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nellpire · 8 years ago

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[080424] Nell - Separation Anxiety interview

Q: Please introduce your new album. Jongwan: The album title is Separation Anxiety. I think that attachment and obsession is something everyone experiences as we live. It can be towards a person, or towards a dream, for example, and this album talks about the anxiety of possibly growing apart from those things, or the loss of them. We worked very hard on it.

Q: What do each of you feel separation anxiety towards? Junghoon: It's probably the same for all of us, but the anxiety regarding human connections is big. Should I call it the gap between reality and the ideal? (laughter) I think all humans have an anxious side, and we wanted to express those sides through this album.

Q: The public reaction is always very diverse when you release an album. Jongwan: We've never paid much attention to what goes on around us when we make music, so that doesn't bother us. It's okay, because to us this was a good change, an album that allowed us to take another step forward.

Q: The synth sound is a bit more prominent this time. Jongwan: Rather than us going for a synthier sound, we think each song has a specific form from the start. It's the musician's job to express that form, and as we searched for the form that each song wanted, I think we just ended up using a lot of synth. The album can be divided into beginning, middle and end parts, and while the beginning part is pretty simple with a lot of synth, we paid attention to the harmony of guitars and synths in the beginning and end parts.

Q: What is the concept of this album? Jongwan: We wrote 50 songs for this album and recorded 27. Out of those, 11 made it onto the album, but rather than us specifically wanting 11 songs, we feel that full albums need to have a good flow. I think it got divided into beginning, middle and end parts as we tried to find that flow.

Q: It can't have been easy to stay together as a band for 10 years. Jaewon: We've been friends since we were young, so maintaining our friendship was easy. Surely along the way there have been trivial arguments, or... they've been a bit annoyed by working with me. (laughter) I'm like that when it comes to work. Nell: When it comes to playing around, though... (laughter)

Q: You sold more than 20,000 copies despite the recession. Jongwan: It's a real blessing to us. We've always made the music we wanted, and we are so thankful that there are people out there who wait for us and like what we do. Especially since we're not particularly tall or handsome, but just work hard at what we do, and people seem to see us in a good light because of that.

Q: Jaekyung's popularity with the fans is really immense. Everyone but Jaekyung: You worked hard (laughter).

Q: Nell seems to always stand on the border between the indie scene and the mainstream. Jongwan: I know you shouldn't say this in an interview, but we're really the style to not think about that very much. We think a lot when we prepare for performances or albums, but other than that we don't really think a lot about mass appeal, so it's not particularly hard or difficult for us. Jaekyung: We always just do what we want, but it seems people regard us as you say.

Q: Many of your songs have unique titles, such as '_' and '1:03'. Jongwan: Many of them are closely related to the lyrics. But in the case of '1:03', that's simply what the time was when we finished the song. 'Tokyo' got its name because we wrote it in Tokyo. '_' doesn't have a meaning. You'll know if you listen to the song, but it has a feeling that is hard to express in words, so since we felt that putting a title on it would cause a disturbance, we just named it Underbar.

Q: Where did the vocal effect on Underbar come from? Jongwan: Underbar's lyrics aren't included in the booklet with the rest, but they're very realistic. Because of these realistic lyrics, we felt that a surreal voice would be good, plus, if you don't listen carefully, you can't hear the lyrics very well. We liked that feeling, and the feeling of hearing the lyrics moment by moment. Jaekyung: I think it makes it sound even sadder. It might sound random when you first hear it, but if you listen to it while knowing the lyrics, it's really sad. Personally, I felt it was very moving.

Q: Nell's music is depressing, but the members all seem bright and cheerful? Jongwan: I can't say the music is totally different from my personality, but I blow off a lot of steam when drinking, and when I don't drink I also don't talk much, but the four of us have a lot of fun when we're together. We're actually very cautious of strangers and other people when we're together, and if we meet someone else we don't talk nearly as much. I think people are like that in general. You don't tell your friends everything you feel. I guess you could talk when you go drinking with close friends, but you can't always tell them everything you feel from day to day, or if you're suffering, so for me I think those things come out a lot in our music. My every day self could be a bit fake, or it might not, I honestly don't know.

