Calling from a long ride on a winter Midwest road, touring in support of his latest When the Devil's Loose, Auguste Arthur Bondy took some time to chat with us here at IYS. Bondy's humility and wisdom - though he'd never call it that - make him instantly agreeable, and an absolutely comfortable and sincere man to talk to. He shared with us his take on creating, changing, and playing music. His frankness and deep, honest voice made the conversation most enjoyable, and revealed much about the way the man interprets and shapes the world around him in his music. Enjoy.

A.A. Bondy: Why hello

Inyourspeakers: How are you?

AAB: I’m fine. Just driving in the rain.

IYS: So, you’re on tour right now. Show in Minneapolis tonight?

AAB: Yep, that’s where we’re headed.

IYS: How’s the Midwest been treating you?

AAB: Uh…Is that where I am? Hah, Uh pretty good. Can’t complain yet. Even though I do, all the time.

IYS: So, where has been your favorite place to play on the tour so far?

AAB: Ashville, North Carolina was really good. I mean a lot of places are really good, but I remember that being a really good night. Where else? I’d really like to be in Florida. It’s still warm down there. I guess I can kiss that goodbye for awhile.

IYS: So what makes a good show for you? What makes it especially enjoyable?

AAB: Well, it can happen in so many different ways. I just don’t know anymore. Some days you do the same thing you did the day before, and some nights you get up there and set yourself on fire and it’s great. Other times you just struggle to stay on the horse, ya know? And I think sometimes that can be good from a watching standpoint, but it’s not always very fun. The worst thing you can feel - and this happens very rarely – is to be up there and not want to be there. But like I said, that’s a pretty rarified situation. There’s just no telling geographically how people are going to react. It just doesn’t make any sense. Sometimes you play in New York and nobody cares, and other times you play and they go nuts. I think it’s just the planets fallin’ on people, or the moon.

IYS: Any dream locations you’d love to tour?

AAB: I’d kinda like to take a crack at getting out of the whole, you know, bar situation. I know some people have done some interesting things. You’re familiar with Daytrotter? They did a barn tour this past year, and I think another one next spring. I've heard of tours of swimming holes and beaches. Stuff like that sounds pretty appealing. People could just bring some beers. There’s even just some cool rooms, abandoned spaces all over the country that you could just drag a PA into for the night. It’d be more like an event. And also, this 21 and up thing is a drag.

IYS: Whoa, yeah. That’d be cool! Anywho, are you bringing out any songs on this tour that haven’t been recorded on either of your albums?

AAB: We haven’t crossed that line yet because we haven’t had a whole lot of time to mess with anything because we’ve been opening for people…pretty much up until now. So hopefully we’ll be able to work some new stuff in. We definitely, when we do have time, come up with stuff that I’m pretty excited about. So we’ll see what happens. There’s some stuff we’d like to tighten the screw bolt down on before we bring it out.

IYS: Nice. So you played a few dates with Elvis Perkins, right? Tell us about that experience.

AAB: Yeah we did. Two and a half weeks with him. It was great. Nick (Elvis Perkins' drummer) played with me last fall. When you’re touring with two bands, those bands can get up on stage with each other here and there. It’s good to have other people in that situation that you’re friends with. I mean I’ve been out and played shows with bands that I didn’t really feel like I had anything in common with, and the music really only takes up an hour or two hours of the day, so the other eighteen hours….well it’s better if they are filled with people making each other laugh, just being weird in the same way.

IYS: Are there any bands, then, that you’d like to play along side that you haven’t had the chance to yet?

AAB: That’s a good question. I don’t know! I haven’t really thought about it. I’m sure there are. Like this guy James Blackshaw? He’s a guitar player, from England. I like Atlas Sound. I like that kid Bradford. I mean these are all weird things. People think I’d want to open for Willie Nelson or something, but you know, Willie Nelson would be cool, but I’d mostly like to get around situations where there’s good people involved, and you can learn something for yourself. Anytime there’s another great band on the bill, it just makes you - from a friendly competition standpoint – want to win.

IYS: Now, in the past several years, your music has changed a lot. How you feel you’ve evolved as a musician?

