His small-town US upbringing had a huge effect on folk songwriter Damien Jurado, he tells Tony Clayton-Lea
'When you live in a small town, there are lots of things that go on - you know everybody, the affairs they have, the town gossip. For the most part it's constantly interesting. It's amazing the profound impact living in a small town can have on you. You go out looking for things to do - you're bored out of your mind, so you get involved in things you shouldn't. Most of the girls who grew up in my area were pregnant before they even went to high school; birth control wasn't talked about in 1986, you know."
American indie-folk singer-songwriter Damien Jurado - a Raymond Carver type crossed with echoes of Springsteen's Nebraska persona - doesn't live in a small town any more, but he carries with him the memories of getting into things he shouldn't have.
He doesn't visit Grays Harbor, in Washington state, any more either, but through what he cynically terms the "miracle of MySpace" some old high school friends of his have recently contacted him. And the news from Grays Harbor? It's still the same, 20 years on, apparently.
Jurado spent most of his childhood in Texas, but when his family moved to Grays Harbor he quickly realised that his world had shrunk. His only access to the outside world was through television, or magazines he picked up at the local grocery stores.
Occasionally, he would visit nearby larger towns such as Aberdeen (the town where Kurt Cobain came from, and which he described as "very much like Twin Peaks - without the excitement") or Hoquiam and buy rock music magazines.
"That's how I learned about outside bands," says Jurado, prior to his gig at Whelan's in Dublin last week. "Other than that, it was just one radio station that played horrible top 40 music."
He coped with the stultifying cultural environment by coming up with the notion that writing songs might be his saviour. In the mid-1980s, says Jurado, he was into American punk rock - bands such as Black Flag and Minutemen.
"Hearing Black Flag and listening to their lyrics was amazing. I hated living in Grays Harbor at the time, it sucked so much, but I had no idea how much it would stay with me and the profound effect it would have on my writing years later."
Come the late 1980s, the Jurado family left Grays Harbor for Seattle; this is where Jurado first heard college radio, and the rumblings of grunge, where the influence of US punk was transformed into the user-friendly but no less aggressive and sombre music. Interestingly, at about the same time that Nirvana went overground with Nevermind, Jurado dispensed with punk rock and became an underground folk singer. Why?
"The transference took place about the time when Nevermind came out, and I was still in high school. I remember thinking it was going to be big. And once it came out it changed the face of music forever - the guys who were beating you up last year for having a Mohican-style haircut were wearing the same hairstyle themselves. And once the enemy starts liking the same music you like, it's time to change musical genres. That's exactly what happened.
"Also, at that time, my then girlfriend, now my wife, introduced me to the music of Billy Bragg and The Clash - people writing real songs with distorted guitars that bridged the gap between punk and some weird hybrid of rockabilly and folk. That's how I got into folk music - the songs were short, people-based, about the individual. Just like punk."
AND SO IT has been ever since for Jurado; his passionate flirtation with punk rock has infused his singer-songwriter work with levels of anger, frustration and dysfunction rarely seen outside the records of Elliot Smith. He wants, he says, to make people aware that there's more going on with the human condition than the popular media would admit. We are living, he argues, in a day and age where many millions of people cannot relate to anything the art world - and all its multifarious strands - can offer.
Presently, Jurado is decidedly non-mainstream, but then so was Elliot Smith. Is he a cult artist? "You'd have to ask a fan. I have no idea." Is it good or bad that he's non-mainstream? "It's bad presently, but good for the future. It's bad because my wife once said to me that I'm almost like a legend within my own time. I'm not dead yet, but I know I'm on the lips of other musicians and a lot of people, critics and so on, yet I'm not reaching the same audience or status that the likes M Ward, Conor Oberst or Will Oldham are reaching."
JURADO HAS BEEN releasing records for almost 10 years, across a range of record labels - all have sold in moderate amounts and all have received praise for their rooted stories of life's human and emotional messes. Frustrating? "Oh, yeah, I can't lie. Look, I don't want to sell a million copies of an album, and I don't want to play stadiums. I just want enough to get by and have some money coming in. I still keep a job because I'm realistic. I'm a pre-school teacher, and have been doing that for eight years."
Having a life outside his Monday-to-Friday job is, reckons Jurado, as good a balance as any that can be achieved under the circumstances. It certainly makes writing easier, he says.
"Being around a class of 14 four-year-olds, who are just a joy, and having a six-year-old son and a happy marriage makes it a great outlet for the darkness in my songs. There has to be balance. My wife's balance is depressing movies, which I refuse to watch. For me, it's writing dark songs.
"Funnily enough, she doesn't refuse to listen to my music. But, you know, she'll say to me some weekends that we should go see one of her depressing films. And I go, 'Dude, I write about this dark stuff in my music - why the hell would I want to go and watch it at the movies? I'd rather go watch a Will Ferrell movie - something completely stupid."
And Now That I'm In Your Shadow is released through Secretly Canadian