How Ghosts Affect Relationships: 4AD Announces Massive His Name Is Alive Box Set! Plus My Interview With Warren Defever

In what looks like the most spectacular reissue news of 2024, the label 4AD has announced a 6-LP box set from His Name is Alive. Collecting the first three His Name is Alive albums -- 1990's Livonia, 1991's Home Is In Your Head, and 1993's Mouth by Mouth -- the set will contain a wealth of rarities and bonus cuts.

How Ghosts Affect Relationships: 1990-1993 by His Name is Alive will be released on September 27, 2024. A limited edition of 1,000, with a signed print and poster and book, this set will go fast so I would urge you to pre-order now.

I've been a fan of His Name is Alive since Livonia, and I've also tried, over the last few years, to cover all the reissues of the pre-Livonia material. You can find my reviews here, here, here, and here.

I interviewed Warren Defever about those early pre-Livonia His Name is Alive recordings a few years ago and you can read that interview here.

But today, I sat down to talk to Warren Defever again, specifically about the first trio of His Name is Alive albums on 4AD, and this fabulous How Ghosts Affect Relationships box set.

Livonia (1990)

Glenn, kenixfan: Having now heard the reissues of your early tape experiments, I can see a more dramatic progression from those to Livonia. How did you approach this record in 1990, and build upon your earlier material here?

Warren Defever: The earliest pieces from Livonia were recorded on cassette in the mid-Eighties while I was still in high school and had no friends. The approach was originally very simple: when everyone else went to the football game or the school dance, I sat in my parents' lonely basement playing guitar plugged into an echo pedal plugged into a cassette deck while wearing headphones sadly disconnected from polite society. I missed out on everything, especially movies like Beverly Hill Cop, The Goonies and Ferris Beuller's Day Off.

By the time Ivo had expressed some interest in in the tapes I was sending to him, I had started working part time as a junior assistant engineer at a studio and now had acquired three friends so we would go in after hours and try to fill up all 8 tracks on the half-inch machine, which was often challenging after really getting used to the 4-track. The approach to tracks 5, 6, 7 and 8 was usually this: take tracks 1, 2, 3, and 4 and re-process them through backwards echo or noise gates until it sounded like ghosts or a space cat.

I had heard the Cocteau Twins and read a magazine that talked about Brian Eno so I figured I could just do it myself.

Glenn, kenixfan: Key track on Livonia?

Warren Defever: "How Ghosts Affect Relationships" was briefly released as a single from 4AD before the album came out but I think of it as very album-y. It's short, a lot of the bits get repeated / reflected / remixed / refracted, but I think you can just listen to the whole [record]. It's like 20 minutes; you can handle it.

Home Is In Your Head (1991)

Glenn, kenixfan: The sound here is more direct, the effects and "ornamentation" around the material less obvious and more subtle. In 1991, this didn't sound remarkably different from Livonia, but heard again now, it is strikingly different in approach. What changed when you recorded this album in 1991?

Warren Defever: As soon as Livonia iwas released in 1990, I got a quick rundown on how the music industry works and how mechanical / songwriting works from an attorney so I decided the next album would have 23 songs, so I could make twice as much money as Livonia. It turned out, however, that most record companies have a limit of how many songs they will pay mechanical royalties on, so that plan didn't really work out, although it did greatly influence the process -- more songs done quickly as opposed to most bands' focus on "making good songs". Home Is In Your Head is a weird mix of songs that were brand new and leftover ideas from Livonia, and even older bits going back to junior high school. So right from the beginning it's already pulled itself out of the time stream. There's a lot going on in there. Also I had bought an actual acoustic guitar for the first time. On the earlier recordings the "acoustic guitar" sounds were from placing a microphone directly under the bridge of an electric guitar, which wasn't entirely successful, so that was a huge step forward in the overall sound.

Things started to sound the way they were supposed to, instead of the previous album which was made from the limited access to real instruments and incorporated homemade versions of things or adding backwards echo over and over again until it started to sound like a choir or something from space. The lyrics on Livonia focused more on timeless, universal, themes: dreams, death, suffering -- classic teenage drama and tragedy -- and make reference to Shakespeare, Greek Tragedies, William Butler Yeats, etc. The lyrics on Home Is In Your Head start to recognize the real life daily struggles of the suburban teenager and random pop culture references start to appear (i.e., Batman, David Lynch's Blue Velvet, homework, weekends etc.)