AAB: Um, well, what I’m doing now is a little bit more honest than what I was doing when I left that last situation. But, beyond that, now I have room to do whatever I feel like doing. If something turns me on in a particular way, I just want to be able to follow that. There’s always people that just want to hang onto your shirt, and they get bummed out if you plug your guitar in and don’t do what they imagine, or what they clung onto you for in the first place. You just want to create a world that people would want to visit, but at the same time you know each time they go there, hopefully they would get something new. I mean, Chuck Berry’s great, but Chuck Berry has only done the Chuck Berry thing forever. There’s people out there like that. But, I don’t really get by like that.

IYS: What do you think inspired that change? What made you head in a different direction?

AAB: Well, I’m not really good at planning things out. I guess I’m much more intuitive now than I am a strategist. You learn over time, and it’s weird how your perception on things change. It’s not like I woke up one day and decided “I wanna now just exist.” It took a lot of time to undo whatever I was doing before. It took a long time to figure out what I was doing wasn’t working well. When I look back on it, it took a lot of hours.

IYS: That kind of intuitiveness comes across very clearly in your music. Any particular influences on your thoughtful kind of sound?

AAB: Yeah, I mean there’s tons. I love so many kinds of different things. It’s hard to point to just one. I mean the big ones are friends, but you probably can’t hear that in anything I’m doing. But I think the most you can learn from somebody else, besides the way they put chords together and stuff like that, is whatever it is that’s unexplained that they are saying to you. That’s the thing that everybody is chasing after: the unknown or unidentifiable thing that makes something what it is. I mean, why can some people sing out of key and it’s great and other people sing out of key and it’s unlistenable? There’s something else behind all that that makes somebody feel real or honest.

IYS: So what’s the songwriting process like for you?

AAB: Oh, just a million different ways. Usually I just tinker with stuff for long periods of time. That’s mostly because I’m just trying to learn new stuff. And then if I do that long enough, and I’m kind of conducting myself in the right way, stuff will just start coming right out.

IYS: Lyrically, When the Devil’s Loose features a lot of depth in subject matter and in imagery. Why the fascination with darkness and such richness in color?

AAB: There are a lot of descriptions of light on the album too, I think. Well, maybe a few. Sean Moeller over at Daytrotter pointed it out one time and I’d never noticed that. I don’t know. Um, people like a beautiful sunny day. It’s nice when there is a beautiful blue sky, but I like clouds and there’s just something about night that doesn’t feel so open. The night sky is just a little more beautiful than your average noon sky. That’s why photographers don’t take photos at noon if they can avoid it. They do it at sunrise and sunset. I can’t tell you why, because I myself do not know. A lot of that stuff comes out, and I don’t ask where it came from. I just move it around ‘til it feels right, and that’s what it ends up being.

IYS: When you begin working on a song, is it influenced by events or things that you see in the world around you? Or are your songs coming independently just out of you?

AAB: That’s where it all comes on. Whether it’s a current event, or some picture you have in your head, which is probably the sum of some other experiences. I mean that’s probably all I can figure out. I don’t think I’m writing about anything I haven’t experienced in some way. I mean, it’s just like anyone who writes fiction. You might come up with a character like Frankenstein, even though nobody has seen a real Frankenstein. It’s full of Mary Shelley’s experiences and how she perceived things to be.

IYS: Why do you play music?

AAB: Why?

IYS: Yeah!

AAB: I don’t know what else to do! Ya know? Why do I record, as opposed to playing and never recording it?

IYS: Sure, that too.

AAB: I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s just something I’ve got to do. There’s certainly been times when I didn’t feel like doing it, and then I had to stop, because that meant I was doing it wrong. You always struggle in the studio, but it shouldn’t be pure struggle. I don’t believe that. There’s other people that believe that it should be really hard and torturous to get something amazing. But I don’t know, I’m selfish to the point where I’d like to enjoy some of it, even to the point where that means I have to loosen some of the requirements.

IYS: How do you like working with the people at Fat Possum Records?

AAB: I like it a lot! I wish I’d always made records there. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a label situation like this. I mean, I know I haven’t. My old band was on Merge, and they were great; just turn your record in and they spit it out. It’s kinda like that, to an extent, but there’s some other things at work that make them unique.

IYS: Alright, well that's all we have for you. Enjoy your show tonight and have a great day.

AAB: Thank ya much, and you too.