Certainly Maybe Yes: An Interview with Eric Anderson of Cataldo

“This has been a tumultuous six months for me. That is where the next EP is going to come out of – this tough stretch of time in my life.”

I can’t tell at all; I almost don’t believe him. The man sitting across from me at this Ballard pub seems as happy as a dog sticking his head out the window of a beat down Ford. He sips his whisky and ginger ale slowly as I write down responses with my right hand, drink Sprite with my left hand, and smile with intrigue at this dude, who, although he is barely my senior, seems wise beyond his years.

And maybe this has something to do with the fact that he has been writing and performing his own material since he was sixteen years old, putting out his first album when he was eighteen. And maybe it has something to do with how absolutely sure of himself he seems. There is almost no timidity in any of his responses, except when I bring up the “one year” (“Just give me one year/And I’ll be yours my dear” and “If you have one more year/I will be yours my dear”) that comes up multiple times in his newest eclectic collection of pop songs, Signal Flare.

“Well, that year has come and gone…” This when the sheepish grin comes on his face and he looks down at the table and takes another short sip from his short glass. “And, well, that turned out pretty horribly, actually. I think that is about as far I want to go into it.”

I had never seen Anderson and Cataldo in concert, so I don’t know exactly what he will look like, but I know that I am looking for someone tall, and, if he was being completely honest and accurate in his songwriting, someone about six-foot-six (“6’6″”).

“I’m only six-foot-four, actually. But that doesn’t sound quite as good in a song, does it?”

“No, I guess not,” I say.

I want to say that a stiff breeze might knock him over, but that might be an overstatement. Maybe a wild shopping cart on a windy day would take him down. His long legs and disproportionately long feet tucked into his fading New Balance sneakers makes me think of Andy Dufrane from The Shawshank Redemption.

“I used to be a lot shorter, but I was the exact same weight so I just stretched out. I didn’t play any sports when I was growing up, but now I have become a fanatic – not watching, but playing. I love playing basketball and tennis.”

I almost don’t believe him on this one either.

But I do know for sure that Anderson can write one hell of a pop rock love song. Signal Flare shows improvement in his ability to write ditties with tight and precise arrangements of guitar, banjo, piano, strings, horns and everything else that gives his simple songs the flare they need to survive in the bars and rooms he has been playing for the last few months across America, particularly Washington and the Midwest.

“I feel the tension of having to entertain and having to make something new or fresh when I am having to perform live. Some songs you just can’t do in a bar without the drums and the vocals and everything. Really, I just have to entertain myself. If I like something, if something sounds cool, I keep it.

“I like the songs that I write. Sometimes I introduce stuff too soon. I write a lot of material for a song, but the song the way you hear it on the records, I have taken a lot of things away.”

This sounds much different that what I hear other artists say about their material. It seems that to be an artist you must be a bit timid and slightly embarrassed (David Bazan and Ray LaMontagne come readily to mind) you must act as though you secretly hate all the songs you write and wish that you could write a song like ABC Songwriter and XYZ Recording Artist. But Anderson seems positively proud of himself and the songs that he writes. He tells me that he is a hopeful person, but are there insecurities?

“Hell yeah! I made my first record when I was eighteen. I go to school. I want to play music and pay my rent and I can’t help but ask sometimes, what the f*** am I doing? That’s being human. That’s being normal. I know what I want to do and I can afford to be young, dumb and starving.”

I can tell that Anderson could be doing a lot of other things besides playing music. He tells me about his love for words and his tendency to write and re-write simple emails and notes, the way he speaks to me about the things that he loves with deliberate thought and careful articulation. I can’t help but think that this would be a boss’s greatest dream in a sales firm or a corporate office.

This caution shows up in his songwriting. He is very careful in how he displays his emotions about love and love-loss. He denies that he only writes love songs, but he sure as hell writes a lot, and those are the songs that stick.

“Those songs are sentimental, sure, but they are not cheesy. That’s important. Really, I’m not expressive person in most situations.”

If he were able to express himself and his romantic emotions in real-time, in real life, he could nab just about any girl he wanted. All my friends who happen to be girls are absolutely in love with him and they don’t even know what he looks like or if he is a good listener and gives good foot-rubs. He could be a six-foot-four lobster; it wouldn’t matter as long as he could talk about dancing cheek-to-cheek to country tunes and tracing the line of her back and telling her that she has eyes like two polished glass test-tubes.

He’s good at his art because he chooses his words wisely, although, he says, the new EP he is recording (he thanks his current unemployment for the opportunity to do so) will be much more emo – not in the Taking Back Sunday type way he assures me – in that he will let the turmoil of now guide his words, as well as the words of those who came before.

“I have an interest in words. There is no one that I model myself after, but I steal a lot of words. You can’t have too many words in your pocket, ready to go. I have been reading a lot of Renaissance poetry. They didn’t put those out like they do today; no one published those poems. They were written for particular people to particular people. They were about the same things that I am writing about today – love and such. It makes me know that I don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

Before he has to go catch a bus to his friend’s art show at a Gibson guitar showcase room (he tells that any artist who is willing to play in front of people gets to play any guitar he chooses. That’s a singer’s wet dream, I say. And he wholeheartedly agrees) we discuss literature and the power of the Steinbeck, Hemingway, McCarthy, particularly American, short, declarative sentence.

“My professors used to say that my prose had no jazz. I don’t want them to have jazz. I want to be able to say exactly what I mean. There is nothing more powerful than the short, declarative sentence.”

Then we left. The end.