GALO: Some of the song structures in the new album Gloryland do not adhere to any typical verse, verse, chorus, verse kind of structure. Do they just come out that way or is that the rebel in you?

KG: [Laughs] I think both are true. I don’t ever really plan for these things to happen; that’s just sort of the way the songs came out. Things like “Colfax/Stepping Out” — the long one came out on its own, even though I was trying to write that song for a few years. When I first started trying to write about that experience, it was an entirely different groove, melody, and refrain, and they all seemed to demand this very dramatic (in a network TV [kind of] way) ending. But I wanted to stay true to the real experience, so I heard a couple of friends of mine, singer/songwriters here in town, Tommy Womack and Peter Cooper — both of whom had a couple of songs that were long narratives in that talking/verse sort of way – and so, their songs pointed the way to go back to that experience and write about it again.

GALO: Did you actually play the horn as mentioned in the “Colfax” song?

KG: I played trumpet that year in seventh grade.

GALO: I love the sound of the guitars on the new record. Especially in the title track “Gloryland,” where their sound comes off a bit mean and nasty; reminded me of a weapon. A weapon aimed at the phony purveyors of paradise?

KG: I think so [laughs], in the sense that Joe McMahan produced the record and he and I are still of the mind that the music in a track should reflect what it’s talking about. I hear a lot of singer/songwriter type stuff; I mean you could change the lyric and it would still be fine. What Joe and I wanted to stick to was having the music represent the song and what the song was specifically about.

GALO: I believe you have created a truckload of memorable and catchy hooks on the record, which flow so organically from one part to the next. In “Don’t Stop Me This Time” was there someone on your case telling you to get a “real job?”

KG: Yes. That song started as a very angry fragment — one chord. But I wrote enough lyric that I knew it was worth going back to. I was going through certain periods, where I had to say: “This isn’t really a career choice, it’s just who I am.” It’s not like I could go out and be a professional hockey player or a chemical engineer; there’s a reason I’ve been doing this for 20 some odd years. And everybody to their credit respected that, but it did take me standing up and saying, “Look, [laughs] I might be crazy, but this is who I am; this is what I do, and I could really use your support. Yeah, that is definitely one of the most personal songs on the record.

GALO: A lyric I thought was interesting from “Don’t Stop Me This Time” was “strapping that plank on my shoulder.” Do you often refer to your guitar that way?

KG: [Laughs] I think the first time I heard that “plank” reference was when I was playing with Bo Ramsey in Iowa. I think the phrase was “spanking the plank.” That always stuck with me, the nature of the guitar being basically a hunk of wood.

GALO: I think the reason everyone is talking about “Colfax/Step in Time” is that it’s such a powerful, racially slanted story, especially in these days of Obama. Would you say, on some level, the song is about innocence lost; the monsters under the bed becoming real?

KG: Thinking back about that experience, I don’t remember being particularly freaked out by the Klan [Ku Klux Klan] being there, but at the same time, there was a silent collective feeling of strangeness. This is something that’s not normal. It only was years later that I started thinking about our band director (Mr. Minifield) and what that might have been like for him.

“That’s when I saw them at the end of the block/Imperial Knights of the Ku Klux Klan/In their white dunce caps/And robes with red crosses/Embroidered on/Like gilded leaves on an automatic rifle/Or an image of the suffering Christ/Airbrushed on the side of a missile.”

GALO: He’s the one who would have felt strangest of all, being Afro-American.

KG: I’m sure. I’ve yet to talk to him about the song, but he has heard it. He has a copy of the record. He’s now an attorney and teaches law at Grambling State University in Louisiana; a great person. I didn’t realize how much I had learned from him until much later.

GALO: Then there are the softer sides of the record, which are “Pecolia’s Star” and “Nine Bells.” These make me think, I should ask, if you are a melancholy man.

KG: I would say so. “Nine Bells” came from my journal and was put together that way. “Pecolia’s Star” had a much more definite influence and that was reading about Pecolia Warner (a quilter whose work appears in the Smithsonian Institute) in a book called Local Color by William Ferris. Each chapter was about a different artist, and it was in first person, so it was as if the artist was talking to you as you’re reading. So, in my head, she was talking to me for about 20 minutes. Then, within 10 minutes or so, I was writing that song. The things she said about her own art and her community and her faith really struck me.

“Tell me have you seen Pecolia’s star/Eight points of diamonds/All the colors in between/You’d be safe and warm/Under Pecolia’s star/Shining for all the world to see.”

GALO: Moving away from the record for a minute, would Steve Earle be an influence?

KG: He was, early on when I was living in Iowa. I remember getting in the van to get to gigs and listening to [Earle’s] Guitar Town record on the cassette player. [Laughs] That music resonated for us. We would find ourselves at these truck stops in the middle of nowhere. The spirit of that record really felt close to what we were doing.

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