Thurs..Oct, 23

Say this for singer-songwriter Robert Fisher: The man knows his way around a sad song. In Fisher's hands, there' beautiful, elegaic compositions, rarely in a hurry to get anywhere, but when they do - whoosh - you realize you've been taken on quite an emotional journey. Fisher's band is the Willard Grant Conspiracy and they'll be playing the Lily Pad in Inman Square (small place for big stuff) Thursday Oct. 23 at 10 p.m. with a $10 cover. Also on the bill, Drew O'Doherty and Chris Brokaw (the jack of all trades, master guitarist who's releasing WGC's new, eigth disc, "Pilgrim Road," on his own label Capitan. WGC is a collective of musicians - as few as two as many as 28 (probably a quartet or quintet here). If you ever liked Tindersticks or Leonard Cohen, you owe it to yourself to see these guys. In the 14 year history of the Willard Grant Conspiracy some great musicians and songwriters have been part of the band's unusual floating membership.(Click the "read more" button to get you to a version of a Boston Phoenix piece written last year, and an interview with Fisher.)
      Current notable songwriters that are a part of the band include Mary Lorson, Jackie Leven, Chris Eckman, Chris Cacavas, Edith Frost, Duane Jarvis, Kirk Swan,Steve Wynn, O'Doherty and Brokaw. Along with the other 28 members of the band, it makes for an embarrassment of riches. We haven't heard the lastest disc yet, but here's what's being said about Willard Grant Conspiracy's new disc: "The sound is epic, florid, grandiose; the mood dark; the achievement great" - Time Out; "WGC are reminiscent of The Band in all their gothic pomp"
Mojo - "Full of dark grandeur, Pilgrim Road is exceptional."
 - Uncut "While a lot of the album has a late night, soul-searching feel, there are also choir-based tracks that have an almost ethereal, spine-tingling beauty_ There are diamonds of wisdom in the gravelly voice of Willard Grant Conspiracy's Robert Fisher."
Scotland on Sunday.

An edited version of the Phoenix piece ...

