Like Pabst Blue Ribbon and vinyl records, Leon Redbone is suddenly becoming hip again.

The singer-guitarist, who sprang up on the national music scene in the early ‘70s, has made a career peddling Depression-era jazz and blues standards and the songs of Tin Pan Alley. Known as much for his attire as he is for his ubiquitous smoky growl of a voice, Redbone is a throwback. Rolling Stone once described him as “so authentic you can hear the surface noise [of an old ’78 record.]”

I’m interested in everything I like and nothing I don’t like. My main interest is music and has always been music. The funny thing about music is if you cast your mind back a few years, you realize that the way music is understood and absorbed today by the many bears no resemblance to the way music came into somebody’s life many years earlier.

What do you mean?

The way [people] used to listen to music [was] once in a while they’d take a record out and put it on the gramophone and sit outside and listen to it. Compare to what goes on today. It’s something that’s a stark revelation where you have music plugged into your ear and in your back pocket and on your computer. There is this maniacal desire to download. Who listens to all this stuff? What kind of a mind do you have if you listen to music 22 hours a day? How can you listen to all of this? And what do you get out of it?

Do you have an iPod?

No. I should have one, because I could theoretically carry these things around with me as a library of songs, but certainly not for something I'd be listening to 22 hours a day. What we have today is volume and less in quality, and once you have that, it's difficult to discern what quality is if you're listening to one kind of music one minute and something completely different the other minute. Well, what are you getting out it? That's what I'd like to know.

The explosion in technology certainly has made it easy to record music and get it out there for the masses. The elephant in the room that nobody seems to want to talk about is that a lot of the music being put out there is terrible.

It's a new way of mind control or desensitization or completely eradicating any sensibilities that anybody is likely to ever have in regards to music. Once you introduce anything, as long as it's loud and has the right instruments, it immobilizes you because it's too damn loud you can’t do anything except be completely overwhelmed. And this has filtered over into some clubs and theaters around the country.

How so?

If you don't want the music played in the house as loud as they're accustomed to, you're actually interfering with their facility.

As little as possible, I hope. I should buy one of those meters. It might be a useful tool.

INTERVIEW CONTINUES BELOW VIDEO

Where does all this loudness come from?

Most of this has to do with the obvious culprit, which is what is now perceived as rock music. It's not rock and roll anymore. It's just rock – whatever the hell that is.

Do you listen to any rock music?

Not as far as I know. But then again I don't know what rock music is at this point. All I can figure out is that it's more volume. Musically speaking there doesn't seem to be anything happening. For the most part, there's nothing happening in melody. There's nothing happening in emotional delivery of a line or a song because at that volume, it's very difficult to discern what the sentiment of the song is because it doesn't seem to have one. Or am I being to critical? (laughs)

What about hip-hop?

I actually have no patience nor the time nor the energy to listen to anything that I don't like, which just about includes everything.

How do you know you don’t like it if you don't even try?

Easy. I think you're born with it. You either like something or you don't like it. I don't like noise. I don't like people screaming. I don't like electric instruments to speak of. I don't like any of it. All I want is to hear one moment of sentiment in one song and that's it; because if you can't express some sentiment or whimsy into musical material, it's probably no good.

Is there anyone that’s making music these days that performs with sentiment or whimsy?

You know a person who's maintained this over the years even though he's started out as a poet was, uh, what's his name? The Canadian poet?

Leonard Cohen?

Cohen. Leonard Cohen. When he started out, he couldn't sing a note. He was a poet. Over the years, I've seen him on some of the [TV] programs. There doesn't seem to be anything improvised in his delivery, but what is expressed, works.

How's that?

I think it's just the delivery. The mood of the delivery. The level at which it's delivered. There's no chaos. There's no anarchy in his presentation of music. It's simply a graceful moment in time, which is quite remarkable for a man who can't really sing.

How would you describe your delivery? A graceful moment in time?

That's the quest; whether you achieve it or not is another story. In my case, it's just one moment. One moment in a song is worth an entire song to me. And achieving that moment is mostly by total happenstance.

Does anyone ever achieve it on purpose?

I'll give you an example. It’s a wonderful singer many years dead now. She was in her time – the ‘20s and early ‘30s – the best of the best and a very eccentric performer named Lee Morse. She was a wonderful amazing vocalist. Quirky. The songs that she covered in the best way possible were the songs of Irving Berlin. The ones she recorded were a perfect example of how to deliver a song in voice and accompaniment. She covers the entire range from whimsy to downright suicidal. She was essentially the perfect torch singer, the perfect novelty singer, the perfect everything else.

I always thought Billie Holiday was the perfect torch singer.

I would categorize Billie Holiday as a stylist rather than a torch singer; or maybe a mood singer, but not a torch singer.

Educate me on the difference.

A torch singer is someone who can sing a song, not necessarily one they wrote, and could somehow squeeze as much emotion out of it and reach the listener, and you actually feel some physical effect from the vocal performance. It somehow has to transcend the effort of the singer and capture the listener. Helen Morgan was a torch singer. She was sort of an almost catatonic individual who would put a song across in a sorrowful sort of way.

You're a fount of knowledge. Aside from performing, are you more of teacher or a curator when it comes to music? What do you consider yourself?

A collector of old and sad songs. And it's music from all over the world, because there is a common bond. It isn't Canadian music or American music or South American music. It's just music. It could be from anywhere. Even if you don't understand a single word that the person is singing — it transcends words. That is the most powerful quality of music.

Do you listen to opera?

I was quite fond of opera until they tanked. There's not much going on in opera since Luciano [Pavarotti] died. It was the end of the line.

What about the music you play and that's relevant to you? Is that near the end of the line? There aren't a lot of people out there peddling that these days.

Peddling is a good word because part of it has to do with that. You have to look from the relatively short period of time from when we went from long playing discs to the beginning of the death of music, which was CDs, and even that's gone out of favor now. This is what happens to a soap bubble. It starts to get very interesting looking and then disappears.

Are there any current artists that you like?

I don't know anybody in the current landscape. The last thing I remember hearing and thinking, “That's pretty good, it's nice reflective and not too loud,” was Ravi Shankar's daughter. What's her name?

Norah Jones?

Norah Jones. Yes. It had some sensibility to it and a calming effect, which I think is what's needed in the world today — in music, at least.

You seem to have a no time for contemporary music, and a huge interest in music from the ‘20s and ‘30s. If you had actually lived in the ‘20s, what kind of music would you have played?

Probably nothing. I'd be listening.

Everybody always asks you how old you are, and you’ve given a variety of answers, including some that place you at 500 years old. I can’t not ask: How old are you?

I answered this question many years ago, and they decided they were going to figure it out for me. Unless I'm joining the Army, I don't see what the relevance is.

Relevance? This is music journalism. You don’t seem to hold journalists in the highest esteem.

All I expect is someone to ask me a question and if I answer it that's the answer, and if I don’t that’s not the answer. There's this maniacal interest in wanting to write about things I'm not interested in talking about. It doesn't seem very civilized to me. Am I wrong? (laughs)

Have you ever played a show in Saugatuck?

I'm sure I have. I can't imagine I haven't. I've been everywhere else.

The Saugatuck Center is a nice venue. They do music and performance there, including theater.

I'll be sure to put my makeup on then.

How will we know if you've achieved one of those graceful moments?

I don't know, maybe I'll be wearing makeup and dress up as a kabuki dancer or something.

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED, CONDENSED AND EDITED BY BRIAN EDWARDS