1. Yes, he’s heard all those Joy Division imitators.
What do you do when your highly influential band splits up? If you’re Peter Hook, former bass player for English electro-pop pioneers New Order, you turn your attention back to your previous, even more influential group. Since last year, Hook and his band The Light have been performing Unknown Pleasures—the debut album from Joy Division, the band whose career was cut short by lead singer Ian Curtis’ suicide in 1980. New Order rose out of the ashes a couple of months later. “We locked Joy Division in a box and put it away in the attic,” he says. “It was wonderful to open that box and find how fresh everything sounded and felt.” As New Order forged ahead, Joy Division’s legend grew. By the turn of the century, the number of bands using Joy Division’s brooding minimalism as a template had exploded. “You do have to take it as a compliment,” he says. “It’s all about inspiration. I was inspired by the Sex Pistols to create Joy Division. And then you inspire other people. It’s perpetuating that circle of life, really.”
2. Nothing ruins a good thing like grumpy old men.
The other members of New Order recently announced they were getting back together—without Hook. This was just the latest in a long line of public spats between Hook and the rest of the band since New Order’s dissolution in 2007; Hook maintains the group split up altogether, while lead singer Bernard Sumner says Hook left. “They may reform and call themselves New Order, but in my heart they’re not New Order,” he says. “They’re as much New Order as I am Joy Division.” For his part, Hook just wishes things could have gone down in a more civilized manner. “As you get older you get very set in your ways,” he says. “Men get very stubborn, very cranky, very obstreperous. And when you’ve got a load of them together you’re gonna have trouble. Groups act like children all the time.”
3. You will always be remembered for your most gimmicky song.
New Order had staggering success, especially in the late 1980s. Yet their biggest chart hit in England was “World in Motion,” commissioned as the theme song for England’s 1990 World Cup soccer team. “The guy who was working at the Football Association said to [Factory Records head] Tony Wilson one day, ‘I’d love to get a great band to do the football song instead of these rubbish ones.’ And Tony said, ‘Well, who’s your favourite band?’ And, funnily enough, he said, ‘New Order.’ That’s one of the great things about being in a group like New Order, who always do things in a really wacky way. You get to do some really wacky shit. And that was one of them.”
4. It’s not so weird to see your life story in a movie.
Fictionalized versions of Hook have appeared on screen twice: in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People—where he was played by Ralf Little—and in Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic Control (Hook was depicted by Joe Anderson). Watching someone else pretending to be you should be an unnerving experience, but Hook took it in stride. “Life has been quite surreal,” he says. “So watching the film and watching someone play you fit in quite well, really. With 24 Hour Party People, Michael did it very much as a comedy. When I saw it I didn’t recognize myself in it.” Control was a different story. “Anton Corbijn is such a perfectionist,” says Hook. “I knew that the guy playing me would reflect me and I was a little bit worried about that. When I saw the film it was like looking into the mirror.”
After toiling away for a number of years, Jake and Jamin Orrall turned many heads with 2009′s Heavy Days and its mix of Nirvana-esque power chord riffing and psychedelic garage rock. Parts of We Are the Champions follows in the go-for-broke spirit of the Nashville duo’s last effort while adding new dimensions to the band’s sonic palate. There were hints of this on “Bummer,” from their split seven inch with Best Coast, which found the brothers slowing things down to achieve a heavier sound reminiscent of Weezer’s Blue Album. “Endless Fire” takes the comparison even further, with Jake and Jamin aping the twin vocal approach Rivers Cuomo and Matt Sharp used to great effect on Weezer’s first two records, singing over keyboards and even a sitar. Of course, anyone who has seen the band live over the past year-and-a-half can tell that these guys love to rip it up and there’s still plenty of that here. “Stays Up Late” and the aptly named “Shredder” pick up where Heavy Days left off, even if, at times, the songs lack the breezy feel of that album’s best tracks. Matching the ferocity of their last album, We Are the Champions manages to push forward without losing the band’s hazy, lo-fi charm.
When was the record recorded?
Guitarist Jake Orrall: We did two songs at one session ["Bummer" and "Mellow Out"] and then a couple months later we did the rest of them.
Did you record “Bummer” and “Mellow Out” with the intention of putting them on the record?
Yeah, we thought we were going to re-record them, but we ran out of time. We only had three days.
You recorded the whole album in three days?
Except for those two songs, and there was some stuff that we didn’t end up using; we’ll see where they end up.
Do you normally go into the studio with the idea that what gets recorded will be one coherent album?
Yeah. During the time we recorded the album we were touring most of the time, by a pretty good margin. We recorded it last year and we did 260 shows last year so we had to be very, very specific about when we were going to record and when we were going to mix, because we were home for so little time.
