From All Ways: In Conversation with Crooked Fingers’ Eric Bachmann

Whether it be via the seminal punk veterans, Archers of Loaf, under the guise of Crooked Fingers or his own name, over the last 35 years, Eric Bachmann has been one of the most authentic voices. Why? Because he’s always been himself. Never playing up to the attention of any rockstar grandeur, it’s only ever been about the music. It always is for the best bands, and alongside Chapel Hill legends, Polvo, Archers of Loaf were among the most potent voices from the American underground.

Bachmann’s songs are like short stories. The prose, leaping from the page and burning into the soul. Never forced, his songs have always derived from a point of deep consideration and patience. It’s this reason that makes Bachmann one of the most crucial songwriters of our time. 

Earlier this month, I spoke to Bachmann via Zoom about Crooked Fingers’ excellent new LP, Swet Deth. The first under the moniker since 2011’s Breaks in the Armour, talk pivots throughout, from Archers of Loaf to recording under this own name.

Thematically, one can draw a line from one project to the next. Take Human – the opening song from Archers of Loaf’s 2022 comeback release, Reason in Decline – where Bachmann sings, “It’s hard to be human / Only death can set you free.” Death has always lingered in Bachmann’s songs, and from its title to the artwork, on Swet Deth (pronounced as just that), it only intensifies.

“The record [and] all the artwork was done, my son did that cryptic dark drawing… the irony there is that I had a heart attack in October on Halloween. The Swet Deth was my son’s prediction of this fucking thing that just happened!” says Bachmann, who last year suffered a 100 percent blockage in his right coronary artery. “I didn’t die because I was in pretty good shape,” he explains. “I walk all the time, and I developed collaterals, which are natural bypasses, and that saved my heart.”

Still monitored by doctors “like a hawk”, Bachmann says he won’t be touring the album until the issue is resolved. “The problem now is that RCA is blocked, I skip about 8000 beats a day. That’s right at the point where you’re kind of like an ablation or maybe a bypass,” he says.

Listening to Swet Deth without prior knowledge to Bachmann’s current health circumstances, and there are moments that attribute to this. The wistful (I’m Your) Bodisvatta and the sweeping string-laden Hospital (featuring Bachmann’s wife, Liz Durrett) being the most obvious. Or perhaps not where the latter is concerned. “Hospital was when I was in San Diego. I did pass out on a plane, but that wasn’t related to this. That was a panic attack,” he explains. “That song was me being in the hospital and not wanting to die like this… the irony is, is now it’s come full circle with the real, heart attack thing.”

Insomnia and Haunted are also moments where anxiety peaks through the cracks. The latter, featuring Sharon Van Etten, where Bachmann orchestrates his most accessible moment as a recording artist. (It even has a fade out!)

Elsewhere, it’s business as usual. The melodic majesty of opener, Cold Waves (featuring Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan) and For All Ways (featuring The National’s Matt Berninger), songs that lay the foundation for Swet Deth.

Then there’s the sunset swoon of Spray Tan Speed Queen (In a German Car). Featuring Skylar Gudasz, it sees Bachmann having fun, with a song inspired by an encounter following a week-long, three-times-a-day run of shows poolside in a hotel in Las Vegas. “They were just trying to get cool, hip, indie-rock songwriters to play their freaking pool party,” laughs Bachmann. “It was a horrible experience. Nobody cared. Nobody was watching you.”

Bachmann recounts the story, where an SUV pulls up at the traffic lights next to his van while two girls are playing a Kenny Chesney song, with pleasantries between both parties soon exchanged. “It was the sweetest transaction I’d had in five fucking days, so I wrote a love song to her,” he smiles.

Floating in the same orbit, Empty Love and Cheap Thrills (featuring Avery Leigh Draut) and Lena are slightly more shadowy encounters. Reckless abandonment where dark desires overshadow reality. Quintessential Bachmann, as effortless as he’s ever been. And finishing with Steady Now, it rounds out Swet Deth as another Crooked Fingers release destined for the win column.

With Merge reissuing the project’s early works in 2016 and 2018, it steered Bachmann towards releasing Swet Deth under the Crooked Fingers guise. “It could have been my name, but I feel like it was more collaborative,” says Bachmann. “It’s hard to navigate that stuff. There’s a lot to be said for people that keep their name all the way through. Looking back, you should maybe do that. But Archers couldn’t, because that was a band. And then you go solo as a band name, because you don’t want to put your name on a T-shirt,” he laughs. “Any advice I could give to a kid starting out, just be confident. Pick a good name that you can hold on to for the next 50 years.”

