On October 11th at Chicago's Double Door night club, an enthusiastic audience gave Marshall Crenshaw that rarest of gifts: a genuine encore.

Having already been told that Crenshaw had rehearsed no more material, and despite a puzzled roadie wandering the stage, unsure whether he ought to gather the equipment, the crowd cheered and stomped and hollered and whistled until a delighted Crenshaw and his band returned to the stage a second time. They brought the show to a perfect close with "Louie Louie," the greatest garage band song ever written. His audience knows Crenshaw loves throwing odd covers into his set, and it also knows he doesn't play "Love's Theme" or "Knowing Me Knowing You" to be cute. You may grin as Crenshaw chops out those opening three chords (so familiar they're in our DNA by now), but the smile comes from realizing that "Louie Louie," even after you've heard it 108,000 times, is still a great song, and that it will always be a great song as long as there's someone with the right mix of humor and good faith to play it. Crenshaw has it, and that combined with considerable songwriting prowess and a killer ear for hooks makes him one of America's most valuable--and underrated--musical artists.

Pop-Culture-Corn met with Crenshaw on the morning after his Chicago appearance to talk about his new album, #447, his songwriting methods, and the value of acting your age.

Let's start with the title "#447." You've said this is kind of like a sarcastic joke about the fact that you've made so much music, and I just wondered if you could elaborate on that--

A good-natured joke.

It's not like "God, I can't believe I've been doing this this long?"

No, not at all.

Are you surprised it's lasted this long, your recording career?

Surprised? No, not really. I still really like making records; I guess it's my life's work. At least it has been so far. Because before I ever did it I was preoccupied with the idea of doing it, and so I think I'll just keep doing it until, you know, when and if it becomes impossible for some reason, but that time just hasn't really come yet. A couple times I've waited long periods of time between records, but I always end up getting inspired to do it again.

Does the wait come from other projects, or just lack of--

It really varies. One time I spent a year working on a book project, and then part of the following year just sort of hanging out with my wife because she had some health problems. Different things.

Now you recently wrote some music for a tv documentary [Deja Vu All Over Again, about the life of Yogi Berra], some of which is on the album. Did that feel like a new thing, or was it just what you do anyway, only on TV instead of on an album?

No, it was really cool...I really like writing instrumental music, you know? I feel like right now it's almost a more pure kind of expression, as opposed to songwriting. It's nice to be able to let the melodies stand on their own, without a bunch of verbal information attached to them.

And without having to attach a meaning to it, necessarily.

Yeah. Melodies come real easy to me, song structures and musical atmospheres or whatever, I could do those non-stop. The thing with songwriting is I have to go about the lyric-writing in a real painstaking way, make sure that every syllable--or try to make sure that every syllable--serves the melody. And at the same time, you're tethering the thing down to one specific idea; you're limiting it in a person's imagination as to what it can be. I like doing that, but also it's really cool to be able to put your mind in a certain place and try to conjure up something musically that fits a scene in a film. It's cool; I've been doing more of it over the past few months and I find I'm surprised by some of the things I've come up with, and that's what it's all about; hopefully you surprise yourself once in a while.

Do you have an urge to do something orchestral, something big, instrumentally?

Right now, I don't have the chops to write anything for an orchestra, and I don't know that I ever will. But I do have a real taste for writing instrumental music, I hope to get more and more into it. I got another scoring assignment for later this year for a Disney film; it's a project for Disney television animation. I'm not supposed to say what the title is, though; they're very hardcore about that stuff, but it's something that's going to come out in mid-2001. And right now I'm writing a handful of songs for that film, and after that, I'm actually gonna score the thing, which is really cool. [grins] I feel that's dignified work for a guy my age.

You kind of went for a quote-unquote "low-fi" approach for recording [the album], with tube amps, mellotrons--

Yeah, I wouldn't call it low-fi, it wasn't really...

What would you call your approach, if you had to call it something?