Was the album written on tour?
Yeah, mostly.
Is that how you normally write?
No, but we had no choice for the last couple albums.
Does it change the kind of songs you write?
I don’t think so.
Many of the song on We are the Champions are slower and heavier. Was that something you were trying to achieve?
It kind of happened that way.
A bunch of reviews have compared it to Weezer’s Blue Album.
Yeah. I’ve read a lot of those ― a lot of them.
Are you and Jamin fans?
Absolutely. That’s a huge, huge album for me.
Is there anything particular about it or was it just the time in your life that you discovered it?
I think it was just the timing; I was 11 when I became aware of it. Those are pretty formative years: 11, 12 and 13.
Has their influence come out on your past albums?
I think so, in some ways. Definitely not so obviously, I guess; it’s not necessarily just that album though. Smashing Pumpkins are my favourite band. Veruca Sault and Nirvana were huge for me. I started listening to that stuff again a year ago, just really getting back into that era of my life, because I found all my CDs from middle school.
Had they been in storage somewhere?
Yeah.
What made you pull them out?
I moved into a place. I didn’t really live anywhere for a long time so I just had my shit in storage for a couple years, living on couches. But you’ve settled into a place now.
Yeah, we run our record label [Infinity Cat] out of a house and I live in the house.
Many people heard about you guys through your live show. Was there any pressure to capture that element on this record?
We try to keep our live shows and our record really separate. We have such an intense live show that we don’t usually try and emulate that on record. Most people that try and have that same live experience listening to the record fail at it. We just try and have the best live show we can have and make the best record we can make.
Was there a pressure in knowing that more people would be listening this time?
I definitely wanted to make it better than the last record, but I think we got better as a band.
Do you think you succeeded in that goal?
Yeah, absolutely. The songs are better, the recording’s better.
You’ve added a lot of sounds too ― there are sitar and keyboards.
Yeah, our buddy Ryan plays sitar. We had a friend who plays sitar and we were making an album and we thought we’d take advantage of that.
Did you want to expand your sound?
Not live, just on record. If we just played the songs through like we do live it wouldn’t be as interesting. And [if we replicated the record] live there wouldn’t be kids jumping off of the stage, you’d just be sitting there listening to it. When we record we try and put stuff that will make it as attention grabbing of a listening experience as it would be live. But live it would be really difficult to incorporate anything else because there’s only two of us. So we might as well keep it simple so we can rock harder.
You’ve always taken a very DIY approach to your career ― starting your label, producing your records, shooting low budget videos ― where does that attitude come from?
Growing up in Nashville, it wasn’t like anyone was going to do that for you. The punk scene was pretty small, pretty underground. Watching kids come through who had obviously dropped out of school and quit their jobs and who were just doing it, that was a pretty big inspiration. No one else is going to do it for you and you can either keep playing local shows once a week or you do some shit.
Did you find it difficult to break out of Nashville and tour?
Yeah, it was horrible. The first four-and-a-half years that we toured it was just trying to find someone interested in having us play in their parents’ garage. We can deal with anything; we just want to play in your town. At that time it was all through MySpace. Everything that we did to book a tour was through MySpace. 2006, ’07, ’08 was all MySpace. We’d find a band that seemed like they’d be pretty cool in the town we were trying to do the show in and then negotiate a show swap, where you book them a show and they book you a show in their town. We did that for four-and-a-half years, then we got a booking agent and told him to put us on the road all the time. It was really hard; we weren’t making any money. You’d make 50 bucks if you were lucky, which would be just enough to get to the next town. But mostly it was spending your money or whatever people would donate. And we’d have to find people’s couches to crash on. It was really hard, but it was really fun.
Is that how you developed your live show?
Yeah, just playing every night for a long, long time.
What turned the tide for you? You mentioned getting a booking agent.
When we put out Heavy Days, we really went for it. We both quit our jobs and moved out of our places and lived in the van for 13 months. Then we got a booking agent and started to make a bit more money.
You recently played a gig in Moscow for Vice Magazine. What was that like?
It’s totally different. We did a Europe tour in the spring and most cities, no one knew who we were. In Moscow, we played with two Russian bands and we were the headliner ― no one gave them the time of day and when we went on people lost their shit for the whole show. And no one even knew who we were. They could care less. We were just some rock band from America that flew all the way out there for one show. They were really appreciative; it was cool.
Brooklyn, N.Y.’s The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart won over a lot of fans in 2009 with the fuzzy indie pop of their self-titled debut.