Speaking from his home in Athens, Georgia, Bachmann reveals more about Swet Deth, how some of the collaborations materialised, and more.

Renegade Saint: In Conversation with Holy Sons’ Emil Amos

Sun 13: Are you someone who often looks back at your past? For example, the early days of Archers of Loaf?

Eric Bachmann: “I tend to look forward. Those are good memories, though, so I have a positive memory of that. I get depressed if I look back to the glory days, you know? (laughs) I’m still in touch with the Archers guys, so I get what I enjoyed out of that band. I talked to Matt [Gentling] a couple days ago.

“Times change so much. It was such a different time. There was no Internet. It was slower, in a good way, in terms of how you imbibe creative things. The way you take that in was so much more rewarding back then than it is now, because now there’s no ritual to it. It’s just your quick dopamine hit and you’re out.”

S13: Did you ever envisage a solo career or something away from Archers?

EB: “No. In fact, Crooked Fingers was just me, thinking, ‘What am I going to do next?’ Because when the Archers ended, I had no intention of ending. When the Archers started, we thought we would do it for a few years, and I’d have to go back to school or go get a job, you know? We got fortunate, and I felt like I could pull a living out of it. Because I enjoyed doing it, I just kept going.

“I feel kind of embarrassed to admit this, [but] there was no planning in my mind of, where can I take this next? I just did what I did in the moment. That’s changed, obviously, as I’ve gotten older. But from those days, it was a different mentality. I think most young people probably do that. I smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and drank too much back then. Of course, when you’re doing that all the time, you’re just kind of ploughing forward.”

S13: Revisiting your discography, and it feels like White Trash Heroes was the through line into Crooked Fingers. I’m not sure whether that’s something you’ve thought about?

EB: “Totally. That’s an accurate assessment. That record is the sound of us breaking up, essentially. Not because of animosity towards each other. Just because we didn’t feel inspired as a group of people working together as much. I love those people, and I liked working with them on the last record [2022’s Reason in Decline], so it wasn’t anything like that. We had just gone through so much of the industry stuff, and we had become so jaded by our experience with the label we weren’t that happy with. And then we toured so much. I didn’t have hardly any money to show for it, and all the stuff that bands go through if they don’t plan it. We just weren’t taking it seriously enough at the very beginning. That’s why you choose a band name like Archers of Loaf, which I still like that name (laughs).

“When we made [White Trash Heroes], that was the first record where it was Brian Paulson and me working for a few hours for the first few days, and then Mark would come in by himself. We just weren’t a band at that point. And certainly if we had had an argument – which we didn’t really have because we got along so well – I guarantee you the best songs on White Trash Heroes would have been on the first Crooked Fingers record, because that’s essentially the same songs that I was writing for that. They just weren’t finished in that moment.”

S13: While there’s been some years between your last solo album, No Recover, I feel like you’ve always had a very big work ethic. Do you work on music every day?

EB: “Yeah, I do. I have a nine-year-old boy, and I have a wife, and we have this house, so there’s stuff that distracts you in a benevolent way. It’s almost better for the writing, because you don’t stifle it and overwork it. The way it works now is songs I’ve been working on for three or four years are starting to be finished now. Not because I overworked them, but just because I let them rest. I let them bake in the oven, then I come back to it. You have to allow them to enter your brain. The lyric has to enter your brain effortlessly, so it sounds effortless.

“The work isn’t like grinding over the part of the lyric or the song. The work is waiting for it to hit, so that takes a consistency that you can’t fake it. You have to just be there. You lose so many good ideas because you don’t write it down, or you don’t preserve it on your phone, because I got to go pick up my kid at school! I just forget the idea, and it’s lost forever. Sometimes they’re good ones.”

S13: Do you always have a notepad or something that’s close by?

EB: “I have them everywhere, but I feel like the battle is making sure you’re always in a spot where you can grab the thing when it hits you. That’s the work, not the grinding over a lyric. I used to do that, but that just makes the song sound overworked.”

S13: When you’re writing songs, do you have a feeling whether it’ll land in the Crooked Fingers silo or under your own name?

EB: “That’s a mixed bag. Sometimes I know this is going to be a solo song or mellow song, [and I] put it under my name. Sometimes I know that, and sometimes I’ll think this is more of a band. If it’s a band, I’m either going to call it Crooked Fingers, or if the Archers get back together for some reason, which at this point, it’s probably not likely. But in the early 2020s, we thought about making more music. If it’s more of a rock thing, I’ll put it over there.

