March 2014 Q&A with Andrew C. Schlett Editor Rivethead Magazine Andrew: Who played all the various instruments on all these tracks? I know you're the guitar player, but I'm hearing drums, bass, keyboard, etc all throughout. Did you work with a band, various individual musicians, or just a mid-90's version of Pro-Tools? Wes: Everything heard on MCMXCV is me and me alone. Andrew: It sounds like several different singers are singing on different songs through the record, [and] none of them particularly sound like how I would imagine you to sing. Did you have people come in to sing, or is this all actually your voice? It doesn't sound anything like ratbastard, bro. Wes: The cornerstone of most every vocal track I've ever done reflects a blatant theft from the pages of the Lennon/ McCartney cookbook. I am not a very good vocalist. I try to cover that up by mimicking complexities beyond my means. To my ears, former-ratbastard front man, Jan Mundorff, has a most distinct, hybrid-vocal styling. Look here... try and imagine Oderus Urungus and Jello Biafra making sickly-sweet love in a pool of rancid pudding and soon after shitting out a tragically deformed alien trashcan baby sporting a multi-ethnic foot. That baby would talk the way Jan sings. Andrew: Some of your lyrical content leads me to believe that this period in your life was shortly after going through whatever [personal bullshit at the time]. Is this correct? If so, how much impact did it have on these recordings, and did you feel somewhat purged when you had completed them? Wes: Lyrics can often be a creepy means of personifying those dark places in which we sometimes dwell. In that regard, when your job and your wallet are adversely affected by months and months of continuous rainfall, I suppose it’s not much of a surprise to find the pen doing what you perhaps cannot do verbally. In 1994, the Magnolia/ Tomball area experienced an anomaly known as a 500-year flood. At one point, we ventured from our Magnolia home on a Tomball pawn shop run to buy a camcorder so that we might film the ensuing carnage. The raging waters made their way into the floorboard of our car as we crossed Spring Creek Bridge (Harris County/ Montgomery County line) into Tomball. We were in and out of the pawn shop in less than ten minutes, however, DPS had the bridge barricaded off by the time we attempted to cross back over. We found ourselves quite literally marooned at a makeshift Red Cross shelter set up at Tomball Elementary for the next three days. The historic 500-year flood of 1994 later proved to only be the beginning of record rainfalls that punished the region well into 1995. Andrew: This entire effort is a radical departure from anything I've heard you do before, as I may have indicated. Where do you think it will fit into your overall body of work in the long run? What relevance do you believe it holds to Wes Dodson as an artist? Wes: One of the single most exhaustive labors that I've taken on in recent times has been the research and archiving of a back catalog spanning more than two decades. It is in many ways an archaeological case study of a grossly misspent life. Being of little commercial value, the timeline entries still very much serve as a testament to this pauper’s legacy. This has been my life.