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New Haven-based musician Shawn Persinger was a 5‑year-old kid in Slidell, La., just outside of New Orleans, when he walked into a record store and bought his first record, a Kiss album.
“I went in and said, ‘I heard this on the radio,’ and the kid at the record store said, ‘Well, was it this?’ And he put on Kiss’s ‘Shout It Out Loud,’ and I said, ‘yeah, that’s the record I want,’” Persinger said in an interview on WNHH’s Northern Remedy.
For Persinger, the first songs he loved as a child — Kiss, Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy,” Linda Ronstadt’s cover of “When Will I Be Loved,” Cliff Richard’s “Devil Woman” — set the stage for his career as a musician and for the singular voice he developed as a guitar player. He heard that first Kiss record and thought, “Oh yeah, this is what I’m going to do.”
But he has “always been a huge fan of weird music. I’ve also been a huge fan of normal music,” Persinger said.
As a kid he started writing parody songs. He couldn’t have been more than 9 years old, he said, when “I had a babysitter who I just thought was horrible,” he said, “so I wrote a parody to ‘This Land Is Your Land,’ which was ‘This House Is My House.’” The songs may have been jokes, but he knew then that the impulse behind writing them wasn’t.
Persinger moved with his family to Virginia and started playing guitar when he was 13, “right after ‘Rock You Like a Hurricane’ came out,” he said. “And the summer before ninth grade was when I finally learned to play ‘Rock You Like a Hurricane.’ And if you find guys my age, that was the first song we all learned. Because that was the song of the summer, and it’s a really easy song to play. It’s catchy, and you feel instant gratification when you play it.”
Though his ear was out ahead of his fingers. He bought a three-dollar cassette of Stravinsky that blew his mind. And late one night, just after high school, “I’m coming from a bluegrass jam and on the radio,” he said, “they’re playing the music of Henry Threadgill,” a composer, saxophonist, and flautist associated with free jazz. The album coming over the radio was Too Much Sugar for a Dime.
“This record was so unique and interesting to me,” Persinger said. Threadgill “had developed a vocabulary that was his, and he could own it.… The punk band the Minutemen, I think, did the same sort of thing, where they established a sound that was theirs, and they called it scientist rock.”
After high school he went to Musicians Institute, where he studied and played guitar intensively for a year. On Thursday afternoons the school opened its stage to let the students play for each other.
“I just wanted to play music I could call my own,” Persinger said, and every week he tried to play something different. “And I walk on stage one week, a good half a year into the program, and the teacher says, ‘oh, here comes Shawn. A lot of people don’t like Shawn at school … ‘cause Shawn does his own thing, and people hate that.’ And then I proceeded to play something that people thought was weird.”
After graduating from the Musicians Institute, Persinger decided to find other people to play his weird music with, which led to the formation of Boud Deun. “I put up these ads and I managed to find a really great bass player who was into weird music, into some of the same weird stuff I was,” Persinger said. “So then I find this violinist who can play anything, and who can write stuff down, and then found a drummer who could play anything, and was a big Frank Zappa fan…. and we kind of clicked right away.” They signed to a label. They put out four records and did a lot of shows over six years. “We were playing in the DC and Baltimore areas, where we actually had a pretty cool following.”
He was doing nothing but music, playing and teaching. “Since I got out of school I’ve been making a living with music, one way or another,” Persinger said.
He moved to New Haven in 2002 and, to his surprise, found a musical home. “I went to a young composers’ symposium at Yale and I told them what I did and I went to go spell my email address, which was the name of the band, and another kid in the room said, ‘you’re in that band?’” Persinger said. “And then I met Steve Rodgers at another symposium and he said, ‘you know, I think we played a show together in North Carolina.’”
He had by then lived in a few places where he felt that he didn’t quite fit in, musically. New Haven was different. “When I came to New Haven, I thought, ‘Wow, these band are weird, and they’re good. I used to have to go to a festival” to find that. “It’s not the same old thing. It is hard to describe.”
What makes New Haven like that? “It must be the water,” Persinger joked. “Like the pizza.”
Persinger quickly established himself as a player and educator in town. He first appeared as a solo act — “Shawn Persinger Is Prester John” — that became a duo with the addition of David Miller on mandolin, playing and expanding on Persinger’s songs and compositions. Persinger and Miller met at BMAD while playing bluegrass and “hit it off immediately,” Persinger said. “I said, ‘do you play any David Grisman? And he said, ‘sure, yeah, of course.’ So we played a David Grisman tune. And my train of thought is, ‘bluegrass, David Grisman … do you play any Frank Zappa?’ And he went, ‘Sure, why not?’ And once David and I got together and played, I realized David graduated from Eastman School of Music second in his class. So at that point I realized we could play 21st century classical music. We can all the stuff I’ve wanted to do.”
Persinger started writing music, and Miller learned it fast. “I was lucky to find David,” Persinger said. Their first recording, Desire for a Straight Line, showcased their instrumental abilities. Their next, Rise O’ Fainthearted Girls (the second title is an anagram of the first title), focused on the group’s songs and singing.
But Persinger has kept moving, constantly writing more material, learning other people’s songs, and taking on new projects — and just as it always has, his appetites take him from the obscure to the famous. He gigs around town as much as ever, from Prester John and the Luck Pushers (a country and swing band) to Emily B. (a progressive punk band). He’s working on what he called a “semi-top secret” string quartet project. He just finished a soundtrack for a Canadian filmmaker; the film is about to come out. But also, he said, “there’s a song by Buddy Holly, ‘Well, All Right.’ I’d never heard that song. Oh my God, what a great song. I’m so excited I learned that song now.”
Click on or download the above audio file to listen to the full WNHH radio interview.
