In this interview spotlight, I chat with Robert Andrew Wagner of The Little Wretches about the nuances of genre labels, technology, challenges and, of course, the latest music.

Full Q&A along with links and music below.

You’re from Pittsburgh, PA and record folk rock music.  Are the two related in some way?  Has your locale influenced the type of music you make?

How deep do you want to go, because I’ve spent a lifetime thinking about and studying this question. The answer to Part Two, the influence of the locale on the music, will be obvious to a person who listens to The Little Wretches and easy for me to talk about.

The first part of the question is the sticking point. What is folk music?

“Rock music” is easy to define. Let’s define “rock music” as music born of Elvis Presley and The Beatles, and that music, of course, was born of recording technology, electricity, juke boxes and radio, blues and other traditional “peoples’ music.”

You might define “folk music” as traditional peoples’ music, and I wish people actually DID define it as such. But what is generally called “folk music” today is woven from a few different strands. A lot of it is just acoustic pop. Let’s not even talk about acoustic pop.

Okay, you have the traditional peoples’ music thing, the pure music uncorrupted by commerce, the kind of music created for its own sake within the family, within the community, children’s songs, church songs, dance songs, like the musical equivalent of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and this music varies from region to region, Celtic music, Appalachian music, and so on down the line, music from another time and place that, like an ancient language, has an entire world embedded in it, like ancient Canaanite and Semitic languages. What’s it all mean? It’s deep, mysterious, undefinable yet has the ring of truth.

This is a bit of an aside, but a lot of what I hear today is not authentic at all but seems to be an attempt to capture the feel and vibe of those old and ancient sounds. Billie Holiday’s STRANGE FRUIT was written as propaganda. LONG BLACK VEIL was written on Tin Pan Alley. All these kids pretending they shot a man in Reno just to watch him die when they probably never held a gun, much less pointed it as someone, much less pulled the trigger.

Then, you have researchers, documentarians and ethnomusicologists that have an agenda—the Lomax recordings, the Harry Smith anthology, Ken Burns, stuff like that. What these researchers selectively shared with the world tended to bolster their respective agendas or hypotheses about the fabric of the human spirit.

That trajectory may have culminated in the Greenwich Village scene of the late ‘fifties and early ‘sixties, and it has its own sub-genre in the form of stuff that comes under the banner of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Sing Out Magazine, stuff very much connected to the United Front Against Fascism, the “old” Left. These are the people who booed Dylan when he went electric at Newport and slow-clapped him in the UK when he was playing the greatest concerts ever performed by anybody in folk or rock music.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, as they say, so even the orthodox Lefties found themselves embracing the power of electric instruments. In addition to electric Dylan, you get The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and on down the line.

To tie it all together, I guess what is called folk-rock today traces back to the popular music listened do by young people in the Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements or to the middle-of-the-road soft-rock of the early ‘seventies—Seals and Crofts, Carole King, John Denver, Jim Croce. But it’s not really folk. It’s a marketing niche, a label on a bin.

For me, folk is very much a conscious attempt to preserve the stories of my people, my family, my community, people I’ve been fortunate to know and learn from. I’ve been a religious fanatic. I’ve been a political fanatic. Whatever I do, I’m going to be a fanatic.

Frankly, my folk music comes from Moses in ancient Hebrew writing and The Beatitudes in early Christian writing. Take “Honor thy father and mother” and stir it together with “Blessed are the meek, the reviled, the poor in spirit,” add my personal observations and experiences growing up around Western Pennsylvania, and out comes the catalogue of The Little Wretches.

Stylistically, I’m like the Three Little Pigs. When I have straw to work with, I work with straw. When I have sticks, I build with sticks. Sometimes, I’m smart enough to scrape up some mud, mix it with the bricks, and make some bricks to build with. But I use the tools and materials available to me.

If you don’t listen to the lyrics and go only off the audio, you’ll hear obvious allusions to The Beatles, The Kinks, The Velvet Underground, Mott the Hoople, Phil Ochs, The Clash and Bob Dylan.

My most serious “folk” songs have not been officially released yet. I made an album called SCATTERED SEEDS, FRUITLESS TREES & GRANDMA’S HAT that is not available for download, and I’ve seen copies going for $199 on Amazon. No kidding. That album has an epic song called SEVENTY YEARS about my maternal grandparents coming to and building their lives in America from what is now the Slovak Republic.

I have a song called THE REMAINS OF JOE MAGARAC, an acoustic performance available on a concert-recording called SONGS FROM THE LAND OF UNIMARTS, PITBULLS & KARAOKE MACHINES. Each verse of the song deals with a different character or different relationship in the river towns of Western Pennsylvania.