“The truth is, I try to do that, but at the last minute, when you’re putting a record together, you might take one of those songs that you intended for another project, and you might steal it, because you need another song and can make it work, arrangement wise, for the other thing. So, you try to put them in different categories, but when the record’s coming out and you’re almost at the finish line, you think, ‘Ah, I’m going to use this one from over here that I wasn’t intending to’. I do that all the time.”

S13: What was the main aspect with the songs on Swet Deth that you wanted to capture?

EB: “I was consumed, lyrically, with just getting older. I’m 55 and I had the thing on the airplane in San Diego. You have a child, and you think about this, leaving them early. I was just consumed with it. I have a ton of relatives that have just passed away. My father died five years ago. Grandparents on both sides have died recently. So, it’s just that we’re at that age, or I’m at that age where people are dying, and lyrically I don’t tend to shy away from that. If that’s happening, I just sort of let it happen.

“I said before about the way I write songs, I don’t really overwork it and just let them be what they are, and you just have a lot of things in the fire. If you have 20 ideas, you get 10 or 12 of them finished. I didn’t intend to write about death, or about the endings of things, whether it be a relationship or a life or whatever it is. It’s just that’s what was there, and I know better than to force it away from that.”

S13: Cold Waves is a relatable tale. Was it one of their first songs that you wrote for the record?

EB: “Yeah, it was. It was one of the more light-hearted, straightforward, not love but relationship, lack of love songs (laughs). It really was an exercise. I was just trying to write something really poppy and catchy, and then I was just going to put it to the side and not do anything with it. But the lyrics got dark enough that I was okay with it. Originally, I had lyrics that were way too cute, so I kept changing it. And then one day, a whole new set of lyrics came more naturally, and I used those, and it worked. To me, that’s one the catchiest song on the record with the most levity, just because it’s sort of fun and angry. In a way, that’s just kind of a typical rock and roll kind of thing, you know?”

S13: The other one is Haunted, which features Sharon Van Etten. It feels like a lost, beautiful ’90s FM pop song with those arrangements…

EB: “I talked with Laura Balance at Merge about this for about an hour. I said, ‘I got 10 songs, but I’m going to record them two ways. I’m going to do them all with a band, organically, in a room, and then I want to take those same 10 songs and do electronic versions of them, and we’ll do a double album’. She was like, ‘What? That’s insane!’

“And so I took that and talked about it for a long time, good ideas, the bad ideas, and finally got to about 30 percent done with a record doing both versions, and it just hit me. That’s something I should have done in my ’30s. I didn’t have the bandwidth to finish this. So, I decided to just scrap all the dual versions, and I did the best version of each one. The one that survived as an electronic song was Haunted.”

S13: Wow…

EB: “I knew I heard Sharon on it, and she’s a friend, but I hadn’t talked to her in a while. I played a show with her way back when she used to work at a club in Murfreesboro, Tennessee that I played at a couple times before she had any musical success. So, I know her a little bit, and I know she’s just an incredibly cool person. Never mind that she’s a phenomenal artist, but I didn’t have the courage to ask her. I didn’t want to bother her. But I got encouraged from other friends that I you should ask her.

“With the way her voice was, I thought, ‘That’s a nice thing when you have this robotic musical thing and you have someone with such a human, expressive voice’. My voice kind of does that, too, so I knew that we could make it work, because when you’re playing it with a band live, it moves a little more. But with an electronic thing like that, I felt like part of the robotic nature of it could work. She was perfect to do it, and she did it.”

S13: From All Ways also has a feature guest in Matt Berninger. How did that materialise?

EB: “He’s the guy that told me not to be afraid to ask Sharon, right? (laughs) He and I don’t go back that far, but we were working on a project with another artist that didn’t quite pan out; at least in that moment it didn’t, it might still in another way, but that’s a different conversation. But he and I were trading songs back and forth. He was making Get Sunk, which came out and is awesome. I was making Swet Deth. He was further along, so he would send me finished things, and I would send him things I was working on. Just to have somebody that you trusted to say, ‘Ah, or yeah, that’s good.’

“I was singing everything, and he had suggested the idea of helping get other people to sing on it. Then it came up that he would sing that low part on From All Ways. He brought up that idea, and I thought, ‘Man, I wanted you to do that, but I was too afraid to ask!’ He said, ‘You can’t do that. You got to ask people, they’ll say yes, and if they don’t, that doesn’t matter!’ So, he did that, and he convinced me to ask Sharon. It was his idea to get Mac [McCaughan] on Cold Waves.

