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Artie Lange: Crazy Funny

(Originally published 8/30/2012)

For comedian Artie Lange, heartbreak and catastrophe go in, and humor comes out. It’s really that simple for the 44-year-old best-selling author, comedian, radio show host, and actor. Lange has learned to take the pain of addiction and depression and turn it inside out. He hasn’t had the easiest life, as anyone who has read his New York Times best-selling book Too Fat to Fish has learned, but Lange has persevered if only to make people laugh, and work out his problems on stage.

Lange and his radio show partner Nick DiPaolo will perform comedy on Saturday, September 1, at the Seneca Niagara Events Center in Niagara Falls.

When you sit down to an interview like this are you ready to answer anything thrown at you or are you just sitting there thinking "For the love of god, don't let them ask me about drug addiction or suicide"?

Artie Lange: I’m ready for anything. Whatever you want to talk about brother.

I think most of your fans know by now that you attempted suicide a couple of years ago. You spent some time in a psychiatric ward for a while. Obviously those were some dark times. Were you thinking about comedy at all while you were going through that?

AL: Was I thinking about comedy?

Yeah, when you were sitting in the psyche ward did you ever think about comedy or your career?

AL: Oh well yeah, when I was in the psyche ward, sure. Everything that I had ever done that was normal was on my mind. I was wondering if I would ever do any of it again. It’s funny because no matter how dark it gets you never stop being a comedian. Stuff would happen to me on the ward and I would go “God this would be a great story to tell on Letterman or a funny thing to put in my stand-up act.” So sure, you never stop thinking about it, but at that point I didn’t know what was reality or what wasn’t. I thought maybe I did die and I’m in fuckin’ hell, because that place was disgusting. The biggest thing in my mind was how the fuck do I get out of here?

What popped you back into reality?

AL: Time, really. Everyone who I talked to who was clean or in some sort of program told me that everything that I was thinking at that point, I couldn’t really count as being real because of how warped my mind was from drugs, specifically heroin. They said the longer that you’re off that shit, every single day that you’re off it you’ll start to think clearer. You’ll start to think normal; you’ll come back to the real world. You’ll realize that there is a chance that you could get back into life and maybe be as good or better than you were. That’s what it was for me, being literally locked down in a facility where I couldn’t take drugs. It took time; it took almost a year and a half of not being on dope to get back to normal. Time is what happened.

When did you realize you were funny?

AL: When I was really young. I grew up in an area that had a lot of tough kids. I realized I could get out of fights with someone who I knew could kick my ass by being funny. I can remember there was this black chick, Tanya Davis, and she was big. In the fourth grade she was big and she broke my friend Joey’s nose in a fight. Joey was a tough kid but she punched like Muhammad Ali. She came over with a right hand. I tried to break up the fight but then she wanted to fight me so I started doing a Howard Cosell impersonation, like I was the announcer of the fight or something, and I made everybody laugh. That sorta freaked her out a little bit and she didn’t know what to do, so she didn’t break my nose. That’s when I first learned I was funny.

As a stand-up comedian you're essentially talking to yourself on stage. You have audience reaction but there is no conversation really, at least hopefully not, unless someone is heckling you. As a radio personality it's all about having an interesting or funny conversation. Which do you prefer?

AL: That’s a hard question, radio or stand-up. I love stand-up comedy but when stand-up comedy goes well—and by that I mean not just killing. I’m talking about when you’re killing the material that you actually like and respect and it’s not just something you know people will laugh at so you can get out of there and get a check. When that’s happening, it’s fantastic. But you know, I never really did radio until I sat in on Howard (Stern’s) show. I’ll never forget what Howard said to me after that first show. I knew I did really well because everyone was laughing, and Howard looked at me and said “it’s fun, isn’t it?” and I said “my God, yeah.” Just sitting in front of that microphone and just goofing around and it’s going out to all of these people live. It’s amazing. I got to learn how to do this radio stuff by literally sitting four feet from the best guy who has ever done it for nine years. Talk about a training school for radio. I would see the way he would handle callers or guests, and I’d see the way he’d change and what he would do. There is nothing about radio that I don’t like. If I could only do one thing for the rest of my life, it would be a radio show.

Is radio more spontaneous?

AL: Oh God yeah. Absolutely. Stand-up is supposed to seem spontaneous, but normally it’s an act you’ve been doing forever on stage. It’s a comic’s job to make it seem like he’s thinking of all of this stuff off the top of his head. Even heckler responses are something you’ve done a million times. But radio is. It has to be spontaneous.

Tell me about one of your favorite moments on the Nick and Artie show.

AL: A woman called up, it was probably a woman doing a character because nobody could be this crazy, or maybe she was just crazy, who knows. But she said that if you kill and boil a cat, and eat its bones you would become invisible.

Was she a witch?

AL: She claimed to be a witch, yeah. She had a really funny voice, I think her name was Jen and she was from Naples, Florida. She kept saying that she was stalking me and she wanted to kill me.

When you talk to someone like that are you thinking like “Yes, this is the caller I’ve been waiting for” or are you just a little freaked out?

AL: No, with this person I wasn’t freaked out at all. I could tell she was either too crazy to pull it off or it was a joke. She had a real entertaining voice and I wanted to bang her by the end. But anyways, I tell her that I want to try the cat thing and Nick makes a really funny cat sound—he can make a sound almost like you’re choking a cat. So he started doing it into the mic and she started almost having an orgasm and she’s screaming “kill that thing, kill that thing!” That’s the hardest I’ve ever laughed.

You appeared on Louie this month as a Chemical Truck Driver. I see a very, very subtly ironic message there, you being a Chemical Truck Driver. How was it working with Louie CK?

AL: I’ve known Louie for a long, long time, from the comedy scene or whatever you want to call it. He would always tell me he wanted to do something with me on the show, and I would always tell him that I’d love to do the show. He called me probably about 12 hours before he wanted to shoot the thing and told me “Tomorrow I’ve got this thing you can do, it’s a small thing but I think it’ll be funny. Would you want to do it on the show?” and I said “Heck yeah, whatever you need.” So he gave me his address in the East Village—it’s funny because we didn’t go through an agent or anything, he just called me on the phone—so I stopped by and he told me what to do and it was hilarious. Louie has the perfect combination to become successful. First of all he’s brilliant, second of all he’s really funny, and third of all he does everything. He’s got a work ethic like a Mexican who comes here illegally and wants to stay here. I’ve never seen anything like it. He holds the camera, he directs the stuff, he writes it, and then he acts in it. I’m going “My god I just don’t have the energy.” It was impressive to see a buddy of mine doing all of that. He’s a true sort of auteur, and he’s got a deal with FX—what they call the “Woody Allen” deal—where he just tells them; “look, give me money for a season of shows and you can’t give me any notes, no one from FX can come from the set, and at the end of the year I’ll give you 13 episodes and you can’t change anything.” That’s impressive to see. I’m very, very happy for him.

I have some friends who won't watch Louie because they say it's too depressing, which is funny because it's a comedy show...

AL: [Interrupts] Well it is and it isn’t. I understand where they’re coming from but I mean look, those friends sound like pussies. They gotta man up and just watch it. Here is how I describe a Louie episode: It’s like an Edgar Allen Poe short story. Louie is great because he knows how people behave. Even in a Woody Allen movie you’re going to get unbelievably funny stuff or you’re going to get depressed because he’s a realist. This is how people act. People act in ways that are very, very disappointing most of the time. Louie keeps it real like that in every episode and also gets hilarious comedy out of the way people really act. The episodes have both, so I don’t think you can call it a comedy show. It’s just its own thing. If you read Edgar Allen Poe, some of the stuff is so dark it’s funny, but ultimately it’s depressing. That’s what I think it’s like. If those buddies of yours appreciate art it’s a chance to actually see it happening on TV. They’re not going to see it on Two and a Half Men.

I feel like you kind of walk that same line, taking something that is very depressing and working it into your comedy. Is that a tough thing to do?

AL: Yeah, sort of. I’ve dated girls who have told me that when they watch my act and I’m telling a story about, you know, shitting my pants on heroin or drunk driving—and even though everybody laughs—they wish that I could do something more like Jerry Seinfeld. For the people that love me it could be depressing to hear because maybe they were there the night that that happened and it was anything but funny. It’s like being in the psyche ward. I have jokes in my act about being in rehab and being in a psyche ward. I do an impression of a counselor I had in rehab in Miami. While it was happening it was anything but funny, but people laugh at it during my set and the people that are close to me are thinking “well shit, I wish it was that funny when it was happening.” It depresses them but I’d rather tell my tale in a funny way and maybe people will get something out of it.

Looking at the way your life has gone, it seems like there is nothing you could do but be a comedian.

AL: [Laughs] I’m not going to be on the police force. Now a days, with background checks—you’re right man—with my background, forget it. I can’t even vote for Christ’s sake. You’re right when I think about it. I better make this work.

Tell me about the best thing you've ever done in your life, and the worst thing you've ever done.

AL: Well the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life was stabbing myself in the stomach that morning because I knew that the only two people who could have found me were my mother and sister. I wasn’t thinking like that, I wasn’t rational, but in the back of my head I had to know that. They did find me and I’ll never get over that guilt. Thank god they seem better and everything seems fine but the guilt of that will never fully leave my body, so that’s a no brainer. The best thing I’ve ever done I think was going to do stand-up in Afghanistan for those guys. I always said I wanted to do it and my agent kind of called my bluff and told me there was an opportunity to do that. I said to myself “Wow, I can’t pussy out here. I gotta do this.” I realized I was going into a war zone and my mother was worried but I was with Marines and everything. Guys would come back from missions doing God-knows-what, and they’d sit down in all of their gear, in that heat, and they would just be like “Ok make me laugh, dance like a monkey or something.” I would have done anything at that point, dance around like a monkey or whatever. How grateful they were. So if I had to pick one thing, it would probably be that and I would do it again if I could. I just hope we get all of those guys the fuck out of there soon.