But a lot of heads were turned when it was revealed that their follow up to that modern lo-fi masterpiece would be recorded and mixed by English duo Alan Moulder and Flood, probably best known for their bombastic production on ’90s classics like Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral and Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness.
Belong, the resulting album, is far more polished than its predecessor. But while not espousing the virtues of his favourite bands, singer and guitarist Kip Berman maintains that underneath the walls of guitars, the band were able to retain their core identity.
“It’s sort of a mall-rock aesthetic,” he says. “If you aim for that and you are who you are, the reality comes out in between.”
Here are some other things Berman had to say:
You guys took a bit of a gamble with this record. Have you been happy with how it’s been received?
It’s not so much the reception. We were just really happy with the record we got to make. It’s such a relief that our idea for it and our songs got captured in the way we wanted them to sound. Once you do that, you can’t control much else. But you do you have that record on your shelf that sounds the way that you feel happy with. That was really the exciting part.
When was the decision made to take things up a notch on the production side of things?
I think that’s a process that started back in 2007 when we started the band. Each successive thing we’ve done was to try to get better.
I still don’t think we’re very good. Our first recording was self-recorded with a drum machine and that was okay. Then we got Kurt [Feldman] lined up to play drums and he really improved things. We recorded [the band's debut] at my friend’s basement studio and that sounded better. After that we recorded the Higher Than The Stars EP and another mixer came into mix the single — each thing we’ve done has tried to improve on the thing before and try to get to a better spot.
Were Flood and Alan Moulder at the top of your list of people you’d like to work with?
It’s not like we had a list.
We were excited to work with Archie Moore on the first album. He brought a lot to the mix of the first album. If you’d heard what it sounded like when we were first done recording and then Archie Moore mixed it, it sounded way better. We were all really excited about that process and the work he did.
On this record, getting the opportunity to work with two people who have been involved with a lot of the records that we love and a lot of bands that we love just made intuitive sense. If you want to make a big American rock record, those are the two British guys that you want to talk to. Our idea going into this was make it a really visceral, powerful, kind of excessive… not excessive in a bad way, but superfluous amounts of emotion and feeling and sound and really just push things beyond reasonable subtleties and good taste.
It’s sort of a mall-rock aesthetic. Let’s go further than cool. When you look to bands like Weezer and Smashing Pumpkins and listen to bands Alan Moulder mixed and Flood produced as well as examples of an ideal. It’s always that thing, where if you aim for that and you are who you are, the reality comes out in between. Our record doesn’t sound half as bombastic as Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, and nor should it. But having that as a goal pushed us beyond our normal comfort zones, and we were pretty psyched with how it turned out.
Yeah, it sounds great. And probably a good thing you left the orchestras out.
Yeah. There are ideas of excess that are positive and then there are ideas of excess that are not positive. And we didn’t really need to bring the string section in for our second record on Slumberland Records. Nor could we afford to. We had a synthesizer that sounded like strings.
Did you spend a lot of time in the studio compared to past records?
It’s an interesting thing. The first record was chopped up. We recorded in my friend’s basement, but we could only use it when his roommates weren’t home. It wasn’t like a solid stretch of time.
This time, it was pretty solid. It was in two parts. We did all the music in New York, and then went on tour and ended in London, went into a studio, did all the vocals and mixed it. I think we had not enough time to pursue any dumb ideas. It was still very around the clock, and we can’t really afford this anyways. Even though those dudes are awesome to work with and they want to work with you, we want to make the most out of this opportunity and get the most out of it that we can.
You’ve spoken in the past of your love for fuzz boxes and I read that you had one that was custom made to sound like the Smashing Pumpkins.
It’s funny, because at the time — if you go back two years ago that band name never came within 500 words of our band name. But it’s a sound we’ve always really loved. And just because we love the Smashing Pumpkins doesn’t mean we don’t also really love The Pastels or Rocket Ship.
Growing up when we did, there were two worlds of music. There was radio music which wasn’t always bad. A lot of the times it was Nirvana and Weezer and Smashing Pumpkins and Ash — this really big huge sounding alternative rock — we love that. That’s just what we grew up with. And at the same time there’s the underground stuff which was basically just pop-punk and then later on it was indie-rock and indie-pop.
I don’t know if anything unifies those two loves. But there’s something about stepping on a fuzz box and playing some chords that never gets old to us. Even if it’s not something new. The Ramones weren’t something new. They just stuck to something that they thought was the true spirit of rock ‘n’ roll, and in a weird way they corrupted it to their own vision. Now people look at them as the true spirit of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a process that goes on and on, and we’re happy to be a cog in that wheel.
It seems like the lines between the radio and the underground were a lot more blurred in the ’90s than they are now.
