Few signed singers choose to live out of a van. But Eric Bachmann isn’t the average Saddle-Creek-label, indie boy. In fact, he’s not an indie boy whatsoever. The North Carolina songwriter got his start after getting cut from the baseball team at age 15. “Apparently I was athletic when I was younger, but when I didn’t make the team it was actually kind of a relief,” he said. “You fail at one thing and then you start another, I guess.”
Bachmann has started anew as a musician a couple times in the last decade as well, though few critics would call his late band Archers of Loaf or former solo-project Crooked Fingers failures. Today, the Chapel Hill music school dropout departs on another tour, this time as Eric Bachmann – writer of stripped-down, simple yet beautiful folk songs.
In his most recent album “To the Races,” Bachmann writes melodies that stop time with their calming guitar progressions, light piano accents and playful violin solos played by DeVotchKa’s Tom Hagerman. The honesty apparent in Bachmann’s self-recorded, non-distorted voice complement the colorful images in his lyrics and the puzzling abstractions that accompany them. Bachmann himself, like many artists, is unsure of the “meaning” behind his songs. Trying to define his music and words is somewhat irrelevant, he said.
“You write about what’s important – trying to talk about it seems cheesy or over-sentimental, but the truth is, I just don’t know,” he said. “The mystery of it is half the appeal.”
His lyrics reflect his travels, while his style is rooted in deep American singer-songwriter tradition. In a track called “Man O War” from his latest album he writes, “Set adrift into her swarm-man o war / Caught up in her dangling sting-off the shore / Of a foreign brown sand beach as blue bottles cover you.”
Bachmann spent last summer in Guatemala without his guitar.
“I was burnt out,” he said. “I’d been playing since I was 13.”
He studied Spanish while abroad and stressed his personal admiration for other languages. Bachmann, however, doesn’t try to make his worldly endeavors a romantic glamour.
“Going to Guatemala isn’t pretty; it’s actually kind of depressing if you’re politically aware,” Bachmann said.
Though he’s written a song in Spanish and admires the rhythmic beauty and inherent rhyme of romance languages, Bachmann will stick to English for most his lyrics. After all, he’s a child of North Carolina. His native tongue can best translate his life experiences, he said.
Bachmann listens to Latino-inspired, guitar-based music and admits he hasn’t heard much new music, including the work of more famous indie-rock artists like Bright Eyes or The Faint on Saddle Creek Records.
“I just discovered a lot of old Mexican singers like Tomás Méndez Sosa,” he said.
The late composer wrote Mexican folk and ranchera music.
Bachmann did mention he’s friends with Neko Case, the female alt-country star for whom he’s opening on the West Coast tour, and a fan of her music.
So where is home for Eric Bachmann? Is it Greensborough, N.C., where he was born, Seattle, where he found success in Crooked Fingers or Denver, where he resides now? Bachmann is somewhat of a wanderer but acknowledges how his birthplace, the South, influences his style.
“You can’t really leave it,” he said, though he physically left for quite some time.
At one point Bachmann lived out of his van between tours. He wrote songs and took some showers at local YMCAs.
“It’s not that big of a deal,” Bachmann said. “People think it’s weird, but it’s not that big a deal. I thought I could get a place and spend a lot of money, or just live in my van. I didn’t feel that pathetic, I felt pretty good about it; I viewed it as liberating.”
Once again, Bachmann has left “home” to play at West Coast venues with singer Neko Case. Then, after more than a decade, the singer will take a breath of mountain air as he settles in Denver.
“I have plans to just write,” he said. “I’ve been touring a lot for the last 14 years. I just want to write and write and write and write.”
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