Can you tell me a little bit about your new book, Crash and Burn?

AL: It picks up where Too Fat To Fish left off. It’s about what happened to me. My stand-up act has a quick snippet, a comedic version, of some of the stuff that happened. Crash and Burn is what happened in long form: What I was going through and the darker side of the rehab and the psyche ward, and what was going through my head the morning I stabbed myself. What I was thinking afterwards. What it was like waking up after that. It’s got a lot of comedy in it that comes from that, but it’s the real, full story, which has a lot of darkness in it. The title comes from when I was working at a port as a longshoreman. I was deciding whether or not I should quit the port and become a comedian. I was sitting at the bar with my buddy’s older brother, Chucky, and he goes “fuck it man, go for the good life. If you got talent just go do it. If you crash and burn at least you tried. You’ll feel better if you crash and burn than if you never tried.” So every time I’d see him after that he’d shout “crash and burn!”

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Bob Saget, Bluntly

(Originally published 4/12/2012)

It takes a lot of adaptive skills to go from playing a wholesome, Brady-bunch style father on Full House to playing a crackhead in Half Baked. It takes some serious guts to go from America’s Funniest Home Videospresenter to a roastee on Comedy Central. Bob Saget has made his career by adjusting from TV father to blue comedian, bringing his audience with him. This week I talked to the 55-year-old comic about his infamous role in The Aristocrats, his adaptive comedy skills, and peer pressure. Saget will perform his stand-up routine at 7pm at the Seneca Allegany Casino on Saturday, April 14.

There is a song by Jamie Kennedy called “Rollin’ with Saget” on your website. The lyrics go “This night started just like that, except Jamie’s in the driver’s seat, Saget’s in the back seat rollin a blunt.” At this point in your career, how difficult would it be to find someone to roll your blunts for you?

Saget: Well, that is an interesting question. I think I would actually get a trained animal of some kind. Like a marsupial, a raccoon, or possums. To me that would be hilarious, to get like a Disney version of your guy, whoever takes care of you, your homie. I don’t really know, I’m not a smoker; I don’t condemn it or anything, though. People think I’m a pothead but I don’t have the lung capacity. I remember smoking a blunt years ago, though, it was weird. I was doing an event with Jamie Kennedy, ironically—it was when the WB network existed. I was with him and Jason George, and we were in Philadelphia and we were backstage with a group called Nappy Roots, which was an interesting hip-hop group. I had seen blunts before but never one that looked that big. It was the biggest blunt I’d ever seen, and I was kind of peer-pressured into taking a hit off of it.

Maybe that’s where Jamie got the inspiration for the song. What happens when someone comes to see your standup thinking they’re going to see the Bob Saget of Full House but they actually get the Bob Saget of The Aristocrats?

Saget: Well, I’m not really the Bob Saget of the Aristocrats. That was really foul. That was just an odd circumstance. That was so dirty because that’s about a family who will do anything to get into show business. As far as the Full Housething, that was 25 years ago, and God is that a scary thing to think about. That was a character I played. I was on Conan once and we made the point that if you’re playing the part of Hannibal Lecter you don’t necessarily eat people, though Conan pointed out that Anthony Hopkins actually does eat people. But Danny Tanner was a part, and I played it to the best of my ability. What’s weird is I don’t mind doing family stuff, but then I go off and do this other thing, so I compartmentalize my audience in a way. My audience ranges from like 15 years old to dead. I get old people who come to my show because they just want to see someone talk dirty. And I’m not even dirty for the sake of it; I just do what I find funny. I’m getting less and less blue as I watch our culture change, too.

When did you realize that you were a blue comic? Was this something you were always into, even before Full House? Or was this something that developed?

Saget: My act, if you can call it an act, but my performance piece, or whatever the hell it was when I would go on stage, was always strange. I was a likeable-looking young guy; I looked like a pre-med major, which I actually was for a while. I used to say stuff like “I have no act and I have no life and live in a car.” I used to say I had the brain of a German shepherd and the body of a 16-year-old boy, and they’re both in my car and I want you to see them. And it would just be these long run-on scat kind of things. Scat in the riffing sense not as in poo. Now I’ve combined them. That’s the beauty of The Aristocrats; it has both definitions of scat. But I guess at the same time I was doing Full House and the video show, I did an HBO special where I was dropping the F-bomb quite a bit and annoying some people with my blueness, but at that time HBO wasn’t as popular. It was popular for comics and comedy but it wasn’t a true alternative to the networks.

You’ve got a million and a half followers on Twitter. That is pretty huge.

Saget: What should I do with them all? We’re going to rob a liquor store.

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Norm MacDonald talks about Death, etc.

(originally published 8/25/2011)

Actor, writer, and comedian Norm Macdonald, best known for his five-year stint as Weekend Update anchor on Saturday Night Live, will perform his standup routine at the Seneca Niagara Casino’s Events Center this Saturday, September 3.

Over more than two decades in comedy Macdonald has dabbled in all forms of funny, leaving his mark on SNL with his now classic impressions of David Letterman and Burt Reynolds; performing in movies like Billy Madison and Doctor Dolittle; and appearing in more than 15 different television series like The Norm Show, Family Guy, and most recently as the host of High Stakes Poker on GSN. This week I talked to the 47-year-old comedian about his career in standup, 3D technology, and his run-in with airport security.

How does doing standup now compare to when you began your career in Canada in the 1980s?

Norm Macdonald: I like it way more because I’m better at it. The better you get at something, the more relaxed you get. Even though I still get nervous, I’m usually confident that I won’t be booed off the stage. That happens less frequently than it used to.

You’ve done a lot of celebrity impersonations in your career. Which is your favorite?

MacDonald: I never really considered myself an impressionist, but on Saturday Night Live they ask you to do those. The only ones that I could do were of guys that I was very very familiar with, like David Letterman and Burt Reynolds. I would watch these guys all of the time. I guess my favorite one to do was Burt Reynolds because when I was young I was so shy and Burt Reynolds seemed like the coolest dude ever. I’d watch Smokey and the Bandit all of the time and I’d go, “Oh, if I could only be like this guy.” So when I went on Saturday Night Live I told them I wanted to do an impression of Burt Reynolds, but I couldn’t figure out how to do him because I didn’t want to do him as an old guy. So I wrote this sketch, “Celebrity Jeopardy,” and I remember Lorne Michaels had a white beard for me and I was like “No, no, I’m playing him from the 1970s.” So for no reason Burt Reynolds is from 1970 and everybody else in the sketch is modern.

AV: You were the host of High Stakes Poker on GSN for their seventh season. What is the most you’ve ever won or lost in a poker game?

MacDonald: One time at the World Series of Poker, which is a poker tournament, I won $95,000, so that was the most I’ve ever won playing poker.

Wow, did you expect to do that well?

MacDonald: Oh no, no, no. I always expect to lose. I’ve kind of perfected that, actually. After losing so often, you lose all hope of ever winning anything. So I was pretty shocked when I won that much. The field was so large and it just keeps narrowing down and you forget because you’re there all day. Those guys, I don’t know how they do it, you just get so tired and part of you just wants to lose already so you can go watch SpectraVision in your hotel room. There is a focus it requires, which I don’t have at all. I just kept clumsily winning.

This season of High Stakes Poker was broadcast in 3D.

MacDonald: [laughing] I forgot about that. It was so crazy. I haven’t even seen a 3D TV so I don’t know what it looks like. I remember the producers would say things like, “Here, throw a card at the camera,” and I’d go, “Jeez, man, this seems like the least 3D show you’d ever want to see.” Throwing the cards at the camera reminded me of this old Second City TV sketch where John Candy would do this 3D thing where he’d push a sandwich into the lens for no reason.

Did you ever feel the urge to push a sandwich into the lens?

MacDonald: Yes, but [the producers] didn’t get the reference. I kept trying to push the cards in slow like John Candy anyways, like, “Look at this, the ace of clubs, oooooooo.” Have you ever seen a 3D TV? I haven’t. The thought of sitting on my couch wearing 3D glasses kind of turns me off, though.

MacDonald: I imagine it’s awful.

You have more than 260,000 followers on Twitter. How does it feel to command the attention of all of those people all at once?

MacDonald: It’s weird because I didn’t even know what Twitter was until like February or something like that. It’s really fun just saying whatever you want to say, but you’ve got to be really careful. Fortunately, I don’t drink or do drugs, because I don’t understand how drunken people don’t just say the craziest shit. Even straight I have to be very careful because I’ll think of something to say and then just be like “Uh-oh, I can’t say that.” I just found out you can read people’s replies—this I found out like two weeks ago—to whatever you tweet. Oh my god, these people are brutal. And these are people that are following me! I look at them and I’m just like “Good lord, these are my fans?” It’s funny, because I guess this is how people really feel. In real life they won’t say it. I remember one time I saw this guy that I didn’t even like—I think he was from Three’s Company or something—anyways I recognized him in this book store and I went to him like “Oh man, I love what you do, you’re so great,” but obviously I didn’t mean any of it. So the guy is like, “Yeah, okay, fine,” and he blows me off. Then I leave and I’m thinking, “Oh my God, I didn’t even like him and he blew me off, I can’t go back now and tell him I really don’t like him or anything like that.”

Well, now you can just defame him on the Internet.

MacDonald: I guess that’s what I’m doing here.

On Family Guy you voiced the character of Death, but after a couple episodes your friend, Adam Carolla, replaced you. Who do you think makes a better Death?

MacDonald: Well, I love Adam Carolla. The people at Family Guy wanted me to continue voicing Death but I couldn’t because I was on a standup tour at the time.