“I had people from Athens, Avery Leigh Draut sings on Empty Love and Cheap Thrills. Skylar Gudasz from Durham is a good friend of mine, and she sang on a couple tracks, so it was pretty collaborative that way. A lot of that was inspired and not inspired by being nudged by Matt.”

S13: I think Empty Love and Cheap Thrills has the best line on the record: “So familiar, the comfort kills ya”. Are you generally restless person?

EB: “I am. That’s a weird song, because I always am reticent to play guitar like that on a record. Because it’s got such a place that’s so South American and I’m not South American, there’s an inauthenticity when you do that. But it doesn’t matter, because you add all these elements to it that are more authentic, so it’s okay. I quite liked that song on the record. I think it’s my wife’s least favourite song because of the sort of samba thing on the guitar. (laughs) I like that lyric, though.”

S13: A lot of people haven’t got the self-awareness to acknowledge the authenticity about it, so in that regard, I think it works well…

EB: “It’s okay. You have to have cojones. Just go for it, and if you fail, you fail. I’ve made so many bad things where people are like, ‘Oh, that’s awesome’. It’s terrible to me, but I don’t say anything (laughs). You just try things. To not try is an artistic crime. You got to push yourself. There are things I made for this record that you’ll never hear because they’ve just failed. But sometimes, you got to finish the thing and then choose.”

S13: I think so many people are drawn to your music because you’re your own person. That’s quite a feat in this modern-day attention economy. How does it feel to be an artist navigating through things like social media. Do you embrace it?

EB: “I don’t embrace it. I’m not a Luddite, so I don’t hate technology. But I do think it’s the negative long-term effects of capitalism. I’m not a communist, but there’s got to be a balance, and this money is eating everything. The real issue is streaming just eating any kind of profit an artist might make from record sales. That forces you to have to tour. I love touring and playing, but right now, I’m kind of fucked, because I can’t tour for a few months, maybe forever. I don’t know what’s going to happen, and if that’s the case, it’s over for me, because you don’t make any money from the record sales.

“So, because of this dynamic of streaming eating the income you might have made from record sales, you have an animosity towards the technology. But if you can tour – I do a lot of house shows – that stuff has massively benefited from the internet. You use social media to get people to come to shows and to let people know you exist. That’s a positive thing. So, it’s not all bad, but in terms of creating content to post, I just don’t have time to do all that and make songs and have any other kind of hobby.

“If you’re writing short stories, or you’re drawing, it’s hard. You don’t want to design a drawing that’s supposed to be a comic to be held in somebody’s hand. It doesn’t translate or manifest the same on an Instagram post. So, there are all these problems with it, but I deal with it because it’s the world that we live in, and I want to keep making a living playing music. In 1990, if you were a band you played. Now, you got to do that and this and this, and it sort of dilutes everything.”

S13: It’s a disposable culture these days.

EB: “Yeah. At the very beginning, the whole way people appreciate any kind of art, we would have put the turntable on and just looked out the window and listened while smoking a cigarette during a bottle of wine, and actually listened to it. Very few people do that now. It’s just not how music is consumed.”

S13: Going back through your discography, are there things you would have done differently?

EB: “Not really, because you’re in the moment and you’re just trying to do it. There are records that I don’t like as much because of the way they were presented. I remember Forfeit / Fortune that I put it out on my own with the help of [my] manager at the time, Ben Dickey. We had all these B-sides, and there were some songs that were good, and so we thought, ‘Let’s just take those B-sides, write a couple more songs and make a full album’.

“Out of the gate, that’s already going to be a disconnected, because you’re making a record that’s not thematic, in terms of time where songs are written – eight years ago, 12 years ago, new songs… you’re trying to make it a cohesive thing. What we should have done was just use the original recordings, not re-recorded what we did, and presented a compilation of B-sides. So, in that lesson, you learn to present shit how it is. That’s really the only one I could think of.

“Some Archers stuff was that way. Where you’re putting out demos – and everybody does this – you’re putting out demos that were never intended to be heard. But people like to hear them, so maybe I shouldn’t be so picky about it. It’s hard to know what to do. It’s not a good idea to regret, because you’re just doing your best in the moment. So, I don’t regret any of it.”

Swet Deth is out via Merge Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.