It’s almost like a wave. There’s always that moment where the underground breaks into the commercial world. That happened in the early 2000s when bands like The White Stripes became huge and they were on Sympathy For The Record Industry. It was a bunch of stuff like The Dirtbombs, who up to that point had never been considered a commercial or marketable beyond a niche community. Or like when Teenage Fanclub were playing on Saturday Night Live.
Instances where something cool creeps into the normal reality. Then it recedes and you get copycat bands and it becomes the thing where it’s like “We’ve got to sign the next Nirvana” and you get Candlebox. That is the mentality of the music industry. But if it weren’t for Nirvana, I wouldn’t have known who The Vaselines were when I was 14 or have been curious about the Beat Happening. It paved the way to discover more music.
I’m glad that you mentioned Ash there. I always thought they were underrated.
They’re so underrated. I love 1977. It’s an amazing record. Everyone romanticizes [Weezer's] Blue Album and Pinkerton, but I think that’s right up there.
I love Supergrass as well. Just big, fuzzy, great pop songs. It’s all the good ideas of punk with an extras ounce of mega-ness… they take it up to another level.
We were music fans before we were a band, so we have more than a healthy interest in stuff involving bands.
You’ve called yourself a record nerd in the past. Do you make records for all the other record nerds, with nods to your favourite albums built into the music?
I wonder who are the bands who aren’t record nerds. Like it’s always a surprise when a band really likes music. Who are these bands?
I think at the end of the day, everybody who plays music must be in some way. I think it’s really funny when I see old records of ours selling for a lot of money on eBay. I couldn’t give those away when I had them. I should have kept some more of those. It could have been my retirement fund.
You played in a couple bands before Pains Of Being Pure At Heart — The Starve and Jackie— that sounded much different than Pains. Has your music changed as your tastes have?
I really loved the Starve. That’s probably the band I felt the most at home in until Pains came along. I wrote all the songs and lyrics and sang. It’s hard to explain why The Starve is similar to Pains. It’s this idea of emphatic, over the top expression of an ideal.
With Jackie, it was fun, but The Starve was emotionally connected to the ideals of music that I love most in the same way Pains is. Me and Alex [Naidus, bass player] when we met were both big fans of the Exploding Hearts and they probably inspired us to play music a lot. They’re just great written songs. They’re catchy and immediate.
I feel like progress in music isn’t about boundaries and who can play the loudest or who can play the fastest. I think I realized this in seventh grade. No one is better pop-punk than NOFX or Propagandhi. You can’t outdo that. But it’s that realization that you can’t out Merzbow, Merzbow. There’s always someone on the periphery. And at some point you push boundaries to for the sake of boundary pushing, which is great.
But for me, progress is at the centre, where you just write pop songs with energy and enthusiasm with lyrics that are really good. That ideal doesn’t seem like it ever will be fully realized. The Buzzcocks were great, but 20 years later the Exploding Hearts come along and they’re really great in a similar way but at the same time completely different. It means a different thing to be a pop-punk band in Portland in 2000 than it did in Manchester in 1978. And you shouldn’t pretend to know what it’s like to be in Manchester in 1978.
To me it’s that ideal, that if you can write a great song in under four minutes with great lyrics, there’s always more room in my life for that.
Jimmy Eat World‘s 2009 tour to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their landmark Clarity album was in many ways a nostalgia trip for both the band and their fans. Like Weezer’s Pinkerton, Clarity was an under-appreciated gem in late ’90s burgeoning emo scene.
But the tour would also prove to be creatively fruitful for the Arizona quartet, as it gave them a chance to reconnect with the record’s producer, Mark Trombino (Blink-182, Gob).
“He came out to the show in San Diego and hung out,” explains guitarist Tom Linton.
Following the success of Bleed American, Trombino had once again been tapped to help the group record 2004′s Futures, but had to bow out after scheduling conflicts arose due to what Linton describes as the band’s lack of proper preparation.
“We weren’t ready to go into the studio,” he says. “We kind of went in with a lot of the music finished, but the lyrics weren’t really done.
“There was tons of pressure on Jim [Adkins, vocals/guitar].
“It was just really bad timing. It just wasn’t working out.”
Prior to running into Trombino, Jimmy Eat World had already begun work on what would eventually become their recently released Invented album. With their meeting fresh in mind, the band decided to team up with the producer again.
“We just felt the songs that we had were almost suited for Mark,” Linton says. “He just has great ideas as far as song arrangements. He also comes up with really cool keyboard lines.
“And he’s brutally honest, which is probably the best part about him. If he doesn’t like something, he’ll be pretty straight up with you.”