I just wanted it to sound cool. I think tubes are really versatile, you can create this really good distortion with them, and also they can sound really classy and expensive. They're just really cool to have. I don't know, I always wanted my stuff to sound like it was recorded maybe in 1957, or 1965, or last week, like you weren't really sure which, you know? That's always been my goal, and this time around I got right on it, I mean I really dig the way the record feels and the way it sounds.

There's a real warmth to it.

Yeah, the bass is really nice, it's mostly acoustic bass, like only about four tunes on it have electric bass. And the rest is all stand-up.

Were you playing that or did you have someone else playing the bass?

There's a lot of other musicians on the record besides me. I got a lot of really great performances from different people. Yeah, the record's cool, you know, rhythmically it's really nice, it all feels really good, and sonically I think it's really great.

Speaking of that, I wanted to ask about the mellotron, 'cause when I heard you were using one on this record, I immediately think psychedelia, but the way you use it it's not like that, it's very subtle; it's not a weird thing you put out there so it sounds weird.

I guess, yeah; I mean, there's only two songs that have mellotron on it, but it is a really quirky and off-the-wall kind of a sound. And it's a funny contraption too, like these days most of the ones you run into are really decrepit and beat up--

They're all original, right? They don't make them anymore?

No, they don't make them anymore, and it's a mechanical device with tape heads with strips of recording tape inside, and the heads kind of travel. Anyway, they always do funny things when you use them, and I remember I was in a studio a couple years ago trying to get a sound out of a mellotron, and it was just acting crazy, and one of the assistants said "Look inside; maybe the hamster died." Yeah, they're cool.

Do you write constantly, or do you sit down and say, "It's time to work on the next album," and write a bunch of stuff at once?

No, I don't write constantly; sometimes you've got to stop, I think. I don't think I could write constantly.

Do you get melodies in your head, and think "Oh my god, I've got to save that, I've got to put that down"?

Once in a while I do, but mainly when I come up with something it's because I'm sitting down and it's time to work. That's mainly it. It's really good if you can be completely isolated, undistrubed. I actually try not to think about songs and songwriting when I'm not sitting down and working, because it can just take over your thoughts so much, and if you're actually trying to interact with people it becomes really difficult. I do have that problem sometimes, where I just will be thinking about something musical and I'm just oblivious to what's going on around me and what people are saying. That gets a little awkward at home sometimes, so I really try to do the work when it's time to do the work, you know, just live my life in a purposeful way, do the work when it's time to work, save it for then.

Elvis Costello told this story, he had this idea for a melody, and in order not to forget it he was going down the street with his fingers in his ears singing it to himself so he wouldn't be distracted. So I guess you don't have a story like that?

No, you know what? I do, come to think of it; there's a song on the album called "Tell Me All About It," and the whole melody for that thing just hit me one day when I was driving down the New York State thruway. I mean, I had the whole thing by the time I'd gone forty miles, and what I did was I pulled off at an exit and I called my answering machine at home and sang the thing into my answering machine. That's the only time I've ever done that.

Now you make demos, I know. How much of the arrangement gets done on the demo, and how much do you leave for the studio and the other musicians?

The way I work now, I do everything on my own time; there's not really any studio time until towards the end. So the demos really now are the record. I don't make demos anymore; I used to, when I was recording for Warner Brothers. There would always be a thing where you'd prepare, you'd do pre-production, you'd write or whatever, then you'd go and do the album. So that was when I used to make demos. Now I just try to make the demos the record, make 'em sound like a record. And that means that sometimes they evolve over time, like "Television Light," I think the version on the record is maybe the third version that I finished.

The third version in the studio that you completed?

Well, I wrote the song about two and a half years ago for this little film called Pants on Fire, and I finished a version then that had different fiddle parts on it, and a different bass, different things like that. I guess this is only the second one. But anyway, it's not so much demos anymore, it's just record.

