He will always be Steve Wynn but doesn’t intend to repeat past achievements.
Steve Wynn maybe 64, but that doesn’t mean he has lost the drive and energy that drove the 21 year old music obsessive to form the Dream Syndicate in 1982, and in doing so not only laid the foundations of his own varied musical career but also for the subsequent genres of indie rock and americana music. While he has continued to manage the Dream Syndicate’s legacy and collaborate with a range of musicians, recently his prime focus has been his autobiography “I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True”. Americana UK’s Martin Johnson caught up with Steve Wynn over Zoom to discuss his new book, and the new solo album, “Make It Right”, which was inspired by the thoughts and emotions generated by writing the autobiography. He explains that the UK tour to promote the book and the record will also be the first time he has played shows that mix narrative, legacy song choices, and a Q&A session, and these shows will be more structured than the normal Steve Wynn solo experience. If anyone ever wondered why the Paisley Underground took root in California the way it did, Steve Wynn shares his view that it was down to a group of music obsessives trying to create the music they loved but wasn’t being played anymore. Finally, he confirms that he would like to bring the Baseball Project to the UK, and while they may get into a few statistics, he explains their songs are really about universal themes.
You chatted with AUK recently about the last Dream Syndicate release and their tour of the UK. Now it is your autobiography “I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True” and a new solo album “Make It Right”, why the high level of activity?
This is what I’ve really been working on for the last several years, the record and the book, but because I have a reasonably sized back catalogue things get reissued and reconfigured and when 
they do I’m always happy to talk about them. I’ve never shied away from my past, but this right now is the new work. I can talk about for example the Dream Syndicate documentary and film and the soundtrack that came from that, with appreciation for all the people who put in such hard work. The guy who made the movie did an amazing job, I look at what he did as a fan of his work, not as a guy crowing about what I did forty years ago, or ten or twenty years ago. When I was talking in interviews about that project I was just trying to get the word out, but this, the book, it’s weird to think about it but I’ve spent a good chunk of my life working on it. I’ve spent ten years working on it, and even for a guy like me, that’s a good chunk of the time I’ve spent on the planet, so I’m around everywhere I can letting people know this thing is coming out.
The same thing for the solo album, because I see the solo album as the same thing as the book, I think they both go really well together and it is almost a weird soundtrack to the book. It is a similar life story, it is a similar type of reflection I was putting into the book, and they feel like they should be talked about together.
What did you learn when you wrote “I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True”?
In some ways, it was easier to write than I thought it would be, and in other ways, it was harder. I’d thought about writing the book for a long time, but the whole idea of writing a book seemed so daunting because of the time I knew it would take to do it, and also, I’d never done it before. I read quite a bit, and it is amazing when you read someone else’s book and there’s a flaw in the logic or structure or the way it was carried out on page 179, as a reader you pick up on it and I was afraid that if I wrote a book I’d fall into the same pitfalls. I always said I’d always wanted to have written a book than to write a book, because if I could say I wrote that I could be proud.
So how do you begin to do it? As it turns out once the pandemic started and we all had to find things to do to fill the time and use our energy somehow, I chose to work on this book. I said if I was doing it I would do it for me, I’m not doing it for an audience or to sell anything, I didn’t even have a publisher so I’m just going to do this and get it done. I’d heard people say if you were going to write a book, write five hundred words a day, or write a thousand words a day, or twenty words, say how many words you are going to write per day and that’s all you have to do, don’t look forward, don’t look in the distance just go there. I decided to try it that way, and the words flowed, I ended up writing about three thousand words a day, I was enjoying it and it came so easily. So, the worrying about it was difficult, but the actual writing of it was fairly easy, and then once I had a publisher and I knew it was coming out, the editing was the hardest part because then I was suddenly looking at every page, and every time I looked at any page I’d see something different about me, something I had to change. Something I’d missed out, a flaw in the logic flow in my own head, things like that. That was the most time-intensive part of the whole thing, getting it all tidied up to be released, and I think it came out really well.
How easy was it to be sure of some of the details from so long ago?
I had two things in my favour when I wrote the book, one, I’m a really fast typist and that helped me write without worrying too much, just keep it going and write as fast as my fingers can type, and two, I’ve got a really good memory, I remember a lot of what went down, and maybe I won’t in ten years so I figured this is a good time to get it all down. As I was getting near to the finish line I sent it out to people who were there, I sent a copy to Dennis Duck the drummer from the Dream Syndicate, I sent a copy to Vicki Peterson from the Bangles, I sent Peter Buck a copy, and I told them to tell me if I’d got anything wrong. Dennis found a few things and questioned a few things, but mainly everyone was just like, yeah don’t know how you remembered this stuff but it seems OK to us.
