Harry Shearer is a Renaissance man. Beyond his work in television ( The Simpsons, Nixon’s the One, his new series in which Shearer stars as the former President), movies ( This Is Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind ), radio (Le Show), documentary film ( The Big Uneasy ) and narrative fiction ( Not Enough Indians ), Shearer has created comedic music albums Songs Pointed and Pointless (2007), Songs of the Bushmen (2008) and Greed and Fear (2010). His new release Can’t Take a Hint, features Dr. John, Jane Lynch, Jamie Cullum, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and many more. In the following conversation he discusses many of this projects as well as his ongoing effort to provide a moving target within the entertainment industry.

The last time I spoke with you for Relix was three years ago, right before the Unwigged and Unplugged tour [in which Shearer and fellow Spinal Tap members Michael McKean and Christopher Guest performed acoustic versions of Tap tunes]. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts and memories of how that all came together.

You know, we did that because we had originally planned to do a Spinal Tap tour and that was the teeth of the recession, that there was no commercial sponsorship that was gonna make that possible. But we’d done unplugged evenings two or three times and always liked them, and the audiences seemed to respond well so we thought, “Well why not do that?” and I think we all had a great time. We played just sort of the perfect sized rooms. I think the largest place we played was the 4,000 seat Chicago Theatre, but we played mainly 2,500-3,000 seaters. Which is, you know, a great size, and we had some great folks join us. I mean, probably one of the highlights was playing the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee and having Bela Fleck onstage with us. It was just ridiculous… just insane. But I thought the show that we played for the DVD was a really good show and I’m really proud of the DVD. I wish more people owned it [Laughs.] But, you know, it was a great experience.

Do you anticipate that you’ll do any more dates with the two of them?

You know, with three guys who have such disparate and active careers it’s hard to anticipate anything except hoping that we’ll do something, but who knows.

This interview will run around the premiere of The Simpsons Season 24. So before we start talking about the new album, I was wondering if you could offer any tidbits or hints of what’s to come…

Well, you know, the thing about that is by the time the season starts, not just by the time the season starts, but throughout the whole year, we’re eight months ahead of where broadcasting is in terms of what we’re doing. I barely remember how the season started. It will be fresh and new to me when it starts, as a result, because of the production schedule, we are way, way, way ahead of what people see and I don’t even keep track of who the guest stars are because these days the guest stars come in on their own schedules, so I rarely see them in person. It was much more easy to remember when you were sitting in a studio and sitting next to you was Michael Jackson. That sort of was hard to forget.

Is that the one that jumps out if I ask you to were to close your eyes…

Oh yeah. Well, partly because the circumstances were a bit out of the ordinary. I mean we did the read through up at his manager’s house and partly because there was an unexpected development when we were doing the read through. We used to do a read through right before we started recording, and we’re doing the read through and he’s reading his lines, and then there comes a point where the character he’s playing is supposed to start singing, and he nodded and a white guy across the table started singing. It was an odd moment, and I whispered to the woman who plays Lisa, Yeardley Smith, “I think we paid enough for the talking Michael Jackson, but not for the singing Michael Jackson.”

So is that what happened?

Nobody explained it any further but that’s how it appeared.

Let’s move on to your new album. Can’t Take a Hint, the title itself, what does that reference?

I guess the fact that the first two records I made got Grammy nominations and the last one didn’t.

Do you have any thoughts as to why you were shut out last time? Do you think it was the subject matter?

Having been in a movie about the whole experience of the awards process in Hollywood, [ For Your Consideration ] I think that movie speaks for me about the impenetrability and unreliability of the whole process. I certainly don’t think the last record was not as good as the previous two, but I don’t know what role that might even play. It certainly was a more thematic and specialized kind of topic because the songs are based on the odd language that spurted out of mouths at the time of the financial crisis. Everybody was hearing those words. It’s not like explaining or dealing with arcane financial subjects, which I don’t understand myself.
*Did you have specific people in mind when you were writing these songs? For instance Jane Lynch on “Like a Charity?” *

No, I didn’t. When I first recorded them I had to sing them no matter what they were, and some of them were out of my range grotesquely. The idea was basically to try something different, since I know a lot of people in music, to call on people I knew, and try to, as I said to somebody else recently, to try to break the four-figure sales barrier.

Jane, we’d worked together in a couple of Chris Guest movies and she had sung at Judith [Owen, his wife] and my Christmas show in L.A. last year, so that was when I was reminded of just what a great singer she is.

