Squanderers “Inspiration is for amateurs”
Squanderers at Big Ears Music in Knoxville, TN on March 28, 2025 (photo by Valerie Zars)
Squanderers is a trio comprising guitarists Wendy Eisenberg and David Grubbs, alongside multi-instrumentalist and producer Kramer. The group emerged from a collaboration between Grubbs and Kramer in 2023 and expanded to include Eisenberg in 2024.
Their debut album, „If a Body Meet a Body2, was released in the fall of 2024, I had the huge please to experience their debut concert during this years Big Ears festival in Knoxville end of March.
The following interview was conduced in written form later on.
Starting with a simple one, I’d love to hear what each of you appreciates most about the other artists in Squanderers?
Kramer: What matters MOST to me is the Love & Friendship I share with these two remarkable human beings, the way they freely share their galaxial intellects and curiosities with me, the FEELING I have when I am with them.
Their musical mastery and the uniqueness of the manner in which they play their instruments, is secondary to me. It’s important, but secondary. The humanity we share comes first. Great collaborative art is the natural by-product of Love & Friendship. No Love, no Art.
David Grubbs: I second that emotion. It can be difficult to stop yapping and start playing—both give such pleasure
Wendy Eisenberg: Thirded; I’m incredibly honored to be in the company of these two, to see how they encounter the world, and metabolize it, and feel everything. Many people use their intellects and the vastness of their experiences as a shield. They use it as a bridge, a beckoning hand.
The project originated from a collaboration—for the song “Congress of Poodles”—between you, David, and you, Kramer (for the 2023 Shimmy-Disc box set „Rings of Saturn“). So, my first question coming from this: what led you to expand that collaboration into a full band?
Kramer: I don’t think we ever considered expanding it to a ‘full band’, nor did we ever think of someone to add to make it a trio. What we both thought simultaneously is that Wedny Eisenberg MUST join us in this project. it wasn’t about adding ‘someone, it was all about adding Wendy.
David Grubbs: I recall that Kramer at one point had the idea that we should add another member with each release, but once we tricked Wendy into playing with us, three seemed the perfect number.
Wendy, how did you feel about joining the two of them in the first place?
Wendy Eisenberg: I’m just happy to be here!
Recording SQUANDERERS LP #3 at Citizen Vinyl Studio in Asheville, NC on March 31, 2025 (photo by Valerie Zars)
Listening to the album and seeing you three live in Knoxville, it’s kinda clear that each of you plays a specific role in this trio – but then again is it? So let’s flip the question: how does it feel for you? Do you feel like you fulfill specific roles, or is it more about the flow of artistic dialogue between the three of you?
Kramer: It’s definitely about the unfettered flow of mutually attained freedoms that we share. I don’t see a role for myself. I see the trio as a single entity, like a multi-celled organism that behaves in the manner it does without any discrimination, without any goal other than to reproduce and remain alive, and our acts of reproduction are the records we make. If I have a ‘role’, it’s to mix and master the recordings, and hold down the low frequency foundations when it’s appropriate to do so. And when it’s not the right thing to do (the bass, I mean), I remain quiet. Silence is a vital part of what we do.
David Grubbs: Yes, I couldn’t pinpoint one particular role for me in Squanderers. And if I feel that it’s starting to calcify, there are ways to respond to that. I keep thinking about us playing in the proximity of pianos and keyboards—there’s nothing to keep us tethered to the current guitar/guitar/bass setup.
Wendy Eisenberg: I can feel some roles calcifying but they don’t feel fixed, to me. Something more like a lava cake, or a jello mold. One of the silences I’m enjoying is not singing, but that might not have to be forever. I’ve learned much by the way Kramer plays and doesn’t play, and by the way David composes before and during. I am already growing so much through my proximity to their approaches, in a way that makes me feel like all the roles I may be filling now will shift.
I read in a Pitchfork review that the band name Squanderers comes from “The Voice in the Headphones,” a poem/book by you, David, in which you tell the story of a musician struggling to record a soundtrack for a film, based on your own experiences over the last four decades. Can you give our readers some context here, David?
