Paul Grimstad is a composer, writer, professor, and actor. His latest record, SONGS, is out now.
Paul Grimstad is a composer, writer, professor, and actor; Sean Price Williams is a cinematographer and director. The longtime friends’ collaboration started when they worked together on Ronnie Bronstein’s film Frownland, and has continued through to Sean’s 2023 directorial debut The Sweet East. Now, Paul has a new record out, called SONGS, and acts in the new PTA film One Battle After Another. To celebrate it all, Paul and Sean got together to catch up about their Frownland memories, Frank Zappa, and more.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Paul Grimstad: How are you?
Sean Price Williams: Good. How are you doing?
Paul: I’m fine.
Sean: Wow, what a crazy year.
Paul: Crazy year, yes.
Sean: I had a baby, and now I’m working more than I ever have. Got more money in the bank than I’ve ever had.
Paul: Incredible.
Sean: Didn’t really make that happen in any intentional way, but that’s just how the cards have fallen.
Paul: You got another mouth to feed now. You gotta bring home the bacon.
Sean: That’s right. Anyway, here we are, a couple of late bloomers. Turning points in our lives that we wouldn’t have necessarily worked on or chosen if we had been choosing the path in life based on any sort of career. We always say that you don’t like the word “career.” I hate it when people say “career” to me, because it seems like a joke. I mean, if I was working on a career, I think I failed.
Paul: I have always been distrustful of the word “career.” It suggests that you’re following the right resume pattern and you’re ticking off the right boxes, and if you do everything right and all the pieces line up in the right way, then hooray! You are off and running in your “career.” I never thought of it that way. It’s much more improvisatory and pragmatic and messy.
Sean: I think we’ve actually been careering like the English use it and the Public Image Ltd song.
Paul: We’ve been careering. We’ve been kind of sailing and swinging.
Sean: Swinging left and right and doing whatever just feels good, or even wrong. But no thought in it.
Paul: Some thought, but practical in the moment thought. Not some big master plan. I guess the other way to put it, the distrust of the word “career,” is there’s no one right way.
Sean: Also, we are just the tail end of a generation where selling out is the worst thing you could do; you’d be so ashamed of yourself to sell out. And I think younger people see selling out as, like, victory.
Paul: Or the standard of selling out doesn’t even show up on the radar. There is no difference between commodification and making stuff — the distinction has vanished.
Sean: Well, because you have to make yourself exist very intentionally in sort of an alternate world to right now. If you want to have any sort of hope of even being seen in the real world, you have to make this entire appearance in an alternate world. I think that’s what young people assume. And then when you’re having to do that, then you’re already pushing yourself out there.
Paul: You mean like this whole thing of what people call “creating a brand”?
Sean: Yeah, creating a brand, creating your online appearance or whatever lifestyle you want the world to think that you lead.
Paul: Boy, then we’re really fucked, because we’re two pretty offline dudes. [Laughs.] I’m very offline.
Sean: You’re incredibly offline. And the thing is — “your industry” probably sounds just as stupid as “career,” if we talk about music and your relation to it.
Paul: I have no relation to it. [Laughs.]
Sean: Well, what’s interesting is, there’s the bedroom musicians, maybe like Jandek — but he would actually tour also, so that’s why he became famous. But the guy who really just stays in his bedroom and records… But you didn’t start that way. Your [band] Ex-Action Figures—
Paul: Oh, wow. We’re going way back.
Sean: Yeah, well, I’m sure you go way back even before that. Some high school band…
Paul: Well, even earlier — in the bars on lead guitar at 14 in Wisconsin.
Sean: Exactly. So you were playing live.
Paul: I’d had enough of my fill with that before I was 25.
Sean: That’s the thing. You were filled up.
Paul: Yeah. I mean, I’d already toured some, but I was in sleazy taverns playing rock & roll guitar at 14.
Sean: Because that was what it was about.
Paul: I just wanted to play guitar. I taught myself all the Van Halen and Zappa solos from the magazines and could play. And then I got tapped to be in my high school jazz band, where I learned to play, you know, Wes Montgomery stuff. But guitar was a very early, deep — and it still is, I love guitar. That’s how I got going.
Sean: Right. So, when I was younger, I wanted to be a rock star. And even when I came to New York and had all my friends that were musicians, it just seemed like hotter guys and girls than the film people, you know? Because they were sweating and showing what they could do in front of us. I just was so in awe of that.
