Interview: Tim Lowman aka Low Volts

by Megan Zabriskie

In my quest for the most bad-ass interview subject who fit the preferred criteria of being an artist with roots in the San Diego scene, I immediately realized that the dark and steely Tim Lowman from the one-man gritty blues-rock band Low Volts was just whose brain I wanted to pick. One sentence into the history of his one-man band and my heart was thumping just as quickly and powerfully as that deep kick drum with a biography on how Lowman wouldn’t be here today if his great grandfather hadn’t escaped allegations of murder and his own personal date with the electric chair. It’s exactly that kind of electricity that makes the band so spookily and eclectically balanced: the heavy and metallic roots of a tasty slide guitar bringing you down to the deep south, and Lowman’s simple but passionately loaded lyrics. So, naturally, when he agreed to answer a few questions for me, I was praisin’ “Oh My Stars“!

Here’s a little taste to wet your beak…

Your 2011 album “Twist Shake Grind Break” was a huge influence on me and sparked my interest in dirty-blues rock. You’ve called yourself a “one-man lightning storm” and I think that is the best description of your work. How did the idea of forming a one-man blues rock band come about? Did you always think that you would form a solo act, which is already a difficult aspiration, and were you always inclined to reawaken the dirty-blues genre?

Becoming a one-man act was mostly born out of necessity. I’ve been in really great bands with extremely talented musicians but it seemed that just when things really started moving, someone would join another band, get their girlfriend pregnant or develop a drug habit and we’d have to start all over again with a different dynamic. Basically it got frustrating having to rely on people to just get together and make some music. One day I was at home playing some dirty slide guitar riffs and I had a dusty old kick drum in the corner that I would just stomp to the rhythm to keep time. After a while I started writing full songs with lyrics and would record them just so I wouldn’t forget them. When I played the recordings for friends, they couldn’t believe it was just me playing everything live. After getting coaxed into playing a few house parties, I really started to focus on creating a thick and heavy sound that sounded like 3 or 4 musicians without using loop pedals or samples. Just a real bare bones, dark and heavy good time!

Who are some of your musical influences? Were there particular swampy, gritty blues rock artists who inspired you to form Low Volts? If so, who lit your fire, so to speak?

I grew up listening to bands like Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath. People who took a traditional sound, lit it on fire and danced in the ashes. I’m also heavily influenced by a street musician I saw in Marrakech, Morocco. He was playing an Oud through an old sears home stereo system complete with wooden speaker and powered by a motorcycle battery. His riffs were so dark and almost Sabbath-like and the tone he got out of that homemade set up inspires me to this very day.

One of the aspects of your music that caught my attention at your Sector 9 show was the simple, quirky and sometimes dark nature of your lyrics. “Granny’s gold teeth in my granny’s old mouth, gonna put ’em on a necklace, gonna put ’em in a pouch!” and “I cried my guts out” in particular were lyrics that I was playing over and over in my head after seeing you perform for the first time. How important is the lyrical writing process for you? Do you usually start your writing process with the lyrics first or with a dirty, heavy guitar riff?

Haha yeah I’ve got some stories! The writing process is completely different every time. I’ll be driving or in the shower and a melody or lyric will pop into my head and I’ll have to grab my phone and hum it into the voice memo app still dripping just so I don’t lose it. It’s pretty wild, and extremely unpredictable, when and where inspiration will hit you upside the head. The story with the song ‘Granny’s Gold Teeth’ is, I was hanging out with my Grandma one day and we started talking about teeth for some reason. I told her I wouldn’t mind having a gold tooth one day and she says to me, “I got gold teeth!” and pulls her cheek back to reveal some golden molars. “You can have ‘em when I’m gone!” Now, at first I was shocked and mortified she said that, but then I started thinking that if I put them on a necklace or put ‘em in a pouch, that she’d always be with me…in a rather unorthodox, slightly creepy kinda way.

Your 2012 album “Oh My Stars” is a more complex, modernized version of the stuff you did with “Twist Shake Grind Break”. The lyrics, thumping guitar riffs and instrumental layers are more an eerier, darker progression that hooked me immediately. How did the development of “Oh My Stars” differ from “Twist Shake Grind Break”? In your recording process, do you layer and play your music in the same one-man-band format as in your live shows?

When I was writing the songs for Oh My Stars I was listening to a lot of 50’s rock n’ roll like Gene Vincent and Elvis Presley and you can definitely hear that, but with a more modern twist. I also like a lot of the music Quenten Tarantino uses in his films so there’s a bit of a ‘spaghetti western’ ish vibe going on there too. When I record in the studio, I play the songs live with kick drum, vocals and guitar with mic’s on everything and amps in isolation rooms. Once I get a good solid take, I’ll add some extra percussion and elements that the Hi-Watts (female go-go dancers) can play live if they are on stage with me. I still need to be able to play these songs live at shows so I try to keep it pretty raw. I used the same process for both albums. The first record was recorded during a super blue moon and took less than two days to record.

You’ve posted on social media that you will be moving from Southern California to Tennessee soon. Are you moving because of the success of Low Volts and the audience you could potentially reach out there? Surely, there are probably more dirty-blues rock aficionados in the birthplace of country, rock and blues. Will you still be coming back to San Diego to tour?

I’m headed to Nashville in January to begin making the next record, surround myself with like-minded folks and get immersed in a music-driven town. I’ve been out there so many times and really feel inspired and ‘at home’ every time I visit. The journey is pretty open ended so I’m not really saying I’m ‘moving’ there, just gonna spend some quality time with my guitars in Tennessee. San Diego is really great but it’s so damn beautiful all the time that it gets really easy to put things off until ‘tomorrow’. I call it the ‘Mañana Factor’, “It’s too nice outside lets just go to the beach and get drunk, we can do it mañana!” I really want to create timeless art that inspires people long after I’m dead and gone and sometimes you have to get out of your comfort zone and shake things up a bit make things happen. I’m really excited to get working on the third album, I’m also really excited to experience ‘seasons’ again!

Are you working on a new album at the moment? Low Volts lovers, like myself, are anxious to here what direction your music will be taking with the success and growth you’ve been accumulating. What can we expect out of your new music? And when can we expect an album drop?

I’m very close to having everything written for the new record. At the moment I’m doing basement sessions in Morrison CO to prepare. Come early spring I’ll be headed Southern Ground Studio in Nashville where my other band Blackout Party recorded a lil’ ways back. The Foo Fighters recorded there too recently, you can see the studio vibe in the Nashville episode of their show Sonic Highways. It’s a really incredible space that I can’t wait to spend more time in! I’ll be setting up a Kickstarter album presale campaign soon to help fund the recording, mixing, mastering and vinyl costs so keep a lookout for that. Ideally I’d like to release the record around mid 2016 but I’m not going to rush this one. As for the albums direction, all I can say is it’s gonna be REALLY HEAVY and REALLY BEAUTIFUL.

For more LOW VOLTS you can buy albums, check tour dates, and other info here.

Oak Tree photograph by Ian Kasnoff

Get a little taste with this killer video for “Roam With You” recorded at a legendary motorcycle shop

http://www.lowvoltsmusic.com

Low Volts Live photograph by Arlene Ibarra