David Grubbs: Yes. “The Voice in the Headphones” is a book-length poem about the culture of the recording studio; that much of it is based on my own experience. The narrative about a musician trying to finish a film soundtrack while being mocked and hectored by the director — she mocks the musician as a “squanderer,” someone who has failed to capitalize on his obvious talents — is fictional. The epithet “squanderer” was suggested by liner notes to a reissue of Big Star’s “Sister Lovers” in which there is discussion of Alex Chilton having squandered his talents. I just thought that it was such a cruel weapon to use against a musician!
As a German, I’m not particularly fond of my own language, but—maybe because I’m a writer—I’ve always loved the term “Schreibblockade.” Do you all know what it feels like to experience writer’s block?
Kramer: I actually have no experience with that. Like Richard Serra and Chuck Close, I just show up and get to work. Inspiration is for amateurs. All I need to do, is BEGIN. I’ve felt the need to do Nothing at many times in my life, but that is another form of Silence, and it’s a valid choice for any artist. We simply need to be certain that when we DO break the silence, we do it in a meaningful way.. .in a manner that has the potential to communicate.
David Grubbs: Me neither! I’ve had periods as a musician of feeling that I’m bored with what my hands instinctively want to do, but then I explore different approaches to the instrument, focus on a different instrument, spend more time writing, spend more time improvising, etc. “Writer’s block” for me is like color blindness or something of the sort; I can imagine it, but haven’t experienced it.
Wendy Eisenberg: I’ve had writer’s block. Usually it just means I am doing a poor job trusting myself, or alternately, doing a fabulous job overestimating some works of art that already exist and comparing myself negatively to it.
If so, what are your tricks for overcoming it?
Kramer: No tricks. I just show up on time and get to work.
David Grubbs: Ditto.
Wendy Eisenberg: I have to sit down and try to write the worst piece of music imaginable. Inevitably, my sense of taste kicks in and prevents it from being as bad as I’d expected, and I learn who I actually am again.
at Big Ears Music in Knoxville, TN on March 28, 2025 (photos by Valerie Zars)
Listening to “If A Body Meet A Body,” it doesn’t sound like you experienced writer’s block at all, right?
Kramer: Speaking for myself, no.
David Grubbs: Er, no.
Wendy Eisenberg: Not even me!
I read that you recorded the album in live sessions at Studio B in New York. What does that mean for the songs on the album? Are they excerpts from longer jams, or do they represent nine of the pieces you played over a few days in the studio? I’m curious about your working process.
Kramer: We were in the studio for one day, and performed all of the pieces on that LP prior to breaking for lunch. Our forthcoming LP, “SKANTAGIO”, contains the pieces we performed AFTER lunch. We may be Squanderers, but we don’t dally. And we don’t labour over our spontaneous inventions while we’re in the studio.
Following the one-day recording session, I took the audio home and selected what I knew to be the best of what we’d done together on that day. It was not difficult. I knew it when were recording it. Listening to it afterward was more of a review and editing process, than a stressful series of hard choices that had to be made. There were no hard choices. The LP came together as seamlessly as the performances themselves. The work was in juxtaposing the pieces in a manner that offers a cohesive listening experience from start to finish, and i’ve never encountered any serious roadblocks in that process. Not with my own music, nor with my own collaborative recordings, ever.
In a way, I’m making the LP in my head simultaneously with the making of the recordings and the live performance in the studio. I can see where an LP is going before the recording process is done. It’s like 3D chess. I naturally think several moves ahead. Editing comes last, so it’s like making sure the car has air in the tires before I climb in and drive downtown. Eyes and ears open. WIDE open. That’s the key that starts the engine. Sorry for the greasy metaphors, but they seem to be working for me right now.
David Grubbs: Squanderers are extremely lucky to be having Kramer on the tasks of editing, mixing, and sequencing—although I have to say that those are jobs that I also greatly enjoy. They always feel like the homestretch.
Wendy Eisenberg: I’m horrible at sequencing. It’s hard for me not to just instantly accept each recording I hear as perfect in the form in which I first encountered it, and recording improvised/improvisation-adjacent stuff is the ultimate exercise about that kind of acceptance. I’m lucky that these two relish these tasks.