Paul: Ludlow Street, 2002.
Sean: Yeah, exactly.
Paul: Max Fish and Luna Lounge. And Brownies was still around. I played Brownies, I played Arlene’s Grocery…
Sean: The best I would do was bring my little mini DV camera and record my friends doing the shows, and just being jealous that I couldn’t do it. The performance thing seemed like such an important part of being an artist when you’re young, I think.
Paul: It is important.
Sean: Even painters we would admire in the 20th century, they had to have such a public sort of action element.
Paul: That was what they called what Pollock was doing, “action painting!”
Sean: So of course, there’s famous examples of musicians that decide right at the height of their career to not appear anymore.
Paul: Like the Beatles.
Sean: Yeah, or Brian Wilson.
Paul: Or Eno. Or XTC.
Sean: Yeah. So you have specifically even heroes of yours that decide that. And does that make it easier for you to say, “You know what? I don’t really want to do this.” Or was it something when you’re, like, turning 30 and you feel like you’re old? What is it that makes you stop?
Paul: You know, there are a couple of things. When things started to go online initially — and that would have been stuff like Myspace, and putting stuff out for that register of consumption — people started becoming their own publicists, their own managers, their own agents. I was in New York at that point, and I’d made a bunch of records in the apartment that the Frownland movie is about, on Montague Street in Brooklyn. And to some extent, Frownland really chronicles that period, but I got really kind of depressed and annoyed with what the — when you’re still young enough, you think there’s a “scene,” quote-unquote, and you’re trying to make the scene. And I just was done with that. As I said, I’d already been doing it since I was 15.
Sean: When you moved to New York, was there a scene that you were a part of at all?
Paul: Well, I was signed to a label — you have the Ex-Action Figures records. Then I was signed to Saddle Creek, which was Bright Eyes and Conor Oberst and The Faint. I did a seven-inch split with The Faint on Saddle Creek, which is a song I recorded in Williamsburg that ended up being the first song on a record called The Other’s Buzz. The Other’s Buzz was on a label called Genuine Particle, which was a little DIY project also in Williamsburg. Anyway, that was what the scene was for me. It was actually quite off the grid and quite independent even by then. I really didn’t like indie rock. I didn’t like the conformism of it, the way every fucking band acted the same and looked the same.
Sean: You would have had no interest in, like, trying to get with Matador.
Paul: I would have been had I positioned myself to do that. I wouldn’t have said no. But I wasn’t angling for it. I wasn’t trying to do that. I also always had this bookish side because of the way I was brought up — my grandmother was one of the first women in the country to get an MD, and was a professor of medicine in Madison. I had a deep, somewhat haunting but real education ethic in my family, and that was always kind of lurking in the background. When I got to the point where I was like, “I’ve had it. I don’t like these people. I love recording, I love composing, but I don’t like this scene,” I was just like, “Here we go, Kant’s first Critique, let’s do philosophy.” And I went and got a PhD. At the time it felt like a rebellious thing to do.
Sean: For sure.
Paul: And I look back on it, to this thing of not having a career, and I renounced that as a career too. I’m not doing that. That’s not my focus in life. It’s part of what I do — now I teach at Yale, and that’s because I got a PhD. But I kind of just do what I want. But that goes back to, I was doing what I wanted when I said, “Fuck this indie rock thing, I’m gonna go get a doctorate.” But I never stopped composing music. Hence the archive, hence the 400 songs. The recording and the composing never stopped, even through all of that. So those are like refusals of careers and kind of non-decisions through my late 20s and 30s. Then I got married, I have a son. That’s a whole other facet, which is pure joy.
But an interesting thing to note for this interview: We have been making shit and hanging out since, what, 2002?
Sean: We started Frownland in summer 2001.
Paul: So it’s almost a quarter century.
Sean: Ronnie [Bronstein, director of Frownland] doesn’t like everybody knowing how long it took us to make it, but… I mean, I hope he does at this point. At the time, it was kind of a point of embarrassment that it took almost six years to make the movie. But of course, it took six years to make the movie because we were making it the right way as we could, without any help at all, in a total vacuum, when I could schedule myself off from the video store.
Paul: And we could get people to show up at the same spot in Red Hook at the same time. [Laughs.]
