Behind the Curtain: An Interview with Storm Large and James Beaton

Storm Large Makes it Home is the latest collaboration between Storm Large and James Beaton. While it is impossible to pin more than two decades of friendship and creation down in one interview, the pair sat down with Dramaturg and Literary Manager Kamilah Bush to try.

KAMILAH BUSH [K.B.]: How’d you two meet? 

JAMES BEATON [J.B.]: Prison ‘89. Storm was a guard.

STORM LARGE [S.L.]: He was in a padded cell. Nobody fucked around on my block! No, anyway, did we meet when you were playing with Everclear? You guys came to my show at Bottom of the Hill and I kind of just became friends with the band. And then September 11th happened. And I was just like fuck music, fuck performing, fuck America. I want to do something of service and so I moved to Portland. I started working at Dante’s. Dante’s had regular gigs all week and Frank [Faillace] kept trying to get me to sing. I’m like I don’t do that anymore. I’m gonna do something important. And then someone in the middle of the week fucked them over and Frank called like “I need a favor. Can you just do anything?”

J.B.: And I had talked with a couple of our musicians and the crew guys from Everclear about coming off the road and doing a jazz version of heavy metal and punk songs. We called it —

S.L.: LoungeCore 

J.B.: And Jeff said “Hey Storm has moved up to Portland she wants to do something.” So we got together.

S.L.: We just got together at your little house. We learned maybe 10 songs.

J.B.: If that. We got together, put the music together. Played at Dante’s, quickly ran out of songs and had to play all those same songs again the same night.

K.B.: How much time was between meeting in San Francisco and playing together at Dante’s?

S.L.: We met in 2000 and Dante’s was June of 2002. Oh my god. It’s been 26 years we’ve known each other.  

J.B.: That’s what the math is. One of the things that’s kept it interesting to me, though, is we haven’t done the same thing for 26 years. It’s always been an evolving thing. So from that LoungeCore situation, we wrote a couple of original songs, we played a couple of songs, and I remember so clearly, we were irreverent and sacrilegious about our approach. And then we came up with an arrangement for a Pixies song – and it wasn’t irreverent. 

S.L.: It was like a genuine and honest reinvention of the song. You don’t mock the fucking Pixies.

J.B.: It felt like the start of the shift in what we would be able to do energetically.

K.B.: Initially, was it this irreverence that drew you two together?

S.L.: We both had a “Fuck you” to authority and that included the status quo and expectations and cultural circumstance —

J.B.: But also not having a pretension about that which is interesting.

K.B. And hard to do!

J.B.: It never felt a hipster thing to do.

S.L.: We weren’t hipster anything. Hipsters hated us.

K.B.: What does your collaborative process look like?

J.B.: It’s a mess. No. It’s intensely varied. There are times when Storm shows up with a song that she’s written on like ukulele, start to finish, and the song is done —

S.L.: He’ll throw in more interesting chords here and there—

J.B.: No but the song is done. It’s just arranging at that point. And then there’s time when I’ll bring an idea and play something for Storm and she’ll immediately take it in a wildly unexpected direction. 

S.L.: I would say 99% of the time, the very first thing that comes out of my mouth to the music is what we keep. We’re very different songwriters. I’m like a typical lyricist where I’m like “I need you to understand me!” and James is like “Let’s put a fucking C minor, diminished submarine, brown note in the background so people don’t know why they have diarrhea!” 

J.B.: I’m just a music nerd though. I know that. I own it.

S.L.: He’s more focused than me. I’ve got like major squirrel energy really bad and James can be pretty myopic.

J.B.: I’ve felt like a taskmaster—

K.B.: With so much love!

J.B.: With so much love. Always with love.

S.L.: Always with love because we are both so invested in making something impactful. When I moved here I was going to quit music and I wanted to create sort of an educational Meals on Wheels to teach people how to get access to SNAP benefits and how to make healthy food for the family, how to stretch it and make it enough, and literacy on food deserts and things. I wanted to be of service. But then slowly as we got back into performing and I saw the impact we were having on people and the activism and political fundraising we got invited to participate in — we were like “this is service!” And so somehow still not taking ourselves seriously, we take the task very, very seriously.

