Wes Tirey
on sounds of the Midwest and the gift of time
“I don’t chase songs. One just comes into my orbit, and it’s up to me, if my tools are sharp enough, to get down to work.”
On his newest release, The Midwest Book of the Dead, Ohio-born musician and poet Wes Tirey puts his songwriting skills to the test. The record is grounded in Midwestern imagery and textures; Wes sings of bluffs and brambles, stray dogs and crawdads, factories and pool halls. Although released in April of this year, it’s a record that feels very much like a soundtrack to late summer – a time I often associate with a melancholic awareness that autumn is quickly approaching and summer might not have been all it was talked up to be anyways.
The 18-song double album is Wes’s first for Dear Life Records, who released a chapbook of lyrics and prose poetry alongside the record. Both works showcase Wes’s unique abilities to tell you what he means without saying a word and help you hear a beat - a pulse - without picking up an instrument. It’s spacious, nuanced, and thoughtful work, and our conversation feels just the same.
The Midwest Book of the Dead came out this spring right as things started to reopen. Are you looking forward to performing live again?
Overall, my view is a feeling of relief and excitement. It's obviously something that we're going to remember for a long time, but I think there’s this feeling of something new around the corner. I’m looking forward to what the future holds as the world reopens. However, even before COVID, I wasn’t performing a whole lot. I had reached a point personally where I was being selective about the kind of shows I was playing. With things slowly opening back up, I’m just taking it as it comes.
Because you’re not prioritizing performing, do you have a preferred way you want people to interact with your music?
I don't know if I would say I have any preferred way. You know, it’s not really up to me to suggest or decide how people experience some art, whether it's my own art or somebody else's. I guess I'm not personally invested in even thinking about whether a song can be experienced one way or another. If people are hearing my songs, whether they're on an album or in person, I'm lucky to have people experience it, period. I’m thankful for that.
Songs, when you share them, they’re out in the world and people are free to analyze them and think about what they mean. A songwriter doesn’t get much of a prize thinking about what their material means, that shit just happens. I don’t chase songs. One just comes into my orbit, and it’s up to me, if my tools are sharp enough, to get down to work.
When it comes to a muse, has your music always been rooted in this tradition of American country/folk songwriting or have you been experimental?
I think I’ve ventured into different territories. I’ve tried some writing practices, experimented with different song forms.
When it boils down to it, it does come back to this tradition and lineage of American folk song craft. And that’s not a monolithic thing. That includes Hill Country music, Delta blues, Piedmont blues, Americana, and country. Not every song has the same form, but there is a structure to it that can be internalized and felt and understood.
What was your first exposure to American folk songwriting?
My mom loves to talk about how I loved listening to Conway Twitty. That might have been my first exposure to that music. I didn’t grow up in a super musical household, so I was kind of just swimming through whatever I was exposed to. In my late teens, I started getting into what we would call alt-country music. That Americana music was the first genre that I was kind of like, ‘Ok, this is it for me.’ As soon as I started listening to that music, something in myself attached to it.
Were you seeing music live or listening to recordings at that point?
I would listen to whatever I could get my hands on, whether it was downloading shit online, finding forums to see what other people were listening to, going to the library, going to Best Buy, seeing which CD had the coolest looking people on the album cover. Whatever crumb trail I could find, I would follow. I started playing in the Dayton songwriter scene when I was around 17 or 18, so there were folks that were older than me that were doing stuff that I had never heard of before, and I’d learn from them.
Tell me about where you grew up in Ohio.
I grew up 20 minutes outside Dayton, in this small town called Farmersville, Ohio. I moved out when I was 19 and lived in downtown Dayton for a year and a half. Then I moved back home for a little bit, back to Dayon when I was 23, and then moved to Asheville when I was 25.
What is Farmersville like?
Well, if the name doesn't give it away – Farmersville is this very archetypal rural Midwest community with a population of maybe around 1,000 people. There’s a stoplight, a gas station, beauty parlor, meat market, mechanic. It’s quaint and quiet, but also not so isolated from the outside world.
Were you ready to peace out from there when you moved?
Oh yeah. When I moved from Farmersville to Dayton, it felt like I was taking off for the big city. I was young and full of piss and vinegar and thought I could take on the world and had it all figured out. We’re all going to rebel in one way or another. Sometimes we decide when it’s going to happen and sometimes it just happens to us. I didn’t get accepted to the one college I applied for and I was playing in a band, and so I just wanted to write songs, smoke pot, and work at Starbucks.
I'm interested in this concept of a Midwestern identity having grown up with Midwestern parents and spent my adulthood in the Midwest. Being in this part of the country does feel like a very particular thing. Do you think there’s a certain spirit here?
Dayton is only an hour north of Cincinnati, and Cincinnati is just on the other side of the bridge from Kentucky. So I think there are parts of the Midwest that are in this liminal space between the South and the greater Midwest. One of my professors in community college once said that when he moved to Dayton down from Michigan, he didn't realize he was moving to the ‘Deep South.’ Dayton, Ohio has this sensibility where the Bible Belt, the Rust Belt, and the Corn Belt are all colliding into some kind of cloud.
Is there a Midwestern sound?
I don't know if there is any particular Midwest sound, but I think you can hear it in your head. With the Midwest being this amalgamation of genres and cultures and influences, the sound itself is going to be a pretty liminal sound too. There’s a sparseness, minimalism, or bare essentials quality to the Midwest sound, at least in folk music. On the new album, “Red Corn, Yellow Corn,” is a song where it feels like there is some kind of Midwestern sonic palette. Dry. Crisp.
