In Conversation: Ohama
In Conversation: Ohama
Clay Geddert
Tona Walt Ohama’s legacy is both widely celebrated and widely unknown, but that has never pinned him to convention or trends. I caught up with him to chat about his latest release, My Electronic Country Album. Just like his past work, MECA is continuation of the creative intuition that has driven him throughout his career and led to an impressive discography that spans many strange and wonderful genres. Just as before, some will turn their nose up at the idea of Ohama’s latest offering; but to scoff at MECA before giving it a fair shake would be to miss a remarkable effort that will please country and synth haters alike.
MECA strays from convention not only in format and sound, but it is also bold new territory for Ohama as he opens up about his personal life for the first time. Opting to read his liner notes before covering a classic country tune, he pairs weathered country story telling with an innovative synth twist on tunes we can all sing along to – and probably have personal associations with. Typically one to hold his card close to his chest, Tona decided to lay them all on the table go all-in. He may have played his last poker game many years ago, but I am so glad that he decided to lay his cards on the table for us once again.
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Clay Geddert: By recording your liner notes, you gave us a great introduction to yourself, the music, and why you chose to record a country album. Tell me more about how you came to start compiling your stories into a country record. Why now? What was the impetus for My Electronic Country Album?
Tona Ohama: You may be surprised to hear that My Electronic Country Album was actually inspired by a progressive rock record.
10 years ago I was listening to a lot of chiptune music, stuff like 8-bit Dark Side Of The Moon and 8-bit Led Zeppelin. I actually come from a prog rock background, bands like Emerson Lake & Palmer, Yes, and Genesis and I’ve often wondered if one could do 8-bit music a little more seriously by adding real vocals and actually performing the music.
Often 8-bit cover songs are made from MIDI files, a type of digital sheet music so the video game sounds aren’t played, they are triggered like a player piano. Nothing wrong with that but I’ve always had this belief that a monophonic synth could embody the heart and soul of a rock guitar or classical violin if it was played with enough passion.
In 2012 I decided to do a cover version of Jethro Tull’s Thick As A Brick using synthesizers. That was the first album I bought at age 12 and it’s now become an iconic prog rock album. On any Greatest-Prog-Rock-Album-Of-All-Time list it`s going to be near the top but no one had covered the entire song before. Oh yeah, this album is just one song, pretty unusual for 1972.
I wanted to stay very faithful to the original so I did it in the original key and spent a lot of time trying to match the original tempo changes. If you play my version side-by-side with the original they will stay in sync for the entire 43 minutes. It took about 900 hours to record that album. I worked very hard to achieve “real” performances. I’ve never done better and was so happy with the album I entered the Juno Awards in the electronic category. What happened next was a surprise. The album was disqualified. In 2012 no cover songs were allowed in the Electronic Album category!
My immediate thought was “If I submitted a cover song in the Country Album category nobody would make a fuss” and that’s when the idea for My Electronic Country Album was born.
CG: Despite being steeped in prairie tradition, you took a very non-traditional approach to country and blended sounds that are rarely associated with the genre. Can you tell me more about the decision to blend 80s video game sounds with country music?
TO: I used to play a lot of video games. I’m talking early arcade days, 80s games like Defender and Missile Command. I’ve always wanted to use those types of simple electronic sounds to make some serious music. Also, and this is an important distinction, my focus is synthesized sounds, not samples, not imitations of acoustic instruments. For people who don’t know the difference, samplers often begin with recordings of actual acoustic instruments like grand pianos, drums or guitars. Synthesizers begin with generated waveforms like simple square waves or sine waves.
With My Electronic Country Album I went even further than Thick As A Brick The Synth Edition because I decided to not use a drum machine. MECA is 100% synthesized except for the vocals, and it was very important to me that the vocals sounded completely natural. Very few studio tricks, no voice doubling, no Auto-Tune, no vocoders or harmonizers. In modern country music there’s a lot of slick production and auto-tuned vocals. Don’t get me started on Auto-Tune. Or quantizing everything to the grid. Or loudness war mastering! I know it sounds kind of funny for an electronic artist to say this but I wanted a return to the basics of classic country.
CG: Obviously, the artists you covered in the album carry some significance to you, but were there any specific artists or albums that inspired you to create an electronic country album? Are there any sounds that you were trying to recreate?