J.B.: If Storm was standing on a soapbox on a street corner saying some of the shit she can say in between songs, they’d chase her out of town with pitchforks!

S.L.: But because I got my titties out and I’m singing, they’re like “She’s a genius!” I recently got lost a little bit in Washington talking about the Voting Rights Act. And I started to cry. Right now we’re so broken and sad. We need some light and humanity and connectivity. It’s so powerful to get to do it with music and humor and storytelling and irreverence and self deprecation and with honesty and integrity.

K.B.: You’ve made these two theatrical pieces together. Crazy Enough and now Makes it Home. What is different about making music for your band and making a play together?

S.L.: Jammer loves this process more than me —

J.B.: I do. And I think it’s the long form storytelling. I know it’s challenging to put on the page, but I know you love Hannah Gadsby. It’s the opportunity to lay all of this out and then to pull these threads together. I loved Pink Floyd when I was a teenager and they had just these long arcs — they created worlds — and you can create a world in one song too, but I like being lost in that space of a larger structure. When you have all of this energy going over a long period of time, all of this thinking and all of the interweaving that starts to happen — I think has credibility and value.

K.B.: What’s different about making this from making Crazy Enough?

S.L.: I haven’t thrown up yet, but I might. We took longer to write Crazy Enough. We had more time.

J.B.: For better or worse because we had done JAW and it wasn’t even a quarter of what it ended up being.

S.L.: And I had a lot of people dragging it out of me. I was like “I don’t want to talk about my mom.” James called me a chicken. Sitting with it though, with the hurt and pain — this is a wound everybody knows. Everybody knows feeling unloved and feeling unwanted. And as badly as I want to be the shiny, foul mouthed singer, whatever, boot stomping badass — this is the truth and what I’ve discovered since this my second time doing a musical memoir is some things wouldn’t have gotten scraped out of the proteins and the fatty white stuff in my brain.

J.B.: We’ve known each other a long time and you’re telling stories I’ve never heard. I’ve learned new things about you in this process. I think you’ve learned things about yourself. Writing Crazy Enough, it wasn’t until months later that we realized how valuable it was to the community. Being able to look back and having experienced what value it brought to people, when it comes to hard storytelling now, we know that it can be valuable and be of service to other people.

S.L.: That's the most important part. It’s not like “look at this lint in my belly button.” And James is a good barometer for that. He has a good eye for when I’m straying into bullshit. 

K.B.: I think you two have kind of become a mirror for each other. I don’t know if this is a question. Maybe just a reflection of your beautiful friendship. The only thing I can liken my experience of being with the two of you is being around my married friends. It’s really special.

J.B.: We’ve been stuck in a sexless marriage.

S.L.: He’s my work spouse!

K.B.: I think the best artistic collaborations are all sexless marriages!

J.B.: Storm has been illuminating to my understanding of myself at times. She’ll say something and I go “oh I understand that better now!” We have a shared history, but we’re not the same people we were in 2002. In some ways we’re bound to those old stories, and they are a part of us now, but they’re not all us. It’s ok to evolve and change.

S.L.: For sure, I have a lot more confidence in myself as an artist. James has always had a really strong artistic identity by knowing what he would never tolerate. And I had things that I would never tolerate, but being like the attention seeking front person, I would allow more people to define me in ways that made them comfortable. And as I get older now, I'm more like, Nah, that's not me.

K.B.: Last question! What is currently bringing you joy?

J.B.: It’s hard work finding the joy these days, right? We came home from wherever we just were and I just jumped in the fucking ocean.

S.L.: The joy for me has been the audiences since the COVID lockdown. It might be magical thinking but I do feel a palpable, muscular optimism in people coming to shows. Like we’re here. We’re still fucking here. 

J.B.: You know that sensation right before you’re gonna kiss somebody for the first time – like butterflies. That first show we played after COVID was psychedelic!

S.L.: Being together, the thing that makes us human was illegal — and it’s the thing that AI is ripping from us and these gajillionaire oligarchs with their beautiful bunkers — they’re planning on a dystopian future with just some worker bees. And when I get into a room full of people in the dark and they’re listening —we’re like “Ah, we’re still fucking here and it still matters.”