You started playing the fiddle at 3 – was that a family tradition or something that you just picked up?

It was a little of both. My parents were folky, hippie type people, and then their parents loved music. My grandfather played the harmonica at the local campfire singalongs in their town and stuff. So they grew up with music, and then in their 20’s they fell in love with folk music as part of the folk revival in Cambridge. They moved to Vermont in a very conscious way, as did a lot of other people at the time, to continue a folk music tradition.

In terms of musical exposure, did that environment give you a very narrow or very broad view of things?

They were curious about all kinds of stuff, so they played banjo for Appalachian songs, learned New England fiddle tunes, and loved traditional Irish and English folk songs. So I was exposed to little bits of all of that, and then in my own life I was drawn to certain aspects of it myself.

I was wondering how those location-specific traditions managed to propagate in the pre-Internet era.

When they were younger, they had done more listening to field recordings. For them it was really a living tradition, really about them and their friends. They had all learned from older musicians or visited Appalachian people or learned from records, but by the time I was a kid they were mostly just listening to each other’s records, albums from people within our community. Each of those people would listen to older records to get material, but it wasn’t so much about origins as it was the result of our community music-making. I would go to these camps and festivals and go to the tune sessions and play along. It was very much an inter-personal thing, as opposed to studying the style or something.

Did you have any musical contemporaries as a very young child?

I had one very close friend, Thomas Bartlett, who has now grown to be a big part of the indie rock world. He produces albums and plays keyboards for people. He was my best friend starting around that age, like 6 or 7, and he was brilliant. He was a serious classical pianist, but we got obsessed with all of this fiddle music. Having another friend definitely drove it as well, it definitely wasn’t all over the school or anything.

What stands out about a song that makes you want to re-arrange or adapt it?

It’s a very random and personal process. I’m not an expert in traditional Appalachian folk music – the thing that I was drawn to as a kid was actually Irish fiddle tunes, and I am an expert in that. I could sit down and play you a thousand Irish fiddle tunes right now. But I’m not an encyclopedia of ballads or anything, it was just that I had a bit of it in my past from my parents and then really got into it as a teenager when they started re-issuing Dock Boggs and the Harry Smith anthology. My parents sang a lot of those songs, so I had them in my mind, but it’s a very subconscious process. Almost a backwards thing, where on a lot of albums I’ll just start out writing guitar parts and humming melodies and then eventually different folk songs will pop into my head and I’ll realize that it works over a given thing. It’s a very collage-style process, and then maybe a song comes along where I think that’ll be really cool if I just shift this one chord here. For me, it starts more from oh, I’d love to make a song with this or that person, a musician not from that tradition, and we’ll get some guitar parts going. The material itself can come later.

Would you characterize your musical role as more documentarian or re-interpretive?

It’s more that I don’t really think about that at all. For me, the assumption that every album you listen to is people singing songs that they wrote is a totally arbitrary idea. I listen to fiddle records where the fiddler didn’t write any of what they’re playing, and yet it’s so profound without even being changed that much. I listen to jazz records by Sonny Rollins, one of the great auteurs of all time, and yet the album is all jazz standards. He’s playing Broadway tunes on the saxophone and completely re-inventing them. I might listen to a Bonnie Raitt record, where she has songwriters and yet the whole product feels completely personal to her. Or a rap album, where the rapper is rapping his words but the beat’s a remix of a James Brown song. The amount of music that I listen to that’s a person pouring their heart out over their own lyrics is, like, 5%. It’s Joni Mitchell, and that’s it. Bob Dylan’s a genius, but it’s never been for me. Nick Drake’s amazing, but I don’t think of him as a songwriter – it’s just that his voice is beautiful, and those guitar parts that he wrote. And then you’ll listen to Leonard Cohen, right, where he’s writing his own songs and yet the musical content is the same two chords that everybody else had. Not that I’m criticizing it, it’s masterful. But it’s not like it’s some profound originality where he’s coming up with chord progressions that nobody else has ever heard before. To me, that whole conversation about originality or not just isn’t that compelling to me. I love singing, love writing and coming up with different types of music. I love collaborating with people, I love these old stories, and that’s my record.

I suppose that’s the history of any genre that has a standards catalog.