TO: In a sense I was inspired by early 70s country Moog albums because I thought they could have been done better and could have been more country. Albums like Gil Trythall’s Country Moog Switched-On-Nashville and Rick Powell’s Switched-On-Country miss the mark because there are no vocals and the essence of country music is in the words and vocals.
As for specific sounds, yeah, there were a lot of moments from my past I wanted to recreate or recognize. Take a listen to the monosynth work on Billy Joel’s “Great Suburban Showdown” from 1974 and you’ll recognize similar synth lines throughout my album. Listen to the 1982 video game BurgerTime and you’ll clearly hear its influence on “The Gambler”. The violin parts of “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” heavily imitate games like Galaxian from 1979. I’ve always loved these little beeps in the game Metroid from 1986 and sprinkled similar sounds throughout every single song. Listen closely and you’ll notice I synthesized lots of tiny blips and beeps inspired by things like 1985’s SuperMario coin or 1987’s Zelda II: Adventures of Link sword slash or the 1980’s PacMan munch.
As a kid in the 60s I camped out in front of the television to watch the Apollo moon landing and there used to be a beep every 15 seconds to indicate they were recording. I did a similar thing during my spoken word sections except I’m using the beep from my 2010 song “Earth”. This country album really pulls all my previous work together in one place. Even the ambient drone that appears in the spoken word sections references my Multiambient Soundscape installations.
CG: John Prine would often say that he gravitated towards country because the form was so conducive to story-telling. I thought it was very interesting that you chose to tell your stories via spoken word in between covers of country classics. Why did you choose to tell your stories through spoken word, rather than putting them to song?
TO: Actually the album started as songs with printed liner notes. But since a lot of people don’t read album liner notes anymore I got the idea to record the liner notes. It’s easy to make multiple Spotify playlists so you could have the songs in one list and have songs + liner notes in another list - like a director’s commentary. Turned out to be a poor idea, the liner notes just didn’t sound very interesting but it did evolve into the stories you hear on the final album.
I’ve written songs, but I don’t think of myself as a songwriter. I certainly don’t have the ability to write an entire album of original country songs. Songwriting is really tough. It’s probably the artform that uses the fewest words to convey story and emotion. One line in The Gambler “Then he bummed a cigarette and asked me for a light”, those last 6 words flesh out exactly who this character is. I find it remarkable. If I could write like that, I’d be making my living writing country songs.
CG: My jaw was on the floor after listening to Double or Nothin’. It’s the type of tale that a kid like me only sees in movies. How do you think your life would be different today had you won that last draw?
TO: (Laughs) I`m glad that story grabbed you! Oh, it would have been horrible if I’d won. What a nightmare! It would have destroyed his family, what if the guy committed suicide or something? Like I said, I've never been so relieved to lose.
By the way, he’s still around, I’ve seen his profile on Facebook. But we haven’t spoken a word since that night over 40 years ago.
CG: In comparison to some of your other albums, the production is slimmed down considerably. To me, listening to My Electronic Country Album felt like listening to a weathered crooner pluck out a tune in a dimly lit bar. No bells or whistles, just the stories and a guitar‚ only in this case, it’s a synth. Was it your intention to sound live?
TO: Yes! That was exactly my intention. Imagine a country band, say a six piece band, and picture the musicians standing on stage. Imagine them in cowboy boots and western wear. Now, picture their instruments. Drums and upright bass, a pedal steel guitar, a piano, a fiddle, maybe a Gibson Country & Western flat top acoustic guitar. Now, imagine them playing a classic country song.
Okay, now imagine the same band, same musicians, same stage, same classic country song but now they are playing an ARP Odyssey, a Minimoog, an EMS VCS3, a Korg MS-20, a Buchla 200 and a Yamaha CS-40M. That’s what I was going for.
CG: The album follows a gripping narrative arc throughout your life that eventually crescendos in a harrowing tale of sexual harassment. It has a cinematic quality that kept me on the edge of my seat from start to finish. These stories though, don’t seem to be chronological, instead, you did a tremendous job of compiling your vast life experiences into a narrative that flowed naturally. What can you tell me about dredging up all those memories and sculpting them into a narrative? Was it a difficult process or did it come to you as naturally as it felt in the final product?
TO: Very difficult process. I`m not a natural storyteller. I had to become a storyteller to do this album. I spent ages writing the stories, months and months and honestly I thought the easiest part of the album was going to be the stories. I didn’t actually read them out loud until I began to record and when I listened back I was literally sick to my stomach. It was horrifying how bad they were. Things that sounded fine in my head did not translate to spoken word.