The strange thing is, you do all these things in your career and you’re remembered for something you do for 10 minutes, which was literally what it was. One time I was on an airplane, and there were these kids on the plane who recognized me from Family Guy, so they sent a note through the flight attendant that said, “It is very comforting to know that Death is on the plane.” Well, the flight attendant didn’t know who I was, so this note must have upset her a little bit, because when we got off of the plane she had me and these two kids pulled aside and we were all interrogated for like an hour. It was just me and these two kids trying to explain a cartoon. I guess they thought we were some kind of terrorist cell.

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Interview: Dr. Dog

Dr. Dog’s Toby Leaman talks about the band’s custom studio, the Beach Boys, and life on the road.

A band’s creative process doesn’t always begin when the first notes of an album are recorded or even when the first lyrics are scribbled into a blank notebook. For Philadelphia-based psychedelic rock band Dr. Dog, the creation of their latest, soul-inspired album, B-Room, began with a hammer and nails rather than a pen and paper.

Before a guitar string was plucked or a vocal harmony constructed, the six-piece band and their friends set to work constructing their ultimate studio in a repurposed silversmith mill outside of Philadelphia. The result was a studio specifically built for the band that would be recording in it. It may not sound important to the casual music fan, but to have a second sound room in their recording studio, a b-room as it is called in the biz, was such a big thing to this band that they chose to name their seventh album, released in October on Anti-Records, after the space itself.

This week we spoke with songwriter Toby Leaman of Dr. Dog about the creative explosion that was the construction and recording of B-Room, the first time he heard the Beach Boys, and his favorite childhood toys.

Buffalo is the second date of your headlining tour. You’ve done headlining tours in the past, but you’ve also done many tours as an opening act for bands like the Strokes and the Black Keys. How does headlining compare?

It’s drastically different. For the first five years all we did was open. It was great. We did tons of tours, with Wilco and the [Black] Keys. When we toured with the Keys they were pretty small still. We did a bunch of tours with those guys. We even did Australia with them. But when you’re headlining, obviously you get more time. It’s way preferable. But we actually did an opening tour recently for the first time in four or five years and it was great. Those are actually the biggest shows we’ve ever done. When you’re opening you have about 45 minutes of work to do a day, which includes the show. Very kush.

When I went to listen to your latest record, B-Room, I thought I knew what to expect based on your previous records. But the moment I heard the first track, “The Truth,” I thought, “Wow, this is actually a soul record,” especially tracks like that and “Minding the Usher.” Of course there are folky songs and psychedelic rock songs, too, but then there are tracks like “Distant Light” that bring the soul and the psychedelic rock sounds together. How do those two sounds work together for you?

It was sort of a happy accident that [soul] was the music we were gravitating toward. We were trying to make a concerted effort to do everything live, to do as much as we could live, all six of us in the room at once, and try to minimize the overdubbing. When you’re in that situation, where everybody is playing to everybody else in the room, what you end up doing becomes pretty simplified. It becomes more crucial, but you become less busy. There is more space. So for whatever reason, when we start to play like that we just gravitate toward soul music. It’s fun to play that together. It’s satisfying music to play.

How does the place, the setting where a record is recorded, affect the resulting album?

Pretty immensely. We have always been very particular of what our studio looks like, what it feels like. We built this one so it was easy to make it very comfortable; to make it a place where you’d want to hang out even if you weren’t recording. The process was pretty relaxed. We had never had a b-room in recording, so we had two rooms working at once, which is something that we always wanted to do. And then there’s a whole chill zone and bedrooms and a shop and everything. If you weren’t feeling it, normally you’d have to just sit there and hopefully get it together, but we had so much stuff to do just maintaining the studio and getting it right, that if you weren’t feeling it, you could go be productive in a totally different way that would still be helpful to everybody. If you were there and you were engaged in any way, shape, or form, your presence was meaningful. Which is nice because then you’re not stuck just sitting there reading a magazine while someone is on their 50th take on an organ sound. In any other studio that’s what it would be.

At what point during the creation of the record did you decide that you wanted to name it after the recording studio?

We didn’t have a name for the record going into it. A million were tossed around. We’ve always been a band that tends to pick a song name from the record as the title—I mean it’s almost always been the name of a song, except for Be the Void, which was actually a song that didn’t make the record—but nothing seemed to fit, nothing was all encompassing. The b-room, I felt, was a focal point for this recording. It was a huge part of why this recording felt so breezy. I mean obviously you pull your hair out and you want to punch everybody in the face at some point, but for the most part it was a lot of fun. There was a lot of freedom, we had a lot of time to do it and we did a lot of songs.

Was that by design?

Yeah. It took us about a month to build the studio before we even really recorded. We were working on this thing for a month before we even played a single note of music, and then about the first two weeks we just played. We purposefully didn’t bring any songs to the band. I didn’t bring any, Scott [McMicken, guitarist] didn’t bring any. We felt like it would be cool to just play and get the room figured out, make sure everything is wired right, and at the same time get everybody’s chops back. We were able to just ease into the record.

That sounds like a pretty wonderful process, actually.

Yeah, but it was a process. It was a lot of time and commitment and fighting. There has never been anything good to come from total relaxation; you need some kind of conflict and sweat.

Did just building the recording studio feel like an accomplishment in itself?

Absolutely. I was just there yesterday and every time I walk in it just feels so good. There is still stuff to be done too, which is exciting. It’s a fantasy. When you’re 12 years old and you have a guitar, you’re always imaging your ultimate jam space, and this is it.

Listening to your music, it’s obviously heavily influenced by the Beatles and the Beach Boys. Do you remember the first time you heard either of those bands?

I do. I remember the first time I heard the Beach Boys. The first time I really processed the Beach Boys I was probably like 19 or 20 and our old guitar player Doug [O’Donnell] was hugely into them. He had everything. He had like nine different versions of Smile. This was at the dawn of the Internet, so this stuff was still pretty hard to get. All I knew was like “Help Me, Rhonda” and “Little Deuce Coupe,” but then he started playing this shit and I was just like, “We gotta sing like this.” Not that we sounded like them, but we tried to; we tried to sound like them, tried to get our harmonies like that. The Beach Boys were so advanced, so far advanced. Trying to duplicate it was intimidating, of course.

You met guitarist Scott McMicken when you were pretty young, when you were 13 or so. How did you meet?

His dad was a pilot so he was always getting moved around. He just moved to my town [Clifton Heights, Pennsylvania] and he just came into class at school. He would wear Chuck Taylors and liked to write the names of bands on them. I don’t know why, but I just remember looking at his shoes and thinking like, “Oh yeah, that’s cool.” But he was the new kid in town. I was trying to play music but he was like a little kid phenom on the guitar. It was a no-brainer. We probably hung out one time before we decided to start a band. We didn’t know that we’d be a good fit, we’ve played with other people and stuff, but you’re so hungry for that kind of stuff when you’re a kid.

Other than play music, what did 13-year-old Scott and Toby like to do together?

Probably just try to buy weed and walk around [laughs]. Watch MTV and eat potato chips. We played some basketball. We spent a lot of time on music. We would spend hours just trying to figure out the frickin’ Alesis drum machine or something.

I ask that because I saw the video for “Love,” and it features a bunch of clips from vintage toy commercials. What toys did you love as a kid?

Hmm, well, I played a lot of sports. I remember as a really little kid loving Lincoln Logs and Legos. Anything you can build I was really into. I never had action figures like He-Man or G.I. Joe or anything like that.

Lincoln Logs and Lego’s are more of a creative thing; you can build whatever you want.

Yeah, yeah, and I have an older brother and he was always building stuff, so it was like anything he was into, I was into. He’s very handy. He is actually one of the main dudes who helped us build the studio. It’s right down the street from his house.

Favorite place to eat on tour?

That’s tough, man. You end up trying to eat at the place that looks like it will do that least amount of damage. We want to try and eat healthy because so much of the time you’re not eating healthy. We have the luxury now of being able to afford to think about where we’re eating, but for years we were just eating you know, two sausage-egg-and-cheese things at the shittiest gas station you’ve ever been to. Then you’re eating there and you’re crapping there. It’s gross, it’s a horrible cycle, but that’s your life for a month when you’re on tour in a van. Crapping at gas stations and eating whatever they offer.

I’m glad you guys made it through that period of your bandhood.

Hey we could always go back. You never know.

[coryperlaportfolio]

Interview: Andrew Bird

Interview by Cory Perla, originally published June 12, 2012

Touring behind his 12th album, the multifarious Andrew Bird returns to Babeville

A broken heart is something everyone should experience at least once in a lifetime. At least that is what indie rock musician, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter Andrew Bird believes. This year Bird released his 12th studio album, Break It Yourself, and as the title suggests: If you can’t find someone to break your heart for you, go ahead and do it yourself.

This is the type of attitude that Bird has always stuck with in his writing and performing. He goes with his gut; he likes to do the unexpected. When it comes to performing on stage, Bird is like a painter with a palette of different colors and materials at his fingertips—oils, pastels, spray paint, watercolors—and as he sits at his canvas he grabs at each, whipping them at the blank slate as he sees fit. His violin, guitar, xylophone, and mouth are his media, and as a member of his audience you never know what you’re going to get next. Sometimes even he doesn’t know.

Bird returns to Buffalo on Monday, July 16, with special guest Patrick Watson at Babeville’s Asbury Hall.

You have a little bit of a connection to Buffalo. When you began your career as a solo artist, you were signed to Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records, which is based here in Buffalo. How would you say your music has evolved since those earlier days on Righteous Babe?

Andrew Bird: I put out a bunch of records before that period but they were more of a band experience. Ani took notice when I kind of reinvented the way I was making music. Then I went through a long period of really getting deep into what was really going on inside of me, and that was kind of isolating. Those were those records like Weather Systems and The Mysterious Production of Eggs.