Yeah, exactly. And Bob Dylan created this expectation where you’re supposed to be the person that did the thing. And that’s great if that’s what your thing is – there are people who are great songwriters, and that’s what they’re completely committed to. That’s not really me, but I do sing and I write music. Somebody wrote these songs somewhere, but then when he taught the song to somebody else they cut a verse and added one of their own. And then at the next exchange they forgot a really important verse and could never remember it, so they had to come up with something else to fill in. That’s the folk process. And then who knows what was forgotten before it could be recorded?

What drew you to Iceland? Is there a tangible sense of place to albums that you make here?

It’s very much the environment here – not so much the nature, but the world of Reykjavik and Valgeir and the studio that he’s created and the feeling of being in the darkness if you’re here in the right season. There are definitely elements of that that contributed to those records, but it was also just hugely Valgeir’s own environment that he’s created for music-making – the way that Valgeir thinks about sound, the way that Nico thinks about arrangement, the way that the other musicians that I brought in took to the place.

Are physical spaces of particular creative importance, or is it a mental space? More simply, could you make a record anywhere?

Yeah, you can. It’s important what the space is, but that doesn’t mean that it’s supposed to be everything. One of the things that I liked about Greenhouse Studios, where I did one of the albums that I did here, is that it’s not like a gorgeous woodland thing. It’s a house in the suburbs of Reykjavik. When Nico first told me, ten years ago now, that he was taking me to Iceland to record, I imagine that it would be this rustic cabin with a waterfall, and then we showed up at this random house. Inside, it’s actually really beautiful. But that’s really important to me, because I’ve never been able to work in those studios that are like a cabin in the woods. There’s just this pressure that you need to make some kind of beautiful music to live up to the space. You need to find that balance, you can’t have any pressure to do something great. It has to emerge in an organic way out of the energy in the room.

It’s funny to visit here for the first time, since at this point hearing that a record was recorded in Iceland gives it this whole mythology. It’s not like you’re set up to fail, but it certainly colors your listening.

Absolutely. It’s this totally magical alternate universe to step into, especially when I first came. But at the same time, there’s nothing precious about that space. It’s just ok, here we go.

Speaking of musical worlds, do you view songs as having some essential portion that you have to preserve, or is the listening experience meant to be more referential to the various traditions that you’re engaging?

Again, it’s really not something that I’m thinking about too much either way. The songs are strong, you know? I’m just using them as source material to make something happen with the musicians I’m playing with. Of course, the lyrics are there, so like any song you’re arranging obvious the story has to be told. So you’re keeping an eye on that as a musician, but not as a cultural preserver or something. I have no illusion that I’m making folk music – I make albums that have an element of traditional songwriting. You trust in the room and the people and the sonic environment that you’ve culled together, and your own natural filtering process of whatever you’re drawn to. It’s subconscious, which is great because you never have to worry about your own taste. To me, it’s something I’ve never felt the need to address consciously because it just happens through the process. I’ve always made my albums very quickly, and mostly in one studio. The most recent album, Lily-O, was made in four days, even though none of the musicians had heard any of the source material before coming in. We’d go over the chords, do three takes, and move onto the next one.

With source material coming from your own listening, are you in a perpetual album cycle? As soon as one’s in the books, research for another begins?

Even in the year or two before that, you’re gathering material - it might be totally skeletal, but you have a stray part here, a song idea there. You kind of ferry it along, and then you put the date in place for recording. When it gets close, you see what you’ve got in the garden, what’s growing, and that overlaps between albums. There are always songs that weren’t ready, or were just obviously part of a different feeling that I left for the next one. Every two years I go in, and it’s not like I’ve been working every day for the prior two – I’ve got kids, I’m reading books and shit, just walking around listening to jazz – but in the corner of your mind you’re always just keeping an eye on what’s out there and what’s compelling.

What do you know about an album before you make it?

It’s a really difficult balance – one of the most difficult paradoxes of the recording process is that you don’t know what’s going to happen during the recording process. You don’t know what album is going to emerge. You have your conception of what you want to do, but you’re also aware that that conception is quite vague and might change the moment that you get into the studio and something else is happening. But you have to choose the studio, the engineer, and the producer – you have to work that out beforehand. So one of my difficulties is whether the space you choose is gonna be the right space for what ends up happening, which you absolutely cannot predict in advance. It’s just something that you have to trust, which comes out for better or for worse in different situations. Or maybe it always comes out the way it should, who knows? For me, it’s always much more compelling to work with musicians where you don’t know what they’re going to do, who won’t necessarily obey you, but who you trust at a fundamental level.