Jim Carroll Moves Between Two Worlds
A successful poet, musician and novelist, Jim Carroll, author of The Carroll has recorded with Pearl Jam, hung out with Andy Warhol and dated Patti Smith, Despite having lived a life that would destroy most men, Carroll remains a working Late last year, Carroll simultaneously released Void of Course, and a CDNOW: What made you decide to do an album again now? Jim Carroll: It didn’t start out as a music album, but the new poems I had let I don’t think that a poem is worth itself unless it works on the page. But I do think, So it [Pools of Mercury] started out as a spoken word album, and I had no I’m not going to name names but there’s a guy from this one label that’s been bugging And then there was another guy, the head of this record company, who really wanted me So now I’m gonna be up the creek when I run into these guys, because basically, One thing about publishing your diaries from when you were so young is that your Fifty percent of the stuff in the notebooks was never published or anything, so that “You’re really a writer or a musician 24 hours a Yeah, there’s some great feeling of getting rid of all of this stuff, but like you With the great bonfire of ’79, purge was some instant gratification that lasted a few What was the time span in which these poems were written? I wrote these poems within a very short period of time. They really seem very old to While I was writing them, I was rereading them at readings, so they don’t seem as new How did making this album differ from your earlier ones with the Jim Carroll Band? One of the great things about it is I was learning about the technical aspects of I could have learned so much from Bob Clearmountain. He’s one of the best producers I thought the studio was beyond me. I’m not good with electronics and stuff. But the This girl who was singing with me had this feverish, on-the-money voice that came out “When you’re performing, rock & roll By the third album, I knew what I was doing in the studio. Of course, this time was Do you enjoy performing? When you’re performing, rock & roll has that ecstatic youthful energy that’s in I always liked that. It was when I would start to lose that, because after a while you One or two songs you can bring it back, and when you have a new album and new songs
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