Now slowly each record is getting more and more back into music as a social experience. There is still that private element that I keep in the shows, like when I perform solo. I think I’ve been getting back into making music with people, though. This last record shows the most amount of trust I’ve put into other musicians in a long time.

What sparked your reinvention?

Part of it was moving out of Chicago and living on a farm for a couple of years. Just completely changing my lifestyle and my environment. It makes sense that what you see everyday is going to affect what you hear in your head.

I also wanted to eliminate the feeling that you get as a bandleader that you’re always hosting a party because that doesn’t always go so well. That can lead to repressing ideas. You’re deferring to other musicians and their influence, and their record collections come onto your record, and suddenly it’s like it’s not something that you would completely say is yours. I needed to change that. I had an unusual past, musically, and there are lots of layers, and I don’t want to neglect any of them. I wanted to exercise every part of my musicality and I had to put myself into a vacuum to find out how it all fit together.

Break It Yourself was recorded a little bit differently than most would expect. You did a lot of the takes live with the whole band rather than recording instrument tracks one by one. Oh yeah, and you did it all in a barn. Why did you choose to do the record like that?

That shouldn’t be that unusual, but more and more these days it is: Just four musicians in a room playing music together. That is an incredibly elusive way to do it. Everything about the recording process begs one to deconstruct what is natural and piece it back together. I got really tired of production. I can hear it on all of the records. I can hear choices being made. It just sounds like conceit, it sounds like choices instead of music.

All of us come from a jazz background, we can improvise, but we appreciate a well-written pop song. This record goes from incredibly straightforward, for me as a songwriter, to some of the wildest solos I’ve ever played. Take “Give It Away.” That song is very direct to me yet the soloing—the pizzicato solo—is the most out-there stuff I’ve allowed to be on a record. It’s got these extremes and this dynamic range that is kind of unprecedented.

When I began listening to the new record I was really blown away by the first track. There is a moment toward the end of the track where there is a violin solo, and the violin hits this sustained high note that sounds almost like a synthesizer. I really liked the way that the sound of the violin transformed before my ears. Most of your music sounds very organic, though; can you explain the marriage between electronics and acoustics in your music?

Everything you hear on that track is completely live. We’ve developed so much on stage, so many ways of manipulating the notes we’re playing in real time. There are no prerecorded samples. There are no synthesizers per se. What I was doing in that case is I’ve got two loops going. One is the pizzicato pattern that is the groove that the band is playing along with—when I do these pizzicato patterns each one is unique because I’m just feeling my way through it.

Then I have a whole other rig, which is what you were talking about, that note. I’m soloing and then I hit a note and I loop just that one note, then I pitch shift that note all over the place. The song is talking about bees, so I thought that kind of sounded like a buzzing bee. I spoke with this French journalist from an electronic magazine not too long ago and he wouldn’t take my word for it that we weren’t really an electronic band. He wouldn’t take my word for it that there was no production. All of these ideas are happening on the fly. My drummer Dosh is highly respected in the sort of underground electronic and hip hop circles, but he plays like a jazz musician. He’s improvising with himself and looping. You can see it happening.

Something about that process is different than what I think of as “electronic.” To me, Kraftwerk would be the other end of it, where everything is kind of on a grid and put in its place. On this record, there is production but it is all improvised and happening before tape.

I recently watched a live video of one of your performances of the song “Plasticities” from a couple of months ago. When the performance begins you’re plucking a violin with your fingers, then you’re bowing it, then you start to sing, you pick up a guitar and strum that a little bit, then all of a sudden you’re playing a xylophone and whistling at the same time. You move so fluidly from one instrument to the next. How do you keep track of it all? Do you ever find yourself holding a drumstick when you should be holding a banjo or something?

Sometimes I do cross the streams inadvertently. Sometimes I feel like I’m doing a live cooking show and I’m like the absent-minded cook, thinking, “Argh, I forgot to add that,” but it’s no big deal because who knows what is supposed to happen next? I don’t even know. I kind of embrace that attitude on stage and it works. I don’t get flustered really. I’ve got this good racket going where failure is part of the performance. Failure is something I look forward to because then I have to really be present.

It is a challenge for you. Do you ever wish you had like four more people on stage with you or a whole orchestra? Or do you prefer to have control over all of these different instruments?

You know, the more people on stage the more it is going to feel locked down. Then you’ve got arrangements and charts and every measure has to be accounted for. I don’t really enjoy that. There is something about the feel of the way I do pizzicato that if you gave it to an orchestra it would sound really, really square. So far that has been my attitude, but I wouldn’t mind hearing what a cello section or a double bass section would sound like playing an idea. That is something you can’t replicate with electronics.

On Break It Yourself you have a song called “Eyeoneye,” which is obviously a made-up word. I found one or two other invented words on this album like the word “pasifizers” on the third track. What is the relationship between the music and the words on this album?

As far as “Eyeoneye” goes, I kind of like songs that have words with a lot of vowels in them, words that are palindromes or nearly palindromes. I just like to remind myself that not only are melodies malleable and changeable, but so are words. Words are not a static tradition; someone had to come up with them to begin with. To me morphing words and misunderstanding words and going ahead with those misunderstandings just helps to keep the folk tradition alive. Rather than having a preservationist, purist point of view, I have kind of a free-flowing philosophy about words. I mean, “pasifizers” is no big deal; I just changed the word to make it rhyme. I remember asking my guitarist Jeremy [Ylvisaker] “Is that okay? Can I do that?” and he said, “Of course you can.”

When I found out that I was going to have the opportunity to interview you, I logged onto Twitter and asked for my friends their thoughts on Andrew Bird. One friend replied with “middle-aged white male who is super good at everything he touches.” I looked up your age, 38, and I thought, you know, I don’t really consider that middle-aged. But you have been doing this for a while. Break It Yourself is your 12th album. Some would consider that prolific. How have you maintained your creativity?

Well, I certainly don’t consider myself middle-aged yet. I think when you do it long enough and you spend years playing in bands when you’re younger trying to make a living as a musician, after a while you just know when something isn’t working. You know when something feels futile musically. I think that waking up in the morning and not knowing what is going to come out of you and not thinking that you have it all figured out as far as how to write a song is what maintains the creativity. Not falling prey to using devices, like in film. Not falling into that. If I don’t feel like repeating the chorus, I don’t. I just like to go with my curiosity instead of going straight for the jugular.

[coryperlaportfolio]

Interview: Michael Gira of Swans

Interview by Cory Perla, originally published July 3, 2014

The prevailing view of creativity is that it declines over the course of a lifetime. If that’s the case then Swans frontman Michael Gira is certainly an exception to the rule. 

At the age of 60, the stoic singer and guitarist has produced some of his finest work since reactivating his renowned noise band, Swans, in 2010. Swans formed in New York City in the early 1980s and perpetuated a rhythmic, no wave sound that has influenced countless bands in the doom/sludge/drone scene.

But Gira didn’t reform Swans to revisit the past. That’s not his style. He reformed the band with long time members—guitarists Norman Westberg and Chrisoph Hahn, and drummer Phil Puleo—and newly added percussionist Thor Harris and bassist Chris Pravdica to push forward, not look back. In fact a live Swans set is usually restricted to material from the band’s most recent record, whatever that might be at the moment, and unreleased material. For this tour, Gira told me that the band is playing three brand new, unreleased pieces that take up about half an hour of the set, along with a select piece from 2012’s The Seer and a few from their latest, To Be Kind, which was released in May.

Each of Swans last three records has somehow managed to top the last. The bands eleventh studio album and first after reforming, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope to the Sky was a transitional record, merging the sounds of Gira’s previous project, Angels of Light, with the grand, punishing drone-metal that would be fully explored on Swans’ follow-up, The Seer. Upon its release, The Seer became the 32-year-old band’s most critically acclaimed album to date. Rolling Stone called it the band’s “grandest statement yet,” a feat for a band renowned for grand statements. In May the band did it again with the release of their thirteenth recorded album, To Be Kind. Upon its release, To Be Kind became the band’s most critically acclaimed album to date. This is a phenomenon: A band that actually gets better with age? It’s almost unheard of. Not only are Gira and company still moving forward, but they’re doing so at an exponential rate.

Though Gira may come off as a nihilist, with lyrics heavily themed in depression, desperation, and death, he has often described performing live as “like going to church.” The music of Swans is inherently spiritual in the sense that the band’s often-droning yet dynamic music is personally transformative for not only the band but the audience as well. This week we talked to Gira about the band’s transformative live show, legendary blues guitarist Chester “Howlin’ Wolf” Burnett, and the great black lake of death.

You’ve been on tour for most of this year already. You started playing solo shows in Europe in March. How are you feeling as you wrap up this leg of your tour?

Michael Gira: We’re touring for the next year or 14 months. The music is taking on new shapes. When we started touring we worked out three brand new pieces, or songs, or whatever you want to call them so they take up about half the set. I thought they were pretty good but now that we’ve played them a good deal, they’re getting to be very good in my estimation. We’re playing a few from the last record, and then something fromThe Seer and that’s it.

When I watch Swans live it’s hard for me to tell if I’m hearing something just incredibly precise and rehearsed down to the millisecond or if I’m witnessing something very fluid and improvised.

I would say with us lately there is no difference between the two. We’re sort of like one body. The mind of the body is the music and we’re just the limbs and torso and organs of the entity. We’re very connected, now .

How do you achieve that?

Playing together all the time and touring constantly. And we don’t get trapped in playing the same thing all the time. The set stays the same for a cycle, but the material grows and expands, and I like to say it metastasizes on its own. So it’s never the same, things are always shifting and extending and growing. It becomes intuitive after a while. We could play this music with just a sense of smell now actually.