Glenn, kenixfan: Key track on Home is in Your Head?

Warren Defever: Similar to Livonia, the songs segue into one another and are relatively short and there's not really a key song or radio friendly single (sorry marketing department) so you just gotta sit down with your headphones on, lay back, and listen to the whole jam as one piece. There's a real flow and Ivo masterfully chose the sequence and did the crossfades so it's perfect as it is. Quit trying to ruin it by taking a track out of context. There is no context. Don’t ruin the dream, Dream Ruiner.

Mouth by Mouth (1993)

Glenn, kenixfan: This record still sounds like the perfect mix of your earliest, more experimental material and a direct, concise form of songwriting. The tracks are accessible but nuanced and filled with interesting effects and ornamental embellishments, for lack of a better term. Also, it's impossible not to think that this album feels generally more upbeat (as upbeat as this kind of thing can be termed) compared to the first two records. What can you say about how you approached making this album in 1993?

Warren Defever: By the time Mouth By Mouth was finished, I was basically a normal person: there's songs about eating Chinese food for the first time, I had a girlfriend, I was producing other bands, doing remixes for people, I had two samplers and a drum machine, the Beastie Boys had released Check Your Head, etc. I'd gone to London for weeks on end and Ivo really hooked me up with new ideas that I had really no access to in my cultural wasteland of Livonia, Michigan. It was the best of times.

At that point I wanted it all, I wanted to do everything, I wanted to do every kind of music and try every possible recording technique which I will not list here at this time. I had a lot of energy and had a thousand ideas, a million ideas. The approach was the Everything Bagel approach.

Glenn, kenixfan: How did you hook up with the Quay Brothers?

Warren Defever: Ivo and Vaughan Oliver sat me down with a VCR and a stack of Quay Brothers VHS tapes (where did they get them back then I wonder now) so for an afternoon I got transported to their weird dark, blurry olde fashioned nightmare world and I really wanted to be a part of that so Ivo set up a meeting and we went to their studio which I’m pretty sure they also lived in (mostly because of the bed and the fact they just woke up and were getting dressed when we arrived). They were like "We are not interested in making videos. Please leave us alone. We have a lot of work to do."

And then the next day after listening to our records they were like "We love this! Can we pick which songs we will make videos for???" They sent us a film treatment inside a sealed envelope inside another envelope and asked if we wanted to check out the script. We could, but we waited until it was finished and approved before opening the secret letter. Inside were weird diagrams and a vague list of things that did not end up in the videos. We trusted them and their vision a thousand percent and a few years ago I felt very lucky to see them displayed as part of the Quay Brothers exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Way better than the janky homemade video we woulda made ourselves in my parents' basement.

Glenn, kenixfan: What drew you to cover songs by Rainbow and Big Star in this era?

Warren Defever: Ivo had suggested we do a cover song, maybe something a little more normal than our short weird songs that didn't always have a chorus or make any sense, maybe a song with a familiar melody and standard structure. He suggested maybe a song by The Band. Instead we recorded "Stairway to Heaven" (Led Zeppelin) and "Across The Universe" (The Beatles). That was a mistake. Both were horrible and never to be released, not even now 30 years later. I should probably put in my will that neither should be released for at least 50 years after I die (2074) to spare the feelings of everyone currently living.

The Rainbow song ("Man on the Silver Mountain") featuring Ronnie James Dio was a daily radio super jam in Detroit when I was a kid and everyone around here learned the riff as a beginner guitarist, and the lyrics are vaguely spiritual, and Karin [Oliver] sounded really great singing it. It wasn't intended to be ironic; we were doing the best we could and thought it was serious. These days you see a lot of "soft versions" of Nirvana songs or heavy songs played acoustic / sad in movies and TV shows but I'm pretty we were the first on that tip.

Big Star's "Blue Moon" is one of two or three classic songs named Blue Moon (see Elvis, Bill Monroe, or The Marcels for more), and it's on one of my tip-top favorite albums and at that time nobody had covered it before. It contains the line "DEMONS COME WHILE YOU'RE UNDER" which really hits me every time and I think everyone can relate to."

Glenn, kenixfan:

Thank you!

How Ghosts Affect Relationships: 1990-1993 by His Name is Alive is out on 4AD on September 27, 2024.

Pre-order How Ghosts Affect Relationships: 1990-1993 by His Name is Alive here.

[Photo of Warren Defever: Tim Bies]