Signal eats noise.: November 2006

So, as I was working on my article for this week, which is about The Oranges Band, who are absolutely one of the best bands out there these days, I began to realize that singer/guitarist Roman Kuebler and I had had a really kick-ass interview but that I didn't have room to really get to everything, so here's the transcription of the interview I did. It's not absolutely everything, and you don't get to see my questions, because I usually don't transcribe those, but I've subdivided it into sections. Anyways, Roman's super-cool and so is his band, so you should probably go check them out on Sun., Nov. 26 at the Triple Rock. You better believe I'm going.

Roman Kuebler (Oranges Band) Transcript

The last year

Hmm ... that was November ... what have I done with my life? That was our tour for our album that came out in June, 2005, and you know
our label kind of had some problems. So after our album came out, like 2 months afterwards, is when they kind of let go of all the bands and all the staff. And we went out on that tour and it was pretty obvious that support for the album was dwindling to a point where we couldn't push it all that much. We also had to get back to working. Spring is a busy time for me personally, so we did that instead of doing our usual trip to SXSW. We just thought we'd concentrate on our personal lives and focus on what we were going to do next. Which is what I did over the summer, after working pretty intensely over the spring, which is what allowed me to work on music almost exclusively and I worked on a lot of demos and I also worked producing a couple other bands. Which I'm still doing: it kind of takes forever when you don't have time or money.

The band wasn't all that active-- that's kind of the way we do stuff: I'll work on stuff and then we get back together and work on combing through stuff. We've been playing a lot of shows this fall.

It's kind of taken the whole year. It's kind of odd that it takes that long, but I guess I don't mind that, since it's given us the time to reflect on it in a way that is comfortable to us. In the past, I've always felt pressured by time, and not having that pressure has been really kind of liberating.

I think it's important to have a little bit of a reset. I think I've always used that and I imagine most people do. People who aren't The Beatles.

I do freelance artwork-- graphic design or art production. I also do architectural modeling. All different kinds of art production and design production. Our last album, Tad (Kubler) shot the cover, so I just compiled.

All the other albums, that's a part of it that I really like doing, but to have other people involved is something I also really like doing. I like singing backing vocals, but it's cooler when I get other people to do it.

Songwriting

I'm definitely the primary writer, which can mean a number of things. I also happen to play bass and drums-- I play all of the rock instruments at least well enough that I can write with them, so sometimes, when I'm coming up with an idea, I'll go all the way and just demo a whole recording with drums. Sometimes, when we then play it, it's fairly accurate to what I've done. Sometimes we'll take a demo and just mess with it and change it and see what anyone else can bring into the equation. The idea is that I'm always open for suggestion and I like the input of everyone in the group. The best stuff that we play tends to be when everyone is inputting their ideas, but the truth is, is that also the musical style sometimes doesn't suit everyone in the band, and the songs are different enough from each other that sometimes it's better to approach it in a different. We kind of always do what's best for the song. We did that some on our last record where Dan (our guitar player) would play drums on a song, or he'd play bass or I'd play bass. We'll kind of bounce around like that.

Things are changing. I always kind of reference ideas pretty specifically because it's been my experience that I can try and re-write a song and it's going to come out different enough that it'll still be my creation. So 'White Ride' is a Chuck Berry thing because I'm way into Chuck Berry and I thought that would be cool to do that. I don't mind directly referencing a band in that way. Like, it's clear where this came from, but this is how we're going to do it. Because we're not the Beach Boys, we're not gonna sound like the Beach Boys.

It's always all over the place. It's almost like for every song I could name the specific idea where that came from and sometimes that's not the case, but I would say with 75% of the stuff I can reference the band or the song. Right now, we just did a song that was this weird kind of funk-based thing. Kind of supposed to be a bit of an ESG kinds of thing, but I kind of ripped it off of a Peter Gabriel song, and then it got a little bit of a Clash thing going on. Somehow in the end it sounds like Spoon. I'm not sure how it happened, but it literally started with me trying to gank this Peter Gabriel idea and then it went through the ringer. I'm not against being straight-up about where things are coming from. I'm not that interested in being original. I don't know what original music would sound like. Of course it's original because it's come from my head, so I'm confident enough in that that I know no one's going to write the same song just 'cause that would be impossible.