*Dr. John appears on the album. What sort of guidance did you offer him when it came time to sing “Autumn in New Orleans?” *

You know, with Dr. John you don’t guide him, you just say, “Have a seat; can I get you anything?” He’s a modern master, and he’s deservedly legendary. I spent half my time in that session marveling at him and the other half marveling at Nicholas Payton. It was an amazing session to be part of.

Touch My Junk" with Skunk Baxter on it, can you talk about that?

Skunk has played on a bunch of my stuff over the years, ever since he first came in and played with Spinal Tap. “Touch My Junk” was motivated by the ongoing controversy over TSA junk touching which started with someone memorably saying, “Don’t touch my junk,” and I thought, “Well, there’s got to be a countervailing attitude to that,” someone who just yearns to have the TSA give them a good going-over and so I wrote it from the standpoint of that character.

Another one that jumps out is “Celebrity Booze Endorser.” How did that song come about?

I’d been listening to, driving around, I’d been listening to Welcome Interstate Managers or Utopia Parkway, one of the Fountains of Wayne records, earlier in the day. Then I saw a story in I think Variety about Madonna signing a deal to flack for a brand of vodka and the headline is what really stuck with me: it said “Madonna Joins Ranks of Celebrity Booze Endorsers.” And I’d just never seen that phrase before, and I just loved the notion that that was a career choice [Laughs] So having the Fountains album in my head, it sort of told me I want to write this as a third person song, not a first person song, and with a certain kind of attitude to it. When it came time to do the record, I called Adam Schlesinger and said “You guys inspired me, so you gotta play on it.”

How did they take that?

They were great. The one thing was, Chris [Collingwood], I think, said, “But you gotta sing it.” I originally thought they would play it and sing it too, but they, Chris said, “No, no, you sing it,” so I said, “OK, but you sing background.” It was great because we, C.J. [Vanston] the producer on that track, and I came into the studio and said, “Do this the way you do one of your songs. Do your process; don’t worry about us, we’ll just kibbutz.” So we really did watch, and they contributed a lot of ideas musical and lyrical that really helped the song, so it was a great process to be part of, mainly as a spectator until the time came to sing my part [Laughs]. But, you know, anytime you can basically sit in the studio and watch a band that you really love create a track, it’s great fun.

• “Macondo” features Rob Brydon singing from the perspective of another character, a BP exec.*

In the middle of the Gulf Oil Spill Tony Hayward memorably said, “I want my life back,” you know, the ultimate insensitivity. It’s one of three love songs on the album to inanimate objects. Tony sings this melancholy farewell to an oil well that he loves not wisely and not well. Also, Sarah Palin [Owen] sings this yearning love song to the Bridge From Nowhere, and then Alice Russell and Tommy Malone sing a love song to the Iraq War. I don’t write normal love songs, obviously.

• “Deaf Boys” finds you portraying a character.*

“Deaf Boys” is the most out there on the satirical edge song of this collection, or maybe that I’ve ever done. It came up because of one week, an American priest from Milwaukee was revealed to have abused a couple of hundred deaf boys. The same week stories came in about an Italian priest and a British priest who abused deaf boys. And I thought this, as Newsweek would describe it, is a burgeoning trend…but of a highly sinister sort, so I determined to write a song about it.

The first question I asked myself was would this be written in the voice of a character or in the voice of an observer. It’s creepier to do it from the voice of the character himself, the abuser, the priest. The next question was how does he sound? And I thought, “A singing priest – hmm… Bing Crosby! ‘Goin’ My Way!’” Then when I tried thinking of instrumental treatments for it, and I thought: Gregorian chant because it’s much more claustrophobic that way. I’ve done it live a couple of times. The first time I did for an audience at the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans and I don’t really think on a Sunday afternoon that’s quite what they were expecting.
In terms of expectations, jumping to another of your recent projects. You direct a documentary on Katrina, The Big Uneasy, which to me at least seemed to come out of left field. Can you talk about the feedback and impact that followed its release?

Well first of all, it came out of left field for me. It’s not like I was expecting to do a serious documentary at any point. But it was something I felt really impelled to do by the circumstances, that all this stuff was knowable and known, and on the public record, yet not known to most Americans, and nobody was moving a finger to make it known to Americans. And I just felt an irresistible compulsion to be that person, I didn’t see anybody else doing it. The reactions – I toured the country for six months last year with it, so I got to see audiences in big cities and small towns, in New Orleans and away from New Orleans, and the reaction in theaters was pretty uniform. I mean people stayed almost to a man and woman for the Q and A afterwards. The responses that I got verbally were really very favorable, very positive, and almost universally they were of two ilks: “I had no idea,” and “What can I do?” That being said, the impact, I must say, has been disappointing. The first and most important to me part of the project was to gain the attention of the national media for the story, and that didn’t work at all. It’s still a big secret to anybody who hasn’t seen the film.

