Andrew Bird :: Armchair Apocrypha :: Making the album with Ben Durrant

Ben Durrant runs Crazy Beast Studio in Minneapolis and has recorded local artists from Dosh to Roma di Luna, but last year, he began to work with Chicago-based singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird after Bird began working with Martin Dosh as a duo. His last album, The Mysterious Production of Eggs, was something of a breakout hit for Bird, who first came to prominence as a member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers and later as the leader of Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire. He's a notoriously restless and genre-devouring musician, a virtuoso violinist, a mellifluous and sometimes acid-tongued singer and certainly a decent enough guitarist. When all the diverse elements of his repertoire are combined with a nimble talent for looping parts and harmonies, Bird becomes a virtual one-man band, and Dosh brings many of the same abilities to the table. Translating all this work from a live duo into a full studio album was Durrant's task, and I recently got to sit down and talk with him about his part in making Bird's latest album, Armchair Apocrypha, and his general approach to recording.

Signal Eats Noise: How did you get hooked up with Andrew Bird?

Ben Durrant: It was totally because of Dosh. I don't remember how it first happened. They had been here after tour and went and did a couple songs at Third Ear [Studios, owned by Tom Herbers] and they were still just trying to figure out where and what and what kind of songs and how they were going to work together for recording purposes. So he had told Andrew about working at both places, and I got a call from his manager one day and they wanted to do, like, two days to see how it would go. Martin [Dosh] told me that he's kinda ... not fickle, because fickle wouldn't be the right word ... decisive about what he likes and doesn't like. Then [the manager] was telling me the stories about how, with the last record [The Mysterious Production of Eggs], they had done it three times and scrapped it and started over. So I was thinking, we'll see how it goes, but it probably won't be a match.

But we did "Fiery Crash" first, which is kind of loop-based, so it was sort of along the lines of something that Martin and I would've done on one of his albums, and we just ended up clicking pretty good. A lot of it was that we personally clicked well, too. Liked a lot of the same kind of stuff when we were talking about music. So we did those two days and it ended up going well, so they came back for another five days in a few weeks. All along, you didn't really know--it certainly wasn't one of those things like, we're gonna do these 14 songs. It was very much a just-keep-going, see-which-things-work thing. In the end, most of it worked out really well. There are pieces from different places and people, which made it kind of tricky, within the same song, to meld different places, different people playing different instruments, kind of different songs, but in the end it all jived.

SEN: So there was stuff that had been recorded other places that you then had to mix with stuff that you were recording?

BD: In some cases. "Heretics" was the main one. That one, the drums were done in Chicago with his other drummer. I don't know if that was done before any of this other stuff--I'm not sure of the order of things. And I think they did the bass at Third Ear and then I got the tracks for that. On that one in particular, nothing was labeled. The drums were amazing sounding, but I didn't know what any mic was. I think it was like 20 drum tracks and no idea what any of them were. The left side of the room? An overhead? That one was nuts. "Armchairs" was another one that was a shared one. Most of the basic tracks on that one were from Third Ear. Then we did the vocals and guitars and some of that sort of stuff. I don't think, in the end when I listen to it, it doesn't seem like, that was this and this was this. There's enough mixing of things that it seems unified.

SEN: Well, it seems like it has a sonic identity that's cohesive. Sometimes you hear albums--you know Feist?--Feist's first album had 12 tracks that sounded like they were recorded at eight different places because they were all approached so differently. Armchair Apocrypha seems like it has a unity of purpose to it. Is going from place to place way that he had worked before? Is that his general way of doing things?

BD: It seems like it. Mostly just from hearing stories about the last one. I don't know if it's restlessness or trying to get the right sort of vibe for a particular song--whether that's a different place or a different space, I'm not sure, or people--he definitely seems to be someone who really absorbs the people that he's playing with and the people that are around him. For better or for worse. It seems like he can definitely get ... if he gets in a bad mood or he feels like the takes aren't good, he can definitely get [to feeling like] everything sucks. So, from my standpoint, definitely a chunk of this whole thing was to get him to do his best. To feel like he was doing his best, to get him comfortable. I think a lot of that happened because we jived pretty well and when it wasn't working out, it would be OK.

I think that had a lot to do with him moving around to different places, especially with that last one, because I looked at the credits for that and it was like, Whoa. Every song was different places, although I think in the end David [Boucher] mixed all of it, and he obviously did a great job of making it all seem pretty cohesive. It didn't seem as crazy as you'd think it would be.