While reteaming with Trombino makes Invented seem like somewhat of a throwback record for Jimmy Eat World, the album also finds them introducing new elements to their creative process. Chief among them is the new lyrical approach Adkins took during recording.
The singer/songwriter drew inspiration from a book of Cindy Sherman’s photography. He began writing from the viewpoint of the characters in Sherman’s photos, giving many of Invented‘s lyrics a female perspective.
Given this new approach, it seems somewhat appropriate that the band were able to find a female foil for Adkins in singer Courtney Marie Andrews.
“She plays around Phoenix,” Linton says. “She’s a folk artist. Jim met her at a show and started talking to her. He had her come down to the studio and it ended up working out.”
Along with contributing back-up vocals to five of the new songs — including “Coffee and Cigarettes” where she duets with Adkins — Andrews will tour with the band, singing and playing keyboards.
“It’s really nice having someone singing all those back up vocals that we haven’t had there,” says Linton. “She’s kicking butt.”
This story originally appeared in the October issue of Exclaim.
Nick Hornby has finally made the transition from overly opinionated music geek to actual songwriter. The British novelist (High Fidelity, Juliet, Naked) and sometimes music critic provided the lyrics for piano-pop maestro Ben Folds’ latest record, Lonely Avenue. The collaboration was inspired by a fake album Folds recorded and leaked in 2008. Written and recorded in a single day, he was emboldened by the fast pace and quickly emailed Hornby. “I said to Nick, ‘We should do this,” Folds recalls. “We were writing bad words on purpose. If you wrote good words on purpose I could move quickly and have something really wonderful.’” While not an obvious first choice to play Bernie Taupin to Folds’ Elton John, Hornby did contribute lyrics to the William Shatner record Folds produced. “I can’t think of any other novelist where I’ve read everything they’ve written,” he says. “And I’m lucky enough to know him as well and he’s really familiar with my work as well.”
In stark contrast to the speedy release Folds had envisioned, Lonely Avenue ended up taking 18 months to put together. “The gravity of the lyrics being really good, suddenly I’m not going to move quite as fast,” says Folds. Still, once the lyrics were in hand, he was turning tunes around in 24 hours, taking special care not to revise Hornby’s words. “It’s a different song if I change his words,” he says. “There’s a reason he wrote them that way and I wouldn’t work with someone I didn’t have complete trust in.” In fact, Folds found working with someone else’s words to be a relief. “I’m burdened with the task of finding the words that are supposed to be in the song, which is really difficult for me to do, so I prefer to do this,” he says. “But I do have to get back to my own words, because that’s part of why I’m here.”
You’ve talked a lot about how this is a return to the rock for Weezer. Was that something you set out to do when you started recording?
Singer/guitarist Rivers Cuomo: Well, I never know how conscience anything is. It’s maybe half instinct and half wanting to make our core fans happy ― give them a real rock album.
Do you find it a difficult balancing act to please your core fans?
I don’t know if it’s really a balancing act; I more get really into something and next album I’m really into something else.
Once again you’ve had co-writers on many of the songs for Hurley. What made you finally open up to writing with people outside the group?
Well, one thing was the Hootenanny tour we did in 2008. We’d show up at a VFW hall or a roller-skating rink, invite 50 to 200 fans down and they’d bring their instruments and we’d play a few songs. It was a new, interesting, musically challenging situation: new instruments and new people from different backgrounds. It was fun for me; I think it was natural to just start calling other musicians and start writing with them.
Have you found anyone that you really connected with and that you’d want to work on an album or a chunk of songs with?
No; I always like working with new people.
You’ve been in the studio with Julian Casablancas recently?
Yeah. We pretty much finished the song; we just need to spend one more day working in the studio and finish it up.
What will become of it?
We figure all that out after ― just come up with a pile of songs and figure out whose record they go on.
With the new record, you seem to be looking back quite a bit, particularly with first single “Memories.” Is the band in a bit of a reflective mood?
I wasn’t aware of it, but it seems like a lot of the songs are about the passage of time and growing up and looking back at my youth. It does seem like that was what was going on. I don’t think I’m in that phase now though and it wasn’t intentional.
Was it the band’s decision to reissue Pinkerton or Geffen’s?
We’ve been thinking about that for a long time ― just waiting for the right time in our schedule. I think it’s just an obvious choice for all of us. A lot of our fans love that period of our creative lives and there are definitely some great tracks that we never released from back then that would be great to put out now.
Are these songs from the lost album, Songs from the Black Hole?