At the beginning of “Theme for Pattern Recognition,” we hear a voice asking, “Are we rolling?” This made me think of those awkward moments as a journalist when you realize the tape wasn’t rolling. Have you ever experienced something similar as musicians? You played a song thinking it worked perfectly, only to realize the recording didn’t capture it? Or was there a specific reason you left this in?
Kramer: As the mixer/editor, I left it in because it possessed an emotional impact that conveyed a sense of place to the listener. Music doesn’t emerge out of the ether. it has a physical place of origin. In the case of our debut LP, that place of origin was a recording studio in Brooklyn, in which we spontaneously performed and recorded several pre-determined themes and improvisations LIVE and without overdubs or labouring over our so-called ‘intentions’. Leaving my voice intact, as it occured in real-time during that recording session, brings the listener closer to us, closer to what we experienced in that moment, and closer to the possibility that the listener might find a way to dive more deeply inside what we did, and what we’re doing. We are not two guitars and a U-bass. We are three human beings. If the record fails to convey that to the listener, then I´ve failed as a record producer.
Sometimes, you just have to ask the obvious question: what happens “If A Body Meet A Body?”
Kramer: It’s not about what happens. it’s about what CAN happen. It’s not about HOW we did something. it’s about WHY.
Wendy Eisenberg: It’s about rye…
All nine songs on the album present “Themes for…”, which creates a very cinematic atmosphere. Fittingly, the video for “Theme for Squanderers” looks like a silent movie (referring to another song on the album called “Theme for Silent Cowboys”). There are so many directions to go here, but let me start with this: Do you believe there’s a theme for every possible situation, or are there moments or situations where silence is the answer?
Kramer: Silence is so underrated and under-used. People always feel that they have to do something. They often narrow it down to two choices; do I go left, or do I go right? sometimes they envision a third choice; go straight ahead. People too often neglect to realize that doing Nothing is also a valid choice. But as humans, we have evolved into beings of action.
John Cage taught us that there is an alternative path – one of Silence – and that it would behoove us to consider it. The trio format is always wide open to the entrance and proliferation of silence. There is no more open configuration for musicians, and for the creative process itself (in my opinion), than the trio.
David Grubbs: [Silent]
The video for “Theme for Squanderers” was created by you, Kramer. You quote Friedrich Nietzsche in it—are you a Nietzschean?
Kramer: NEIN! Nietzsche ist ein Verlierer!
David Grubbs: I think Squanderers are an especially non-Nietzschean group, starting with our very name.
Wendy Eisenberg: WE: [silent]
It must have been the late ’80s or early ’90s when I first saw you perform with your band Bastro, David. Around the same time, I was buying tons of Shimmy Disc records, Kramer. It may just be me, but after a period of not hearing your names as much, you’re both suddenly everywhere again. This makes me think about art-life rhythms. When you’re young, touring seems like the best thing in the world, but at some point, it gets harder to stay motivated—before the longing for the stage comes back. Does that resonate with you? Is this your experience?
Kramer: I have never once in my creative life or my so-called professional life ‘longed for the stage’. It never seemed worthwhile to me to waste 23hrs of a day traveling/arriving/preparing so that I could spend one hour a day onstage. I only did it because I felt it was the best possible way to promote the artists I worked with on my label.
Now it seems to mean even less, in that regard. Performing live doesn’t sell records. In fact, performing live keeps me out of the recording studio, away from film sets and cutting rooms, and distracted from my efforts to create a kind of cinema that is reasonably new and original. There are only two reasons that I would put myself through something as nonsensical and pointless as ‘touring’ again, and those two reasons are as follows; David Grubbs, and Wendy Eisenberg.
David Grubbs: Traveling has been one of the great educations of my life, and I owe it all to playing music on tour. I’m usually ready to hit the road, which is easy for me to say because I have a full-time job as a professor, so touring is part of an ideal larger life rhythm for me.
Wendy Eisenberg: Like many people, I come to music-making as a place of psychic refuge. Paradoxically/classically, the road, in its infinitely public feeling, is a significant refuge for me, when I’m doing it right. The sort of traveling you do on the road for music, the “peeking into a foreign window” sensibility of moment-by-moment city observation, the magic of the people you meet whose lives you dip into only so briefly – all of the specificity of those experiences balances the work I do as a professor, like David. It reminds me that what I’m teaching my students about the communicative power of music is extremely real.
