A Different Animal: Soundgarden's Ben Shepherd reveals In Deep Owl

“Fuck time, man. Take your time,” Ben Shepherd drawls as our interview runs dangerously close to the moment he should probably be on stage. We join him as Soundgarden’s most extensive UK tour in 17 years rolls into the Manchester Apollo, the closest they’ll get to the Barrowlands (“This is the perfect tour to do that; pisses me off we’re not. Me and Cornell realised yesterday that we’ve never even played Edinburgh,” he laments). But nobody’s here to pick holes in the band’s itinerary, or recap their resurrection. This is purely about Hunter Benedict Shepherd.

Wise and opinionated, occasionally shy and self-deprecating, Shepherd cranes his towering 6'4" frame as he races between topics, people and eras – one minute he’s praising Joy Division, or proudly showing off photographs of his teenhood band March of Crimes on an early tour with Melvins and Malfunkshun like pictures of his firstborn, the next he’s recalling the post-Soundgarden wilderness years when he could barely afford to eat.

On the face of it, his solo LP In Deep Owl is a hard-fought victory. In the acid-drenched haze of Hater and Wellwater Conspiracy, Shepherd had more in common with garage rock progenitors like The Stooges and 13^th Floor Elevators, but as HBS his gift as a compelling and irregular songwriter is fully exposed.

Announced at the tail end of the summer and arriving, as it has, on the eve of being thrown back into the Soundgarden machine for a month of gigging, Shepherd’s painfully aware of the pitfalls in promoting the album now, but this was no rushed release. “It was supposed to come out before we were even reunited,” he says of the timing. “I should’ve put it out back then, when it could stand on its own legs rather than riding the coattails of Soundgarden. I made my own label just to put this out.”

"Solo records bunk if other people contribute too much. It’s not a true picture" – Ben Shepherd

Flashback to 1991, and an eager to impress Shepherd, bound by phantom major label duress from the moment he joined the band, couldn’t quite resolve the freedom they were afforded to perform outside their day jobs. “I did Hater as a side-project self-consciously,” he remarks almost guiltily. “We were doing pre-production at Avast! Studio for Badmotorfinger and I brought in a song. The engineer, Stuart Hallerman – who later helped with Deep Owl – said ‘You should make this a single and do it on your own.’ I asked Matt [Cameron, drummer] when we were taking a break between takes, ‘Is this a good idea? Is that legal, that we can do stuff outside of Soundgarden?’ He was like ‘Yeah, man.’ I’d always treated Soundgarden as my main priority – I wish we all did."

Disillusioned after Soundgarden came out the other end of the industry meat grinder in 1997, a short-term retreat from music was understandable enough, but Shepherd says a later unexpected blow nearly spelled the end of it. “Soundgarden got robbed. We’d sold our building and I was moving the equipment out. I flew down to LA for a weekend to finish off a soundtrack I was helping with, but when I came back everything was gone. Two records that I’d recorded, all of my equipment – all gone,” he throws his hands up. “So for a few years I thought ‘Alright, the world’s telling me nobody cares – fuck it, I won’t play.’"

Besides recording and touring with Mark Lanegan and dusting down Hater’s 2nd album in the middle of the last decade, it wasn’t until 2009 that Shepherd finally found himself tinkering with a guitar in a buddy’s studio. A reluctant soloist at first, he maintains that In Deep Owl simply wouldn’t have happened without the encouragement of those around him, but concedes that the more he eased into the project, the tighter he gripped the reins. “My friends Dave [French] and Chad [McMurray] conned me into making a record. I recorded two songs and they were like, ‘Keep going, make more.’ I thought ‘OK, but you fuckin’ guys don’t wanna record with me! Whatever your idea is, I’ll probably throw it over the ropes. My attitude was, ‘I don’t have a band; I get to do this my way.' To me, solo records bunk if other people contribute too much. It’s not a true picture of a solo artist.”