It's not something you need to do in order to remember the song, before you get to actually cut it in the studio?

Oh, those kind of things, yeah. Yeah, I always put stuff down when I'm working on it, but that's usually just me with a drum machine and a guitar.

You wrote several of the songs on this album with collaborators. I'm wondering what you look for in a collaborator, what they give you that you don't feel you can do adequately yourself?

The guys I collaborated with mostly are lyric writers. Well, let me back up from that a little bit: there's two songs that I collaborated on where we did the whole thing top to bottom in a collaborative way, like I wrote the music with them, the lyrics, et cetera. And then the one I did with Richard Julian ["Tell Me All About It"], he gave me a couple drafts of lyrics, and I sort of edited it, added to it and stuff like that. Same thing with Bill Demaine on "Truly Madly Deeply." In those two cases, those guys mainly were the motivators; they were the ones who laid it out lyrically. There's one line in "Tell Me All About It," Richard Julian came up with this line about, you know, "people can hide things up their sleeve even when naked." I couldn't have come up with that myself, I don't think. I think that's pretty funny, and I just thought, man, when he read it to me over the phone I just thought, "Well, now we've got a song."

Can you tell me about the first song you ever wrote?

Ooh. Let's see...I didn't really get seriously into songwriting until I was about 26 years old.

You were just listening up 'til then?

I just would do it sporadically, and just occasionally. I wasn't too careful about it either. [laughs] But I'm not really sure, honestly, what the first song was that I ever wrote. When I first got to New York I was working on this one on my first album, called "Girls... ." [laughs] It just kept running through my head as I was making the rounds in New York when I first got there, I was really dazzled by the city.

Midwestern boy in the Big Apple? [Crenshaw grew up in Michigan.]

Yeah, yeah, and just the energy of the city and everything, it just knocked my socks off, I fell in love with the place day one. And of course, one of the first things you notice about New York is that there're just beautiful women everywhere you turn, coming at you from all directions, you know? So it was really just like a collection of impressions of that first little spell in New York.

You seem to avoid "social," "political" commentary, and that's kind of a clumsy way of saying it, I know, but your lyrics and your subject matter tends to be of a specific kind, kind of a human drama sort of subject matter. I wondered how deliberate that was.

There does seem to be this sort of ... [pauses] I don't really get much into specific social commentary, hardly at all, even if I am writing and I have some kind of specific issue in my head, I usually dance around it rather than just coming right out and saying what I'm writing about; I'm not sure why I do that. [laughs] It's kind of the way I am. I'm not really gonna be spilling my guts too much in my songs. For instance, I wrote one song called "Somewhere Down the Line" back in 1991 [on Life's Too Short] and it was really about my wife and I, we tried to have a child for ages and ages. We have two kids now, but we went through a lot of psychodrama and heartache over not having any kids. But the only way you'll know that that's what the song was about is if you are me or her. I don't really spell it out, but that's what I do. If I'm writing about something like that, that's really personal, I like to get it out, but I don't necessarily want to beat someone over the head.

It can overload a song, I guess...

Yeah, if you make it more general, more people can get into it I guess, or not. Maybe I'm wrong about that. Another song on my previous album, Miracle of Science, there's one called "Laughter," and it's about when my wife and I lived in New York in the mid-80s, we had this circle of friends around us and there was this group of guys who were like her protectors; whenever I'd go out of town, and back then I was almost always on the road, I always knew she was safe because she had these, like, big brothers who were her pals and shit, and they were gay men, you know. And by the end of the decade, nearly all of them were dead, from AIDS. "Laughter" is about that, but I never come out and spell it out. I mean, if you know, then you know, you can tell. So once in a while I write songs about specific topics, but I'm not real clear about it sometimes; you sort of have to know in order to know. [laughs] But I'm not sure why I do that. It just has to do with my personality I guess.