SEN: Well, I think the role of the person who's running the boards--especially if someone's particularly sensitive to it--has such a huge effect on the album, because ultimately I feel like albums are a collection of little things. You might have an idea about some big thing, but it's going to be made up of all these little choices and little decisions you make. If you have somebody who's attuned to those things--I've always had to work in situations where you go in and do five tracks or ten tracks and then you're done, because I haven't had the luxury to do it any other way. But, if you've got somebody who wants to make sureeverything's right before they proceed to the next step, then you've gotta have the right people working around you.

So did he come to you with distinct ideas about where he wanted things to go, or did he just feel it out as they progressed? It seems like when you've got somebody who can do so much live by themselves--I mean, by himself he's a whole band, and then you bring in Marty, who's by himself a whole band. You've got two guys like that--is that a lot different than working with somebody who just has one perspective from one instrument?

BD: Oh yeah. On a given song, he had a pretty good idea of how he wanted to approach laying down that song. It wasn't like he had a road map, but it seemed like in a given song, there's a pretty good idea of at least the basic elements of what was going to be there and how they would do it. Would it start with Martin doing a loop? Or was it live drums and he plays guitar and sings? Some of them started with him on the guitar and then the drums came afterwards. Almost every song is done in a completely different way. Overall, he had a pretty good idea of how he wanted to do it, or between the three of us, we would sort of figure out what seemed like the right feel for that particular song, but again, a lot of it sort of morphed along the way and kind of took on the collective identity of all the people that were working on it and along the way it got more streamlined as it went.

The earlier [songs] were still sort of--not only were they [Bird and Dosh] figuring out how they played together, but also how they were going to record together, and we were figuring out how we were going to work together also. So some of the earliest ones, in the end, were the hardest because they took the longest to figure out. Some came together incredibly fast. Like "Simple X": I think we did that from end-to-end in like an hour and a half. The lyrics, I think he wrote really fast. Another funny thing is that there's a line in there about "scattered about from hell to breakfast? My friend--that's a saying he uses all the time and I used that in the course of a conversation that day, talking about all our crap spread around the studio. And he just looked at me and said, "What did you just say?" And I told him and what it meant and everything and he said, "That's the weirdest sounding phrase I've ever heard," and sure enough, he drops it into the song. As we got more in tune to how to approach things, it got a lot faster.

SEN: Aside from Marty, there are a lot of other local musicians on there--Haley Bonar and other people. Did you work with them on that stuff or did their tracks come separate?

BD: Yeah, they came here. The Haley things, he had a pretty good idea of which ones he was going to use her on because I think she had sang on a lot of those songs on their tour, because she had opened for him. Chris [Morrissey, bassist], I think it was the same kind of deal because he was touring with Haley at the time. He didn't play with Andrew, but Andrew knew who he was. Jeremy [Ylvisaker] totally happened by accident. We went to see Haley at the Cedar Cultural Center and Redstart opened [Ylvisaker's band with Wendy Lewis, Mike Lewis, Greg Lewis and Martin Dosh] and we got there right at the end of their set and they were playing one of their real pastoral kind of tunes and Jeremy was playing fingerstyle electric. We'd been working on "Scythian Empires" at the time, and that was one where he wanted to add fingerstyle guitar and he had laid down a good fingerstyle part that worked pretty well, but then when we went to that show, he was like, "I love that; I have to work with that guy." He went back to Chicago with some rough mixes of things, knowing that we wanted to do something on that one song. So when [Bird] came back, Jeremy laid that on there and did some other things that were on songs that didn't get on there, but again, [Ylvisaker's] one of those people that, musically, they hit it off and next thing you know he's in the band and playing on Letterman.

SEN: It seems right, because that community that he's slotted in with here is a group of people who seem very well-suited to what he does. it just seems like a great match with Marty and Jeremy and theRedstart people and Fog. It seems like it a really good fit.

BD: And Andrew plays on one of Fog's tunes on their next thing and I think that he used a loop of one of [Andrew] Broder's things for one of the dance--he just recorded some stuff for a dance performance thing--and I guess he used a couple of Broder's loops for that. So he's become pretty intertwined with that group of people, which totally makes sense. He's just kind of a sponge--he definitely picks up, musically and personally, on the feel of people, so I can totally see why those three [Bird, Dosh and Ylvisaker] fit together so well.