Recording SQUANDERERS LP #3 at Citizen Vinyl Studio in Asheville, NC on March 31, 2025 (photo by Valerie Zars)
Wendy, as I just mentioned, David and Kramer have quite a history together. What was your first point of contact with their body of work?
Wendy Eisenberg: I first encountered David’s work when someone told me about Gastr del Sol when I was like 20 and writing my first songs as an “adult”. They said, “your songs kind of sound like Gastr del Sol,” and sent me some MP3s and I thought, Jesus, that’s flattering. Then, thanks to being a millennial child of the internet, I dug deeper into the Grubbs universe, read all his books, and became (forgive me), a superfan.
I was already at that point a superfan of Kramer, due to the aforementioned internettiness and love of music. After reading “Our Band Could Be Your Life” in middle school, I was introduced to a lot of Shimmy Disc stuff by doing deep dives with my friend Alex, with whom I rocked with in an early band. Alex had a Chapman stick and was really into prog, and is the person who showed me John Zorn’s “Naked City” and Trevor Dunn’s Trio Convulsant when I was in 6th or 7th grade; he made me some kind of huge data disk and because I was so curious about everything I heard on it, I kept looking stuff up on internet fora, and then kept encountering Kramer’s name. Ruins? Ween? Royal Trux? Gong? Daniel Johnston? It was kind of endless, Zeligish. Once in college I made a genealogy of Paul Motian’s career to articulate something to myself about modern jazz; much of the most formative stuff in my listening diet growing up is stuff made possible by Kramer’s taste.
Did you feel any shyness working with them on music?
Wendy Eisenberg: Absolutely, at first. I tried to play it off casually, but I was and remain hugely starstruck.
Do you discuss the socio-economic and socio-political aspects of being a musician outside of your music-making?
Wendy Eisenberg: As much as any other people with the same job do when in a car. Maybe more, because being a musician is weirder, but maybe I only think it’s weirder because I’m not from a family with careers in music.
Kramer, David, do you feel kind of relieved that you don’t have to start over as a musician today, given that it’s probably harder to make a living from music than it was in the ’90s?
Kramer: Making a living doesn’t even enter into it. I’ve been lucky. I know many musicians who’ve worked just as hard as I have, and are no longer making music because they found another way to earn a living and build a retirement fund. I’ve been very very very very lucky. I’m making a ‘living’ mixing and mastering for artists who feel that I can play a positive role in THEIR music. I’ve never made a living as a musician. Maybe that will change. I’ve been told it’s never too late. Time will tell. Big Ears was a great experience, but there’s only one Big Ears.
David Grubbs: I only had a brief while—definitely less than a decade—in which playing music was my full-time job. I’m happy to have spanned several different regimes in the business of making and selling recordings; otherwise I think it would be hard to really wrap your brain around how different particular periods can be from one another.
David, you just completed a fellowship with the American Academy in Germany. I’m curious how you experienced that, especially during this specific moment in the “Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft” (to reference the band DAF), considering the current state of the transatlantic relationship.
David Grubbs: Oh my. I could write a book about this. Almost all of the public programming at the AAB last fall was organized around the transatlantic relationship. I was drawn to consider certain parallels between Berlin, surrounded by states in which the AfD either came in first or second in elections this past fall, and cities in the United States that are surrounded by far-right areas.
I was happy to be thousands of miles away from the US during the conclusion of the fall elections, and I found it helpful, as always, to put some distance between myself and the US to be able to get more perspective on the situation here. It is, as most everyone understands, a complete disaster at present, and who knows where we will be even several months from now.
I also bring this up because you worked on a book project there about collaborative work (mostly with visual artists, from what I understand). But do you think your experience with Squanderers will make it into the book as well?
David Grubbs: It won’t by and large — but that’s because the book is about co-authorship among people from different disciplines. The book would have to be many times as long if I were also writing about collaborations among musicians.
As stated, we’re living in strange times, to put it mildly. Culture, and especially music, with all its social possibilities, helps us make sense of challenges like politics and the environmental crisis. How do you, as artists, feel about this?