Having been in North Carolina for the past 10 years, how do you relate to it? Do you feel like an outsider?
It’s been a good home. I lived in Black Mountain for 4 years when I first moved down here, 15-20 minutes east of Asheville, and then moved to Asheville proper to be closer to my work, when I was working in town. Asheville is a town full of transplants. It’s almost a more rare experience to meet someone who has grown up here. You meet a lot of people who move from Florida and from Ohio – places where it’s easy to feel like you need to get the fuck out of there, and go someplace else. The only thing about Asheville, like any smaller town, is you can feel like it’s a bubble whether you want it to be or not. You can get a little worn down by the smallness of things, but that probably happens to anybody anywhere.
And you moved to North Carolina for school, correct?
School mostly. My girlfriend and I at the time wanted to move to finish our degrees, wanted to go someplace new, and the Dayton scene was feeling pretty dry, so we chose Asheville. I was initially in the Appalachian studies program at Warren Wilson College and minoring in philosophy. I really didn’t care for the Appalachian studies department, I think I naively thought I would just be able to study folk music and folk art, not realizing that’s something you get to do in a Master’s or PhD program. My philosophy advisor was this life changing and influential figure in my life, and I was really into the philosophy department work I was doing, so I switched my major to philosophy after my first semester there.
Do your philosophy studies show up in your songwriting?
I like to think not. If you don’t want to go into academia professionally, when it comes to the work you’re doing otherwise, you can think about shit too much. And that stuff gets in the way. I try to not be guided by any kind of intellectual idea when it comes to what I’m writing. Songs are not philosophical treatises. They’re not arguments. Songs are exhaltative experiences. Leonard Cohen said a song either affirms the heart or it doesn’t.
You work a dayjob in the coffee industry. Does having a dayjob affect how you view yourself as a musician?
Songwriting or being in the coffee industry, neither of those things make up a sense of identity for me. I talked a bit with Lara at Petal Motel about this, as well. As a country, do we treat working artists like shit? Yeah, that’s not the way I think it should be. Musicians who are trying to keep a roof over their heads while also managing addictions, mental health struggles, and economic situations without any infrastructure has been a problem for a long time.
But I do think there’s something to be said for artists who do work a job and what that job can provide for them creatively. If you’re not connecting with people in some kind of way, your head is going to be up your ass and you’re going to make art that sounds that way, so there is a reward for interacting with people and feeling inspired by human interaction. Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury working as a nightwatchman. Sherwood Anderson wrote Winesburg, Ohio while working for an ad agency. There’s some kind of reward there I’m convinced.
Tell me more about the chapbook you printed with your new album.
The lyrics are what anchor the songs. That’s where the content is, that’s where the stories are. If I can present them, then I always do. Some of those prose poems have been sitting around for awhile, some of them were pretty fresh. I just wanted to be able to share those in a chapbook because I thought they were relevant to the larger project.
Have you ever had prose poetry turn into lyrics to a song or vice versa?
In prose poetry, there is a pace and a rhythm and a mood. It’s not the same as songwriting, which for me, has a form that the songs take shape in. I’m an old-school formalist when it comes to songs – I want there to be a rhyme scheme, those kinds of things. Also, you’re singing it and thinking about delivery and cadence. It’s not easy to do, in my experience, with something that is as freeform as prose poetry. That is the kind of writing where I am not restricted by any kind of form. I think about how it might be presented. A prose poem might start as one big block of text and then get broken out into two or three separate paragraphs.
I’ve done some songwriting exercises with some free association that starts in more prose form, and it gets slowly broken down over the course of a night or two. Things will start to reveal themselves. But songs and prose usually happen in different ways at different times. If something comes to me as a prose block, that’s usually what it stays as.
How did The Midwest Book of the Dead come together?
I had recorded the first half of the album during the end of 2019, and I had toyed around with putting that out as its own collection of songs. But then I had started writing a lot of the songs that ended up making up the rest of the album over the course of quarantine. When I was talking with Dear Life about doing something together, we talked about putting it out as one large project.
I like how it turned out that way. A lot of my previous albums were more predetermined. I knew exactly what kind of songs were going to be on there. With this, I let go of that side of myself, and it felt good to build something organically from the ground up and to see what kind of narrative can be shaped. It’s cool to get a song down and sit back and be like, ‘What can we do with this?’ and do a guitar part on the fly and see if it fits or not. Looking back, what I like about what happened with The Midwest Book of the Dead, is there are a lot of different characters. There’s not just one voice or leading character or narrator. There’s multiple people coming in and out of a song, and it feels like a collection of short stories.
Are you working on any new recordings at the moment?
I’m going with the flow right now. If I needed to, I could go into the studio, but I feel like I learned something with the most recent album, and I’m trying to keep that in mind in the future.
What is that ‘something’ that you learned?
Time can be a motherfucker, but it can be a really good friend too. I like resting with stuff, letting songs settle, season themselves, and then coming back to them and seeing how they feel. There’s something really valuable with taking your time and letting things breathe.
Wes Tirey’s music and chapbook can be purchased on Wes’s Bandcamp, westirey.bandcamp.com. Header photo by Bow Smith.
Pantry Staples
The Midwest
Wes Tirey shares some of his favorite books, music, and TV from or about the American heartland.