No, they’re tracks from the Pinkerton sessions that didn’t make the cut for one reason or another. Like this one song, “Tragic Girl,” that I think is at least as good as anything on that album, but I got stuck. There were a couple melodies that I couldn’t figure out if they were supposed to go up or down. But you get away from it for ten years and I look at it again and it’s real clear how to finish the song up. So, we did that with a couple of things and they sound great.
For a long time, it seemed like you were very uncomfortable with Pinkerton. Have you grown into it?
Well, it wasn’t a long time. Right around 2001, when we put out the Green Album, I said a lot of negative, inflammatory things about Pinkerton and about a lot of things; I said a lot of crazy stuff. And those quotes have lived on for the last nine years, and people get confused and think I still feel that way even though it was something I said in an off-handed way nine years ago. But ever since I’ve been trying to make it clear that, of course, I think it’s a brilliant album; I love it. I love the songs and I love playing those songs and I hope the positive message gets through. For some reason, some people in the music community out there, they love the idea that an artist has disavowed one of their most popular albums. For some reason, that’s perversely satisfying to some people.
Are you going to go ahead with a tour playing those first two albums?
Nothing’s confirmed yet, but we’re going to start rehearsing.
And you’ve also got another one of your solo albums coming out and a Weezer rarities complication. Are you worried about overexposure?
Yeah, it’s something I very much worry about. I feel like you need to have a limited supply in order to maintain demand. But nowadays, you don’t sell records anyway so what’s the difference? Our core fans, they want to hear new music all the time and we’re happy to give it to them.
How did you end up signing with Epitaph?
After 15 years, we’re finally free of our deal with Geffen and we wanted to try something different. They’re big Weezer fans and they made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. We’ll try it and we’ll see how it goes.
If Baltimore is known for anything these days, it’s the gritty drug culture so eloquently showcased in The Wire. But recently, the northeastern U.S. city has birthed a diverse group of bands. That includes the duo of Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally, better known as Beach House, whose lush dream pop can be described as anything but gritty. CHARTattack had the chance to speak with Legrand while Beach House were on a recent break from touring in New York. We talked about the origins of the band’s intimate music and how they translate their tunes live.
CHARTattack: What are you doing in New York for the meantime?
Work stuff. It’s very fascinating. Our touring’s been pretty consistent since the beginning of the year. There’s like a week interval between each tour.
Your sound on record seems, to me, very intimate. How do you transfer that to big, outdoor festivals like the gig on Toronto Island?
Sorry can you repeat the question? I was watching a guy do a one armed push-up.
Well, I’ve never seen you live, so I was wondering how you translate the band’s intimate sound to a large audience?
We’ve evolved a lot since the beginning. The live show is important to us. So much of Teen Dream is a reflection of what we’ve learned by touring a lot. Being on stage and playing large venues, what that taught us about our sound. I think it can be a different experience [than on record] still. But I’d like to think it’s also very personal for people. And I think it can also be a big wash. Our sound is not small. We’re definitely a live band. I think people may have thought in the past that we’re not capable of playing a festival, but the music has evolved and we’ve grown. It’s not that way anymore. We’ve definitely gotten more intense.
You said that Teen Dream is the culmination of everything you’ve learned. How so?
Well, it’s not a culmination; it’s just an evolution. It’s not an ending point. Every record we’ve done has been a gateway to the next one. Then the touring after each record is another gateway. It informs us of the next path in some very abstract way. Teen Dream has a lot of the intensities and energies that were in us for a certain period of time, and then we put them into a record, basically.
How does the songwriting dynamic between you and Alex work?
Alex and I write… the songs are all composed together. We’ll write together as well. Someone will have some chords and bring them to the table and then we work on it. If we believe in it, we keep working on it. I’ll have a melody and some chords or Alex will have a melody and some pieces and we start from there. It’s never the same way every time. Every song we’ve ever written has come together in its own way. Some took longer than others. Lyrically, I’ve always been the lyricist. But it’s just the two of us. It just goes back and forth constantly. We support each other. It’s not super analytical or intellectual, it’s very instinctual and basically what sounds good to us. We’re lucky that we both agree when things are right and when things are not right.
To me it seems that the vocal melodies are what propel the sound.
I think the way I think about music is through word melodies, and I think that’s a big part of our sound. I’ve actually just started realizing that. I think it’s a good point. I think that the music and the voice work together. When we’re writing, one melody can very simply and naturally construct the path of the song. I also think that a few chords can birth a melody. Melody is something that’s really unpredictable.
You’ve said that you think of music in a very visual sense.
Yeah, I can see things sometimes, like melodies.
Is that very common amongst your songwriting peers? Do you even have conversations about songwriting with them?