I try and study a lot of music as much as possible. I've been listening to music pretty intently for a long time. When I was in middle school, I was into skate culture so I was into Minor Threat, Bad Brains, skate punk, stuff like that. Also the Smiths for some reason, but I guess that was just a middle school thing. In high school I got into old school rap, which, of course, at the time was not old school. So right around the first wave of rap I was kind of into it, but I got really into it when I got the first Run DMC record, so there as that whole period, and then I got out of that by getting into R.E.M. really strong and then from R.E.M., I went to Pavement and Nirvana and from there just went into indie rock, which started with Archers of Loaf and Polvo. From there, it's just been grabbing whatever's around. Figuring out where people are getting their influences, like listening to Otis Redding. I try to know about the stuff so I can talk about it. Candy Machine was a band that was around in Baltimore in the mid-'90s, and they did a kind of Gang of Four/The Fall thing, but when I first heard them, I'd never heard those bands. So when I heard them, I thought, man, this band sounds like no other band I've ever heard in my life. Just a sound I'd never heard before. And then I heard The Fall and Gang of Four. It didn't alter how much I liked Candy Machine, but it was just a lesson that music comes from someplace and it's good to know about that. I try and be as academic about music as I can be.

Recently I got this music archive from a friend of mine, and it has the Billboard charts for the last 50 years-- all mp3s. So it's got the past 100 for each year. It's an incredible resource. It's something that I look forward to knowing.

Also the bands that just didn't make the jump into legendary status or ones whose songs you know.

Baltimore

I moved here when I was 7 or so.

The city is not the way it used to be. They tore down Memorial Stadium and built Camden Yards, which is downtown, is much hipper, is more expensive, is cleaner, is cooler and appeals to people from D.C., and that pretty much describes the entire city. It's cleaner, it's a little bit cooler, it's safer, it appeals to people from D.C. and it's way more expensive. All of which is fine and good, except that I like it the way it was. I liked it being a little bit funky. I liked that I could live wherever I wanted and afford it.

There's a lot of development going on. I think someone finally realized that what Baltimore was was a major east coast city that no one was paying attention to. People figured that out quickly, and it changed the makeup of the city and the face of the city and the way that it acts. And that's not all for the bad. But it's lost that character: the ethnicity of certain neighborhoods. The class struggle seems a little bit more pronounced. As developers take over poor neighborhoods and turn them into little gold mines.

The place is always defined by the people, and I certainly have plenty of friends and people that I'm really happy to be around, and there's a lot of music happening here that's really excellent, and I would be hesitant to leave that scene.

It's not a regional problem: I don't think what's happening here is unique. I think it's happening in a lot of places and I wouldn't necessarily want to leave the east coast for any long stretch of time, and any place I'd end up would be similar. I've got this network of jobs and things that allow me to do what I do in general, which is work some, play some, tour some, play a little bit more, travel, and I guess I'd like to continue to be able to do that, so if that means I stay here, that's cool.

This is exactly what I'm talking about with the city: that building has been a club for 20 years if not more. In recent memory, it's been three rock clubs and servicing that community. Now all of a sudden, because there's development downtown, it's starting to be not a place where you can do this type of thing anymore.

I don't know how to feel about that kind of thing in general. I guess maybe that's how society happens-- it happens in fits and starts. Maybe it's dormant for a while and then everybody gets on the bandwagon.

The All-Music Guide

I kind of apologized to them because it was kind of a snarky little thing to do. I just thought it was funny way to approach that. I hadn't made any announcement that our old bass player had left and that we had a new bass player, and I didn't know exactly how to do it, and that seemed like kind of an appropriate way. For a long time they had us listed in the past tense and I'd always try to get someone at our label to do something about that. I tried at least one other time to figure out how to contact them with no luck, but I finally found the hidden link. Now that I have an in there, every other week, I'm just gonna send 'em a new update. It'll be like my own personal All Music Blog.