I have an idea of what your influences were, and I wonder what influences you've picked up since you've started recording, rather than what led you to record in the first place. If anything.

Well, I have really wide-ranging tastes.

Is there stuff that you kind of, you listen to your records and you think, "Oh, well that's from that jazz record," or whatever? Is there stuff you really recognize?

Yeah, yeah, definitely; on the new album there's a thing called "Eydie's Tune," that was a thing that was in the Yogi Berra documentary, and when I was working on that thing I was working from a cue sheet; there was no script, but there'd be like verbal cues about the music. They wanted something to express melancholy, melancholia, whatever, so when I was writing that I was definitely in a very melancholy frame of mind. I was noodling around with the chord changes of this--I have this record by Carmen McRae, it's like from '57, somewhere thereabouts, and I was trying to figure out the chords to that, and they wound up being the chords that are in the tune "Eydie's Tune."

Is that a jazz record? I'm not familiar with the artist.

Yeah, she's a jazz singer, or was; she passed away like two years ago. There's a certain school of torchy jazz chanteuses from back then, like her and Dakota Staton, June Christy, Sarah Vaughan, you know, a whole crowd of them, and "Eydie's Tune," the title refers to Eydie Gorme, 'cause she was around back then doing that same kind of thing. I like her, I like her stuff from back then. This record called Eydie Gorme Swings the Blues, it's really a good one. The cover's great too: she's sitting in the studio with this dress on, and her hair, it's a really beautiful picture. But my stuff's always been informed by a wide range of influences.

Of the too-many-to-list variety?

Kind of. It's mainly 60s pop and rockabilly, but with all kinds of influences. It's kind of interesting stuff.

Does any of the pop music today interest you, in any of its permutations?

Yeah, yeah, I've always got at least a superficial interest in what's going on in contemporary music. Let's see...I guess if anything from the last few years influenced this record it's the post-rock stuff, like Beck, I really love Odelay. You're not gonna hear that obviously in the stuff but it just, I don't know...most everybody I know is a fan of his. Most every musician I know is a big fan of his.

As far as current songwriters, obviously Beck would be one who you think has got the goods, but is there anyone else who you think is producing work that's up to the standards of the work that led you to start songwriting?

Yeah, I think so, there's certain guys that I'm like repeat customers with. I always get a Tom Waits record, usually buy Iggy Pop's records; I have the new one, I haven't played it yet. Avenue B, it's called, I just bought it the other day. I like Lucinda Williams. There's really lots of good ones. I'm bad at sort of...what was that thing by TLC, "No Scrubs"? That was a great song. You ever hear that one?

I don't know if I have.

Aw man, that's a great record. There's lots of good stuff.

Lots of people tend to disparage current music and what's going on...

Well there is a lot of shit out there that I don't like at all, but there's just as much that I could get with.

I guess we can wrap this up with: where do you expect your career to go from this point? We talked about the scoring project for the film...

Yeah, I definitely want to do more of that kind of work. I don't know, I do really love my record, and I hope that other people will pick up on it. So far the feedback's been really good. It's getting played on the radio in New York a lot, and the people that I really make these things for, like specific people that I know, all really love it, so that's a good thing. I figure probably people in my own age group would be the ones who get it, but maybe...there's a lot of cool stuff going on on the record, so maybe I shouldn't limit it; it's just a good record. I'm proud of it.

I'm not in your age group, but I do find that the things you tend to sing about mean more to me than the things that people my age tend to sing about.

Oh, no kidding?

The things that John Mellancamp is doing now, and Los Lobos, they write songs for adults, with real concerns.

Yeah, I do that; I'm not ashamed of the fact that I'm an older person, now. I mean nobody's gonna get any younger, so you might as well just...I mean, I think our culture is way too youth-oriented. It's not that I hate youth culture, I don't want it to go away, it's fine, but it's just there's no way that you should try to get with it if you're older, if you're my age. Most of it you better just leave it alone, you know? [laughs]