Q: Are you changing musically as you grow older? Jongwan: I think we're all changing naturally with age or with time, but usually when that happens you watch yourself from extremely close up, and I think while making this album I got to step back and see myself from more of a distance. Should I say it felt like seeing myself from a third person's perspective? So I think because of that I've calmed down a bit and there were many things I gave up on. Jaekyung: Musically our scale got bigger and I think we can express better what we want. I always felt that what I imagined in my head came out distorted, but now I think we can express it well. Junghoon: I think we expanded ourselves as we recorded, which can be good and bad. Now we can truly look at music as music. Jaewon: We used a lot of programming, so I went back and forth a lot in the process of burying acoustic drums in that sound. I'm happy with the result and I think I can do even better next time.

Q: As much as you matured musically, your appearance also became cooler. Jaekyung: Thank you for seeing it that way. When all is said and done, the secret to beauty is the hard work of the stylists. (laughter) Jongwan: We're in charge of visuals. (laughter)

Q: After Nell's breakthrough, many other bands with a similar feel appeared. Jongwan: They're all good at what they do, so we never got that feeling. No matter what, a band making music and doing activities is a happy thing to us. And we hope many more will be introduced and successful in the future. If there are kids in high school right now just taking up music, who listen to our songs, think "I want to do that too" and end up working hard for themselves, then we are proud and touched by that. We want to help if we can.

Q: What is the joy of band music? Jongwan: I think it's the same for all music. For bands, in our case these neighborhood friends got to work together. We get to do what we like as a job, and since we're with long-time friends we're never lonely, and when it gets hard we understand one another and can go for a drink. Jaekyung: It's likely the same for all occupations, but since it's work we really want to do, it's okay even when it gets hard, and I think that's a huge joy.

Q: Are you in a situation where you can make the music you want without any meddling from your agency? Jongwan: There's barely any. I think because the people around us know our personalities and how we've worked so far, so they don't try.

Q: Please introduce the exquisite fusion of '80s synth pop and modern rock that is 'Tokyo'. Jongwan: Me and Junghoon went on a trip to Japan after the Christmas concert last year. You can try the instruments in the music stores there. We played a bit of this and that until I found an instrument I had wanted to try for a while, and we wrote this song while playing that. We came back to Korea and did the arranging, but Junghoon and Jaewon had two different ideas about how it should sound and they were both good, so we mixed the best points of both. We combined samples with acoustic drums and the rhythm made the song exciting.

Q: The new songs were all written by Jongwan, but what are the other members' styles? Junghoon: I write at home in my spare time, and I think my style is strong rhythms. I'd like to show something sometime when there's a chance. Jaewon: I also didn't write much, but my style is sloppy drum and bass? (laughter) I don't know melody and chords well so if I do write then it's only drum and bass. I need help from friends and work hard, right. Jaekyung: I make music that's more dreamy than Nell's. I'm making music that's heading for a dreamland. I want to create beautiful music. Jongwan: Isn't that just you heading for a dreamland? (laughter)

Q: Does anyone have thoughts of starting another project besides Nell? Jaewon: If I find someone I match with and it works musically, then I could do it if there was a chance.

Q: Jaewon seems to have the most unusual personality out of the members? Jaewon: I'm an idiot. Jongwan: He's funny. With lots of talents. And he's really good at talking to himself.

Q: Is there a reason for counting your indie and major albums differently? Jongwan: It's nothing important. Looking at the foreign bands we liked when we were young, their so called first albums were not actually their first records. They released their first album when they were underground or indie... that all seemed like a given to us, and rather than having meaning for us it just seemed natural since we'd seen it so much growing up.

Q: I heard you're doing everything including stage design for your upcoming concert. Jongwan: To bands especially, I think albums and concerts are the most important. Concerts are where we show ourselves, you know. Therefore, we think that the stage itself needs to express the music. Since it's our album release concert this time, we want to show the new elements in our music through the stage. We're working very hard on it.

Q: Do you buy albums often? Jongwan: We spend a lot of time in the car, so we listen to music in there a lot. Junghoon: When we were preparing our album we couldn't listen a lot, so I recently went to a record shop in Hongdae and bought a lot. Jaekyung: Apparently these friends bought a lot of CDs and even CDPs while I slept. It's good to see.

Q: What are your plans for the remaining album promotions? Jongwan: It's been 1 year and 6 months since our last full album. We can meet people who like to listen to our music in their spare time through concerts, but we're trying hard to do do a lot of music shows, radio and interviews so as to not have our image distorted.

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#nell #interview #separation anxiety #translation

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