Eric Ziegenhagen spent his high school and college years composing his humble, enigmatic folk tunes in places where he was sure no one could hear him. He plucked out simple melodies on a guitar he barely knew how to play, and he croaked out unadorned lyrics in a meek, untrained voice. “I assumed it was too simplistic, that it wouldn’t sound any good,” he says. “I assumed I was fake.”
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Along the way, he’s made enthusiastic fans of other local musicians, including Andrew Bird, Kevin O’Donnell, Edith Frost (whom, according to her blog, he’s now dating), and Steve Frisbie. “The simplicity of his playing and songwriting is something that, I think, only strikes the jealous and cynical as a weakness,” O’Donnell says. “His songs are gifts,” Frisbie says. “I feel better each time I hear them. My wife says he sounds like a little boy and an old man at the same time. She’s right.”
Music soon took a backseat to theater. Ziegenhagen began writing and directing plays at Kenyon; in 1994, a year after he graduated, he moved back into his parents’ house and began staging small projects in storefront theaters. Like his songs, his productions were rudimentary and minimalist; props, sets, costumes, and lighting design didn’t interest him half as much as two people talking about seemingly ordinary things. “The most important days in people’s lives come out of a little conversation in a bar or some small experience, instead of ‘the day I lost my arm fighting in a battle,’” he says. He wanted a finite number of details divorced from any obvious context for his plays, and he used the same tactic when writing lyrics. “It’s almost dreamlike, in a way,” he says. “In a dream, you don’t remember a shelf full of books and all the titles. It’s just a book on a table. But there’s something behind it, something resonant in there.”
They say there’s a wildfire
I stood on your front steps and watched
Recorded and mixed in nine straight hours, most of the 14 songs on You’re Talking to the Wrong Guy feature only Ziegenhagen’s quavering voice and rudimentary guitar playing. Elizabeth Lindau of the local band Canasta contributed mournful violin to four tracks. It’s a raw album–he’s straining for notes well beyond his range throughout–but purposely so. “There’s a live recording of Sinatra doing ‘Imagination’ in Paris sometime in the 1960s, and he loses his place and sings, ‘Imagination is silly / You . . . willy-nilly,’” he says. “And I love that kind of thing. Not because it’s ridiculous or wrong but because it’s live and human. And it’s not his only recording of ‘Imagination,’ so he can get that part right somewhere else.”