Knuckling down to the task, Shepherd chose to ignore external influences but kept two trusted allies on speed dial in case of a creative bind. “I wanted to stay in my own head, didn’t want to listen to music at all – I purposely did that. I wanted to see where I was – no influences, nobody. But I did call up Mark and Chris, because I’ve never been the singer like that, where you have to do everything on your own, arrange the whole recording session and keep it on track. I’d seen Mark do it, so I called him up and said ‘Man, if I get stuck with lyrics I think are stupid or bad ideas, will you help me out, answer the phone and talk me down from this mental ass-beating?’ He said yes, same with Chris. Those are the only two guys in the whole world I would trust at that point, without messing with my head. Fortunately, I never got in that jam.”

At times the results evoke a kind of modern Americana last heard on Lanegan and Mike Johnson’s Field Songs, to which Shepherd contributed heavily and co-wrote the blissful instrumental Blues For D. He’s having none of that comparison. “Nah, those songs belong to those guys,” he shrugs. “I was just there. There’s a whole spectrum of music that I will play and will always do by myself or with other people, which will tend to be more electric. At the point I did Deep Owl, the idea was simple: this is what I’m into now. But I have way older songs; 500 of all different genres. Regardless of who I’ve played with, those are the songs that I’ve always had and always related to. If anything, being compared to Lanegan just makes me go ‘Fuuuuck!’ That’s way too good a company.”

Although clearly intended as a solo effort in the truest sense from the beginning, In Deep Owl is very much an album of two halves. “I was half-way through when drummers started showin’ up, like [original Pearl Jam drummer] Matt Chamberlain and Matt Cameron.” Shepherd couldn’t turn them away. “I said, ‘Sure – if you guys wanna record, pick a song and let’s go.’ That changed everything. I thought ‘Fuck, now I have to get real.’ Without the involvement of those guys I’d have stuck to this being one man and his guitar.”

Inevitably, with Shepherd being the principal songwriter behind such anomalous moments from Soundgarden’s catalogue as Badmotorfinger's Somewhere, Superunknown’s Head Down and Down On the Upside's An Unkind, In Deep Owl trades in the same vocabulary of eerie, middle-eastern melodies and off-kilter percussive arrangements. Stuttering jams like Baron Robber, which escalates into an untameable wrecking ball, could easily have seen another life. “I think all of them could’ve been Soundgarden songs,” Shepherd confesses. “The band actually said, ‘We could do Baron Robber,’ when it came to pre-production for King Animal and I said ‘No, that record’s already done, man. It’s its own thing.’”

Then there’s a track called Koda, where he takes swamp blues to their literal nth degree by bringing in a frog chorus. “Initially I didn’t even want drummers, I wanted stuff like that. I had those frogs recorded for years before I used them. I was at my sister's house and we used to smoke around their pond, those frogs were little dudes, but really loud. The biggest one was right by me, so I just started recording it.” 

Beyond his unorthodox use of found sounds, Shepherd chose not to take the obvious path by approaching Deep Owl as a series of first person confessionals. “It’s where I was mentally, but each song is a different character. I imagined this train that they were were on, all on the one car. I had the thread of music that would tie it all together, without making it a concept record – just a certain sound that shows up and links it all back together. The Train You Can’t Win was supposed to be an instrumental song that plays through every stop, it was meant to be in-between every song and there to finish off the record. I wanted the vocals to sound so low, like they were coming from the other room.”

It took startled feedback from a local greengrocer to derail Shepherd’s original intention. “There’s a grocery store down the street from the studio, where we'd go to score almonds and oranges, ‘cause that’s all we could afford to eat. There was a girl there who totally dug Gerry [Amandes] – the guy that owns the studio –she came back the day we recorded that last song. I’d just woken up at about two in the afternoon on one of those yoga balls; after recording Collide earlier in the week my back was killing me because the mandolin is so small and I’d been playing it for three days to get this song right. So I’m a little grumpy, and I sang The Train You Can’t Win. She was just totally terrified because it’s all about murder. Like, ‘Oh my God, what have I gotten into?’ We decided right there to leave it just as it was.”

Does Shepherd intend to take the HBS train out on the road? “I’m sure I will,” he nods. “But probably not in America.” Was he tempted to test the water onstage in Manchester tonight? “Fuck no,” he barks, suddenly wearing his other hat as he scrawls his signature across The Skinny’s weathered copy of Superunknown. “This is a Soundgarden show,” he says, the name through him like a stick of rock. “This is the only band I’d be in.”