Samuel Barker: To begin with, introduce yourself and let everyone know what you do.

Beaver Nelson: My name is Beaver Nelson, I write songs and I play them. I play acoustic guitar and I sing.

Samuel: You moved from Houston to Austin 10 years ago, what kind of impact has that had on your life and your music?

Beaver: I’m sure it’s had tremendous impact, I’m surrounded by people who write great songs, it’s hard not to be influenced by that or inspired by it, to see bands on a fairly regular basis who have good songwriters. There are songwriters everywhere in Austin, some really, really great, and some really, really terrible ones too, you just got to weed through it to find the good ones and see them as much as you can.

Samuel: Doing the music thing so long, are you still a fan, do you still go out and see people play, or are you more focused on your music?

Beaver: I don’t know...that’s an interesting question and I have an answer to that. No, generally, I’m frightened by music. So much music is so god awful and so bad right now, and I’m not talking just talking about radio, I’m talking about in general. That I...I won’t even say it’s bad, I’ll just say it’s got nothing to do with me as a human being, so I’m really hesitant to listen to this band or that band, or to ‘check this out,’ and stuff like that. I don’t get out much, I’m playing all the time, I’m married, I have a one year old kid, I’m not hopping bar to bar like I was as a young man, so I don’t try out a lot of new stuff. I don’t know, maybe that’s getting older. I’m still open to the idea that there is stuff out there that will knock me out because I’ve had that happen a few times over the past couple of years. I know it’s possible. I just listen to the guys who I think are really, really great. There is just so much out there I don’t want to fill my mind with. I don’t like to fill my mind with bare rubble, I like to fill my mind with what’s great. That’s a real long answer to the question, but yes, there is still stuff out there that knocks me out, and I’m open to that. I usually have to hear from more than one person that ‘I really like this.’ before I’ll invest the time to put the CD someone gave me into the CD player. What I don’t want to do is get burned so many times by ‘you’ll love this’ and I put it in and it’s a load of crap, that I’m just scared to put anything in my CD player anymore.

Samuel: I saw in your bio that you named Springsteen and Dylan as your major influences, but who are some of the more modern songwriters, in the past 10 years or so, who you’ve found inspiration in?

Beaver: Springsteen and Dylan in the last 10 years. Look at what Dylan has done in the past 10 years, Time Out Of Mind, Oh Mercy...Oh Mercy may be ’89 or ’90. He also put the two acoustic records, those are some of his greatest records ever, so I still draw a lot of inspiration from those guys. To say he’s one of the best is a silly thing to say...then there is just...that’s the thing about living in this day and age, I can just mine though 70 years of recordings and constantly be inspired. The truly great songs still mean something today as it did when it was recorded, sometimes it means more. So much of the world those people lived in is gone. I find more inspiration in the older stuff than I do in the new, but then again, as I said, there is some new stuff that really knocks me out. But it seems to understand that timeless thing, they’re shooting for that. That’s what I shoot for, I don’t know if I get there or not, that’s for someone else to decide.

Samuel: What was it about songwriting that made you willing to commit your life to doing it?

Beaver: Umm...Well, I always liked music and I always liked words, all in the matter of a couple of weeks I realized I could put the two together, it made so much sense to me. It’s such an efficient way to communicate. As you can tell by this interview, I have tons of swirling thoughts constantly, and songwriting is a good way for me to categorize a mood or set of thoughts and put them in a working order to try to tell someone something. It’s a lot more efficient than the general ramblings I do in conversation.

Samuel: I know you had a hell of a time getting a first record out, is it comforting now that you have a couple of records under your belt, you know have more to play that people know, or are you pushing to get more out now?

Beaver: I’m already writing the next record and the new one just came out two months ago. I don’t think in those strategic terms. I do, as much as I can, but I don’t have a big operation. I don’t have big money behind me to where it makes sense to be like ‘I’ll record this, then make the push to sell it, then I’ll lay low’ and wait for the economic cycle to turn over and wait 14.2 months...I don’t think like that, I write songs and I play them. That’s my life, that’s what I do. None of us have an guarantee we have to do what it is we’re doing, and I’m planning on leaving as much evidence as humanly possible that I was here.

Samuel: How do you handle songwriting with the band? Do you write something and come to them with the song or do you ever write with them?

