‘Insignificance’: how Jim O’Rourke made his masterpiece in seven days
Considering how prolific his output has been over the last four decades, it’s remarkable that anyone would consider Jim O’Rourke to be an elusive character. The producer and songwriter is constantly working on something new and innovative, and just because he doesn’t provide regular interviews about his endeavours doesn’t mean he’s not busting a gut trying to get his next project over the line. As one of the most important figures in the modern history of Chicago’s experimental music scene, O’Rourke should be celebrated more often, and dismissing him as a background character would be ignorant of the masterful work he’s done throughout his career.
Whether acting as producer-cum-member of bands such as Wilco, Sonic Youth or Gastr Del Sol or knocking his head together with avant-garde composers like Oren Ambarchi or Christian Fennesz, O’Rourke’s works are always full of personality and a drive to make something forward-thinking. However, the music that he is often most celebrated for are his more ‘traditional’ rock records that see O’Rourke paint himself as a world-weary songwriter who fuses together alt-country, folk and baroque pop influences to make more accessible albums.
The trouble is, these releases are all too rare, and this is probably the reason that O’Rourke gets lumped with the reclusive tag so often. His last rock album was 2014’s Simple Songs, and before that, he hadn’t worked on a record in this vein since his 2001 masterpiece, Insignificance. Both of these albums, along with his other releases of the same style, such as Eureka and the Halfway to a Threeway EP, are demonstrations of his adaptability as an artist, but one might think that his reason for not working on music of this ilk too often is down to a sense of perfectionism standing in his way.
However, these releases aren’t exactly too much of a hard task for O’Rourke, and that’s evidenced by the swift fashion in which he put together Insignificance from scratch. Far from being a slog that took years to complete, he chose to enter the studio and challenge himself to make an album under tight restrictions, and the seven resulting songs that came from these sessions stand tall as some of his finest works.
“I wrote it in two days, then recorded it in three days, and mixed it in two days.”
Jim O’Rourke
In a rare interview with Filmmaking Review in 2013, he was invited to speak about his career, with a particular focus on the scores he has created for Werner Herzog and Harmony Korine’s films. At the same time, he divulged that he was almost finished with recording what would become Simple Songs and that it had been a much more arduous process than making Insignificance, revealing that it was completed at lightning pace.
“Insignificance was done on purpose very quickly,” O’Rourke explained before humbling the interviewer by revealing that he “wrote, recorded and mixed the stuff in a week as sort of a challenge.” Coming back shocked at the idea that such a complete-sounding album could’ve been created so rapidly, O’Rourke then broke down the process, stating, “I wrote it in two days, then recorded it in three days, and mixed it in two days.”
So why didn’t he revisit this style if it came so effortlessly to him? “I had kind of done what I wanted to do,” he admitted. “I definitely could have gone on making records like that, and I probably would’ve been able to pay the bills more comfortably than making an album of squiggly noises for an hour. I said I’d do that again to get myself going again, but it’s been four years now. I have to do other things so I can eat.”
Furthermore, O’Rourke explained that the reception to the album at the time of its release was largely negative, with very few people latching onto the humour of what he dismissively referred to as “the yellow record”. With some uncomfortable lyrics sung from the perspective of jerkish characters with nothing nice to say, O’Rourke confessed that his decision to tell stories from these perspectives wasn’t meant to illustrate himself as the bad guy but was influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright and its use of the unreliable narrator trope.
Now enjoying something of a renaissance, Insignificance is regarded as perhaps O’Rourke’s best work, with the gentle piano rock of the title track, the slew of terrific insults on ‘Memory Lame’ and the chaotically abrasive outro on the gentlest song, ‘Life Goes Off’ all being a handful of moments that make the album shine. It might have picked up a cult following, which some of his collaborators and friends have informed him of since he now resides in Tokyo, but O’Rourke is typically droll about how the album is perceived these days.
“I guess there’s a whole new generation of people who’ve somehow gotten into that record,” he concluded. “I’m really happy about that, but it’s about ten years too late.”
