Not too long ago, Aaron Lee Tasjan and a buddy of his were asked to play "dudes who looked like they were from the '70s" in a music video, a request they were happy to oblige.
"But it made us think," says Tasjan, his heavy-lidded eyes fixating on the coffeeshop tabletop from behind horn-rimmed glasses, "because at some point in the last few years, it seems like a lot of people have gravitated towards this kinda like Heartworn Highways aesthetic of the music they're gonna make and the kinda look they're gonna have. We were like, 'We're just dudes from the Midwest that grew up listening to Bob Seger-type music, and we just always thought this stuff looked cool. ... Well, where does this leave us now? Have we become the thing that we were trying to originally rebel against by wearing this stuff?'
"We wrestled with that for a while," he continues, "but eventually we just gave up and went to the bar or something."
Like a lot of 20-something artists, Tasjan is pretty much constantly pricked by self-awareness, and more than once he's spun those uneasy thoughts into a song. The Jayhawks-ish twang-rocker "E.N.S.A.A.T." ("East Nashville Song About a Train") that appears on his new album In the Blazes is an eye roll at the notion of musical posturing, be it the contemporary country, punk or Americana variety. The latter is Tasjan's niche. He implicitly links himself to a boho identity that borrows from blue-collar sensibilities and is firmly rooted in the East Side, where he lives.
"I have to make fun of me," he says. "I can't take it seriously. I mean, I take the making-up-songs part and the playing-and-singing-and-doing-a-good-show part seriously, but everything else, I don't have it in me. ... I really care a lot about [music], but I just choose not to present myself that way."
Tasjan relocated from Brooklyn two-and-a-half or three years ago; he's a bit fuzzy on the actual date. Down here, the singer-songwriter scene was far more welcoming of droll yarn-spinning, the sort of thing John Prine and Todd Snider — two of his heroes — have been doing to acclaim for decades. Tasjan found plenty of locals to share the bill with, from John McCauley to Tim Easton, Brian Wright and Lilly Hiatt, but perhaps his most memorable opener to date was a big-mouthed douchebag who called himself Captain Folk, Tasjan's alter ego.
Says Tasjan, "He's a dude that says out loud a lot of the stuff that I think but don't say, because I'm embarrassed to say it. He'll show you where I ripped all my songs off from. ... [He'll say] that I'm just a wannabe Kevn Kinney or Todd Snider. That I really just play the same four guitar licks in different keys the whole night. That I wear my own merch on laundry day. Just true stuff."
Tasjan has also inhabited a world where an extravagant constructed image is embraced as an aesthetic tool. Early in his New York tenure, he played guitar in Semi Precious Weapons, helping accentuate the androgynous, glam theatricality of the band's frontman Justin Tranter.
"His whole thing was, 'I wanna take the culture of the entertainment that's happening in some of these tranny clubs in New York and make that a rock 'n' roll stage persona and give empowerment to transgendered people, the transgendered community,' " Tasjan explains. "In the beginning part of what we were doing, that was definitely a big part of it: 'Let's make this guy famous so that the world can be a better place.' "
Since he parted ways with that band, Tasjan's launched roots-rockers The Madison Square Gardeners and held down sideman gigs with Drivin' N Cryin', the New York Dolls and other acts. But he's really come into his own standing onstage alone, a lovably self-deprecating embodiment of a paradox unique to alt. country and indie-rock singer-songwriters: the good-natured slacker who's nonetheless a meticulous craftsman.
The cover art of In the Blazes hints none too subtly in this direction. The title is spelled out in block lettering engulfed in flame, and Tasjan leans in like he's just lit the joint between his lips on one of the E's. Getting high and/or tanked is a recurring songwriting motif for him too. Live, he'll set up tunes like the lazily funky country-blues album opener "The Trouble With Drinkin' " by recounting his foolish exploits in comically sheepish fashion. Like the time he stumbled back to his hotel after a gig, forked over all of the night's earnings to a pizza guy and swore the next day that somebody must've robbed his room.
"I don't regret it, because I had a great time doing it," says Tasjan of such inebriated episodes. "But I'm definitely like, 'Yeah, I probably shouldn't do that.' I guess it's my way of just kind of publicly embarrassing myself. ... Maybe I'll feel bad enough about it to not do it again."
Of course, he's actually very thoughtful about all this. "If you're not risking something [as a performer]," he says, "then you're not gonna learn the lessons that you're supposed to learn from doing this, which means that you'll never get better at it. You'll never grow as a person.
"It's kinda weird. I guess I do a lot of dumb stuff, but at least in my own mind, it's all under the guise of trying to become a better person."
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