Beaver: Almost entirely me. Sometimes I’ll write something with someone, that’s pretty rare. More often than not I’ll an idea in my head I can’t quite pin down and someone I know will have a chord progression that I’ll go ‘Can I take that, can I steal that from you?’ though I don’t really steal it because I put their name in the CD. With Scrappy, who produced all 3 records and plays in the band, sometimes I’ll bring in a song and I’ll say ‘I think this needs a musical interlude, or a chord change to give it that extra something, why don’t you find it’ because he’s pretty good at reading my mind. That happens periodically. Generally I just walk in and say ‘this is the song.’ The band has a hand in arranging sometimes, but I pretty much do all my writing all alone.

Samuel: Speaking of Scrappy Jud, how did he end up in the band? I know he played with Toni Price for a long time. Was he just done with her and dug your music enough to play with you?

Beaver: There was some other people out there. He played with Toni a long time and he was in a band called the Loose Diamonds before that. He co-fronted that band actually. I don’t know why he joined this band, other than that’s what he wanted to do. You’d have to ask him. I’m incredibly grateful he did. Like I said, you’d have to ask him, I can’t speak for anyone else’s motivation.

Samuel: In your press book you had explanations of the songs, but they still left mystery as to what the songs meant, do you feel it takes away from the impact of the song if you have to explain what everything means?

Beaver: I don’t know if it takes away from the impact of a song, but sometimes it’s tiresome to explain. Sometime it’s just more fun to not pin yourself down. I like the fact that I can put on a Townes Van Zandt or a Dylan record and 15 years after I first heard it and can be like ‘Now I get it. Now I know what he meant by that.’ or I’ll be taking a leak in some restaurant and be like ‘That’s what he meant, I like that.’ and there are a few people out there that like that, and that’s for them. In my songs I try to do what I like about songs I enjoy. I like mystery and I like figuring things out and getting to the bottom of that. I don’t like songs that mean less the more you hear them, I write songs that mean more the more you hear them, that’s my humble opinion. That’s what I’m trying to do. I think I pull that part of it off pretty well. They’re not all that hard to figure out. There are a few that it’s pretty obvious what I’m getting at. I don’t think they’re all particularly shrouded in a cloak of mystery. A lot of them you could still listen to 10 or 15 times and be like ‘huh?’ but the mood is there and the sentiment gets across. The heart of the matter is there, but how I get there, that’s for the interested listener to figure out. Whenever someone asks me something specific, like ‘this line, what were you getting at?’ then I don’t mind talking about it, but when some asks ‘what’s this song about?’ that’s when I get cagey, and I don’t know why. But when someone asks me about a specific line, then I instantly think, ‘this is someone who has listened to this album over and over and is curious about what this means’ and then you can’t get me to shut up.

Samuel: Well, I know a lot of writers will explore many different things in one song, are you that way or do you stick with one set of ideas to follow?

Beaver: That’s a song to song thing, like on this last record...well, the first two records were just a collection of songs written over a long chunk of time and I just picked my 12 best songs on this record and my 10 best on this record. Everything on this new record was written after the record before it, it was all written after I recorded Little Brother. They’re all cut from the same cloth. With the new record everything is pretty much about the same thing, just each song approaches it differently. It deal with the concept of time and the disappearance of time, the meaningfulness of it and the meaninglessness of it. That’s the concept of the record. I won’t say it’s a concept album entirely, but it is a record where Jud and I mapped out the order of the songs and what we’re trying to do. We mapped out the order of songs before we had out first rehearsal. We were really going for a mood and a feel on this record.

Samuel: Speaking of time, I read that you actually took time between writing parts of each song, did that help you be more focused on each song or did it drive you nuts waiting to finish it.

Beaver: Both. What I wanted to do...well, people like great love songs when they’re in the midst of a love struggle or like great whatever songs when they are struggling with whatever. Concepts about time, not to get mystical or anything, because that’s not what I meant, and not to get completely existential about it, because I don’t think that way either, but it’s the tension between those two extremes that drive this records. And I thought on the actual construction of the song, wouldn’t it be interesting on several songs to write two or three lines and willfully put the paper down and say ‘I can’t touch this for 3 days,’ wait 3 days, write some more, then be like ‘I can’t touch it for a week’ and feel the passage of time as I wrote about that subject. I’ve never written like that before, usually I’m like a boiling pot of idea and I keep getting ideas and keep getting ideas then I’ll write a song in like 20 minutes. This time I just took a very, very different approach, on some of them. Some were written in a moment of inspiration or desperation, or whatever you want to call it. Some of them were written in that way, which is an interesting thing, a stretch in my way of writing, to test myself.

Samuel: Do you have any plans coming for the new year?

Beaver: I’m working on a record. I have no idea when I will come out. I have a few tours coming up, then we’ll see. I’m going to write songs, I know that.

Samuel Barker is Senior Editor. Contact him at suma@rockzone.com.