Do you feel a certain pressure to be outspoken about politics these days?
Kramer: Speaking for myself, NO. I think about Love, past and present, lost and gained, and its possibilities. Those are the kinds of things I think about… things that make me FEEL something vital to remaining Human. I don’t allow politics to turn my attention toward rage, which is where it would go if I let it.
John Cassavetes said, “ALL I care about, is Love”. He was right to do so, and his great and timeless work reflects that ethos. And maybe if more people felt that way, perhaps politics wouldn’t be such a destructive force in the world, and in our lives. Protest, of course. Make your voice heard, and join with other voices who think and feel similarly, but then get back to making art as quickly as you can. I think it’s possible that THAT is our only Hope. Do something creative. Don’t think about whether it’s art, or not art. Just MAKE something. Create. It’s a healing experience. Make something WITH others. It’s the path to awareness. Don’t allow politics to drive your Life. THAT, is the path to unhappiness. Happiness isn’t all around us. We must now seek it out, aim for it, and put everything we’ve got into it. it’s hard work, but I know of very few things that are worth equal effort. Even brief glimpses of it…it makes all the work worthwhile.
Don’t focus on the Void. That is the road the enemy WANTS us on. Ignore the calls to darkness. And there’s my wholly political plea to all artists to eschew politics in their art.
David Grubbs: I’m down to talk politics, most any time and anywhere. Right now it’s really fucking demoralizing, but if the music or writing that I do makes it such that I can engage in talking politics with others, that can only be a good thing.
Wendy Eisenberg: I think the work we make has no choice but to be political, regardless of our intentions. Our silences are political. Our choices to make audible what we find transcendent, or to document the transcendence of a singular process in time – all modes of expression have an uncanny sense of revealing the character of a moment to anyone bent towards specificity, who wants to understand larger contexts. I’m reading Jameson’s “Marxism and Form” right now, which begins with an essay on Adorno, and he reads the “evolution” of Western classical harmony in parallel with the concept of the social subject… I don’t think that type of analysis ends with Jameson, or historicity, or the death of the subject or anything. I see a politic in the types of music that are rewarded and not rewarded by certain markets. I see what happens to both music and politics when they’re meant to articulate each other. It is rarely as good as when you experience either of them in a dialectic to each other. I think it’s meaningful that the work of music, in its infinite abstraction, is not tied down to a particular political register, but can at once accept, reject, transcend, diagnose, and articulate it.
I bring this up because I missed hearing political statements at Big Ears, aside from Anohni, who spoke quite extensively about the state of US politics, and my friend Shahzad Ismaily, who’s been very outspoken about the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Kramer: It’s impossible to ever be proud to be an American again. Not in our lifetimes, I fear. Ed Sanders said, “There’s a mean streak in America that may take 500 years to solve”. Voices other than my own speak far more eloquently and meaningfully than I ever could on the great and tragic inequities and horrors of our times, so I choose to listen to them instead of raise my own voice. I choose to make Art, make Love, and Die.
David Grubbs: I was so happy to hear Anohni address what’s on her mind, and my hat is off to her for even traveling to Tennessee, a state that has recently passed laws against drag performance (but were blocked on legal appeal and aren’t being enforced).
Wendy Eisenberg: Echoing my bandmates here. I’m completely demoralized by the political reality of this world, and I do think it’s imperative as a human being to speak up for those targeted by these bullish, idiotic governments (not just America, the rightward turn, etc)- trans people, Palestinians, immigrants, political dissenters, women, everyone who doesn’t pay fealty…I wonder how much of the radical politics I see as evident in many of the musical acts can be expressed in words as deeply as they can in the forms some of their works take. Western music, modern music, is so uniquely situated both as and outside of ritual in a way that seems microcosmic of world structures. Maybe the sounds are telling us something about our world, or maybe they just transcend…
I find it remarkable that your performance at Big Ears was your very first concert together. I’m saying this because of the intense atmosphere you created in a challenging room, but also because I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a band recording an album before performing together. How did you experience the show in Knoxville?
Kramer: Speaking for myself, it was by far the most natural performance of my creative life. It was like making Love; no preparations, no compulsions, no ‘battle plan’, no arguing about whether to turn the lights off or leave them on, and certainly no goal other than to experience each other’s respective creative sensibilities, and respond to them.