Sean: What a production. God bless Marc [Raybin, producer of Frownland] and Ronnie for that. Anyway, yeah, that’s when we met.
Paul: And we really got to know each other in that Abingdon Square apartment in the West Village.
Sean: Sitting on the floor… I don’t even know how many hours a day we would spend actually shooting, but I remember it was always hours of hanging afterwards.
Paul: Hanging out, and records.
Sean: So, we’re making Frownland, and there’s a few of us that are all not career-oriented at all, clearly, and finding… not even a community, but just connection.
Paul: There was never a “community.” Terrible word!
Sean: But working at Kim’s Video, I found myself a nice family. I found you guys through that — through Paul Grant, who was a customer. He hooked me and Ronnie up. And the first time Ronnie and I met, all we talked about was Fred Wiseman and Scott Walker, and maybe a little Mike Leigh. It was like that. And it’s still what I look for when I work on a movie with somebody — I gotta say, “Hey, is this somebody I want to be friends with?” It’s not the script or anything like that. It’s like, “Am I making a new friend, or am I continuing a relationship with an old friend?” Which is, of course, not a career thing to do. And if time permits it, I hopefully can keep doing things that aren’t necessarily money, but good projects with good people. They’re still out there, I promise. Don’t give up.
But, so, making Ronnie’s movie — first it was Ronnie and David Sandholm. And David was hipping me to audiophile versions of ‘60s pop music, like only the mono releases of the Kinks reissues.
Paul: In that apartment on 9th Street, which was frighteningly clean.
Sean: It’s in the movie.
Paul: There was something terrifying about how fastidious David was.
Sean: And then at some point, I meet you. I really feel like you weren’t really there in the beginning. It was once we moved over to Ronnie’s brother’s apartment in the West Village, in that building—
Paul: That’s where Adrienne Shelley was murdered, like, two doors down.
Sean: Very soon after we shot there, by one of the workers in her building.
Paul: The Hal Hartley ingenue.
Sean: Very sad. I kept hoping we’d bump into her, I remember, because her name was on the mailbox… Anyway, because of the authenticity of the apartment, the set that we created for the movie, the record player had to play, everything had to work. There was nothing dummy in there. So that’s why we were playing all this stuff. And it was because of you connected with Sounds, the CD store five doors down from Kim’s Video, which allowed me to buy all the ‘80s music that you were hipping me to, that I would have been too snobby to have the ears for without your help. I was able to go and buy every Kate Bush CD for, like, $6 each.
Paul: Well, especially The Dreaming and Hounds of Love was on all the time. And Magazine.
Sean: And just so much XTC. And then you guys talking about Zappa.
Paul: Which, you had renounced Zappa, which you were into in high school. I got you back into Zappa.
Sean: It was just gross, you know? I got rid of all my CDs — and it was all Mothers of Invention stuff. I never got past, like, 1973 Zappa. And then with you, I actually rekindled my way backwards a bit, from the ‘80s.
Paul: What you do with Zappa is you bracket out the stuff that’s just gross-out stuff, and you realize that the guy is operating on a completely different planet musically from anybody in American music in the second half of the 20th century. I mean, it’s really something very special, how far he pushed not just studio tech and multi-tracking — all the stuff the Beatles were doing, and Brian — but the avant garde orchestral stuff that he was equally into. There’s no American composer that is that attuned to those two separate things in that way. I think he’s the gift that keeps on giving. The Synclavier stuff. Civilization Phaze III.
Sean: Yeah, his bedroom recording.
Paul: His bedroom recordings, which was when he dropped like $200K on his Synclavier in 1983. Him and Michael Jackson were the only people in the United States that had Synclavier. Sting had one, I think, in England. But Zappa — that’s just a level of focus and intensity that is very rare. And you needed to be reminded of that. Because, you’re right, there’s something obviously obnoxious on the surface. And then you overlook that, because that’s superficial, and you’re like, “Holy shit, this is a very deep motherfucker operating on a very musically heavy level.”
Sean: And then the humor and the sort of stupidity and the anal orientation is going to turn away people who aren’t good enough to appreciate it.
Paul: I mean, if you care about someone digging into an aesthetic and taking it to the outer limits, no holds barred, pushing it as far as it can go…
Sean: [Michael] Chaiken still has a hard time with him, though.
Paul: Yeah, well, it also clears the room of women.
Sean: There’s also just the way he plays guitar, in a way that he’s a monster and he can do anything.