I write about what I know. And I don’t really know anything except what I’ve seen and heard. So I have a lot of songs based on fragments of conversation, rants I’ve overheard, stories told to me that I kind of felt were being told to me so I could record them and pass them along.

I told somebody recently that I am the product of a marriage between a street fighter and a Hunky girl. Yes, I know there are people who object to the word Hunky, but I was raised to be proud of being a hunky.

I’m not living for me. I’m living to carry forward the dreams and sacrifices of all the generations that came before me.

That’s probably way more than you wanted. But I take folk music very seriously. I wish the “folk community” would recognize that all of my stuff is folk music. Punk Rock was my Woody Guthrie.

What led you down this path of music and what motivates you to keep going?

What came first, the chicken or the egg? I came down this path as one of the most angry and hurt kids you could ever meet. One of the classic albums in rock’n’roll music is The Rolling Stones’ EXILE ON MAIN STREET. That was me, or at least that’s how I felt. Outside of society. Right in the middle of it, but not part of it. Rock’n’roll music and Beat Literature were two areas in which a exiled and outcast person like me could at least imagine fitting in.

I’d like to think my academic bona fides are pretty substantial. I’m well-educated. But attending college was really an excuse for me to tread water long enough to figure out how to get my band started.

I was a mere college-boy poet lacking the courage to start and lead a band till I was diagnosed with cancer when I was 19. I didn’t want to spend eternity knowing I’d never done what I most wanted to do. If God allows me to live, there must be a reason. So I started a band. Why compromise? Want to go to your grave having said and done what you didn’t really believe in?

What motivates me to keep going? There’s a couplet in one of my songs, WALKING AMONG THE BUILDINGS, “I’m walking and shedding the slow, restless agony / Buckling under the weight of my ancestry.” I play to honor the sacrifices of those who came before me. Delusional? You do you, I’ll do me.

This may be totally pretentious or a product of self-deception, but here are the names of former band-members who’ve entered eternity: Charles John Wagner, John Creighton, Dale Nelson, Ed Heidel, Jon Paul Leone, Don Polito, and we recently lost dear friends and supporters Brian Longo and David Allen Flynn. These are people who invested many hours, months and years in making music with me, people who could have done many other things with their lives, but they believed in my songs and devoted a slice of their lives into recording and performing with me.

Like I said earlier, I’m a fanatic. Keep going? It’s hardly even a choice. It’s what I feel called to do. This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.

How is “Undesirables and Anarchists” different than previous releases? Were you trying to accomplish anything specific?

UNDESIRABLES & ANARCHISTS is like, and forgive me if you don’t like sports, but here comes a sports analogy, the album is like a martial artist who has tested for his or her Black Belt.

You want your Black Belt? Fight your way through this column of killers. If you make it out the other side, you have succeeded.

I’m being overly dramatic. But we earned our rock’n’roll Black Belts on this one. The band had trained, prepared, put in the time, effort and sacrifice. The songs on the album were workshopped, revised, and road-tested for years. We discovered the best arrangements possible for that batch of songs. Every syllable is in place.

The basic band was recorded live in Dave Granati’s studio, almost everything in a single take. Like I said, these songs had been stage-tested and road-tested, but we played for keeps. The performances are hot and spontaneous.

That’s a paradox, isn’t it? Spontaneous yet well-crafted. That’s the power of being prepared. We aren’t prepared to play this note or that note as much as we are prepared to explode when the drummer counts us in. 1-2-3-4 Bang! Stay within your abilities, but make something exciting happen. Be bold. Be brief. Be beautiful.

The album has a unifying sound in that all the songs use piano, acoustic and electric guitars, percussion, drums, bass and vocals, and it has a kind of post-punk urgency and punch, but it also covers a range of emotional territory.

I have it in me to write nine-minute epics, but one of the things I love about this album is that the songs are very economical. SILENCE, POISON, RUNNING, MORNING SONG. I imagine that if you did not understand the English language, the sounds of the vowels and consonants, the rhythm and cadence, all the para-verbals of the language would still get the point across.

And let’s face it, Rosa Rocks, aka Rosa Colucci, is a phenomenal voice. HK Hilner on piano. John Carson on bass. Mike Madden on drums. This line up is no joke.

Name one or two challenges you face as an indie musician in this over saturated, digital music age? How has technology helped you (since we know it does help)?

So we’re all needles in a haystack, and the haystack has grown. When I started, a band that actually went into a recording studio to cut a 7” single had shown a measure of commitment that separated them from their peers. Booking gigs out of town separated you from your peers and showed your commitment.