SEN: And for you recording is that the best way for you to work? To just react to what's needed? I know that some engineers have processes and ways to go about things; how do you approach it?

BD: I don't really know how to answer that other than to say that I'm not someone who has a process. Other than that, I couldn't really tell you, but I'm definitely not that.

SEN: What's your background like for recording? Did you study it as a discipline?

BD: No, no. Very much came at it from being a frustrated recording musician, probably like you. The few times I got to record it was 6-8 hours jamming everything in and then you'd move on and you aren't very happy with it. So for me, it was four-tracking to try and record things I was working on and then getting a little Mackie mixer and kind of never really intending to anything all that serious with it and then just gradually, you buy more crap and do more things and you end up somewhere else.

But no, I never studied or anything like that and don't really care to. I'm not all that interested in the technical side of things. It's definitely more coming at it from the musician side of things, and I'm more interested in that. I think, again, that's one of the reasons that we got along, because everybody's had the engineers that are like, "We have to redo this because this moved." That's just not my thing at all. We like the same sort of sounds, and a lot of times I'd play things and dick around with stuff when people are gone. If they like it great, if they don't, fine. So that was part of it, too. Throwing stuff at it and seeing what worked.

SEN: Well, I've done some home recording stuff and I always liked getting the chance to just mess with stuff. I've read some books and things and got a couple tips on starterEQ things, but the exploration of it is nice. A lot of times, you get people who come out of learning to be an engineer and think they're an expert. Well, yeah, you can turn out the same thing that somebody else who went to that school can, but can you do something interesting with it?

BD: Yeah, I'm very averse to that kind of thinking. Most stuff I just don't like the way it sounds; it sounds boring. Or it sounds--I remember when we were getting the mastering done on this CD, which, the first time through we ended up sending it back because we didn't think it quite was right, but I remember telling the person that we wanted it to sound good on the radio, but to not sound radio-y, you know what I mean? There's just this certain kind of radio-y sound that I personally hate. And other people, that's the deal. But that's not my cup of tea.

SEN: Yeah--the album's got such a nice, warm--warm is the kind of thing that when I listen to stuff, that's a lot of what I like to get out of things: a sense of place about it, a character, and that warmth, which is sort of antithetical to what you hear on radio-ready stuff. It's crisp and clean, cold. Here's the guitar, here's the kick drum.

BD: I remember afterwards listening to [Armchair Apocrypha] and thinking that it didn't jump at you in the same way that Eggs does. Both the songs and the way that it was done. I remember sitting down and listening to it all the way through and thinking that it doesn't say, "Pay attention to me," in the same way that that one does. And that was all right. At least for my way of thinking, that it rewards sitting down and listening to in its entirety. Ideally a couple of times and that then you really start to get the layering of things. And I think it's really sort of comforting if you can do that. But if you're wanting it to bonk, it just doesn't. Some of the songs are that way, but I think even in the way it's mixed, it's maybe not as glossy and that's me, I guess.

SEN: It seems like a good match for his stuff, because I know that I had at least one Bowl of Fire CD and I'd heard stuff on and off, and it never really totally grabbed me. I saw him at the Pitchfork Music Festival two years ago and that was the first time where I realized--he's an amazing singer and I got more of an appreciation for the looping thing, but then it takes time. Despite the fact that his stuff is really pretty--you know, it's not difficult--he's got a great voice, his stuff is a little elusive. It's not the type of music that's gonna jump up and grab you and say, "This is what I am," and I think matching those things is a good thing for his stuff.

BD: Exactly, because he's a little elusive, too. It just makes sense that his music would be also. I think that's the same reason why he changes stuff live so much, because he gets bored with it. He wants to keep it interesting for him because I think if he's not interested--and this was true for recording, too--he's got to be in the right mind frame to give it up. And seeing him live, too, you can tell--at least I can--when he's in the groove or not.

SEN: Is it strange for you to have done an album where it's getting so much attention? Where you can read reviews of it all over the web and in major publications? Have you done anything that was like that before?

