Dear Jon

At 48, Jon Langford is a living legend of sorts. As leader of the Leeds, England, punk band the Mekons, he preached his politics with a guitar strapped on his back. His 1991 relocation to Chicago happened almost by default ("At the end of one tour, I just stayed here," he says with a shrug), and in the years that followed, he navigated toward country & western music, aligning himself with the local Bloodshot label, for which he's recorded heavily. He's devoted much of his career to campaigning against capital punishment, most significantly in 2002–03's three-volume work titled The Executioner's Last Songs. Locally, he founded the Waco Brothers, assembled the Pine Valley Cosmonauts and recorded with the Sadies. Oh yeah, and he's a prolific painter.

On Friday 20 and Saturday 21 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, everything that Langford stands for comes to a head in a beautiful clusterfuck of live music, spoken word, video images and improvisational performance—borrowing its title from his three-disc set, and touring various cities this spring. We sat down with him at the MCA to get the scoop.

Time Out Chicago: The MCA performance has to be the ultimate hodgepodge of your entire career.

Jon Langford: It could have been a hodgepodge, but there is definitely a biographical angle to it. That's the only way that I know how to raise these issues—why I would feel the way I do about the death penalty, or other decisions I've made.
TOC: How will the performan-ces be structured?
JL: It's pretty even between spoken word and the music. The whole time we're connected to live, mixed-video animation stuff, which takes a lot from [my] paintings. But I didn't want it to be like a slide show, like, "Here's this slide, and here is this song that illustrates this slide." So it's kind of free-form.
TOC: Do you practice at home, or do you have a studio?
JL: I don't really practice. [Laughs] I've found that it's better not to. I sit around and play the guitar a lot, because I write songs, but they don't really come [to me] when I try to write. If something comes up, it's because there's a need for it, and then I suddenly find my brain snaps into gear. Then I can't stop writing songs; I'll write 20 songs in a week, then go for six months without writing anything.
TOC: How are you preparing for these shows, which are partly improvisational?
JL: Oh, we've practiced. It's a pretty heavy commitment. I'm quite happy being the guy that just turns up, straps on the guitar, sings a few songs, and gets whatever [money] came through the door at the end of the night. I did that for 25 years. But maybe I should be responsible when someone has offered me something that's a little more serious. For me, it's all kind of bound in—the politics, the music and the art. The Mekons essentially had more in common with some kind of art project than a real band, just 'cause of the way our motives always seemed to be pretty self-defeating, commercially.
TOC: What are the live video mixes going to be like?
JL: A lot of my paintings, and then videos. Some of which are the best thing I ever did—one was me reading scatalogical poems in a kayak dressed as a pirate for a kids TV show. They did this blue-screen thing where I'm in the kayak, and I'm rocking back and forth, and the parrot's on my shoulder, and they set it in someone's bathroom sink. Anyway, [videographer Barry Mills] thought it would be funny to include. I'd said, "What's the stupidest thing I've ever done?" and he actually had a record of it—of me being really, really stupid.
TOC: Once the show's over, what's next?
JL: There might be another volume of The Executioner's Last Songs because I have a lot of stuff that was basically too difficult to place with some of the material that I already have. It's like, Look: These songs are covering this subject matter, and they were hits and people were fascinated with this subject. But now, ever since 1976 when they reintroduced the death penalty, all of those songs disappeared. What ever happened to country radio? What happened to drinking, cheating, killing... [Sarcastically] Those are the things we do best.

For more on the MCA events, see listings. Jon Langford's forthcoming solo album, Gold Brick, is out in March.