I read somewhere that Roger McGuinn made a Grammy-winning album that was produced 100% on his laptop. You can produce an Oscar-winning movie on your laptop.

I saw a Reid Paley concert a few years ago, and Reid said something like, “It’s either this or some kid in his bedroom with a laptop.”

That laptop allows beginners to sound like masters. People appear on stage with pre-recorded backing tracks. That would have been regarded as an abomination at one time.

I see solo performers using looping-devices. Here’s my percussion beat. Here’s my bass line. Here’s my chord change. And now I jam over it. Aren’t you impressed? I’m being sarcastic, if you can’t tell. I am not impressed by that stuff.

There were always the bands full of good-looking boys and girls who looked and sounded just right that sold more tickets than we did, but I just knew that they’d all be working in a bank in a few years. You ain’t no lifer. Playing this music is not what keeps you alive.

For me, the technology serves one purpose, one end. Thanks to the technology, the person who seeks the music of The Little Wretches can find it. That’s all I can ask. Do the work and don’t look back.

What was the last song you listened to?

This morning, I made a little playlist on my phone. When you make a playlist, you can give it a title and a description. I titled it, “Are You Feeling Lucky, Punk?” And the description says, “Well, are you?” Kind of a riff on Clint Eastwood’s DIRTY HARRY movies.

The very last song I heard was I NEED YOU by The Kinks.

Do you know the song?

It’s one of the last tracks they did in that primal style that created hits like YOU REALLY GOT ME and ALL DAY AND ALL OF THE NIGHT. I NEED YOU by The Kinks.

Which do you prefer? Vinyl? CDs? MP3s?

I listen mostly to stuff I’ve purchased and either ripped or downloaded onto my phone. I spend a ridiculous amount of time in moving vehicles, and I prefer driving while listening to loud music. As for digital stuff, I really CAN hear that MP3s are not as good as WAV files.

But let me tell you why vinyl albums are the best. Vinyl albums are the best because you can lay on your bed or couch or floor, gazing at the artwork and daydreaming or following along with the lyric sheets. You can invite friends over, and each person takes a turn picking an album side. The average album side is about twenty-minutes in length. In the span of a couple of hours, you and your friends have heard album-sides by six different bands.

The other great thing about a vinyl album is that each side has an opener and a closer, a beginning, a middle and an end. With digital recordings, you lose the drama. Digital is like eating at a buffet. Might be a great buffet, but it’s kind of artless. And album is like a meal prepared by a master chef. Appetizer. Entree. Something sweet. Something creamy.

Vinyl.

How about this one…. Do you prefer Spotify? Apple Music? Bandcamp? Or something else? Why?

I have an iPhone, and that has shaped my habits. I purchase albums from the iTunes Store. Old fashioned. When kids see my collection, they’re like, “YOU PAID FOR ALL THAT? YOU CAN GET IT ALL FOR FREE, YA KNOW!” Sorry. I’m the curator of a fine collection. Vinyl. CD. Cassette. Digital downloads. And most of my digital is Apple by way of iTunes.

Where is the best place to connect with you online and discover more music?

I wish people would visit the website, www.littlewretches.com, and just devour the bios, the photos, all the old blog posts. The Little Wretches have a Facebook page. YouTube has hours and hours of live shows recorded and posted by friends and supporters of the band. Go to the search-engine of your choice, type THE LITTLE WRETCHES, and click as you’re led.

If you go to the website, submit your email address. If you go to the Facebook page, like it and follow it.

Anything else before we sign off?

There’s a documentary called DON’T LOOK BACK with a lot of footage from an acoustic tour Dylan did in England prior to going electric. If you haven’t seen it, see it. If you’re serious about music, you must see it.

There’s a segment backstage where a young guy in a band is explaining to young Bob Dylan that his band plays Dylan songs but has a hard time getting the audience to listen to the lyrics. I think the guy asks for advice or is looking for encouragement. Dylan says something like, “I just play the songs. I don’t even think about trying to get people to listen.”

Okay, so all these years later, Bob Dylan has a Nobel Prize to his credit. But his advice, as well as the movie title, hearkens back to the opening lines of his song, SHE BELONGS TO ME, “She’s got everything she needs / She’s an artist / She don’t look back.”

If you’re an indie musician, be an artist. You’ve got everything you need. Do the work. Don’t look back. Do your work with the tools and materials you can get your hands on, but do the work. Create. Let everything else take care of itself. The creating part is why you’re here.