I actually don’t. I guess sometimes I’ve asked other bands how they write and most of the time they cut and paste. Grizzly Bear, they write separately and then they paste it together. They have a system. It’s kind of scientific. And I think that’s what happens when you’re in a band that has more than two people in it and you all write your own parts.
Alex and I, it’s like we’re a band and we each have band members inside of us. It’s an interesting topic. I guess at festivals and everybody’s running around I don’t have time to have a conversation I’d actually be interested in having.
Well, I don’t mean to read too much into it, but your uncle [Michel Legrand] is a film composer, and I thought maybe that had something to do with it.
You know, he’s a relative. We share the same family name. But I’ve had no interaction with him since I was four. So if it has any effect at all, it must be genetic. I didn’t think that I’d be a professional musician when I was young. Music was part of both Alex and I’s upbringing; arts in general and a lot of other things. What you do in life, it kind of finds you. It’s like something really obvious that’s been there all along and you’ve just ignored it. That’s how it came about. It was never one person having a major say. But [my uncle's] career is pretty intense. I think he’s scored over 150 works. I think I read that on IMDB.
You had done a theatre degree prior to moving to Baltimore?
That was my liberal arts concentration. I did that and music my whole life. Then I went to Paris after school and studied at this professional school. It basically churns you out to be in experimental theatre. I wanted to take it as far as I could, but there was something unresolved. So I just said screw it, I don’t want to be directed by somebody else, and I also don’t want to recite someone else’s text. I want to make my own. That was the decision.
I picked Baltimore because I had a friend in school that I had been in a band with. I just went there because he was there. At the time, Baltimore, what has since been called a scene, it hadn’t had that sort of national attention. It was brewing. I feel like I took the fortunate risk and ended up finding something that is my life. Without a doubt.
Hot on the heels of their recently released, critically acclaimed and Polaris Muse Prize long listed Mount Benson album, Vancouver trioApollo Ghosts are set to drop a new split cassette via Scotch Tapes on Thursday. Their contribution to the split, dubbed The Cedar Streets EP, includes four new tracks and three covers.
“We recorded some of the songs down in Washington at a studio where our friend works,” explains drummer Amanda Panda, calling from a cell phone while the trio made their way from New Brunswick to Quebec. “He gets a day a month, and he invited us down to record.”
The four new songs were all written within a few weeks of the actual recording session, which is a quick turnaround time considering how long some of Mount Benson’s tracks spent gestating.
“When you put out a record, you actually are working on those songs for quite a long time,” says Panda. “We had been working on some of those songs since the summer prior.”
The covers — tracks by The Monks, Minutemen and The Vaselines — were recorded by frontman Adrian Teacher in the group’s jam space on his four-track. All three members are fans of Minutemen and The Monks (“The Minutemen are Jay [Oliver, bassist]‘s favourite band”) As for The Vaselines, whose “Molly’s Lips” gets the Apollo Ghosts treatment, Panda says, “it was a good choice to round it out.”
“It’s just a fun song. It’s a fun song to sing and it’s easy to play.”
As well as seven of their own tunes, Apollo Ghosts share tape with fellow Vancouverites Thee AHs as well as ECCW wrestler and friend of the group, The Divine Prophet.
“He’s a great storyteller,” she says. “He came over to our house and we gave him a cassette player. He sat down and spun 10 or 12 yarns and then Adrian edited them down and picked the ones we liked the best.”
Apollo Ghosts haven’t made any concrete plans following their tour of eastern Canada this summer.
“Touring is always a bit tiring,” says Panda. “There’s definitely a bit of a rest after this.”
The band are interested in starting work on new songs that would form the basis of Mount Benson‘s follow up she says, but again, there’s no timeline just yet.
“We might do it in a different way,” she says. “We might work on it a bit more slowly, or work on the songs a bit more slowly, and get a big pool of songs and whittle them down from there.
While the songs for Mount Benson seemed like aged cheddar next to the one on the band’s new cassette, they were actually written much quicker than the ones on the band’s Hastings Sunrise debut, some of which Teacher had been working on for several years.
“It’s nice to switch it up and try a different method,” she says. “That might change, but that’s kind of the idea for now.”
Prior to NXNE this past week, I had the chance to speak with Andy McLean, the Managing Director and co-founder of the festhere in Toronto, Canada. We talked festival history as well as what they look for when choosing bands from the thousands of entries they get each year. You can listen to the interview in the grand context of the New Wax Show here, or on its lonesome below.
This feature originally appeared in the June issue of Exclaim!