How do you account for that?

I did about an hour long talk at the National Press Club trying to explain my view of it, but to boil it down, I think that people who ascribe media bias to basically left or right wing politics are missing the point. Having worked in the news media for a while, and having watched it fairly closely since, I think the biases are money, logistics, and ego, and I think all three played a role in how the story of New Orleans was covered in 2005. Money dictated that, at that point, no news media in the United States aside from the New York Times had anybody in New Orleans, so everybody was flying in, which made the coverage in New Orleans like the coverage in Name Your Foreign Country – arrive in town and ask the cab driver what the mood here is. Then logistics dictated that they would go to locations that were close to interstate off ramps, which were the Convention Center and the Superdome, and not go to places that weren’t. Therefore you saw all of the black people suffering, and you didn’t see the folks in St. Bernard Parish ten miles away, on their roofs for four days and nights with no electricity, no food and water, who happened to be lower working class white folks, because they weren’t near a freeway off ramp. And then third, ego, was a big factor. They mustered what resources they had to cover the story, and they got great pictures and great stories, and they were really proud of their coverage of the flooding, and because nobody was staying in town, they picked up and left before the real story became apparent, and then it was like, well, the hardest thing to retract is a boast.

In terms of the climate of American culture, your current Nixon project, were you surprised that you couldn’t get someone in the United States interested [it airs on the BBC]?

HS: No, I wasn’t surprised; I just assumed it. I didn’t even try. I knew better. I knew that the first thing out of the mouth of an executive who’s purchased the American project, if I chose to do it there, would be, “You know, I understand that he doesn’t like blacks, but does he have to hate Jews too?”

It’s the nature of the beast. I mean, there are so many great stories about American networks buying rights to shows from abroad and then missing the absolute, basic, essential point of the show, of the project, in starting to make their notes. And I just thought, “It’s not worth it.” I rather go someplace where – you know, I took my chances, there was no guarantee I would get to do it here, but I just thought If I got to do it here, the chances would be pretty good that we’d get left alone, and that turned out to be true.

To me that’s like the American Office is a perfectly fine show, but it can’t hold a candle to the British version.

That’s right, that’s right. I agree. I think it was Greg Daniels in the New York Times who actually cops to one of the basic reasons for the difference. He said he was very aware in adapting the show that he had to give what was in Britain the David Brent character some likeable characteristics.

Well, that’s funny. It’s always funny to be likeable. ..

In terms of, so as your working on this next set of shows for the Nixon series, do you find that you have to provide any back-story for the U.K. audience, or do you just tell it the way you want to tell it?

Well, you know, there’s been a little discussion about that. Me personally, since I feel it’s an entertainment show, I want to provide – and I think everybody agrees on this – the minimum possible explanatory material. I want people to not feel like they’re watching a history lesson or a documentary. They’re watching a very bizarre entertainment, and we tell them a little bit, but there will be a companion show after the six actual episodes with Sir David Frost and my co-writer, Stanley Cutler – Professor Stanley Cutler talking about what all this means and the larger context of the Nixon presidency, so that we don’t leave people with the wrong impression.

How did you happen to work with Stanley Cutler, who is a well-known historian but I can’t recall ever doing a project like this?

We started being booked on the same shows to talk about Nixon anniversaries or Watergate anniversaries and we just struck up a conversation because he got that I was obsessed with his stuff from a totally different vantage point than he and when I thought about this project he was the only person I thought to call.

Last question, which references the range of your projects: when you set out to begin a career, however one defines it, did you anticipate that you’d be doing all of these, working on all of these different areas?

No, no, no. No. I had a fairly simple goal in mind, which was to do satirical comedy – comedy with a satirical edge to it, as opposed to flat out satire. But no, as I’ve gone on, the wisdom of something my mother said fairly early on became more and more apparent to me, which is if you have an aptitude for anything, utilize it. To be honest, having been around show business since I was pretty young, it became clear to me fairly early on that unless you’re remarkably lucky, show business exists to sort of harvest from you what they think your particular specialty is, exploit it for a maximum amount for a very short time, and then toss you out of the car in case of the next one. So, you know, I did sort of knowingly, at that point, begin to adopt a strategy of being a moving target.