When you’re on stage you move kind of like an orchestra conductor, or maybe a slightly inebriated orchestra conductor. You’re flailing to the rhythms of the music. Is the rest of the band taking cues from you? Are you actually conducting in a way or is this a reaction to the music?

Both. It’s kind of a highfalutin’ word, but I’m often conducting I guess. But it’s for dynamics, and the ebb and flow of things and intensity. Things sometimes become like a big ball of sound, and I’m just trying to control it so it’s not just complete chaos. I’m trying to shape it, ya know?

I think it can be argued that as Swans you’ve put out your strongest material ever in the last four or five years.

I would agree.

That’s almost unheard of in music for a band that’s over 30 years old.

It’s determination and talent.

 I’m trying to figure out if you’ve somehow become more creative over time, if that’s possible, or if you’ve maintained a consistent level of creativity over the course of your career, and maybe just the rest of the world has caught up to Swans.

Well I think the latter is increasingly the case, and that’s good to see. The rest, I don’t know, we just try to do good work. There’s a tremendous, on my part anyway, fear of death, so I’m trying to make something that contravenes that inevitability.

Is this a fear you’ve always had or has it grown?

Well as you flow towards the great black lake, it obviously becomes something that preoccupies you a little bit more.

There is a song on your new record called “Just A Little Boy (For Chester Burnett).” You’ve said that the song is not necessarily about the legendary blues artist, but can you tell me about Howlin’ Wolf’s significance to that song?

 I noticed that he was in me for that song, the way I was singing and the feel of it. Obviously it doesn’t really sound like him, that’s not possible or desirable. But he was a tremendous beast of a showman and an honorable man too. But also when he was performing there was this unbridled id and I noticed that in that song. And ya know, I listen to Howlin’ Wolf all the time. He could be, along with Nina Simone, some of the greatest joy I get out of listening to music. So I made it as an homage to him.

In a way you’re kind of like summoning his spirit then?

Yeah. I mean I didn’t realize that it would be titled that until after the song was recorded. It wasn’t like I started recording it and I said “now I’m going to be haunted by the great Wolf.” It’s the approach to the singing, the ugly id side that comes.

“Bring the Sun/Toussaint L’Ouverture,” from To Be Kind gives me a similar impression. The song is named after the 19th century Haitian revolutionary also known as Black Napoleon, but it seems like rather than embodying the character, you’re actually calling out to him as in a Séance. The song also feels very Shamanic and also very painful.

 I was reading a biography of this fine man and that piece was slowly taking shape in live improvisation and direction by me, as you say, and I just started shouting his name. Gradually I started adding in more words that I thought kind of tangentially jabbed at his essence. I feel in a way I was inhabited by him. He was a very intelligent, very rational strategist. He was just part of such an amazing event, that whole period in history, I thought it needed to be brought forth somehow.

St. Vincent sings on three tracks on To Be Kind and Annie Anxiety, aka Little Annie Bandez sings on one. Why were these talented women included in the recording of this record?

Annie Clark [St. Vincent] has worked with our engineer for this record, John Congleton, for all of her records. He’s her co-producer and co-songwriter. He knew along the way that I was going to be looking for female vocals because I often employ female vocals. She’s very talented and she has a tremendous voice and she was interested in singing on the record. She came to Dallas and sang and it was great. And Little Annie, I’ve known for quite some time. She’s developed, as she’s grown older, a very seasoned voice and she’s got a wonderful soul. I thought of her right away.

You’ve described your live performance in the past as “like going to church.” Are you a big church guy?

[Laughs] That’s sorta personal but I do go to church occasionally, yeah.

In what sense is performing live like going to church for you?

Well to me when the music is working it’s something bigger than us; we don’t take any credit for it necessarily. When it’s working it takes us along sort of an ultimate ride; it feels like as close as I’m going to get to a spiritual experience on this earth. Hopefully people in the audience can share in that sensation.

[coryperlaportfolio]

Interview: Washed Out

Interview by Cory Perla, originally published September 2, 2011

Most musicians like to stick to one writing process for a career. Not Washed Out. The 29-year-old chillwave producer originally began making music as a bedroom mixer, using samples as his primary source of sound on EPs like High Times and Life of Leisure, but upon production of his debut full-length album he made a complete 180 degree turn toward organic instrumentation. A risky move for a young producer who’s previous material hinged on samples, but it was a move that paid off because that album, Within and Without, has received plenty of critical acclaim; being named “Best New Music” by Pitchfork and earning high ratings from Spin and the Guardian. Next week Washed Out will join Cut Copy on a U.S. Tour that lands both electronic acts in Buffalo at the Town Ballroom on Thursday, September 15. This week I talked to Washed Out, real name Ernest Greene, about his debut album, and why he made the switch from sampling to live instruments.

You’re doing a bunch of dates with Cut Copy. What will your live set up be like?

Ernest Greene: I have a band playing with me now. It’s a five-piece, including me. When I started off I was playing shows by myself so everything was very sequenced out on the computer. Since then I’ve been through a couple of line-ups with the band, but now everything is not quite as sequenced as it was before. We’re no jam band by any means, but there are portions of the set that can go various ways depending on the night. It makes it a lot more fun for us. It sounds much better and there is way more energy having more bodies on stage. It was definitely something I was thinking about quite a bit [during the production of Within and Without], the album is much more organic than my previous work, which was written when there was no audience at all, so I never thought of performing. At the same time, I don’t want to limit myself in anyway, but I’m definitely using a lot more organic sounds; live drums, bass, guitar.

Did you run into any challenges writing your music in that way?

The biggest challenge I ran into was not having written a full-length album before. It was a bit intimidating and I knew that I didn’t want a mere collection of random songs. I wanted everything to really seem like one big picture. So it was something I struggled with a lot and I had to develop a core pallet of sounds to use to make everything make sense across 40 minutes. It is a lot different than the albums I’ve done before. I’m just constantly changing; listening to new music, learning new things as a producer. I want that to kind of show up on the records. I also like the idea that the songs are like diaries of where I’m at, at that moment.

Why do you think Ben Allen—who produced Animal Collective’s last album, Merriweather Post Pavillion among other things—was a good choice as producer for this record?

I’m definitely a fan of his stuff, that Animal Collective record in particular—but at the time I didn’t really have any network for reaching out to producers so he was the one and only name on my list. I feel very lucky that we had a connection. I live in Atlanta now and I had just moved before we started work at his studio here. It was a great process.

You’re originally from the south?

I’m originally from a town that is about an hour and a half south of here. Perry, Georgia.

That is surprising because your music has a really European feel. How does living in southern America affect your music?

I never thought of myself as really rebellious, but I think a lot of the music I was exploring was a reaction against the music that is big around here, like southern rock. I was just constantly trying to make music that was different.

What influences you? I feel like I hear a little bit of the Magnetic Fields in there. They seem to be a kind of precursor to chillwave.

Yeah, definitely, I’ve loved a lot of his records. I started off doing a lot of sampling stuff, which was more of a hip-hop based thing, and DJ Shadow was of course an early influence. As I got older and the music started to evolve, it became less hip-hop oriented and I brought in some dance elements like the four to the floor beat. There were a handful of more obvious dance influences, especially from the early 1980s, synth-pop stuff. A lot of  hip-hop samples a certain era of 1970s funk, but I eventually got tired of that sound and got much more into 1970s disco, which has a lot more analogue synthesizer sounds. I got kind of obsessed with those analogue sounds for a while, which really shaped what I’ve been doing with Washed Out.

For your song “Feel It All Around,” off of the Life of Leisure EP, you sampled an italo disco track called “I Want You,” which is a fairly obscure track. How did you decide to sample that song?

At the time I was spending a lot of time on the internet looking for samples. On E-bay it is really easy to find rare MP3s because there is this sub-culture of vinyl collectors who upload a lot of limited edition and rare stuff. I was downloading tons of stuff and I had never heard that track before. It was actually a hit in Europe and Italy in the early 1980s, but I was just thinking of it as a really good, kind of cheesy disco song. I pitched it down—which you can’t really do with every song, but this song was recorded in such a way that the bass wasn’t too low pitched and it was really trebly, so slowed down it had this really cool quality about it. The hardest thing for me was trying to put together an interesting arrangement that changes. It is easy to get an interesting loop to happen, but it becomes a collage when the song and loop are constantly changing. It is a very time consuming process to find the right piece to the puzzle and that is what kind of drove me away from sampling. It made more sense to me to just sit down at a keyboard and play the stuff instead of looking for the right piece.

“Feel It All Around” has been used as the theme song to the new IFC television series, Portlandia. How does it feel to hear your music used in such a way?

It is really exciting. There is a short little credit at the end that mentions Washed Out. It was a very positive experience. I never thought twice about giving over the track, I’m definitely a fan of Fred Armisen. I feel like after every episode I talk to people who discovered Washed Out through hearing it on the show.

[coryperlaportfolio]

Interview: Africa Hitech

Interview by Cory Perla, originally published November 5, 2011

Electronic music pioneer Brian Eno once said “The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them.” He was specifically referring to the act of making music with a computer, a task that is much more popular today than it was in 1993 when he made this statement to Wired Magazine. 

This year, Eno’s Warp Records colleagues Africa Hitech have discovered the “Africa” hidden within their music-making electronic machinery, as reflected on their critically acclaimed debut album 93 Million Miles. If you’re wondering what it means to evoke the “Africa” from a pile of strategically placed computer chips, it means channeling humanity. 