Paul: He follows no model on guitar. Who plays like that? It isn’t even rhythmically—
Sean: But it’s not noise.
Paul: No, there’s loads of technique. But it’s jagged and disturbing and upsetting, the way he plays guitar. He plays guitar like Johnny “Guitar” Watson, but with a lot of extra psych and fusion chops added. I mean, Shut Up and Play Your Guitar was the first CD I bought with my own money. I must have been about 12. When those Rykodisc reissues started dropping.
Sean: Mine was most likely a Genesis CD, because they were getting reissued when I finally got a CD player. I was really late to the CD game. In fact, I thought my high school girlfriend was was cheating on me with one of my good friends because he had a CD player and I didn’t have one yet.
Paul: Woah.
Sean: I bought her a Pavement CD, and I didn’t know where she was playing it, unless she was over at his house. I can’t listen to Pavement because of that connection still… Anyway, you were hipping me to what are really standards and staples. And it’s just funny because working at Kim’s Video, you get so warped, and I remember buying a Bauhaus CD on the first floor of Kim’s and kind of apologizing to the guy. I was like, “Yeah, I only had this on cassette, but I just wanted…” And he’s like, “Bauhaus is cool.” Buying stuff like that just made me feel so just normal and boring. But then you were playing that stuff, and you were talking about it in such a way, and it was just illuminating.
Paul: Howard Devoto, who was a co-founder of the Buzzcocks and founded Magazine, which was very much in rotation during those Frownland shoots — he’s like the grotesque, distorted flip side of Morrissey or something. Like literate new wave ‘80s Brit, but with none of the kind of preening self-regard or grandiosity of Morrissey. Much more of an insect. Just as smart and just as interesting compositionally, but way more menacing. Much more like Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man. You know, Morrissey thinks he’s Proust or Oscar Wilde, and Devoto is more like this kind of ragged, marginal character on the sidelines. Secondhand Daylight or The Correct Use of Soap, Magic, Murder and the Weather — I still listen to those records. “Song from Under the Floorboards”…
Sean: Sounds Dostoyevsky-ish.
Paul: It does a bit.
Sean: Pete Shelley came to Kim’s one time on the first floor and was very upset that he didn’t have a section of his own.
Paul: But Howard Devoto did.
Sean: [Laughs.] I don’t think so…
Paul: Well, you know, they split, they went their opposite ways. And Devoto cut “Shot by Both Sides” and Shelley cut “Shot by Both Sides” — that was a co-composition and they each re-recorded it. It’s amazing that “Shot by Both Sides” is the one that they split up on…
Sean: So, back to you: You’re making populist music, I think, except that you were not making it available to any populace at all.
Paul: Right.
Sean: When Paul Grimstad had a new record, it meant WeTransfer to six or seven people. And this is not alienating music. I mean, it probably is — my idea of what the people are going to love is ridiculous, I guess. But to me, you’ve got so many hits.
Paul: Well, one of them is “Evening Mirror,” which is in The Sweet East.
Sean: You’re making more money than anybody else on the movie with that.
Paul: Oof, that’s rough. [Laughs.] Well, the good news is, I can put my shit out there now without the intermediary of a “label.” The record SONGS, which is distilled from about the last decade-worth of composing, and MUSIC FOR FILM, which is all of, or a lot of, the film cues, and Live at Baby’s All Right, December 2024 — guess what, readers? You can get out there and download it without the the pesky and distracting intermediary of a label. Please download it, listen to it, enjoy it. There you go.
Sean: But what’s funny is you’re still thinking like records.
Paul: Oh, I think about LPs all the time. I love the LP format.
Sean: And with Bandcamp, you could just dump everything. There’s just no reason not to put it all out there, and some crazy kid like me is going to just grab it all.
Paul: Well, that’s the plan. If anybody gets Grimstad Bandcamp, you’re going to start getting regular updates of new shit that’s going to drop about every four or five months.
Sean: Because I’ll also say, all of my good friends that are musicians, they are often the worst judges of their own [work]. And of course, my favorite songs, you still haven’t put out there.
Paul: We did “Miss July in Japan” in our last live set for you. I don’t even like that song, but I know that you do.
Sean: The problem is, I like way too many of them. You have such a big percentage of the real estate in my iPod. You and Zappa probably almost have the same amount of songs on my iPod…
