The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: DJ Shadow's The Private Press
June 2002
Somewhere in the middle of DJ Shadow's The Private Press (MCA) you may find yourself mentally looking over your shoulder, wondering what you've missed. It's not that the entirely sampled constructions move too fast: Each one seems to enforce its own sense of time. You may be caught up by a sense of what you're missing because what's being offered here is not a series of formal experiments with pop sound, but a story.
DJ Shadow—Josh Davis, from Davis, California, near Sacramento—works from fragments of vinyl, as a musical gene-chopper. The recombinant music he makes is seamless. There is never a sense that any foreign element has been added to anything primary. You can't begin to tell what came from where, so you stop trying.
"The drums all come from one record, Isaac Hayes' [arrangement of] 'Walk On By,' done by an obscure female singer," Shadow said of a track on his 1996 debut album, the celebrated Endtroducing [Mo 'Wax/A&M]. "I captured just the bass drum as one sample, a few of the snares on three samples, the high hat for a few more—it's chopping up the pieces, isolating a fragment and then finding its key element. Now I have my own [drum] kit, as first assembled in Chicago in 1969. I'm replaying my own patterns, and in an infinite number of patterns within that pattern."
You don't hear this process, and you don't identify the source, or even sense that there is a source. But the peculiar ambience of The Private Press—the feeling that while everything is in place, nothing quite belongs—comes from the fact that each element still carries some hint of its invisible, inaudible ancestry.
Shadow shows his hand before taking the cards away: The Private Press begins with a message from one Novella Johnson, dictated in Richmond, California, 1951. She's probably speaking into a Dictaphone. She's on vacation, sending a message home. You catch something wrong in her tone—that is, she can't sustain it. Everything's fine, everything's wonderful, but everything's not fine. "I just can't get it together," she says; the way her voice crumbles on the last word can take you down. All around her is quiet music, which might be playing in the room in Richmond where she's speaking, except that it sounds as if it were being played underwater.
Everything that follows rests on this displacement. The cheesy, straining vocal performances Shadow uses on "Six Days" and "You Can't Go Home Again" are placed in such beautifully constructed settings that their strangeness—the singing is in English but, you get the feeling, English as a second language—doesn't immediately register. It just gets under your skin.
With "Mashin' on the Motorway" and "Blood on the Motorway"—a hilarious recreation of Jan and Dean's "Dead Man's Curve"—Shadow puts a speed demon on the road and gets him killed. "And now . . . eternity," says a pompous God-like voice. A church organ responds with a fanfare: "Dah, dah, dah." But then there is a note from what might be a piano, and then the same note again, and again. A white preacher—or New Age therapist—begins to speak, and he goes on and on, but he's merely riding the wave that the isolated, repeated note has set in motion. The note has its own autonomy—its own authority. The note, not the speaker, is giving the real sermon. Unlike the speaker, it isn't offering comfort but, as God said, eternity—which, the note says, doesn't end. Doesn't let you leave.
Like Endtroducing, The Private Press is instantly, inherently cinematic. At first it might seem of a piece with Angelo Badalamenti's soundtrack album for David Lynch's Mulholland Drive—but The Private Press is a soundtrack that doesn't need a movie. Its real kin, I think, is Bob Dylan's "Love and Theft": a collection of pieces of disparate styles that only very slowly begin to suggest they are telling the same tale. In Dylan's case it was that of a man carrying a knowledge so deep, and carrying it so lightly, that he no longer feared life. With Shadow it's the opposite: Life is fear, and one's only defense is a sense of beauty, which is also a sense of humor. He lets you get lost in his drifting themes, but not rest with them; relax into the bed of the music, and a new voice will be shouting you awake. As Novella Johnson's husband says at the end of the album, when he takes the Dictaphone from her, "We're having quite a time up here, now. . . well one thing, it's pretty hot up here, too. And look like everywhere I go, I draw heat."
Originally published in Interview Magazine, June 2002
DJ Shadow’s The Private Press blends seamless samples into immersive storytelling.