    “Sober, but not healthy, that’s the way I always refer to myself,” says Robert Fisher, dressed in black, sipping hot tea and nursing a bad throat at ZuZu!. last year. “A long time ago, I outed myself on that. I don’t have a problem with that whole anonymity thing, because the way I look at it is: I’m still a fuck-up, so if some kid who’s struggling with things knows that and sees somebody can do it, that’s ok. Nothing wrong with that.”
     Fisher is the main singer-songwriter for the Willard Grant Conspiracy. (He is to them what Howe Gelb is to Giant Sand.) One of the many versions of the Willard Grant Conspiracy, a sextet, is about to play the Middle East Upstairs. They, along with several other groups, are feting the local Kimchee Records label, for which they’ve recorded. The Willard Grant Conspiracy specializes in elegiac, sad, cathartic rock ‘n’ roll; you’ll find their discs alongside Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Tindersticks and Leonard Cohen in people’s CD collections.
     Depending on budget and time commitments, the Conspiracy ranges anywhere from one – Fisher on voice and guitar – to 16. Fisher has 28 players he can call upon, on two continents. (The only time he’s made money on tour, he says, is when he was a one-man band, touring Europe for six months last year.) On , “Let It Roll”he used eight primary players, plus guests like Steve Wynn and Jack Dragonetti.    
     In an earlier phone chat, Fisher had called it a radical album. I ask him to amplify. “It’s a radical change from ‘Regard the End,’” he says. “That was a sculptured record, created around the songs, and assembled like a collage, whereas ‘Let It Roll’ is really a document of the live band. The main elements of the record are live recording done in the studio while we were on tour.  With the exception of a few songs, it uses the more rock ‘n’ roll aspects of what we do and what we’ve always done. To people who’ve seen us in Boston, it may not be such a surprise that the band is loud. But in Europe, for example, where for the first years, I had to tour without a rhythm section, they were by their nature a little quieter. … One of the things I wanted to do was to create a record that was like an old-fashioned record. I wanted dynamics. No record these days has dynamics because they squash all the compression in mastering it.”
     That’s the sound – like rolling thunder, sometimes distant, sometimes close by. What about the vision? Fisher: “This record is thematically different as well. It starts with ‘From a Distant Shore,’ which is an anti-war song, and  ‘Let It Roll, which could be seen as an anti-war though it is a reworking of a traditional murder ballad. Most murder ballads, there’s some set-up of a horrific act and then the repentance. I wanted one where there was no repentance. I wanted one where the guy goes into the next life as angry as he was before. Then, there’s (Dylan’s) ‘Ballad of a Thin Man,’ and that can be seen as a similar kind of song. I was pissed off after the last election, not the mid-term, but the Presidential one. Normally, I try to stay away from politics on stage, because I don’t necessarily think it’s my job. Usually I prefer to focus on personal politics, because at the end of the day, if everybody were more worried about their personal relationships with people immediately around them, it would be a better world.”
     Fisher is a master of the well-turned phrase, the poignant story-song, but he prefers to eschew interpreting what he writes. “The reason I feel this way about songs,” he says, “is I feel like playing music is an act of communication and by definition it’s a two-way street. When you play live you get a certain amount back from people, but in the abstract (on disc), allowing a song to be inhabited by the listener is a way of making the communication work. So many bands create this wall: ‘Here’s us, we’re the rock people, you’re the audience and everything goes out.’ I’ve always thought our music was more inclusive and less exclusive.”
     Suffice to say, though, Fisher’s still roaming the darker recesses of his mind. In “Crushed,” he’s come “undone” and “lost the faith.” In “Breach,” “And all that matters/Turns to grieve.” In “Skeleton,” “The door is kicked/The lock is blown/Half of everything is gone/From half of everything I own.” There’s a gothic, dramatic feeling to much of this album, with violas, guitars and drums crashing like mini-tsunamis.
     Fisher, a heavyset man, grew up in California and moved to Portland, Maine in 1980, where he played with Volume Control and Blue Section. He moved to Boston in 1984, where he joined Laughing Academy and played with them until 1995. That was followed by stints with Flower Tamers and Violet Crumbles. Willard Grant Conspiracy started in 1996. Three years ago, he moved back to the high desert of Lancaster, California for “family reasons.” When he’s not on the road, Fisher works as a loan officer at a mortgage broker. It’s not a bad thing, he says, that people know that many musicians – even fairly well known ones - cannot support themselves entirely through music. WGC’s last disc, “Regard the End” sold 3500 copies in the U.S., and 10,000 in England. “Let It Roll,” released almost a year ago in England has sold 6000 copies so far.
      What, Fisher is asked is the main misconception about Willard Grant Conspiracy? “That’s easy,” he says. “That we’re a dark band. We’re not. If you’re depressed and listen to the blues it doesn’t’ make you more depressed, it illuminates you, it lightens your load, it takes you places. Somewhere, I suspect in the ‘80s, with the advent of all these pharmaceuticals to take care of every depressing moment, somewhere along the line, someone decided that people should not ever have a dark day. It’s a ludicrous concept. You value the bright days against the dark days, and you get stuck in between. This idea that melancholy music, or music that has substance to it, that isn’t just about getting your groove on, is bad or wrong. It marginalizes it. It’s just absurd.”
    Still, Fisher, who says he’s been in and out of therapy, acknowledges the source of where much of his material comes. “I’m an addict,” he says. “It’s a selfish disease and it’s based on self-loathing. You don’t look the way I look without having some issues. On the one hand, being as heavy as I am really hurts the image of the band; on the other, it’s not something I choose. But it’s part of my disease. If I could somehow fix myself, to the point where I could find it comfortable to be healthier, I certainly would do it. It’s not fun to live like this. You don’t wake up every day and go ‘Gee, I’m glad I’m huge and overweight and not attractive to other people and have trouble finding a place to sit on an airplane where people don’t complain.’ It hurts my band, it hurts my music, it hurts all kinds of things.”
       The only time I saw Fisher smile that night at the Middle East was when he was on stage, in the moment. Perhaps that was most apparent when he was deep into a swelling, surging, nine-minute “Let It Roll.”