BD: No. It's really strange. I wouldn't have at all been surprised if it didn't get very good reviews. I think I personally was prepared for that and I think he was, too. Just because it is pretty different--there's guitars and it's in some ways kind of more indie and in other ways is a little more accessible. Whatever, it's hard to describe. But I was prepared for a lot of people being like, "What's with the guitar? Why isn't there more violins or whatever?" I hadn't listened to it in six months; I think that was part of it, too. When we got done, I was like, "It's done; I don't want to obsess about it." Didn't want to think about it, and how it would end up getting reviewed. It is what it is. It just represents this period of six months and, at least for me, a lot of work. So yeah, it's been wild, but it doesn't affect me day-to-day. It's been interesting ... and my mom is excited.

SEN: Going back to working with Dosh and Ylvisaker, it's great to hear that he's so able to be influenced by what happens around him. I think that's a great quality--it can be a difficult quality, like you said, but it's really good to be able to have so that you can constantly change what you're doing and he's already been like that through his career.

BD: That was definitely the most fun thing about it: He's totally not afraid to just scrap things. There's different versions of most of that stuff, some of which started out a lot more like the older stuff. Whether it's from different environments or Marty or me--you know, I like distorted guitars--most of the stuff on there is him playing my old Jag[uar]. It just kind of lends itself to a certain thing and next thing you know, "Dark Matter" is more that kind of song. There's another version that was more like the old one, and it's fun with people like that that are not afraid of trying things different ways, whether it's new instruments or new sounds. Speed, slowing down, all that stuff is fun, because most people are so ...

SEN: Well, I think with most people you get attached to a certain sound you have an idea for and you get so tenacious with it, you don't want to let it go. It's tough, it's one of those upper level things about making creative stuff that you can't just teach somebody to be able to give up stuff like that. You either need to be like that or just sort of acquire through experience that that's the best way to work. You're never going to go study music and have them tell you to just give up on an arrangement and do something else. It's such a meta way to think about this--how do you think about thinking about this stuff? To have somebody with that ability is great.

BD: Yeah, the idea of not being that precious about things and to just do it this whole different way was pretty neat. But then there were things that got scrapped that I still don't think should have gotten scrapped and there was this one song ("Sycophants") that was totally one of my favorites, that got scratched and sort of replaced with another one, "Cataracts." When I saw him in New York I told him, "Taking that off there was a bad idea, that was a mistake," and he said, "Yeah, in hindsight we would have cut that one and kept the other one on there." Then there was another one--and I still bug him about this, too--another version of "Sparrows" that's completely different and super-sparse and that's still my favorite of all the stuff and it didn't end up on there because they wanted something a little more upbeat. Not that I don't like the one that's on there; I like that one a lot.

Oranges Band transcript

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.

transcript of the plastic constellations and p.o.s.

hereafter follows the unedited transcript of my interview with p.o.s. and the plastic constellations. it's a pretty long one, and i'm not gonna claim it hangs together or anything. plus, there are probably misspellings and nothing's formatted. it's the really real!

Q

Stef: Shut up, dude.

Aaron: Um, Junior high, right? You [Stef] were in 9th grade, we were in 8th grade. Stef was in a punk band.

Stef: I had switched from North Junior High to Hopkins West Junior High. I went to North the first two years (7th and 8th grade) and met Kai [Benson of Swiss Army, aka Marshall Larada of Doomtree] between 8th and 9th grade and switched schools just so I could hang out with Kai. I had to wake up at like six in the morning, take a city bus downtown and then take another city bus back way out the fuck there just so I could hang out with Kai.

Aaron: Him and Kai were in a band called Om and we, as younger kids, had seen you guys around.

Jeff: I remember the first time that we ever met Stef: you [Aaron] and I were in study hall and you [Stef] were in study hall …

Stef: What happened?

Jeff: We were writing- Aaron and I met in 7th grade (like the first day of 7th grade) and we both decided that we liked Sonic Youth at the same time. So that was our friendship. And we would just write band names on the white board, just so we could make a list of all the bands that we liked. Like Sonic Youth, Pavement, etc. And you [Stef] were there and I can’t remember what the conversation was. Something was discussed.

Q

Stef: They had a freaking 7-inch out by then.

Aaron: It was a little unspoken rivalry ‘cause there was a talent show and not all the bands could get in and Om got to headline and we were pissed. ‘Those damn ninth graders!’ They were the most popular band in the school.

Stef: These guys were coming up though.

Aaron: We did get to headline the [next one].

Jeff: That was vindication.

Q

Jordan: It’s always been that. That’s why it’s such a weird-ass dumb name.

Stef: That’s where I got P.O.S. from, too- Om. You know, when you’re in a punk band, you think of your punk rock name. They all have cool punk aliases. Kai picked P.O.S. for me.

