one more for good measure

From Acoustic Guitar magazine:

The vibes and performances of Lee's original repertoire run a wide gamut—from the Memphis soul of "Won't Let Me Go," with a Willie Mitchel-style R&B arrangement supporting Lee's vocal ventures into high falsetto, through the swampy blues of "Truth" and the folkie, John Prine- and Mary Gauthier-like sentiments and phrasing of "Ease Back." "There's no genre that I don't like," the 30-year-old singer-songwriter said in phone conversation from his Philadelphia home last spring. "When you ask somebody what kind of music they like and they say, 'I like everything except country and rap' how can you say you don't like that whole genre? I grew up listening to Boogie Down Productions and Luther Vandross, and then I wound up really liking Iris DeMent. I just did a thing with Paul Simon ["Paul Simon: American Tunes"] at BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music], and it was a really diverse group of people—the Roches, Olu Dara, Grizzly Bear, Josh Groban, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings—and just watching all those guys work really inspired me."

What song on Last Days at the Lodge would you say epitomizes your songwriting approach?

LEE The song that most typifies where I was really at is "It Started to Rain." I got to LA, and I really didn't know many people out there, and I was driving around a lot, because you drive in LA—a whole bunch. The one good thing about driving is you get to listen to a lot of music. I had gotten a copy of Hearts and Bones by Paul Simon, and that's pretty much all I was listening to for a month. There are a few songs in there that were really getting me good, like "The Late Great Johnny Ace" and "René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War."

I was living in the [San Fernando] Valley, so I would drive over the hills, and I would play those songs over and over again, especially at night. The thing about those songs that was so compelling for me was—and I definitely don't do it as well as Paul does it—he comes up with these really interesting harmonic and melodic twists. I guess you would say it's the bridge in [Simon's] "René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War." The middle of that song is very cinematic, almost like a play or a musical, like you're on this journey with these two people and all of a sudden, when he sings "Side by side / They fell asleep," the whole thing changes—he just takes you away. He figured out how to make the music, the chord structure, take you to this place where the lyrics would be able to be used to their fullest. With "It Started to Rain," that's what I was going for—just setting the mood with the music, and the story, and trying to say the most with the least amount of words.