“It’s all about the spaces in the music,” said Steve Spacek, half of electronic duo Africa Hitech. “You hit the drum and then there is a space, you hit the drum again and that is where the soul is, that is where Africa is.” In the mid-1990s, around the same time Eno made that statement, Spacek and his music-making partner Mark Pritchard were entering the British music scene. Pritchard was producing music under a handful of aliases including Harmonic 313 and Global Communication, under which he released a groundbreaking ambient record called 76:14. Meanwhile, Spacek was developing a trip-hop/soul trio simply called Spacek. Both of these projects birthed impressive records and generated many kind words from critics, but the albums and praise were not enough. These two thrive on change. Fast-forward to the early 2000’s and Spacek and Pritchard have removed themselves from the booming, yet overwhelming UK music scene to the stark and serene landscape of Australia. Independently. Though they had begun working on tracks together before their individual decisions to move from the small island on the Atlantic to the humongous one on the Pacific, the duo hadn’t decided on a name or direction for the group. It wasn’t until they ran into each other in Australia that Africa Hitech was born.

“Obviously when you go to different places and meet new people you find a certain type of inspiration,” Pritchard said. “I wondered, when I moved to Australia, how it would affect my music.” As a duo making music in a land new to the type of music they were interested in—a type of music that was developed in the UK, and featuring heavy African drum and reggae samples—Africa Hitech is certainly taking advantage of the global possibilities in music right now. Their first single, “Out In The Streets,” combines a range of dynamic rhythms—deep, banging bass kicks, wandering snare hits, and rolling beats—with a familiar, repeating reggae chorus, which could not have been formed without dipping into a world-wide network of sounds. Such a mixture of rhythms and sound—as portrayed throughout93 Million Miles, especially on tracks like “Light the Way” and “Cyclic Sun”— feel as if they should be performed by an orchestra of drummers, but instead, the duo employ an orchestra of keys and triggers.

Despite their range of inspirations, Pritchard assures that growing up in the west country of England was the most influential period of life for him. “When you’re growing up, and you’re exposed to music, especially at an early age, like when you’re coming out of school and you start going to clubs, that period of exposure to music is a very strong part of life,” Pritchard said. “That is when you form your tastes.” For him, that taste is for polyrhythmic drum sounds, bright chopped-up vocals, and a UK funky flow. These ideas became the basis for93 Million Miles. The duo puts the cutting edge audio on that album into context by using a couple of themes. Like the famous cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey—where an ape throws a bone into the air and it transforms into a space station in the blink of an eye—this band seamlessly transitions from aggressive street level themes to introspective, other worldly ideas without compromising the album’s cohesiveness. Bouncing back and forth between down-to-earth ideas, on songs like “Do You Want to Fight” and “Out In The Streets,” and intergalactic futurism on tracks like “Cyclic Sun” and the album’s title track, “93 Million Miles,” Africa Hitech truly combine humanity and technology, bringing substance to their dancehall grime sound without imposing too much concept upon the listener. “All of those tweaks and layers,” Spacek said, “that is where the feeling comes in.”

[coryperlaportfolio]

Interview: Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend

Interview by Cory Perla, originally published June 5, 2014

When Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig accepted the band’s Grammy for “Best Alternative Rock Record” this year he kept it simple. “Thanks a lot. You guys wanna say anything else?” he asked the rest of his band, keyboardist/guitarist Rostam Batmanglij, drummer Chris Tomson, and bassist Chris Baio. They did not. There was an awkward pause and the band left the stage. After releasing their third album, Modern Vampires of the City, they had already heard it all. They were called the best band in the world; they were called the worst band in the world. They moved on. Of course winning a Grammy for “Best Alternative Rock Record,” is great, Koenig won’t deny that, but after releasing two successful albums, getting good reviews was no longer the end game. Instead, making different, more challenging, personally satisfying music became the goal, and the band was album to achieve that goal on Modern Vampires of the City, an album full of tight indie-rock grooves and lyrics with some actual substance. Winning a Grammy was just a byproduct. This week Artvoice spoke with Vampire Weekend’s 30-year-old singer and guitarist about his former insecurities, population statistics, and his blog from another lifetime. Vampire Weekend kicks off the Outer Harbor concert series this Monday, June 9.

I know you’re playing a lot of festivals this spring. You’re doing the Governor’s Ball just before your date in Buffalo, which is kind of like a homecoming show because it’s in New York.

Ezra Koenig: It’s always nice to play a festival in New York because it doesn’t happen to often for us. It’s cool playing to a big crowd in the city, definitely kind of like a hometown show.

Can you tell me about your favorite festival experience?

I remember after our first album, the first time we played Glastonbury, which is a huge festival in the UK. A lot of times when you’re starting out, when you’re on your first album, you might play a few times at the same festival. You might play on one stage and the next day on another, and we actually played twice at Glastonbury. “Oxford Comma” had just become a single, so we played in front of this huge crowd, outdoors. It was so surreal. Everybody was singing all the words. We weren’t prepared for that.

I heard that when you started this band you set out certain rules or limitations.

When we started the band, we weren’t just starting the band for the pure purpose of playing music; we’d had music projects in the past. This time we wanted there to be more of an idea behind it. So we asked, why are we starting this band? What does this band mean? A lot of it had to do with trying to find a sound that we thought was fresh and new, so some of the rules we set for ourselves were about avoiding specific things. At the time, after having done some electronic music, I liked the idea of having a live band and playing guitar again. Back then we thought about what it means to have a guitar band. Nowadays, in 2014, people wonder if guitar bands are over. We were starting our band in 2006 and that was already a question in the mid 2000s. Our first rule was no distortion. As much as I like distorted guitar music, it didn’t feel right at the time. We liked the idea of having a clean guitar song. I think there is something about the riff from “This Charming Man” by Johnny Marr that makes it the Holy Grail of guitar riffs. There were a few other rules that were like half jokes, like no wearing t-shirts on stage. [Laughs] I don’t know how much people adhere to that. It was just a matter of trying to give the band some identity, because the truth is, that’s the hardest part: establishing yourself. Once you make that first album, then you can break your own rules. Setting out a few rules is like a creative exercise. Otherwise the possibilities are infinite.

The band was named after a short film you made in college. Are there any other threads running through the music or image of the band that you can trace back to that original idea?

The whole plot of that movie, which I made up with some friends, was this guy had to go to Cape Cod and tell the mayor that vampires are taking over the country. We were kind of like idiots running around in people’s back yard, making this movie. There was something funny about going to this real place, Cape Cod, and having this ridiculous mission. That kind of set the tone for the band. I think there has always been that sort of blend of absurdity and real detail in Vampire Weekend. The first album has all these Cape Cod references, and there has always been this strong kind of attachment to geography and place and specific details.

Speaking of geography, I’ve got a statistic for you: Buffalo, New York and the country of Iceland have roughly the same population. I know you’re into population statistics because I read a blog post of yours from 2006 in a blog called Internet Vibes, where you mention it. Do you ever go back and re-read these old blogs you posted just before your band took off?

Every once in a while they’ll pop up in my Twitter mentions. Some of those things are still true, like I do love population stats and it’s amazing to me that Buffalo and Iceland have the same number of people. That’s crazy. I like that stuff, but looking back on it, I wrote a lot of goofy things in that blog. At times I don’t think I really understood stuff or I sound really naïve or stupid in some of the posts. Actually, I did make a decision at a certain point—because I saw so many Vampire Weekend fans, especially the younger kids, finding the blog and reading it—that I was just going to leave it up. I feel like in the Internet era—and we see it all the time—people write something somewhere and they try to delete it, but it never really disappears. What you put on the Internet stays forever. You can move passed it and get better and grow, or not. But the idea of just deleting your past is kind of pointless, and I’m sure some kid out there has my blog archived anyways [laughs]. So I leave it up there and if people want to see the kind of slightly pretentious, goofy thoughts I had nine or 10 years ago, I’m cool with that because ultimately I identify with the internet generation.

It’s pretty amazing that the blog still exists. When I read it, it made me feel closer to the band. It’s unique because as far as I know there is no, like, Diary of Bruce Springsteen floating around or anything like that. To have that kind of access to someone’s past is kind of a new thing.

Yeah, and you know, I’m sure as a writer you probably remember a lot of the think-pieces that came out right around the time that our band started about “is the internet good or bad for music?” Not even in terms of money, but in terms of like, artist development. And people were actually worried about it, as if it was a problem. What if these bands get all this attention from one MP3? Are they just going to implode? Now we see that not much has changed. Some bands implode, some bands don’t. Some bands make good second albums; some bands make terrible second albums. The Internet didn’t change any of that. At the time, people were wondering though. People were wondering how there could be a Bob Dylan in the Internet era. Bob Dylan is a guy who created a whole mystique for himself. He created his own version of himself. There was a thought that you wouldn’t be able to do that with the Internet; people would find your real name and your high school yearbook photo in a second and it would seem kind of goofy. But the more you think about it, it’s kind of like: you can be just as mysterious as ever; you just have to use the internet for it. You can’t get away with straight up lying about who you are, you’ll get caught, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use the internet to show your world, show your thoughts, all the things that people buy into in an artist. In that sense, if you change your name people will find out your real name, but look at Lana Del Ray: People tried to pull a Bob Dylan thing on her, saying “Oh that’s not your real name, we know where you’re really from,” but it didn’t matter because at the end of the day, her persona was something you actually couldn’t poke a hole in so easily, even though it was something that was created on the internet. So for me it’s been really interesting being a part of that transition.

Another thing that Bob Dylan never had to deal with is the idea of instant feedback. I think a lot of bands right now are afraid to say anything political or are not interested because of a fear of instant feedback or backlash from the blogosphere.