The one person who caught a lot of things was Ira Kaplan, I actually went to Ira looking for a blurb for the book and Ira dove in. He used to be a copy editor, so he had a lot of thoughts on it and he really helped me a lot in the eleventh hour to find certain factual errors. One example is that I addressed what the Dream Syndicate was doing in the early ‘80s and somehow related it to the phrase indie rock, and Ira said indie rock didn’t exist back then as a term. I thought, oh my God you’re right, we are so used to saying that, and it is so much of what we were literally, I wanted to drop that phrase. So, he caught things like that, he was very helpful with some things I’d have been embarrassed about later on.
The new record isn’t really autobiographical, is it?
Not in terms of here’s a song about what I literally did when I was twelve. The songs aren’t literally that, but they are all very personal and they are more emotional than the ones in the book. They 
are about things like regret, and looking back and wishing you’d done things differently, or they are about being steadfastly determined to make things better in some way. Most of the songs are about in some way reckoning with the past, and a plan for the future, and I think that came from the fact that I was writing the songs as I was writing the book. It wasn’t a literal thing where today I was going to write about this or that, it was, yeah, I’m taking stock of my life, and that’s going to come out when I strum my guitar and put together some words. I didn’t realise that connection until I was finishing the record and I was like, OK, there is a theme to this album, and once I realised that I realised I wasn’t just writing a bunch of songs. You’ve got to bear in mind that while I was writing the book I was writing Dream Syndicate albums, and writing Baseball Project songs and things like that, and those weren’t quite as tied to the book. Given the space just to write Steve Wynn songs, it makes sense that they would be a reflection of the book.
Do you write songs to order i.e. Dream Syndicate songs, or do you write songs and then see where they fit best?
If I’m talking baseball I know which band that’s for. These days I tend to write for a project. When it’s time to make a Dream Syndicate album I write Dream Syndicate songs, the same for the Baseball Project, and now I’m back making solo records they will be for that as well. I did a record a while back called “Crossing Dragon Bridge” that I recorded in Slovenia, with Chris Eckman of the Walkabouts, he lives there. Once I knew I was going to Slovenia, Ljubljana, to work with Chris in his adopted home town, I imagined what it would be like to be there and what the mood might be like while I’m there, I found myself writing songs for Slovenia. I found myself writing a Ljubljana soundtrack in my head because I’d barely spent any time there in my life. I think now I get excited by the thing that is put right in front of me. Next year I’m going to do a record in Italy with some well-known Italian musicians, who are good friends as well, and I’m already thinking about my Italian record. I’m excited because I will write for that scenario, what I know about their styles and what I know about where we’re going to make it. It’s very different from when I started when I just wrote songs all the time for the hell of it, and I think if you spoke to a screenwriter for a movie and you said do you write scenes for a particular movie, or just for the hell of it, I think he’d say yeah, I write scenes for the movie I’m working on. That’s me at this point, I’m writing scenes for a particular movie.
If you were a new artist, how would you describe the 2024 Steve Wynn?
That’s interesting. I’m lucky in that new younger fans come along, and I wonder what they think of what I’m doing, and I don’t quite know. I wonder whether I’m seen as this figure on Mount Rushmore, this ancient mythic site, or whether it is some kind of new connection. I feel like I’m not trading on my past, that’s odd because we are talking about a book about my life, but musically I’m always moving forward, I’m trying new things out and there is a continuity. It’s funny, with this new record I think there are a lot of new styles and sounds on it, new areas for me, it’s not Steve Wynn by the numbers.
Yet, I’ve seen a few reviews, and they still mention Lou Reed, so I guess there are certain things you are not going to get away from. If I was trying to be Paul Simon, David Byrne, or Sting, and trying to take over another culture and said this is who I am now, it is still going to sound like me filtered through that because there’s been a whole lot of new over the last forty years for people to digest. After a certain point, I’ve used all the shades, and I can apply them to different instruments and different genres but it is still going to be me.
What is your view now of the times that helped make you the musician you are? That post-punk scene in California was particularly productive at the time?
If you look at that scene, whether it was just the LA scene or the Paisley Underground, or even the national scene of R.E.M. and the Replacements, most of the people from those scenes are still very active, and for the most part, creatively hungry and looking for new things. I think what set our generation apart from the one that came before us, say the punk rock era, we were fans first. If you look at the bands I play with, the Dream Syndicate, the Baseball Project, and Steve Wynn And The Miracle 3, almost every member of those bands worked in record stores, Jason Victor, Linda Pitmon, Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey, Dennis Duck. We were all record store employees not because we wanted to learn the world of retail, but because we all loved music and wanted to be around it at all times, and we were the ones who knew more about music than you do in a day when that mattered. I think now we all know the same things, give me a break, we are all experts now but in those days it mattered. If you were that into it you were part of a very select group that cared very much about such things. At the time, I think that is why lots of us started bands, all the people I mentioned and other people in our scene, started bands because we weren’t hearing the music we loved on the scenes we were involved in, so we figured we’d do it ourselves.
