Lydia Loveless
SPB: Who is your favorite pre-1960s artist?
Loveless: Erik Satie.
As a child who didn’t love practicing piano but loved the idea of being a great pianist, I wish I’d discovered Satie, a composer I’ve heard was not very good at sight reading or the old favorite of our superiors, “applying himself.” The deceptive simplicity of some of his songs may have convinced me to try a little harder and saved my poor teacher a lot of time.
In addition to that, he was a real eccentric, Not just a quirky guy with lots of money for funny stage props and analog recording equipment. It’s hard to get to the real truth of some of it since he was around “back in the day” but some of my favorites are that he carried around a hammer for protection and he was jailed for “cultural anarchy”. After his death there were two grand pianos found stacked one atop the other, one used to hold letters. He loved velvet (me too, Man). He is a reminder to me that you’ve got to stay weird for your art , but maybe pop out occasionally to a coffee shop or something before you forget how to speak. Maybe he’d seem like a douche in our day, but back then he was just right.
