Ryan Carpenter and Ian Fisher. Photograph by Jarred Gastreich.
You can go to a lot of shows over many years and still be treated to a concert experience that you’ve never encountered before. The key, maybe, is to go into a night with relatively little knowledge about an act’s live performance. At that point, after all, expectations can be adapted all night long.
This past Saturday night, I wandered into The Firebird during the closing notes of the evening’s opening band, Frances with Wolves. (Should’ve bought one of their $5 tapes.) With Wax Wine playing a combined one-year-anniversary/CD release show later in the evening, the wait was now on for Ian Fisher & The Present, a two-man acoustic act made up of namesake Fisher and his collaborator Ryan Thomas Carpenter. As they walked onto the stage, they stood behind mics that tilted outward from one another, meaning that they’d obviously be playing in close proximity.
But as the house PA died down and the pair began their opening cut, “Nero,” it became apparent that these aren’t just close friends; they’re, for want of another term, close performers. Fisher sang and played guitar for a couple minutes, without aural accompaniment from the nearby Carpenter, who was in motion: uncoiling himself like a snake, cradling his guitar high on his body. As Carpenter began to eventually sing harmonies and add his own guitar lines, the two were drawn even more close, playing off of one another if dancing, their bodies almost touching as the track built in intensity. It was unusual, interesting, transfixing really.
These young cats were feeling it. And as the night progressed, the pair showed themselves to be both remarkably similar and their own men. Carpenter endured tuning issues all night, generally shrugging the moments off, even as Fisher became more agitated by the need to vamp between songs. To fight off the problem, the pair employed some interesting techniques; on one cut, Carpenter put down his guitar and sang, while clapping and stomping in rhythmic support. For the closing two cuts, Fisher simply asked the pair to be dropped from the PA; instead, they’d stand on the lip of the stage, inviting the mid-sized audience to joint them upfront, where they played a little more loudly, intensely for those nearest.
During Wax Wine’s set, Carpenter stood outside in the night’s cold drizzle, just beyond The Firebird’s entry door. He noted a sort of apology for the technical elements, but he quickly added that “my piano instructor taught me that you don’t play the songs. You play music. So we played the music.”
That they did. They did exactly that.
EARLIER ON SATURDAY
Meeting up with Carpenter and Fisher at Cherokee Street’s Mud House on Saturday morning, the pair were patient in waiting for me, after my own bad bout of oversleep. Inside, the two sipped on coffee and reflected all of their personality traits in talking with, over and about one another. It was the kind-natured banter that only relatives and the closest friends can engage in. And over the past couple years, proximity and a mutual love of music have brought them together, Carpenter figures, “about 75 percent of the time.”
The two met, Fisher figures “about five or six years ago at Webster University.” There, Carpenter majored in piano performance, while Fisher studied history and political science. They struck up something of a friendship and working partnership, though Fisher’s move to Webster U. in Vienna seemed to stop most collaboration. That turned out to be a relatively short break, though, as Fisher would eventually send a letter to the multi-instrumentalist Carpenter, seeing if he’d open to joining him in Europe for some live dates.
“He told me to come over and visit, play a few concerts,” Carpenter remembers. “I finally decided that I’d go ahead and do it. As soon as I get there, he tells me that ‘we’ll be playing Berlin, a series of shows in Denmark, then Austria. After that you can do what you want for a while.’ Oh my God. I didn’t realize what I’d gotten into. More than 50 percent of my life is now spent over there.”
During the summers, Carpenter works as a rehearsal musician at the Muny, along with serving in other roles there. That keeps home during those months, though he’s spending much of the rest of the year in Europe, where Fisher’s resided in both Vienna and Berlin, along with frequent gigging throughout Europe. In the process, Fisher’s scored a European label, has a standing band (The Nowhere Train) in Austria, and allows himself time to return to America for occasional bouts of recording, along with visits to his family in Ste. Genevieve.
“I moved to Vienna for school in 2008 and have been touring professionally since then,” Fisher says. “I usually play in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands. Some shows in France, Ireland, Italy, Norway and the Czech Republic. When I talk to some people about that, I get the impression that they’re saying ‘you’re doing something, instead of just talking about it.’ But everyone could do this if they really tried. If you really work your ass off, you can do it. I’ve worked my ass off. I sit on the computer all day long, I organize all day long. I sometimes forget that I’m a musician, since the majority of my life is spent organizing. I feel more like a travel planner than a musician.”
