Interview: Cory Chisel

Cory Chisel’s debut EP, Cory Chisel and the Wandering Sons, weaves equal parts sin and salvation through six portraits of infinite motion. No wonder: The Elko, Wisconsin-raised seeker is the son of a Baptist minister and a gregarious Townes Van Zandt enthusiast.

Cory Chisel’s debut EP, Cory Chisel and the Wandering Sons, weaves equal parts sin and salvation through six portraits of infinite motion. No wonder: The Elko, Wisconsin-raised seeker is the son of a Baptist minister and a gregarious Townes Van Zandt enthusiast. See the album closing “Home in the Woods” for his mission statement. “Don’t mess with me, mama, I’m a mighty good man,” Chisel spits proudly, “I’ll take a home in the woods by myself if I can.”

How does living in Wisconsin directly influence your songwriting?
I never realized how important it was until this past year when I was traveling more than I ever have. It’s tough for me to write when I’m away from Wisconsin. The pace of life offers the chance for a lot of introspective moments. When it gets dark and cooler, you just stay inside and drink wine, which naturally presents songs much quicker than sunny beach time.

Plus, it’s the characters that inhabit these places. It takes a certain type of person to live where we live and put up with what we put up with nine months of the year. I’m interested in those people, the ones who have to persevere to enjoy it. It’s a lifetime of work to figure out why people choose an existence that’s going to be more complicated. It’s an exile. You have to work harder and be more creative. You know, you’re not going to walk out the door in Wisconsin and meet someone in the industry.

The geographic details in “It Won’t Be Long” really caught my attention. How important is it to be specific in story songs?
I very often in songwriting create a jumbled sense of truth or reality. In that song, I bring up three places – including the Red River Valley in Halstead, Minnesota, where my grandfather’s from – to invoke trips I took when I was younger. Home isn’t a place that I’d define just as “here.” There’s something really beautiful and easy to access in the Midwest, but I’ve found that other places like Italy, too. I sort of coagulate them all into a place I’ve been missing, and my songs become like a popcorn trail that you can follow back in your mind.

How does all that relate to “Home in the Woods”?
I’m talking there about a place on the fringe that you can create for yourself. That’s what people up here in the woods are doing. It’s about reconstructing a society for people that works for them. If you go to small towns up here in Wisconsin, they all have their own little feel to them. You’ll walk into a very Norwegian or German one, and they’re all reconstructing where they came from and incorporating other traditions. It’s the exile idea that I’ve been working on for quite a long time in songwriting.

Do you form that narrative, then, and the music follows?
I wish I knew. A lot of times I can’t really tell what comes first. Usually, the seed of an idea will come together with a melody. Songwriting to me is just a byproduct of living or feeling something. Like the first line of that song, “Don’t mess with me, mama, I’m a mighty good man.” The song started right there, and the melody was tied to it. I can’t tell exactly what’s happening, but maybe your mind’s trying to comfort you or something? My music isn’t overly highbrow in the way the melodies are constructed, but sometimes words and melodies just tumble out together. Songs come to me in a very strange way.

Are you talking about a spiritual aspect of songwriting?
Well, if I do believe in spirituality, the only evidence I have is songwriting. There is a haunting of sorts that can often be confused as a spiritual intervention. My father was a minister, so there are some things I can’t figure out if I learned or if it’s something miraculous. Have you ever seen a Baptist minister pour into the closing segment of a sermon? The cadence of a sermon can be so close to a song that a minister can almost start singing. It’s like a hypnotic state and you get to this place that’s affecting you and really close behind it is melody.

There’s a state you can get into where finding a song is just cracking the surface. It’s like picking a potato – it was already growing there. You can just pull it out. I don’t know if it’s a different form of songwriting, but I know when I hear it.

Townes [Van Zandt] would definitely be one of those people. People always call his music otherworldly, and that’s why. It’s not bizarre; it’s very familiar to you. It’s worth talking about. So many people say, “Oh, I love how Townes has such a plain way of saying things.” Yeah, but it’s eerily plain. It’s very similar to a scripture being handed down. My friend Richard Julian used to hang with Townes. He’d say that you’d talk and there’d be the normal Townes. And in a minute, he’d find a point and become elevated and transcendent.

I’ve seen that happen to my father when he’s preaching. One minute, he’s my father; the next, he’s a preacher; then, he’s in possession of something of more importance, something of higher value. The religious aspects – the dogma, the Bible, stuff like that – none of that was interesting to me. But I definitely at times have felt in possession of a power that feels strange, and songs would come out of it.