[Apryl Elektra comes in and discusses her dad’s desire to paint Stef]

Stef: In the first Om full-length, we thanked ‘Those Little Bastards TPC.’ These guys made a documentary which heavily features a part that’s just a section about how much everybody hates [Om]. [laughter] We actually used a section of their documentary to open up our full-length, [a part] that was like, ‘I fucking hate Om.’ [laughter]

Jeff: We’d ask questions like, ‘How much do you hate Om?’ You guys were the first band that was actually out there doing stuff. You weren’t playing the Entry at 14, but all the talent shows, parties …

Stef: We played the Entry when I was … 15? With Sarahteen and Trilobyte.

Aaron: You guys had a posse of a couple bands that you always played with.

Stef: Yeah, lots of bands that turned into other bands. I think Falcon Crest came out of some of the bands we played with. KMB Communique …

Jeff: Wait, who from KMB was in those bands?

Stef: 21 Hats for 21 Heads. That was KMB Communique. Swiss Army …

Aaron: I don’t know if you’ve heard of a band called Soundgarden [laughter].

Q

Stef: I was 14 or 15 so, 1996?

Jeff: We were in 8th grade, so yeah.

Q

Stef: I was so jealous of these guys: They put out a 7-inch and we put out a tape.

Aaron: That cost us so much money.

Jeff: We’ve now sold through all 200 copies now.

Isaac [Gale]: I think I’ve got number 1.

Matt: Yeah, but we made like five number 1s, though.

Q

Stef: That was pretty much Kai and Mike Mictlan from Doomtree and Crescent Moon. We all played a friend of ours’ birthday party. Oddjobs played that birthday party and I talked to Crescent Moon about what he was doing. And I had heard local hip-hop from the Headshots tapes, but I didn’t put together that they were from the same scene. And Crescent Moon gave me a mixtape. Marshall (Kai) was already really into Bjork and electronic stuff, so it was pretty much right there the whole time. And then I’d rap a little bit with Mike at school.

Aaron: You had that boombox.

Stef: Yeah, I brought a boombox to school; my girlfriend at the time had a boombox and when we got to school she’d let me take it out of her car. So me and Mike would make beat tapes and just rap between classes.

Jeff: Do you remember doing Sethtoberfests?

Stef: Dude, Sethtoberfest was where it really happened.

Jeff: It was Matt on drums and me on bass and then you and Mike rapping over us playing the whitest funk.

Aaron: The Whitest Funk would be a good name for a band.

Jeff: Was there a name?

Matt: Rhythmatics.

Stef: The Rhythmatics! That was the first show! At that point, me and Mike had seen each other around but we had never really talked. We both knew that we rapped, but we played Sethtoberfest and I was freestyling with this guy Dave that I was Cenospecies with and Mike just starting rapping, too and it just happened. We set up a show at the Depot in Hopkins.

Jeff: It’s owned and run by Hopkins High School for teens to have an alcohol- and smoke-free place to hang out.

Stef: We just thought it was the dorkiest shit in the world, and it still kind of is a little nerdy, but it does a lot of cool shit. We played and that place was packed, from like the front of the stage to out the door. Just screaming and really happy. Crescent Moon showed up and rapped. That was our first rap show- our first for real rap show. My old group 2-3-7 played one show at District 202. We didn’t have any songs at all. We had two choruses …
Jeff: There was a chorus?

Stef: We had two! And we freestyled for like four hours with a 20-minute intermission.

Aaron: I’m so pissed I missed that. I was stuck at my girlfriend’s house and she was saying, ‘I’m too sick to drive.’

Stef: I remember me and Mike had never really hung out; we met at Sethtoberfest and just decided to do a show.

Q

Aaron: Well I was hanging around with Stef a lot then when he first started making beats and they were working on the Cenospecies record.

Stef: This dude would come over like twice a week and we’d watch these awesome buddy-buddy movies like brothers-in-the-woods and shit like that and he’d always fall asleep.

Jeff: He’s still like that. 25 minutes into the movie, he’s asleep.

Aaron: But I was really, really, really into hip-hop at that point. That’s what I first started listening to when I was growing up and then I got into alternative rock for a million years, and then I got insanely back into it. And Stef was like, you listen to so much shit, why don’t you just buy an MPC [sampling drum machine] to make beats?