Anything that’s political about this band, it’s just so personal that it’s hard to cut it out, no matter what fears you might have. My only fear is usually “am I making a point that accurately reflects my feelings?” as opposed to offending anybody. Historically, I don’t think our lyrics have offended many people. Any backlash that we’ve gotten tends to be people trying paint a caricature of the band, or misinterpret our points. It is difficult, but I don’t know if that’s a product of the internet. You’re right, you can Google yourself and read a million things about yourself faster, but even back in the day people would read reviews and it would hurt their feelings and you’d have to lick your wounds and move on. I would say, if anything, with every album we got a bit more confident. I wouldn’t say it got easier to make each album, but once you’ve read people say you’re the best thing in the world or you’re the worst thing in the world, it’s like, you can’t help but move on. We’ve literally had people say both of those things about us. Once you’ve seen the extremes, you have to move forward.

How do you move forward?

Well, by the time we got to our third album, although it was very difficult to make, I really wasn’t scared of the haters anymore. When you know you have real fans, the haters don’t matter as much. Once you put out a couple albums, you’ve toured the world a bunch, you know you have real fans. You kind of realize it’s all a little bit empty anyways. Our first two albums, they got lots of good reviews and some extremely negative reviews, but you realize it doesn’t change your life. You hope for good reviews, and you hope for fans to like it, but you’ve already played that game a little bit so you just want to make something that you truly feel is great, different, and challenging, and that becomes the goal. That’s still a really hard fucking goal, it’s not like you’re out of the woods, but even now when I start to think of a fourth album, or the future of the band, it’s like whatever happens, we’ve already experienced so much. The thing that gets me excited about making new music is covering new musical territory. I can no longer dream about like, what if our album...

Wins you a Grammy?

Right! We’ve had these things. You can win one Grammy, and you can dream “what if we won album of the year, what if we won five Grammys?” That’s not like an amazing goal, it’s like chill out, if it happens it happens. You’ve got to redirect your energy. That’s the nice thing about getting older and completing this phase of the band: a lot of that insecurity, and that hyperactive energy you have in the early days, it changes.

You’ve followed a pretty consistent record cycle; will we have to wait another two years for a new Vampire Weekend record?

Well, I go back and forth all the time. There are times when I think about some of the songs we’ve already started, I don’t want to call them leftovers from the last album because it’s not like they didn’t make the cut, they just didn’t get finished and they need more time. So I think of those songs and I’m like damn, we already have some pretty good stuff, it could happen very quickly. Then there are other times when I feel like I’ve been on tour for a decade, which is not quite true, but it’s approaching that. So I go back and forth between thinking, “Wow I need a huge break,” to “Meh, who needs a break?” One thing I can say is that I feel like there are already little bits and pieces of new things, things from the last album that I’m excited about. Historically, that bodes well for us. When we were finishing up Contra, Rostam [Batmanglij, guitarist/keyboardist] sent me this instrumental piece of music labeled “Obvious Bicycle,” and it was a cool, it had some beautiful piano chords. It didn’t quite feel right for Contra, but I kept listening to it for two years, and I kept writing on top of it, and that became track one of Modern Vampires of the City. It took a long time, but it was worth the wait, and it was good that we held on to it. So I do feel like we’re off to a good start, however long it takes.

[coryperlaportfolio]

Interview: Thurston Moore

Interview by Cory Perla, originally published September 12, 2013

For Sonic Youth co-founder Thurston Moore, starting a new band was as simple as putting down an acoustic guitar and picking up an electric one.

Since the release of Moore’s deeply personal solo album Trees Outside the Academy in 2007, his first solo album since 1995’s Psychic Hearts, the 55-year-old musician has boomeranged back and forth between solo and band projects. In 2011 his marriage to Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon ended, as did their illustrious band. This major change in Moore’s life happened just after the release of his third solo album, Demolished Thoughts, an anxious record about lost time and deteriorating happiness, written mostly on acoustic guitars, harps, violins, upright bass, and drums. As far as Moore’s solo material goes, this sort of production was normal, yet still abnormal in relation to the experimental no-wave alternative rock the musician spent years pushing into the world through Sonic Youth.

At the end of his tour in support of Demolished Thoughts, the guitarist put down the shining 12-string acoustic guitar and returned to the electric guitar. He asked violinist Samara Lubelski, who had toured with him several times in support of his solo material, to put down her violin and pick up a bass guitar. He asked touring drummer John Moloney of Sun Burned Hand of a Man—a group that Moore describes as “freak-freestyle improv”—to permanently join his new band, along with guitarist Keith Wood, who was signed to Moore’s label, Ecstatic Peace!, under the name Hush Arbors. Together the four musicians formed Chelsea Light Moving, a project that has returned Moore to his signature, raw, no-wave sound. On Friday, September 13, Moore will bring his new band to the Tralf Music Hall for its first performance in Buffalo. We had the chance to talk to him about the band’s genesis, countercultures past and present, and the place of protest in music today.

The members of Chelsea Light Moving seem to have emerged from a pool of people you were touring with on your solo material.

Moore: Yeah, it’s been the same group of people I’ve been working with. I think on that last tour forDemolished Thoughts, I had been focused on playing my acoustic guitar, really investigating it. A lot of it was in contrast to playing with Sonic Youth. I kind of started busting out the electric guitar on the last solo tour, started introducing songs from Psychic Hearts, and started actually writing songs too.

Has it been refreshing to return to an electric guitar?

Yeah, it’s fun. Sonic Youth was just beginning to go into hiatus right then, so I didn’t really have that place to write songs like that. I started doing it and we started playing them live and I was really digging it. I wanted to give the band a name instead of doing it under my own name. I wanted to create a distance from that spotlight of me-me-me-me. I liked the idea of a band, too.

So was there a feeling that starting this band would lend you some anonymity?

Well, yeah, I think I was seeking some kind of anonymity, but it’s for better or worse, you know? Because when you go on tour under a new band name it creates a little bit of an obscurity. It can be a challenge to fill up a room with a new band name, as opposed to Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth. There was a little bit of a trade-off but I liked the idea of a band. It’s more unified.

Where did the name come from?

I decided to call the band Chelsea Light Moving because I had been reading this book called Love Goes to Buildings on Fire by Will Hermes, which is a history of New York underground music from 1972 to around 1978. He talked about Philip Glass starting a moving company. [Glass] had a van and he took a classified ad out in a local paper and he called the moving company ‘Chelsea Light Moving.’ He started the moving company so he could make some coin to rent out a concert hall to put on a performance. As soon as I saw that, I really liked it.

It’s a very gentle name, whereas the music is not so gentle at all.

Yeah, I liked that kind of paradox. It sounds like a British shoegazing band name, but it most definitely is not that. The music is more about immediacy and first-thought-best-thought as far as songwriting goes. The first batch of songs we recorded really quickly.

How does the songwriting for this band compare to writing with Sonic Youth?

I think basically I wanted to have fun and write songs that dealt with getting into the simplicity of the riff. I like working as a democracy as a band, and Sonic Youth was certainly that. That’s what I really liked about Sonic Youth—that everyone really brought something to the table no matter who brought in the structure. Sonic Youth worked in a way where someone would bring in a structural idea and it would be completely modified. Then it was just playing, like just improvising and creating song ideas. That was even more interesting because it felt magical. For the most part, [Chelsea Light Moving] is me coming up with song ideas and just sort of saying this is what we’re doing. I still don’t tell Keith or John or Samara what to play in any notational way, I’m not writing their music. I let them come up with their parts, but I will have the final say on whether that is going to fly or not. And usually it does, I mean, that’s why I’m playing with them, because they have sharp musical minds. But the rest of the band calls me dad.

Do you like that role?

[Laughs] It’s okay, I’m getting used to it. You know, I’m the old guy in the band, too. These guys are all in their 30s and early 40s—it’s not a young man’s band by any means—but they’re much younger than I am. I’m 55.

What does it feel like then to get up on stage and rock out to heavy, chaotic songs like “Alighted”?

“Alighted” is the kind of song I really dig writing and playing, and it’s also the kind of song that I probably would never have gotten away with in Sonic Youth. It has a certain direct movement in it. It really reflects my interest and love for hardcore and heavy metal, which has always been there, but a lot of times it got sort of diffused in Sonic Youth. Now it’s just really in-your-face.

When I listen to “Lip” you sound kind of fed up; it’s a very frank song. The chorus is “get fucking mad/too fucking bad.”

Those lyrics do have a certain cynicism to them. I wrote them during the Occupy Wall Street protests, which I was completely supportive of and really into. I like the attempts at anarchy, and the idea of it being sort of a street-school of ideas. I thought it was contemporary and defining itself outside of the old guard of protests and resistance that had existed historically. The old guard of protests became mollified by the machine of power and money, it didn’t really have much effect any more, so there needed to be a new way of bringing attention to any kind of injustice that goes on socially. I was really inspired and impressed by it. “Lip” was written about wanting to give power to anger in the face of injustice.

But the record isn’t only about present countercultures, it’s about past countercultures as well, right?

Yeah. I deal a lot with that culture anyway; I’m very involved with 20th-century poetry studies. I teach at Naropa University in the summer time, which is the university that Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman helped found in 1974. That’s something that’s very big-time for me. That whole Buffalo literary scene that kind of revolves around Robert Creeley; that is big news for me. I’m also an archivist for underground poetry publications, so in a way, that was like source material for my lyric writing and songwriting. I wrote a song based on the last words of William S. Burroughs, about love being a real cure for pain, as if it was a drug, so I wrote some simple lines about that—having fun with it and referring to him as Billy—and we called the song “Burroughs.” I was really into reading about Frank O’Hara, a great American poet. He was really important in what is called the New York School of poetry. I was reading about when he was killed in a dune buggy accident on Fire Island and I realized that he died on my birthday, July 25. So I wrote the song “Frank O’Hara Hit.” I’m just trying to embrace this fascination I have with this culture and this lineage that I place my work in. When we first started playing these songs and recording them, I referred to the music as “Burroughs-rock.”