Labels and the business

I really like the people at Lookout, and our time there was really well-spent, but I don't think it was the best place for us to be and I think that some of the idea that we had going in didn't really work out that well. We felt like it wasn't going to be that weird that we were a pop-rock band on a punk label, because Lookout had spent its entire career redefining what it was and had had success with people like Ted Leo, but I guess I maybe overestimated that a little, because I don't think that people who were into Lookout as a label were into us being on Lookout, and people who were into us, were not all that into investigating what Lookout had to offer. I think Ted Leo certainly appeals to a Lookout type of crowd, just by who he is and how he conducts himself and his music. I think I maybe underestimated that a little bit. It was a little frustrating. I would just say our record didn't appeal to people, but the truth is, there's a lot of records on there that were kind of ignored. The Mary Tuney record was really, really great. Communique was a really great band. The Hockey Night record-- a lot of these were just great records. The roster they had was really phenomenal and they were just struggling to succeed with any of them, and that's what made me think that this wasn't just about me and The Oranges Band, it wasn't even about Lookout-- it's about other people.

There's a lot that's good about that, but there's a lot that's not. There's a lot that's really worrisome about it as well. It kind of swells and then it drops and what's next for them? A band like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah-- are they done now? Is anyone even interested? I have no idea. And I get the sense that maybe it's just so immediate that no one's interested in longevity. I just had a conversation with some friends at Merge, and they're preparing the next Arcade Fire record and they're like, 'I don't know what to do.' They're not sure what's going to happen. It's funny because you expect there to be a bit of backlash, you expect when someone has a phenomenal selling first record or second record, that the next one is not going to do that good, but if you sell 300,000 records, you can't say this one's going to sell 200,000. You can't want to sell less. It makes me wonder: when Fleetwood Mac came out with Rumours it sold, what, 13 million copies? Now they're preparing Tusk and people are going what are we going to do with this? I guess we have to sell 20? No, it's gonna sell 4. That's a good-selling record! But is it a failure?

Pearl Jam self-detonating their fame

That's such a healthy way to do it and I support that. I thought it was a pretty cheesy move to say we're not making videos anymore, because it was like, of course you don't have to make videos anymore-- you already made it. You already used the medium to its fullest extent and now you're above it? I thought that that was lame, but the way they continued to say, now we're not going to use Ticketmaster, we're not going to play in a venue that is a Clear Channel venue-- at the time I really recognized what was happening, and I realized they were instilling this punk ethic into a mainstream society. You know, 14-year0olds who listened to Pearl Jam had never considered the idea that you didn't have to buy your tickets from Ticketmaster because they're ripping you off. They got that from Pearl Jam, who got it from Fugazi. I thought that was great, eventually. The way that it started was a little suspicious, but they used the industry, and they continue to use the industry to advance their own idea. I think that's pretty cool.

Buzz bands

At times, you're like, how do these bands get so hot and no one's paying attention to my band? That sucks! But in the end, maybe this isn't such a bad thing, to just weather this weird storm and just continue to do what we want to do and maybe pick up a few fans here and a few fans here and build it slowly. I can't imagine what I'd be like if the first record I put out, people freaked out about it, and I certainly don't know what the music would be like. What is the challenge for them now musically? For me, it's always been: I've gotta make better music, because I've got to get more people to listen to it. I have consistently developed my music, not commercially, but with those kind of ideas in mind. More than anything it's caused me to think about it more, whereas if I were just going to make music the usual way, that happens to bands and they're boring. How many bands are there where their first record is their best record? People love that first record, so why would they make a different record? Whereas a band like Spoon, their first record is their worst record. They needed to make a better one, and they did. And they got dropped from a major label so they needed to make a better one and they did. There's so many ways to look at it, but that's how I look at it.

