, hanging from a cliff, the wind was screaming, I dropped my sword into the abyss, etc". It's the other stuff, the constantly feeling lost, the complete newness of what lay over every hill, the feeling of being twenty miles from anywhere and just wanting to say, "that's it, I quit", but having to walk twenty more miles just to find someone to say it to. That stuff is harder to recapture.

Squid: You mentioned earlier that, with respect to this book, you have "a voice that you want to narrate from". Are there tangible elements to that voice that you can describe? How is it different than the voice that exists in the lyrics of The Long Winters?

John:  It's my own voice, which is my speaking voice. The voice I use in writing songs is more poetic, obviously, so I'm at the mercy of the fountain of music. I don't write political songs, or historicalsongs, or even humorous songs, but I love to be funny about history and politics. So my book-writing voice is much more akin to my speaking voice, if I felt like I could speak endlessly about history and architecture and psychology and war without boring the pants off of people.

Squid: Is it possible to extract a highest and a lowest point of your journey? Or do you see it more as a constellation of smaller ups and downs connected by time?  

John: I've said before that I came back from my walk even more confused than when I started, and I say that partly to defuse the expectation that I'm going to claim to have become one with the universe at some point. There were moments I felt like I couldn't go on, of course, and times when I crossed a threshold to a place I didn't know existed, but those were quiet times. There were no angels present, as far as I could tell, and they didn't coincide with the summiting of any literal peaks.   So I resist the impulse to lay out the "five best and worst moments" because those moments are meaningless without living through the eighty days on either side.

Squid: Was it a long struggle to snap out of survivalist mode once you returned to the States? How long did it take you to stop eyeing people suspiciously and gesticulating wildly instead before remembering that you could speak your native tongue once again?

John: Well, it's been five years. I'll let you know.

Squid: Do you think that subsisting on whatever was available permanently changed your relationship with food? I had a friend who did a walking tour of Costa Rica. Upon her return, she said she felt overwhelmed by the volume of choices confronting her in her local supermarket. Do you feel like you have a deeper level of mistrust of our American obsession with consumption, simply because you've experienced life in the diametric opposite?

John: No. I felt that way when I got back from my first few lengthy trips, felt that America was too vulgar and I was ashamed of our great wealth.   But I wasn't just soaking up the local culture past a certain point, I was struggling to make it.  I was in a position of depending for my survival on the kindness of people who were desperately poor, who lived their whole lives that way, and I came to feel that, fundamentally, all is right with the world and everything is in it's proper place.   The differences between American life and life in, say, Romania, are so profound and systemic that the perception of them as unfair or imbalanced is impossible to maintain. People are being exploited everywhere, and yet they are exalted everywhere. It may be a cliché, but it's absolutely true that wealth and abundance are things that insulate us from living honestly. We hide behind our luxury, and everyone in the world wants nothing more than to hide behind the same luxury. But the gifts enjoyed by people who are poor and must band together to survive, the human gifts, are equal to any comfort that money can buy. It's impossible to convince people on any side of this equation of the fundamental truth: that everything is in balance. I came back to America and everything here seemed right and just, because the world seemed incredibly small to me.   

Squid: I guess we need to further extend that question to shelter. Or possibly, the entire hierarchy of needs. I'm willing to bet your walk made going on tour with a band look like a tea party, and that can't be a popular opinion. Do you find yourself at odds with people on that level?

John: I'm deeply at odds with people, not just on what constitutes "suffering", but on the whole concept of justice. The idea of justice, or of human rights, these are a technology that we have invented. Ideas which are easy to say but hard to practice, not found in nature, not fundamentally "true" or given, rooted in religion and in fantasy. We try to export these technologies without fully understanding them, without having perfected them ourselves, still insecure about their meaning or practice. We WANT the world to look a certain way, we want it to be true that men and women are equal, or that the different races can coexist peacefully, or that democracy and freedom are universal concepts that people the world over are mutually seeking. These are ideas we struggle to implement in our own cities, yet we gleefully impose them on our concept of the world as a whole with seemingly no reflection. Being on tour with my band is just a daily process of taking care of business, neither a tea party nor particularly difficult. Taking part in the American democratic conversation, on the other hand, is a giant bore to me now. Whether it's our government supposing they can democratize the Arabs, or the liberal intellectuals asserting that every human desire ultimately constitutes a "right", there seems to be no awareness that the American experiment is unique, novel, unfinished and tenuous, and that the culture of ideas upon which it's founded has all but completely been abandoned.

Squid: Writing is a pretty insular business. Did you have an editing relationship with anyone person, be it an official "Editor" or otherwise?

John: Nah. I've let my sister read it, and a few friends, but finding an editor is like finding a wife. You can't just pick one out of the phone book, and I've been waiting for her to show up across a crowded dance floor.

Squid: At the risk of oversimplifying, do you hope to impart readers with any one particular message? Aside from "Don't Try This At Home", of course.

John: Really, if I had one message it would be DO, absolutely, try this yourself.   Or something like it. There's nothing that's impossible to do. Otherwise, the general message is that life is interesting, the world is smaller than you think, history is fun, and I'm a nut.

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Check out our previous Long Winter reviews:
March 15, 2001 @ SXSW Austin, TX
April 15, 2002 @ Bottom of the Hill



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