I find it difficult to find good protest music right now. Are there any musicians who you feel are making significant protest music?

Well, certainly the people we know about like Tom Morello, he’s the most obvious one. I think it’s a difficult situation because you don’t want to create celebrity out of protest. It becomes a little conflicted because celebrities should have nothing to do with protest, but at the same time, celebrities can draw attention to ideas that should be expressed. When things get hot and heavy sometimes you’ll see some organized musical situations happen, like Bruce Springsteen will get involved, Neil Young will get involved. Certainly Patti Smith has been really interesting in her later years as an artist and she focuses on that in the live context, in the way of trying to encourage people to get involved. It’s a lot to ask for somebody to articulate the material of radical politics. If only Noam Chomsky was the lead singer of a band.

I would listen to that band.

[Laughs] Yeah, but you’ll have to rely on text and interviews instead. To bring that kind of thing into context for youth culture is a little tricky because it becomes entertainment or it’s like getting into the form of entertainment. There is always a balancing act there. It’s a different landscape culturally and politically now. There is a lot of interconnectivity in the world right now, so you get people like Bradley Manning a.k.a. Chelsea Manning…to me he’s the rock star right now. He’s incarcerated for blowing the whistle. I love that term. It’s musical; it’s like plugging a guitar in. I wish I had called the band the Whistleblowers now.

[coryperlaportfolio]

Interview: Jeremy Greenspan of the Junior Boys

Interview by Cory Perla, originally published October 6, 2011

The name of this band says a lot about them. The Junior Boys—a purposefully redundant and simple name—sums up the complex concept behind the band in those two words. The Hamilton, Ontario based synthpop duo, led by singer, guitarist, and songwriter Jeremy Greenspan, have spent the better part of four albums dealing with the pain of aging, a pain that we all feel but find hard to express. Now, with the release of their latest album, It’s All True, Greenspan and band mate Matt Didemus have put an exclamation point on seven years of song writing. This week I talked to Greenspan about the mentality behind the group’s engrossing music, where the inspiration behind It’s All True came from, and what dance music really means to him.

One thing I’ve always found interesting about your band is the idea of lost youth in the whole concept of the band from the name Junior Boys, to the lullaby like tones and melodies, to songs—especially on So This Is Goodbye— like “In The Morning,” and “Like a Child.” How does the idea of aging and getting older physically and mentally play into your writing?

Jeremy Greenspan: It has a tremendous effect. I often write about nostalgia, about lost youth, all of those kinds of things because I think they are universal ideas that people think about all of the time. We probably down play how much we think about the past, and how much we think about where we came from. I feel, musically, that I’m in a weird place. I write about being haunted by the past, but from a musical perspective I want to ignore the past as much as possible. As a musician I think the most negative thing that can be said about you is that you’re derivative, so I think the job of musicians is to be futurists, to be exploratory, and to not sound like things from the past. It’s like balancing on a weird line because you’re trying to evoke some sense of nostalgia in people, but you’re also trying to sound new and fresh and unique. That’s the challenge.

You’ve mentioned Orson Welles as a source of inspiration for some of the tracks on your latest album, It’s All True. Why is that man so important to you and the album?

I was going through a bit of a crisis before making this record in terms of feeling like I was aging in a world that isn’t kind to aging, like the world of dance music. I felt like I was losing touch or something like that. Those anxieties about getting older and losing confidence are real anxieties and I wanted to talk about them artistically but I didn’t feel like I had the artistic license to do so. I just didn’t know how that was done. Then I saw Orson Welles’ last film, F for Fake, and I started to realize he was an artist who almost talked exclusively about those anxieties. He was even writing about that when he was a super young man; about growing older and losing your confidence, and also being corrupted by lies and forgery. Those are the most important themes for me. When I realized he could write about that as an artist it gave me a kind of artistic license, an inspiration. He was someone who did what I wanted to do with my art. It was a great release for me to realize that. Is it important for people to listen to records and know about Orson Welles? No, not really, even though I reference him a few of times on the record, its not that important, but it’s important for me.

When you were writing your new record, did you take into account what is popular in the dance music scene right now, i.e. dubstep?

To some extent. We took into account what we’re interested in. The new stuff we like. In terms of dubstep, that is an offshoot of UK garage music, which I was really really into when I was in my early twenties and forming the band. In terms of what happens in dubstep nowadays I have very little interest. I do like a lot of offshoots of it, like UK funky music, UK funky house, some of that stuff is terrific. One of our earliest supporters and one of my closest friends is a guy called Kode9 (aka Steve Goodman), he runs a record label called Hyperdub, which has been a big dubstep label, but is sort of not really dubstep—I’m always interested in what he is doing. I tend to be interested in more abstract dance music these days. I’m still interested in what is happening in Detroit, I still think there are really important and vital people working in Detroit at the moment—not just guys like Carl Craig, but guys like Kyle Hall, Theo Parrish, and Omar S. There is a whole crew of people making American dance music that isn’t so popular necessarily, but it’s the stuff I still listen to.

You’ve lived in a few different countries during your life, obviously Canada and England, but most recently you spent time in China writing and recording It’s All True. What led you to China?

I went to China because my sister lives there and she has lived there for about a decade. She has a family there and teaches there. I always knew I would go to China at some point, but I decided to go for a little bit longer than expected. Instead of going for two weeks I went for about two months. Because I was going for such a long time, I decided to bring some recording equipment with me. I ended up doing some recording and a lot of writing there. A huge amount of the lyrics were written while I was in China. A lot of the early songs were formulated there. That was funny for me because I was typically just writing in one place, in Hamilton, and although the vast majority of the album was written in a tiny little room in Hamilton, it was nice to get out a little bit. So even when I was back in my room I still had these Chinese sounds and the sense of adventure I experienced there. China is an exciting place at the moment, it’s changing and in transition. It is a place that is growing at a rate beyond anything that we have experienced in our lifetimes. It was like being in a place at the right time, at the precipice of a revolutionary moment.

I don’t think I would have guessed by listening to the album that there was much Chinese influence on it, had I not already known. How do you think your experience in China affected the sounds and what eventually became It’s All True?

I wasn’t too interested in making anything like a world music album. I did hire a couple of Chinese musicians to play instruments on the album. There are about four songs where there are Chinese instruments. On “Itchy Fingers” and “Playtime” there are Chinese string instruments being played. And then there is another song that hasn’t been released; that we will be releasing, which probably has the largest amount of Chinese instruments on it. We had a girl that played this thing called a guqin, which is like a harp, and also pipa, which is a little Chinese guitar. I wasn’t trying to make a record that sounded like world music though. I’m a big fan of the band Japan. They have a really Chinese sounding album and I was really not trying to replicate that. That would have been pretty obvious.

When I listen to this album I feel like deceit and the idea that there is an absolute truth to everything are pretty important themes, of course the album is called It’s All True. What are the major themes in your mind?

That is the major one. Authenticity, truth above forgery, those are the things that are important to me, especially from the perspective of someone in dance music. I felt that dance music used to be about total truth, about not caring about what is stylish, thinking only about what sonically compels people. It was about creating the ultimate visceral, sonic experience, and I don’t think that dance music is necessarily about that anymore, so that was an anxiety for me. Also just the anxiety of getting older, of losing your way, of losing your sense of what is good and what is not good. Those feelings were all present and that was a huge theme for me.

I think the title of this album can be read in a positive way, but when I read the title and relate it to the content of the album it seems like you’re trying to say that all of your worst fears and paranoias in various relationships are all true. Can you talk a little bit more about what the title of the album means to you?

That is a good way of reading it. The title refers to a project of Orson Welles’ that was scrapped. He went to Brazil and was commissioned by the US State Department to make a series of films called Its All True about Brazil, but it was a failed project and he ended up squandering all of his time there. I wanted to reference Orson Welles, but I also thought it was a great title because the record is about truth. The original working title of the album was You’ve Been Cheated, which was a reference to Johnny Rotten asking an audience “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

I feel like that would have worked perfectly for the album too. It gives a different sort of insight into it.

Yeah, I liked it, and that was the title of the album for a long time, but I think it’s too confrontational.

I saw you guys play at the Phoenix Theater in Toronto in June and this was five days before your album dropped. You went into your final song, “Banana Ripple,” and the audience reacted as if Prince was coming on the stage to play “1999″ or something. People went nuts. It was as if it was the biggest hit of your career and it hadn’t even technically been released yet. What is your reaction to that?

It’s been crazy because we’ve been playing that song every night, and every night we get that same crazy response. It hasn’t been our biggest single in the sense that we’re still probably way more known for “In The Morning” from So This Is Goodbye, but we’ve never had a live response for a song like we do for that one.

Where does the excitement come from? It’s really an epic song and you guys don’t do epic songs.

It’s the opposite of every one of our impulses in music. Our impulse is to really strip back and do less, to try and be subtler. But that song is sort of about indulgence, and like the lyrics says “losing your sense of it all.” So for me, I was writing the song and I kept on adding more and more parts to it and I didn’t know how to strip it back, so at that point I thought ‘I’m just going to indulge in this song.’  It was one of those rare instances where it just kept working and there was no point at which it felt like it was a mess. It worked out well. They don’t always.

How does Its All True fit in with your previous albums?

To me it feels like a conclusion. I don’t know what is next for us or for me. I definitely feel like if we did another Junior Boys album it would have to be radically different. I feel like the four albums stand as a single statement in some weird way. I’m more excited at the moment, once we’re done promoting this record; to try something new, do some different types of projects. I actually just finished a song with (Providence, Rhode Island based dance producer) Kelley Polar. He’s got a new album and his new single is a song that we co-wrote together, which I sing on. That is coming out very soon. After that I think I’ll work on my own stuff for a little bit. These albums feel like a complete package to me at the moment.