He continues that “one of the other main types of feedback I’ve heard is that ‘you’re so lucky to do this.’’ I am; we are. I don’t think people realize the baggage you’re given. There’s a responsibility, a lot of instability. We’re basically the working poor. As professional, independent artists, you’re in the echelon of working poor. You work your ass off and don’t make any money. But the trade-off is making amazing experiences. We’ve eaten fondue for breakfast on top of a castle in Switzerland. The person hosting us said that there are only two types of people able to enjoy moments like that: billionaires and working musicians. There’s a lot of sacrifice to not being anywhere for more than a few days, but the reward is making the art you want to make, to be everywhere in the world and nowhere.”
“Part of it’s how you organize your life,” Carpenter says. “Neither of us have [a wife or kids], neither of us have apartments. We’ve given ourselves this situation. I’m 24 years old, but I’ve aged a decade in just the last three months. At the least, I’ve at least gained a decade’s worth of experiences. I could just write it down and write and write and eventually not even keep up. I can’t process through everything that happens in a day. You’re in a different place daily, with different people with entirely new adventures.”
Fisher figures that the pair have played 50 shows in about the last 80 days. There were 115 concerts, in total, during 2012 and another 80 the year before, the year Carpenter signed on.
Playing to European audiences for the majority of those shows, Fisher says that the crowds can differ greatly, as “depending on which country we’re playing, up to 90 percent of people under 40 are going to speak English and will understand most of what we’re singing. That’s true for Germany, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries. But when an audience doesn’t necessarily know what you’re singing, you have to sound good. Be in tune, have the melodies down. Without those things, they’re not going to care. You might be Bob Dylan, but they’re not going to give a shit.”
As if predicting my response to their show later in the evening, Carpenter noted that the “stage presence is so serious for us. We were in Italy for two weeks in October. A lot of folks said that they enjoyed it so much, even if having trouble understanding us. They’d say, ‘We didn’t understand everything you’re saying, but we could tell that you felt it very deeply.’”
Fisher adds, “You can get them involved in the music. A lot of Italian audiences would lose interest when we played something slow, more introspective. When the music was more upbeat, they’d be more involved and interested.”
EARLIER IN LIFE
The music that Fisher and Carpenter are playing comes from a variety of sources. Despite only being 25, Fisher’s released about eight albums under his own name and at least another handful with various bands.
A new one’s immediately on the way, with the release of a self-titled album at Off Broadway on Thursday, January 24, a date they’ll share with Beth Bombara and The Great Grandfathers. Ian Fisher & The Present will soon be released in Europe on Seayou Records, though the pair is still seeking American distribution.
It’s an album that was recorded early in 2012, in a building that Fisher says, “my dad and I built on a farm my family’s owned since the 1930s.” It was a recording session bringing together both lo-fi and modern recording ideals. On one hand, they had “good mics” and proper, up-to-date recording software. On the other hand, they covered windows with tarps to keep out the wind and rain, which could sometimes be heard on playbacks.
Fisher says that the sound is reflective of the musical influences of his Ste. Genevieve youth, ones that European audiences sometimes reference most readily than Fisher and Carpenter’s peers.
“It’s very different when we play these American songs,” Fisher suggests. “People our age don’t have a connection to old-time music. They consider country to be Taylor Swift, Keith Urban, the contemporary pop bullshit. There’s nothing honest about that; it all sounds like a Ford truck commercial. But as time goes on, we discover these musical roots and it makes it a little bit different when playing to American vs. European audiences.”
For those who remember Fisher’s first few efforts, the lyrical content of the current cuts is a far, far jump from his earliest tracks. Then, the political and history junkie focused extensively on lyrically complex, deep songs about real-life affairs. Like many of the forbears of message-driven folk music, Fisher took on situations outside of typical pop concerns, often tackling historical events. A track about a historical workers' strike in Argentina? Yes, Fisher’s actually got one of those.
“The lyrics have changed from when I was writing the political stuff,” he says. “I technically do write on the political, but through the individual and how they reflect society and how society reflects on that individual. Even when I write a song about love, or whatever, it could still be a political song.”
That said, listeners can also simply let the duo’s remarkably blended voices spill over them at a show. And that’s a real treat, too. Just as the pair have a hilarious, almost stereotypically “old married couple” sense of conversing off-stage, they’ve got an unusual telepathy on-stage, even on nights when their guitars aren’t as locked into their task as they are. And when that kind of misfortune happens, these young, road-tested vets just let the music take over. When they do, the results can be spectacular.