Stef: And he bought this Roland Remix Station for like $200. And he called and said, ‘Come over and show me how to use this,’ and I looked and it and was like, ‘You can’t use this.’ It’s one of those really elaborate four-track sampler things. But I was like, ‘This is cheap; you’ll probably be able to work something out on it and if you don’t like it, then it was still cheap.’ And as soon as we sat down and tried to use it, it was like, this is not gonna happen.

Aaron: So I went back and got the real deal. He came over for a day for like three hours. We went to Cheapo, he showed me how to sample and chop shit up. The basics. And then like months down the line I came with a CD of beats.

Stef: And all of them were better than anything I’d ever made. Seriously, dude- like overnight- was the best producer I ever met.

Aaron: I remember that Bodyrock song was the first beat of mine that you ever rapped on and I was like, yes! Finally someone’s rapping on my beat! And then we’ve just been doing it ever since then. Four years now?

Q

Stef: I kind of had a jumpstart on it because Building Better Bombs, when me and Isaac [Gale] first started it was me and him playing guitar and a drum machine. I programmed all the basslines and the drums and additional sounds but right into the drum machine. It just made sense, like, we’ll add this on top of it and we’ll do vocals, but the rest of it is on here. So when it came to making beats, it was pretty much the same process. Like, pick all the melodies and then you add drums behind it, and then you rap over it. It kind of felt like putting together songs the same way. That’s why if you listen to a lot of the first beats from the False Hopes Mega and the first False Hopes [series of shorter CD debuts by Doomtree members], the beats are godawful, but they sound like a band playing. They sound stupid, but they sound like a band playing. And I loved it until this dude [Aaron] really started making bangers and shit. That made me think, maybe I can try not doing that. I pretty much wanted every beat that I had to sound like A Series of Sneaks, the Spoon record. That was my plan, because they’re so choppy and they ride so hard and completely random and all over the place.

Aaron: And I want every beat to sound like Jay-Z. And it’s still like that to this day.

Q

Aaron: All the beats that I made for Stef’s record- he put the pressure on me hard for this record. Because he called me on tour- from the first Atmosphere tour- and I was all excited because Stef’s getting bigger and he’s going to put another record out and maybe I can get some beats on there. And he called me and said, ‘Dude, I’m almost done with this record, but I want you to get a couple beats on there’ and I was like, ‘Are you serious?!.’ [laughter] He said, ‘I need you to mail me a package while I’m on tour so I can write to some stuff.’ So in two weeks, basically all the beats that are on that record [were done], and that’s the greatest moment as a music producer, because that never works.

Stef: Really quick, we should mention that the song with me and Craig Finn [‘Safety in Speed’] was produced by Lazerbeak and in the liner notes it says it was produced by me through some error between me and Marshall, who designed it, and Siddiq [at Rhymesayers] when he was doing the final check. But that should be in big-ass print that he produced that track.

But this record … I started writing the record completely on accident. I just got picked up by Rhymesayers and I was trying so hard to get a re-release for Ipecac [Neat], to like getit out there. And Siddiq was so hellbent on just putting it in the catalog. He said, ‘It’s already done. You made that record. Make another.’ And then four days later I had half a record. It just totally [flood noise].

Q

Stef: It wasn’t even trying to make a record at the time. Cenospecies broke up and I had no real intention of doing a solo record or anything like that. But then, a couple years went by and I had 16 songs and I was like, this is like a record, so let’s just wrap this up and make it a new record. But I came into Audition actually trying to make a record. I feel like it works more cohesively as a record: it fits its title and does all that stuff, where Ipecac is kind of like a compilation of stuff I’d been working on. And it comes off like a record because my life didn’t move very much for three years. I was working at Rick’s, I was writing at Rick’s, I was pissed off. So upset all the time. I wrote that whole record in the bathroom of the strip club where I was a men’s room attendant, not making any hourly, being nice to assholes everyday for tips. I’d just sit in the corner of the bathroom in a black suit writing rhymes. Black slacks and a black buttondown. After the first year I’d roll up the sleeves and wear a black bandana to keep my dreads back because they didn’t like my dreads. They were horrible and not maintained. My hair looked like shit. I just saw a video of myself at the 2004 Warped Tour and I can’t believe how bad they were.

Aaron: For beats, my process is … I just buy a ton of records and I just have to listen to all of them and take the best moments of them. Layer stuff in with keyboards and other stuff.

