The Baseball Project’s Steve Wynn on writing, touring, and his very busy summer

Steve Wynn, Scott McCaughey). // photo credit Marty Perez

Over 40 years in, musician Steve Wynn’s career is booming. He’s currently on tour with the Baseball Project, with former R.E.M. members Peter Buck and Mike Mills, along with Scott McCaughey (Minus 5/Young Fresh Fellows), and Linda Pitmon (Filthy Friends, Alejandro Escovedo), in support of last year’s album Grand Salami Time! Later this summer, he’ll release both his autobiography I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True, and his first solo album in 12 years, Make It Right, on August 30.

Wynn could’ve coasted on the legacy of the Dream Syndicate—the Paisley Underground band he helped start back in 1981—but he continues to make art that is vital and interesting, be it the open honesty of his upcoming autobiography or the joyous odes to the great American pastime from the Baseball Project. We’re all the more lucky for it.

The Baseball Project stops at recordBar on Wednesday, July 10, and we spoke with Steve Wynn to discuss that band, his upcoming book, and, of course, baseball.

The Pitch:  It seems like you’re going to have a very busy summer.

Steve Wynn: I like it that way.

You’ve got a week and a half of Baseball Project dates. You’ve got a book coming out, an album coming out.

I know, it’s great. And they’re all kind of happening at the same time. It all kind of fits together, but it’s funny—People often say to me, “Wow, hardest working guy in show business.” I think that belonged to somebody else before and I’ve had people say, “Do you ever want to take a break?” But I’m doing what I love. I love making music, touring, and recording, and, now, writing a book. It’s nothing that I need a break from. It’s what I choose to do whenever possible.

What is it like for you having so many different musical outlets? There’s the Baseball Project, there’s the Dream Syndicate, there’s your other side projects, your solo stuff, and now a book. What do your separate projects each allow you to do?

Even though I sing and play guitar and write songs for all those, those projects are all very different and they all mean different things in my life. The Baseball Project, for example, is the chance to hang out with my friends and have a great time. That’s almost the party band. With that band, we’re very proud of the records we’ve made and the songs we write.

I think we kind of take what would seem like a novelty concept of singing songs about baseball—crazy idea for a band—we take that to the same kind of emotional and deep, artistically-involved level that we do with our own day job projects, whether it’s Minus Five, Dream Syndicate, or other things.

The Baseball Project is a summer party with my friends. The Dream Syndicate is what brought me to the dance, and that’s a legacy and a history that I’m really proud of. I think every time we play a show or make a record, it’s something we would try to do no harm to try to take that history further into new, exciting places.

Those things are very different. And then writing a book, that came out of nowhere and is something that I really enjoyed, but that’s a whole different thing. Let me put it this way—When I play shows with my various bands, you walk on stage and a couple hours later you, you’re sitting backstage saying, “Well, that was wild. What was that all about?” and you do it again the next night. It’s very immediate. It’s very quick. It’s very disposable in a good way.

Writing songs? On a good day, you write your songs in five minutes. I’ve done that,. My new single that I have out, “Make It Right,” I wrote that in 10 minutes. That was just like a written for a specific purpose and an assignment, more or less, and knocked that out. A book? That took me 10 years of really thinking about it, wondering what I want to do with it, and sweating over it. That was unlike anything I’ve ever done before and really gratifying it that way.

Now that the book is complete, what is it like to have in your hands your life story? It just feels like you have left nothing out.

I try to be pretty honest and direct with the book, hopefully without hurting anybody or saying things. It’s pretty candid. There’s, for example, a lot about alcohol and I know that I had various friends and bandmates look at the book while I was working on it. I sent a copy to Jason Victor—my bandmate, my friend, my cohort in my solo bands and with the Dreams Syndicate. He read it and he came back to me saying, “Steve, I’m worried about you—a lot of drinking going on.” I said, “Yeah, well, that’s what was happening back then.”