I asked my sister Natsuko for help. She’s a classically trained actress and a voice teacher at USC in Los Angeles. Her focus is Shakespeare but she’s had small roles in movies you’ve probably seen, things like Speed, Flatliners, Pirates of the Caribbean. Anyhow, she’s a master level voice teacher working with professional actors and movie stars so I never imagined I’d be asking her for help, but I did and she changed my entire process.
I had to learn and redo everything. I had to rewrite all the stories to be spoken instead of read, in other words I had to learn how to write dialog. There were hundreds of rewrites. The stories turned out to be the most difficult part of the album. I couldn’t just read the stories, I had to memorize every word and rehearsed every day for months until I could deliver a natural performance.
You said “cinematic quality” and it really was like cutting a movie. The first cut was over two hours long and I had to edit it down to 80 minutes to fit onto a CD. My Electronic Country Album is technically a double-vinyl album and I remember thinking, “this is the most ambitious project of my career, the amount of work involved is probably like doing The Wall by Pink Floyd or Tommy by the Who”. After the fact I saw Springsteen on Broadway and thought my album was just like that show. Well, except I didn’t write these songs.
Here’s a surprising fact. I chose the songs and put them in order way back in 2012. Those song choices and that song order stood until the final album. The only exception was the song “These Boots Are Made For Walking” which was added late in the game. It’s the only song originally sung by a female singer (as well as on my album with guest vocalist Janine Bracewell), and it’s the only time where I wrote the story first and then chose the song. I’ve always associated that event with that song because of the line “What I know you ain’t had time to learn” and it is clearly the climax of the album.
CG: I did not expect this album to go in the direction it eventually did, and I think you are an unexpected victim to add their voice to the #metoo movement. Why did you choose to tell this story now? What do you want people to take away from your experience?
TO: It’s probably the most important story of my life. My mom and dad and aunts and uncles all passed away without knowing the truth.
And this might surprise you - until I recorded the story, I didn’t realize it was a #metoo story. It just didn’t connect because I thought #metoo was all about women. It’s not. It’s about the abuse of power.
CG: As per the country tradition, your best story-telling is vulnerable and raw. Was it difficult to open yourself up in that way?
TO: Absolutely. I’m actually a very private person. But I don’t think you can cover a well-known classic country song without a valid reason. The stories weren’t just to show my connection to the song and to entertain. Sometimes they were meant to defend my right to sing these songs.
However, although I’ve shared some very private things on this album that doesn’t mean my life is suddenly going to be an open book. If you want to hear these stories listen to my album, please, thank you. But if you want more detail than what I reveal on the album? I have no comment.
CG: You seem to have an impressive amount of resilience that has carried you through some very hard times. Who taught you to brush yourself off and continue to get back on the proverbial horse? Did that come from your upbringing on the farm?
TO: Yes. And no. I don’t think I possess a special amount of resilience. I think everyone has that. You know, every single person I’ve met has some sort of story. People are just amazing. I’ve met a woman who’s throat was cut from ear to ear. I’ve met a man who drove drunk and killed his wife on their anniversary. I’ve met a single parent who’s wife died of cancer during pregnancy but the baby survived.
People open up to me and share their stories all the time for some reason and as a result I have developed a deep sense of empathy.
Every stranger I pass on the street is dealing with some sort of addiction in their family. Every face is a job, a house, a lost job, a lost house. Yeah, people are amazing. I know I’ve gone off on a tangent so let me close with a little story that got cut from the album.
“When I was 5 years old my dad drove home in his brand new Oldsmobile. White leather interior, fully loaded. On the farm in those days we left keys in all the vehicles so I had a ball playing with those power seats. I loved the sound those electric seats made! And then I made my greatest discovery. Ever. This car had an electric cigarette lighter! I burned this circle and thought, “This is way better than my wood-burning set” and so I did it more. Lots more. I burned these elaborate designs on both bucket seats and I didn’t stop until the car battery was dead. And then I went into the house and said “Hey guys! Come outside and see what I did!”.
That was the first and honestly the only time my father ever got physical with me, gave me a little spanking. I couldn’t quite understand why I was being punished and I definitely didn’t understand why he got these ugly fake fur car seat covers.”
There is a hidden credit on My Electronic Country Album where I quietly say “I made this album for Tona”. That means I made it for my father Tona, that means I made it for my son Tona, and it means I made it for me. I made it for all of us. You too.