So, the music we made was a reflection of our enthusiasm, and I don’t think that goes away, hopefully it doesn’t. You still have that enthusiasm for the rest of your life, and it manifests itself in different ways. It’s different for me now, because when I was 21 and feeling that way, I was loving all these different kinds of music that I had no right approximating. I loved John Coltrane and Miles Davis, and I loved Keith Young, and I was going to make my own version of what I think the essence of that music is, but I’m not going to make that music. Then I made “The Universe Inside” with the Dream Syndicate about three years ago, which is maybe my favourite record I’ve ever made, and that was kind of a Miles Davis record and I had the years, the contact list, and the savvy to pull it off. So that’s the big difference now, we are better at what we do and know more about how to do it, and that’s a skill we didn’t have. Do we have the 24 hour a day obsession in the same way, maybe not, but those two things balance out.
What are you hoping to get out of your up and coming UK solo dates?
I don’t know. I’m pulling it together as we speak, and the UK will be my first testing ground for it. It’s not going to be Macbeth, I’m not putting together a theatre piece for the ages, but it is set apart from my usual solo shows in that there will be more storytelling and a little more narrative. It is going to be specific to the time frame in the book. A storytelling thing about growing up in LA, songs I might have written back then, songs I would never play on stage previously, songs from that period of the Dream Syndicate ’82-’88, with a little bit of backstory for whatever I play, and then skipping 35 years and playing songs off the new album that tie into the topics I’m discussing in the book. Hopefully, it will be the kind of show where you can kick back and relax, and be entertained and illuminated in some way for a chunk of time. Hopefully, people will say that’s a good evening out with the family.
I think the book is an excuse for me to try something different with my solo shows because I’ve been doing solo shows forever, since the ‘80s. I’ve always been pretty chatty on stage, and I look at films of Neil Young playing solo acoustic shows back in the early ‘70s, and he’s so great, and he’ll play a song and then kind of mumble for 30 seconds and then play another song. I’ve always been more of a free-associating storytelling kind of solo performer, but it’s always been a more random unscripted thing. This is going to be a chance to do something a little more structured.
Are you going to bring the Baseball Project to the UK?
I’d love to. For various reasons, we have played a couple of shows in Norway, and in Italy as well, and Spain. So, we have been over to Europe and they went well, they were really good. We didn’t go on stage trying to explain baseball, we just played. At the end of the day, the Baseball Project is just a rock & roll, pop band. We’re just a band that plays songs that are not that far removed from what we’ve been doing in R.E.M. or the Minus 5, or the Dream Syndicate, or all the bands from our histories, it all fits into what we do together. A+B+C+D+E equals the Baseball Project, who we are and what we’ve done before adds up to the Baseball Project, but with the added x-factor of playing songs about baseball. When you get down to it, you don’t need to take a quiz to enjoy the music, the baseball songs are all about subjects we’d write about anyway, things that matter in life, about joy, envy, ambition, regret, and pride, when pride takes a fall all those things, that’s all we’re singing about. We just have more statistics now and then than the average pop song. Major League baseball is played every year in London, they play a couple of games, and if they can do it so can we.
At AUK, we like to share music with our readers. What are three of your favourite tracks, albums or artists on your playlists?
I really like the songs on the new Nick Cave album, I’m a lifelong fan and it’s great to see him doing a Bad Seeds type record with that swagger. The guy has obviously had a very hard and profound decade leading up to this, and it feels like he is able to go back to things he did before. I’m loving all that I’m hearing. Psychic Temple, a band from LA who I collaborated with on my new album, their new album is fantastic, it’s just great. It’s a band I’ve always loved quite a bit, and I love what they’re doing now. Chris Forsyth from Philadelphia, a great guitarist, always doing interesting stuff, and he has a new band called Basic, which I think is great.
That’s off the top of my head, there’s always stuff out there that I’m hearing that I go, that’s pretty good. My favourite song of the year is probably ‘Lunch’ by Billie Eilish, so there’s good stuff high and low to be found everywhere. It’s a lusty little song. Sometimes I hear new songs that come out and I think wouldn’t it be interesting to cover that, just to confound people. I thought I’d love to cover that Billie Eilish song, but people said no, a 64 year old man singing that song would be about the creepiest thing of all time, so I will merely appreciate it as a fan.
Finally, do you want to say anything to our UK readers?
So many things, but I’m lucky I’m going to get the chance to say it on stage in September. Everything I want to say, I’ll be saying nightly in London, Bristol, Sheffield, York, Glasgow, Oxford, Manchester, Hassocks, you name it and I’m going to be saying it right from the stage. Come on out, not only am I going to be developing this show from night to night, and I’m going to be doing this thing on stage every night called the Hot Seat. I will have a guest interviewer every night asking me three or four questions, doing a short Q&A in the middle of the show. It might be somebody I know from that city who I have a history with, it might be a fan I pull out of the audience that night because I like the cut of their jib. So, every night I’m going to have a guest Q&A moderator for a few minutes, so we’ll see who it is night to night. I’ve already got some ideas for the UK tour. I always surprise myself first, and then the audience will come next.
Steve Wynn’s “Make It Right” is out now on Fire Records and “I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True” is published by Jawbone Press.
