Posted by Tobias Carroll

Originally based in Austin, Woven Bones play a fuzzed-out, bliss-inducing strain of rock music that owes as much to stripped-down garage and punk as it does to the wider sonic scopes of groups like Spacemen 3 and The Jesus and Mary Chain. Their first full-length, In and Out and Back Again (Hozac) was a fine distillation of these approaches, and their live sound, direct and compelling, made for some of the best shows I saw last fall. 2011 will bring their second full-length album on Hardly Art as well as a covers-only 12″ as part of the Social Music Record Club. I chatted via email with Andrew Burr (aka Andy Bones), the group’s singer/guitarist, about books, inspiration, and his recent move to Brooklyn.

What have you been reading lately?
I have been reading Guy Debord: Revolutionary by Len Bracken off and on since I acquired it from my friend Juan in Minneapolis during this last tour up to CMJ and back to Texas. He knew I loved Debord’s own book Society of The Spectacle and we share similar taste in art and music. It’s a great account of the life and times of a really influential artist / philosopher. I also have enjoyed reading Yeti Magazine a lot on all these tours, truly a great zine.

What are your favorite books? Is there anything that you find yourself returning to again and again?
Biographies and Nonfiction, though I do really love cheap mystery and science fiction when I can get my hands on it. I go back to books like The Perennial Philosophies by Aldous Huxley because it is so massive and intense, The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels because it beats Dan Brown into the ground, and of course Please Kill Me, for obvious reasons of punk history and firsthand accounts.

Is any literature — fiction or nonfiction — ever a source of inspiration for your songwriting?
Nope. Just real life and my own imagination.

You recently relocated to Brooklyn from Austin. Do you feel that there’s any overlap between the music and literary scenes in either place?
Both towns are great for the arts, New York is just more my speed. There are more serious, talented, or inspiring people above, beside, and below you here. The city is just amazing, even outside the box of our small indie world. That outside is what inspires me here. I don’t see things in overlap, I’m either here or I am there, or wherever…. It’s completely different here than there, but both are indeed swell places.

(photo courtesy of Hardly Art)