The full article

From the City Pages article on The Decemberists:

"The Decemberists turn works of short historical fiction into pop songs; they have no interest in blabbing about their feelings toward their friends or their last relationship breakup. Although they are from Portland, they decline to emote."

From "Angel, Won't You Call Me?" 5 Songs, 2001:

"So here I am in corduroy
Catch it in your Polaroid
Thought it was an off night,
caught in such a warm light

But, Angel, won't you call me?
Could I be the only
though I am a lost cause
Angel, won't you call me?"

From "Grace Cathedral Hill," Castaways and Cutouts, 2002:

"Sweet on a green-eyed girl
All fiery Irish clip and curl
All brine and piss and vinegar
I paid twenty-five cents to light
A little white candle

And the world may be long for you
But'll never belong to you
But on a motorbike
When all the city lights
Blind your eyes tonight
Are you feeling better now?"

From "Red Right Ankle," Her Majesty, 2003

"This is the story of the boys who loved you
Who love you now and loved you then
And some were sweet and some were cold and snuffed you
And some just layed around in bed
And some, they crumbled you straight to your knees
Did it cruel, did it tenderly
Some they crawled their way into your heart
To rend your ventricles apart
This is the story of the boys who loved you
This is the story of your red right ankle"

From "The Engine Driver," Picaresque, 2005

"And I am a writer, writer of fictions
I am the heart that you call home
And I've written pages upon pages
Trying to rid you from my bones"

Now, I haven't gotten into the new Decemberists album enough to be able to find a quote to match up for that one, but it seems to me that their unique quality has long been an ability to deal with emotions in such deft and delicate ways, even when it comes to something as picayune as a break-up. To say that their music doesn't emote because it's literary is to deny the emotive power of literature, I think. Castaways and Cutouts remains my favorite album of theirs because to me it maintains the balance between Meloy's impressive vocabulary and contemporary narrative the best. "Grace Cathedral Hill" is most definitely about the present day; "We were both a little hungry, so we went to get a hot dog." For my money, the tail end of the last verse of "Clementine" is one of the most sweetly evocative lines I've ever heard: "And I watch as you sleep / so indelibly deep / And I hum to you 'Sweet Clementine.'"

Perhaps his early wordplay is overly precious, but as a fellow lover of words, I take great joy in his occasional overreach for rhymes like: "Medicating in the sun / pinch doses of laudanum" from "The Legionnaire's Lament." It's saying that words matter, that songwriting can be literate and evocative, that we can take comfort in the human construction of our world through language.

I see Meloy's lyrics as having anything but an "ironic, literary tone that sterilizes actual human experience to create a stylized, museum-quality version of the real thing." I feel like as the band has become increasingly comfortable within themselves, they've lost a little of the precarious balance that marked their first two (maybe three) releases. As Meloy's found the wheelhouse of his lyrical conceit, he's upped the quirkiness and played down the personal, and in response, the band has grown ever more ambitious texturally. The Crane Wife is certainly an accomplishment, and I recognize that my attachment to their first albums is emotional, and not the cold logic that is oh so ironically demanded of critics these days.

Chris Dahlen had an interesting column on Pitchfork today about the death of criticism, which is one of this blog's favorite topics. In a lot of ways he's right that the community approach to music criticism generated by blogs and other websites has taken away the upper hand that music critics have held onto for so long, so I heartily agree with him that we'll never run out of the need for simply good writing that's about more than just the buzz, the hype or how good or bad something is. Critics need to write critically, about the ideas behind music, about the people behind the ideas and about their own primary responses to the music--and not simply to say whether something's good or bad, but to illuminate the processes behind aesthetic judgements. I hope that's what I do, at least most of the time, and I hope that's what people are taking away from what I write.

Monday, November 27, 2006

The Current's Top 89 of 2006

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

You heard it here first

Oranges Band transcript

Friday, November 10, 2006

Well, I don't know about that ...

Friday, November 3, 2006

Save the 331

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