I think part of the thing with the book that I’ll say is that I wrote most of it without ever thinking that it was going to come out. I started writing it about 10 years ago, like I was saying, because there was a book agent who wanted to represent me and said, “Well, if you give me a couple of sample chapters, I’ll shop it around.”

So, okay, there’s an assignment. One chapter about Alex Chilton, another one about U2. Those two chapters were standalone, dipping my toes in the water attempts just to see what he could do with the book. But when that didn’t pan out initially, and the pandemic hit, I just started writing.

I figured, “Well, I got this thing started.” I found something to fill in my days and I was spending half my day writing this book. I wasn’t thinking in terms of, “This is gonna be a book that people own, that my mom’s gonna read, that my band mates are gonna read, that people in the book who I might say very raw things about are gonna read.” I just was writing it.

At a certain point, the book made its way to Jawbone—this publisher in the UK—and they said they wanted to put it out, and at that point I said, “Oh, whoa, this is actually for real. First of all, I’ve got to finish it, and second of all, let’s see what’s in there,” and like I said, I didn’t leave much out. I decided at that point, I’m not going to turn this around and just make it a G-rated Disney ride for ages 5 and under. It’s going to be what happened.

As I was been reading it, I was reminded a whole lot of Kid Congo Powers’ book that came out a couple years ago. It has that same sort of honesty, but also that sense of adventure and embracing it. Both of you took off, spur of the moment, to go to New York, and it feels as though you still embrace that spirit of getting out there and doing things.

I think so. And by the way, I love Kid Congo’s book. I’m a big fan of everything he’s done. What he was doing with the Gun Club and with the Cramps before I started a band was a huge influence on me. His book was fantastic. One thing that our books have in common is that everybody has a life story. Everybody’s had tension and drama in their lives and if you write a book, you want to include that.

But with both of our books, the primary thing is being a music fan. Being somebody who just loved music to death, who just thought about more than 95% of people who listen to music. They’re the people I know who just think about it, listen to it, make lists, revise things, and hunt it down like crazy, and that was the impetus for them making music.

I don’t know if that was always the case with every generation of musicians. A lot of people made music because they were trained to do it, and it came out of an educational training. Some people became musicians because they just wanted to live the lifestyle and have a party. Some people did it because they thought it’s a way to make money or to get famous. And there’s the generation of the bands that came up in the ’80s, like ourselves, like R.E.M., like Gun Club, who were just obsessive music fans.

Finally, one day I said, “I love this so much. I would love nothing more than to add my own little mark on the wall next to all the other ones I’ve been excited about.”

You mention in the book that being an opening act in those days was great because it gave you time to explore. Do you take advantage still? Does the Baseball Project go to baseball games while they’re on the road?

We have. When it works out, we try to do it. I will say, four of the five of us—me, Linda, Mike, and Scott—are true to what you would expect. We are baseball fanatics. We love the game. We talk about it. Peter, less so, although Peter, I think, because of hanging out with knuckleheads like us, has grown to be a little more interested in it. He likes it from a literary, cultural, and historical standpoint, so he has that appreciation of it.

When we can, we do see games on the road. We had one tour, I think it was 10 years ago, we went out and we were lucky. Every city we went to, the home team was playing, and we saw games 13 of the 14 days and that was amazing. And playing gigs at the same time! We had this thing down.

We had it down where we had to get the sound check done as quickly as possible, get to the ballpark, have our tour manager John Hill wait for us in the van so that we could watch as much of the game as humanly possible. Maybe find out when the opening band was leaving the stage, get back in the van, walk into the venue, get on the stage and play.

It was, rather than some bands where that would maybe pull you out of the mood or distract you, it was good motivation for our set, so we try to do things like that. Overall, when we can’t see games, we all share a love of local food and we really enjoy going to each town and finding out the place to eat, the cool diner for breakfast. As we’re going to find out in Kansas City, hopefully the best barbecue to eat and enjoy that as well.

The Baseball Project plays recordBar on Wednesday, July 10. Details on that show here.