Fabulist!

Jason Webley is a fascinating singer-songwriter-accordionist and sometimes street performer-- if you missed his Eleven Saints video the first time around, I strongly suggest you remedy that. This song is so infectious I have made it my ringtone. I caught up with Mr. Webley after his west coast tour to have a little chat about magic, removing the letter X from the alphabet, and his good friends the Dresden Dolls.

I was reading your blog and it seems like you have an interesting relationship with the number eleven.

The eleven story is kind of long. One big thing about me and the number eleven is that I hate astrology and numerology-- all that stuff irks and irritates me. The fact that I am one of *them* I find really bothersome. So I don't really talk publicly too much how my life is ruled by numbers and stars. But me and the number eleven are getting along really well lately. There was a long period of time where we weren't speaking.

And you have a very private relationship, you and the number eleven.

There's a lot of different layers to this world. There's mundane, physical reality. But there's this world of magic and signs and symbols, which is equally tangible if you know how to look for it. But I think it's just another layer. Just because you can see it, doesn't mean you know the secrets or the mystery of life or anything. You just see a little bit more. The magic layer is very seductive. It's got all these triple-back flips of serendipity and synchronicity that are really exciting and addictive, but I think somewhere there is another deeper, truer and more important layer. And I think that layer is much simpler.

How did you come up with the idea for Eleven Saints? It seems very different from your other music.

I wrote it with a friend named Jay Thompson. He's a poet here in Seattle. I've got this idea that in the next few years I want to do eleven collaboration records with different friends and musicians. The one with him was the very first one. The idea was to get together for a ridiculously short amount of time—twenty-four hours-- and write as many songs as possible. That's where Eleven Saints came from. I think it's a pretty magical little song. (laughs) I think it's a four minute song we wrote in two minutes.

I did a second record in the same series with a folksinger from Michigan named Andru Bemis. That one is all kind of silly too but it's a little more fleshed out. A couple of the songs actually turned out really beautiful.

So that's two of your eleven.

Right after New Year's I'm flying to Indianapolis to record with this group, The Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band, who are good friends of mine. That's going to be the third one in the series. Then the second half of January I'm touring the Czech Republic with an accordion player I met there last February, Jana Vebrova. I'm pretty enamored with her. She's brilliant. Her accordion playing is really rudimentary like mine but her lyrics and her voice are amazing. The record I want to do with her is to take four or five of her songs and just have her play them, and then I'll translate them from Czech into English. I'm not really good at that, but I'll have help.

I'm curious about your fans. They seem very protective of you, and very dedicated. How do you think you inspire that sense of dedication?

I don't know. I've kind of always done what comes naturally. I try not to be mysterious, but there was definitely a time when I was putting energy into enigma. In a way that served me as far as getting bigger audiences, but I don't think it served me very well personally. That's not something I try to do. I try to be really approachable. I talk to pretty much anyone who wants to come and talk to me.

I was on your forum and came across a thread where people were arguing over when someone had the right to call themselves a tomato scout.

(laughs) Tomato scouts, technically, are people who have come to this dumb thing I do every year in Seattle called Camp Tomato, and get registered. But I'm pretty sure anyone can call themselves a tomato scout. Maybe I should make an official statement about that. But there is an oath—you have to take an oath.

I think someone posted the oath, yes. Then they started to squabble about it.

Well, that's good. Hopefully the different tomato scout factions will war.

So what's Tomato Camp?

That was me sort of replacing being enigmatic with something else. I used to die every year. On Halloween every year I'd stage a death. Around May Day I'd stage a birth. During my live six months I'd play and tour continuously-- pretty much a show every night. And then during the dead months no one would theoretically hear from me and I wouldn't do anything. I think it's been two or three years that I've not been doing that? Camp Tomato is the replacement of the spring getting-born thing. It's not really a concert. A bunch of people get together in the park. It starts with a potluck, and people get registered and get divided into four different camps: balloons, feathers, boats and tomatoes. You get a little membership card, and there are places you can get different merit stamps by doing different things. I think this year you'd get your feather stamp by writing a letter to Webster's Dictionary asking them to remove the letter X from the alphabet.

That's amazing.

I think for the boat stamp, you had to walk holding an egg in a spoon carrying a snapshot of the moon across twenty feet, without dropping the egg. And then climb onto this big spool and say "Wheeeeeeee!" Then you could get your boat stamp.

For your boat stamp the year before you had to get shocked with a cattle prod, or give a massage to someone who had just gotten shocked by a cattle prod. OR, capture a live rabbit. Both years I think we had a couple rabbit captures, which I find really impressive.

How many people show up to this every year?

The first year was a hundred, last year was maybe two hundred. It's probably been the right amount of people, but I was a disappointed by the numbers a little bit. People do travel for it, but back when I was doing the births and deaths people traveled a lot more for the Seattle shows. They'd come from Winnipeg, California, Texas-- all sorts of places. The biggest audience was the last time I died.

But everywhere else things are getting busier. I think opening for the Dresden Dolls in Australia was really fun and a lot of people are really excited for me to come back there.

How did that come about?

In 2000 I was in Australia as a street performer in the Adelaide Fringe Festival. There was a street performer who was doing statue work and asked if I wanted to hang out and have dinner and see a play. At the play I saw the most beautiful woman in Australia and fell crazy in love with her and chased her to Bali and she left me and broke my heart. About four years later I got an email from the street performer that I went with to the play, saying "Hey, I don't know if you remember me, we hung out in Adelaide. I'm in this band now, you should check us out sometime, we're going to be playing in Seattle on this day." And that was Amanda from the Dresden Dolls.

Oh, wow.

Theoretically one of the compilations is going to be with her. Our project is going to be cute—it's called Evelyn, Evelyn, and we're conjoined twins. ++

Learn more about Jason at his site and MySpace-- and you can pick up his albums here. (Don't forget to join his mailing list, as he has a book of fairytales coming out that you'll want reminding about!) In the meantime, here are a couple more tracks from the fantastic Mr. Webley.

Jason Webley - Dance While The Sky Crashes Down

Jason Webley - Map