Two Questions with Jef Otte and the Fatality

Jef Otte is better known to the local music community as a journalist for the CU Advocate and Westword; but long before trying his hand at writing about music, Otte was writing songs first in a high school punk rock band, later as a writer of profane acoustic joke songs and, more recently, in the bands The Greatest Hits, Fig. A, and now Jef Otte and the Fatality. I spent some time talking with Jef and the band about the songwriting and the pitfalls of being both a music journalist and an active musician. – Elise Bostlin von Bondie

Even a cursory listen to your album and looking at the track list makes it obvious you’re trying to write songs that have real content. Can you tell me about your songwriting process and the sorts of themes you explore in your music?

Jef: I tend to write the most songs when I’m sad. The divorce I went through made me really sad. I was in bad shape for a long time. The story is that my ex-wife and I were in Fig. A. We got married and she moved to Pittsburgh to go to law school. For a number of reasons I couldn’t go out there when she went out there, I had to wait a few months. I ended up going out there and it was terrible. I could probably go on and on about what I think happened or whatever but it’s sort of immaterial. It just kind of fell apart.

So I came back here and I started writing a lot of songs about it because I was in serious pain. I think songwriting is a big component of how I deal with pain because it’s good to get something solid you can touch, listen to and hear and hopefully you get a good song out of it. I played a couple of solo shows and I thought about having a band again so I called up Brian [B] and Sam and we practiced without drums but I stumbled across Brian [C] shortly after. We’ve been a full band around nine months and we played our first show in March 2009. By summer I was playing all of my shows with the band and we tried to record right away.

The whole album is about my divorce and lyrically I channeled the shit I was feeling. I really tried hard after the divorce to be positive and not dwell on it. I did a lot of work around processing it, but I think a lot of the songs turned out to be about that—the pain of it being over, but also the relief from how terrible it was while it was going on. There were days when I felt really good about it and I wrote a song, and there were days when I felt terrible about it then I wrote a song. I think it’s the most explicitly personal work, this block of songs, that I’ve ever written. Obviously this album means a lot to me because it’s sort of addressed to my ex-wife, who I loved a lot, but we couldn’t be together for a variety of reasons. Musically I don’t know that I have a set process. Mostly I come up with a hook by fiddling around on guitar and piano, and then combine it with other hooks I come up with.

Jef, you’re also a critic as well as a songwriter. Does your mindset in writing about music at all affect how you write songs and how you conduct yourself as a musician? Also, does the fact that you’re a musician and a songwriter influence how you write about music?

I definitely think it influences how I write about music. I don’t even think that’s avoidable. As a songwriter, I value composition and arrangement. So the stuff I strive to bring out in my music is the stuff I look for in other people’s music. I think how I write and what I do influences my outlook on music in general, which influences how I write about it. It’s funny, I started writing about music when I was in Fig. A. The story behind it is that I got laid off from a job I had at a frame job. Then my ex-wife, who was my fiancé at the time, she was a college graduate and she was looking for a real job in retail management and she said, “I always wish I had done more internships and got involved in the school.” I’m an English major so it made sense of me to get involved in the school paper, which I manage now.

Since I was a musician I became quickly involved with the music section. At first I thought it would be a great networking opportunity to get publicity for the band. It actually turned out to be the opposite. As a musician and a critic, there’s a certain level of distance that comes from being a critic. In my experience, I’ve been a musician for a long time trying to make it for a shitload of years, and I’ve been more successful with writing about music in two years than I ever was with music itself. Even though the band is named after me, my name is more attached to my music writing than it is to my songwriting, and I think that’s sort of unavoidable.

At the same time, it kind of sucks because no paper I write for is going to cover me. I managed to get some publicity because of Denver Post’s Reverb and The Onion but I find that it’s hard to get coverage because there’s sort of an awkwardness to it. It’s also hard to network with other musicians because I think there’s sort of a wariness people have toward you when they know you are a music critic.

I think bands in this town have a positive outlook toward my music writing because I’ve been a lot of good publicity to a lot of bands I like. I’m not an asshole and I don’t really like to say I don’t like things because as a musician that would suck to get negatively criticized. If I’m going to do a bad write-up, the band in my opinion deserves it. I don’t do it as some kind of weird ethical obligation. It’s an interesting dynamic that I really didn’t anticipate when I started.

[editor's note: We regret that this interview wasn't up in time for the bands CD release party at Larimer Lounge last Saturday. Below you can stream "Out Into Space" and if you like it please pick-up the Catastrophe EP. You can see them play next at Bar Bar on Feb. 13th]

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