As Concrete Blonde readies a December trek along the East Coast, I was fortunate to sit down and chat with singer and bassist Johnette Napolitano about the tour, the possibility of a new album, Kickstarter, ghosts that help her write music, ghosts that want to see her naked, the five songs that define Concrete Blonde, and what could possibly be the world's most expensive copy of Lou Reed's Transformer.
How are you doing today?
I'm doing great. I've actually had a really, really good morning. I was out with the horses all morning and they're on the porch right now. I'm working on the tour with my tour manager who is in Austin. We're working together to put the nuts and bolts together, travel accommodations and all that stuff. The devil is in the details. It's the kind of stuff I like to get knocked out of the way first so we can get to the party.
That's what I want to talk to you about. In December, you're going to embark on a short tour of mostly East Coast dates. What can fans expect from these shows?
We've taken it up a notch. We're doing some new things, obviously, the two new ones from the vinyl single. We have things people like and they know. We've got a lot of songs. The last couple of years since the reunion tour, we've been trying to go back over our music and rotate the setlists. If we played everything we knew for everybody, I think we'd probably be up there for five or six hours or longer. The set now is about two hours long. We can play every single thing, and someone can find the one song, "You didn't play...!"
We're trying to rotate and put in a couple of new things. We have a really good stage. We've got a great light guy that we love that we're really happy to have on this tour. It takes it up a level.
If everything goes well, are there plans of expanding the tour in 2013?
We know we have to get back to Europe so that's pretty much what our priority is next year. We haven't been to Europe in about twelve years or so. We've been on and off throughout the States the last couple of years. I've had a lot of stuff going on at home, so I had made it a policy not to leave home for more than a week at a time. I can't really do that anymore because it just doesn't pay but also because we missed a festival in Brazil that was really important because I fell off my horse and I broke my ribs.
Oh wow.
Yeah, two days before we were leaving. It was fucked. I was still going to try to go, but the doctor goes, "You can't." My lung was punctured. He goes, "You can't go on a plane. You can't do this. You're crazy." And I'm just like, "NO! I'VE GOT DO IT! YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND!" So that put me in bed for two months. I got to do a lot of thinking and I need to make up for some stuff.
I'm grateful that I can still do it. No lie. I shouldn't be walking right now. I should be on a Christopher-Reeve-in-a-wheelchair level. You break four vertebrae and four ribs, you get a lot of chance to think. The future isn't this endless thing that you see in front of you anymore. It's actually a piece of time, and you're got a certain amount that you want to get done. Physically, if you're able to do it, that's a really important thing. Cliche as it sounds, you gotta have your health, man.
We did a couple of local gigs and they were great and I just want to get back into the show, which I used to be. But a funny thing happens: early in your career, you're really into everything, hands-on everything. I paint everything, I shoot everything, do everything. And then you attract more and more people. Somebody said in an analogy, some comedian: "You start attracting more and more people like lint." And then it becomes everybody else's job to do the thing that made you want to do it in the first place. And now it's this person's job to do the cover, this person's job to do the video, this person's job to tune my fucking guitar. And I end up sitting there, "Okay. What am I going to do now?" Too much downtime isn't good for my head.
Next week, a reunited Concrete Blonde will embark on a sixteen-city tour to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their classic album, 