Looking at photos of Toronto’s Born Ruffians from two years ago, when the trio were releasing their debut album, Red, Yellow&Blue, it seems like not much has changed. But the past 24 months have been a period of strain and transition as singer-guitarist Luke LaLonde, bass player Mitch Derosier and drummer Steve Hamelin saw their friendships get pulled apart at the seams, thanks to months of heavy touring. Thankfully they were able to stitch it back together. “It took a while to learn how much control we have over our music,” says LaLonde, on the phone from London, England. “You’re kind of the boss of what you do.”
LaLonde and Derosier grew up together in Midland, ON and met Hamelin in high school. Despite musical differences (LaLonde was into guitar rock, Hamelin loved mid-’90s hip-hop luminaries like Wu-Tang Clan and Puff Daddy, and Derosier dug the Top 40) the trio bonded over a love of the Strokes-stoked garage rock revival in the early 2000s. “The Strokes came out, and all of us were like, ‘Whoa, they’re so cool. Let’s start a band,’” recalls LaLonde. The trio were eventually picked up by UK indie Warp, who released their self-titled EP in 2006, setting the stage for their full-length debut the following year.
“We recorded [Red, Yellow & Blue] in 2007 and started touring through fall 2008. By the end of the year we had toured more than we’d been home,” explains LaLonde. “Maybe it was a bit too much.” That November, the day after playing a sold-out gig at the Opera House in Toronto, Hamelin announced that he was through with touring. “Steve just really didn’t have fun. He decided that life as a travelling musician wasn’t for him. He missed his life at home.”
LaLonde and Derosier remained undeterred. “There was never any thought of giving it up,” he says. “Right away we both kind of looked at each other and decided we would keep going.” LaLonde and Derosier quickly recruited Ahmed Gallab to fill the band’s vacant drummer seat for the duration of 2008 while Hamelin would help write Red, Yellow& Blue‘s follow-up and fill in live when needed. “We thought we’d transition. We’ll finish this record with Steve, then we’ll sort of play it by ear.”
Say It was finished last September with Hamelin keeping beat in the studio. “We sat down and had a conversation following the recording in September,” says LaLonde. “We talked about everything really honestly and realized a lot of our problems were coming from communication issues.” After hashing out their differences, Hamelin agreed to rejoin the band full-time. “He could drop his issues that he had with touring and focus on minimizing his nerves. He always had a nervous streak before shows. He was the guy puking in the garbage can before we went on. I think maybe he realized he could take things less seriously,” he says. “Whatever elephants were in the room, we put on the table. Our friendships are as strong as ever.”
Despite all the strife, the inner-band turmoil proved creatively fruitful. “It definitely affected the music. Real life just tends to do that,” says LaLonde. “All those experiences went into the songs when we came back from touring to finish writing.” The album’s title came from the band’s new manifesto ― if anyone has a problem, say it.
“Ideas were flowing easier,” says LaLonde. “It made things a little more chilled out and it’s reflected in the songs.” In his quest for a more collaborative process, he would hold back his own opinions to give Derosier and Hamelin space to add their two cents. “I wanted to keep any of my personal demos that had drum and bass parts out of the mix, so that any idea I brought in was an incomplete idea that they could complete. Everything was built from the ground up in rehearsals. We didn’t demo anything and went into the studio blind, in a good way. Ideas were spontaneous, creativity was there. We acted on impulses in the studio and then left it to the mixing to decide what should remain.”
Say It abandons its predecessor’s spiky, staccato rhythms for rolling bass lines. Likewise the gang vocals have been replaced with LaLonde’s more relaxed and at times soulful approach. “I think there was a male, soul influence,” he says, name-checking Sam Cooke, Roy Orbison, Roger Miller and Scott Walker as current influences. “I sort of tried to channel some part of that… evoke an attitude of vocalists I like.”
Talking Heads remain a strong influence on LaLonde, describing them as “comfort music,” but he finds it difficult to nail down what he was listening to that influenced Say It. His interest in new music tends to ebb and flow, a pattern affected by the band’s tour schedule. “[Touring] might make me a little more jaded. Maybe subconsciously there’s a competitive edge to me where when I’m on tour I’m really aware that we’re not the only band in the world and that there’s thousands of bands competing, in a way.” He says his shifting musical tastes and a change in the feelings he wanted to evoke were the likely reason for the sonic shift in his vocals. “I think I can only ever sing how I sing naturally and I try not to force anything.”
The last two years were “a challenge in certain ways and a joy in others,” says LaLonde. “It sort of made me realize that I have to take a leadership role sometimes, be the camp leader and rally the troops.” Where LaLonde used to groan at the prospect of heading to Europe ahead of his bandmates to do a week of press, now he sees the positive side. “It’s nice to have people that want to do an interview with you.”
Stalk me!