We were talking to each other onstage in a language we were inventing in real-time. And that, to me, is a heavenly event. It didn’t feel to me as though it was the very first live performance of a new trio. it felt to me as though we were one entity, painting with sound – one sound with three multi-color brushes, in a spontaneous and ongoing rapture. It felt as natural to me as breathing, or sleeping, or staring at the sea and waiting for the next big wave. It came like the wind, and went like a cloud.
David Grubbs: From where I was sitting: the kind of effort that’s sufficiently rewarding as to seem effortless.
Wendy Eisenberg: I felt exactly as Kramer did. The music was coming out, an articulation of breathless breath, and I just wanted to steward it, to feel the separation between me and my collaborators fall away.
I also mention the Knoxville venue because of the weird video screening of interplanetary images. Coming from your work on collaborative projects with visual artists, David, I assume you three didn’t have anything to do with those images, did you?
Kramer: I didn’t even know that was happening. We have our own visuals; I call it ‘Ambient-Cinema’, but we were unaware that we were able to employ visuals in our performance,. Next time.
David Grubbs: Video screening? (This wouldn’t be the first time that I played at a festival and wasn’t aware of what was being projected behind me.)
Wendy Eisenberg: I’d made an offhand joke that I wanted space on the screen, but I guess they didn’t get it was a joke, because I’m dry as a bone. Weird! I suppose it was my fault that there was the interplanetary, but since I had my eyes closed the whole time, since I didn’t even know about them until now, I’ll choose not to feel responsible.
Second to last question: Now that Squanderers has officially hit the stage, what’s next? Are there more themes you want to explore? Are tours planned? How do you see the band evolving both sonically and conceptually over time?
Kramer: I will continue to explore this for as long as i am wanted, or until i’m too old to safely climb onto a stage again, but I fear that Wendy will be the busiest musician on earth, in due time, and I fear that David will win a Guggenheim grant and disappear for years into the making of his greatest masterpiece. The best is yet to come, from David and Wendy. In the meantime, if more opportunities to travel the world and perform live together present themselves, and I´m promised a private hotel room, I’ll be there. I must have a private hotel room. Not for my own selfishness, but for David and Wendy’s safety. I wake up screaming, you see.
David Grubbs: I doubt I’ll disappear! Gregarious as ever.
Wendy Eisenberg: We will tour, we will play more. What we do is incredibly unique, and I love sharing it with the world.
Let’s wrap up by coming back to Big Ears. You’ve all performed there multiple times, but also had enough time to see other shows. Which performances from Big Ears really stuck with you?
Kramer: I have never performed at Big Ears before 2025. sorry. it was long time coming, for me.
My fav Big Ears shows SEEN/HEARD, in order of excitement: Michael Rother, Al Sparkhawke, Anohni, Phillip Glass Ensemble, More Ease, Lankin, Thor Harris…
My fav Big Ears shows that I PLAYED in: Squanderers, Lonnie Holley, Joyful Noise ‘All-Stars’, Water Damage, and my solo piano performance on opening night (during which Shahzad Ismaily joined me for the second movement of my composition for three pianos: “Music for Pianos & Sunflowers”.
David Grubbs: I’ll add to this list Jules Reidy and Ahmed.
Wendy Eisenberg: Echoing Ahmed. I played six shows, and my father was in town, and between the schlep and the hosting, I did not get to see as much as I’d wanted. The performance that really stuck with me was Michael Hurley’s second to last ever show, at the Jig and Reel. He played right before my set, and it was exquisite to see time in his hands. I was there with Mari of more eaze, who is my partner, and Evan Welsh, who is my manager, and we were all sobbing the whole time, out of the sheer magic of it. There was an intensity to the performance that I couldn’t put my finger on, that I’d certainly heard in his records but something beyond it. We were all floored. He stayed and was eating fish and chips in the back room as we soundcheck, which must have been one of the last things he saw soundcheck; such an honor and an intensity. He is why so much of my songs are sounding the way they now do, and I’m just lucky to have seen him at all, to have shared the green room, to have heard him sing and play like that, for the world.
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