story by Caroline Evans
photo by Jennifer Tzar

Some musicians are addicted to drugs. Some are addicted to alcohol. Jason Hill is addicted to recording.

"I think that first exhilarating feeling from playing the first song I ever wrote at age eleven is always what I’m looking for,” Hill reports to Chicago Innerview. “I think it’s the same for people, whatever their fix is in life, whether it’s love, or drugs, or sex, they’re always looking for that fix again, that same feeling they had when they first tried something, but in a new way. Musically, that’s why I’ve always tried to pursue different things."

The Louis XIV guitarist, producer, and songwriter is speaking on the phone over his dinner break from mixing B-sides for the group’s third album, Slick Dogs and Ponies, slated for release on Jan. 29. It marks a noticeable shift in the San Diego group’s stripped-down blues-rock: a more symphonic approach that includes string arrangements on every track. The album reflects a disjointed musical upbringing that ranges from Barry Manilow to Marc Bolan, from Son House to Stax. "It hearkens back to the stuff that I really got into as a small child, like the Beach Boys or even Barry Manilow and Burt Bacharach, things that always struck me as a really cool sound," Hill explains between mouthfuls of carne asada. "Even though it’s really sort of vanilla, there is something really interesting about the sound of the orchestra."

In 2005, Louis XIV [made up of Hill, guitarist/vocalist Brian Karscig, drummer Mark Maigaard and bassist James Armbrust] released their major label debut The Best Little Secrets Are Kept, which turned heads with its raw sound and sexually explicit lyrics. For all the overconfident swagger of his onstage persona, Hill reveals himself to be a thoughtful, articulate musician, a reverent rock and roll scholar, and an anxious, unsatisfied songwriter. He speaks in metaphors without sounding lofty or detached, and he talks about vintage music with the same enthusiasm he speaks of his own, at one point singing a few bars of the O’Jays’ "Back Stabbers" over the line.

The new album is somewhat more outward-looking than the last, as Louis XIV delves into character sketches, social commentary, and the war in Iraq. On "Free Won’t Be What It Used To Be," Hill asks: "Will you die in the sand? Will you die at the hands of a man who never knew you?" To Hill, the way in which it was recorded reflects its content. "We’re talking about war, which is a chaotic, man-made event. And that track is also chaotic. It’s like bombs going off everywhere. We built a loop around a rhythm on the drums and slowed the tape down to half-speed, so there’s this weird rumbling within it. We looped a section of that in an old-school way, where we had to literally cut the tape and loop it around. I had this 50-foot loop of tape going around mic stands and stuff. These are things that can be done in ten minutes on Pro Tools, but I really wanted to do it old and have that organic sort of feel to it."

Perhaps the most striking song on the album is also the most un-Louis. While the group is known for its self-indulgent sex-rock, "Hopesick" is a personal, piano-driven love song supported by sweeping orchestral arrangements written by veteran composer and arranger David Campbell. It was written during the last days of Hill’s previous band, Convoy, while he was living in a spider-infested garage next to a motorcycle. Early one morning, he roused himself to move his car, which he had parked in a tow-away zone the night before. "When I turned on the car, these words just started buzzing around my head, and eventually I could hear this chord progression behind it. Next thing I knew, I was driving back to the studio to start recording the initial demo for it."

The song was written about Hill’s ex-girlfriend before they were together. "I was madly in love with her, and I thought I’d never be with her. For me, it was kind of difficult to put that vulnerability on the record. It’s definitely more personal. It’s actually more like the things I normally write, to be perfectly honest, but I don’t think it’s the kind of stuff people want to hear, myself included. I don’t want to hear ballads all the time."

Songwriting hasn’t always come as easily for Hill as it did on "Hopesick", he explains. "When I was a kid, I’d walk around with all these melodies in my head, but I didn’t know they were melodies at the time, and it was frustrating because I couldn’t get that stuff in my head out. Now I can, more and more. It’s like when you get out of the shower and there’s that haze over the mirror. It was very frustrating, because for a long time, all I could see was this fog. But little by little, that haze was lifted so that I could finally see a reflection."

Louis XIV :: with Editors and Hot Hot Heat :: The Vic :: Jan. 25.