Q

Aaron: I usually just make beats the way I hear them and they’re usually pretty simple, like three and a half minute beats like with choruses. And then I give it to an artist and if they like and they want to use it, then we sit down [and work it out]. Stef is so easy to work with because he has his ideas and he knows what he wants and then we just change it up. Like the half-time part came earlier in the version I gave him, and we wanted to wait on that, so it came later. Things like that. But not a whole lot of things change, unless the rapper really wants to do stuff with it. But it’s so easy because Stef knows how to make beats, too so he see it from that level. It’s a lot easier than someone saying, ‘I want to spit for three and a half bars here and do a chorus for 17 and a third bars.’ So it worked out real well. And a lot of rappers rap songs and it’s just a verse and a chorus and nothing changes, but he does such a good job of writing songs as a rapper. And they have dynamics and they go in and out and they climax and that helps with my beats, too. Where we position certain instruments and where they come in.

Q

Aaron: It’s fun. No one’s going to tell me they think that bassline is a little too complicated and you should change it. I’m making everything.

Jeff: That sounds kind of specific. [laughter]

Aaron: You write for a band and it’s awesome, but it’s a different experience, because everything you think of, you put into it. So it’s a different dynamic.

Q

Stef: There is a bunch of that [samples from local bands] that’s really hidden on the first record. There’s samples from just absurd ludicrous places that I don’t even want to say. But really painfully obvious stuff that you’ll catch if you’re listening for it. But the new record I really wanted to have a blues feel when I started making the record. I just sampled Howlin’ Wolf and shit like that. And it just wasn’t working; it didn’t feel right at all. I pretty much did immediately skip to things that I thought about, but didn’t want to try, the first time around [on Ipecac Neat]. I used that Baxter sample on the first record [on ‘Kidney Thief’]. But I figured I’d just do the same thing, take the 7-inches and then play them for the bands that I sampled. So like the Killsadie thing is a super-blatant sample. I was actually trying to come up with an idea for a Minneapolis vs. Minneapolis compilation where I get local bands and local rappers to cover local bands and local rappers. That’d be fun. Just a little appreciation because there are so many bands that brought me up, locally. Even if we couldn’t find what we were looking for on a national level, we could go to a Killsadie show at the Foxfire. See a couple bands that kick ass and then see Killsadie, with their whole black-suits-and-ties thing.

Jeff: I don’t know if you were going to get back to the history stuff, but it’s really important to talk just briefly about the Foxfire. That’s why we’re a band. That place was only around for two years, but in those two years it touched so many people. So many bands.

Stef: But that’s two years of four or five bands every single night. Bands that never would have had a chance to play.

Jordan: We were there like two to three times a week.

Stef: I was there every day; I worked there and even when I wasn’t working I was hanging out there. What the fuck else am I going to do? If you’re underage and you want to go downtown, where the fuck else is there to go?

Aaron: Thinking about it, it’s really insane it was on that block. Looking at downtown now, how did that even happen?

Jeff: That place was like the catalyst for us turning from a band that played our friends’ parties to like a band that played shows. I don’t want to say professional, but that’s part of it, too.

Stef: Whether any of us actually lived in Hopkins- did any of us live in Hopkins? [Aaron raises his hand] I never lived in Hopkins, but Hopkins High School had a huge history. It made Minneapolis take a look at what was going on in Hopkins, because every time Om played, every time Plastic Constellations played in any showcase the place was full of people.

Jeff: And it was not just our friends. That was the big change. It was more than just Seth.

Aaron: When it finally started doing really well for us, we had a spot every month and we played. We didn’t even have to flyer really.

Stef: It was on the Foxfire calendar and that was enough.

Aaron: It was such a crucial blow to everyone when it ended.

Jeff: I feel like for three years after that it went down to nothing.

Q

Stef: At the Drive-In said the same thing when they played the mainroom [at First Ave].

Jeff: Did anybody see that show with At the Drive-In?

Stef: That was my first time seeing them and it’s still pretty much the best show I’ve ever seen. So many really amazing shows there. Jimmy Eat World played there. Papa Roach played there. I’m not a big Papa Roach fan, but they played there opening for Two-Ton Crutch the day their video debuted at #7 on TRL. I made sandwiches for them and went home and was like, ‘What?’

Q

Jeff: Well, we got welcomed into the bar scene.

Aaron: It’s sad to say, because when you’re growing up, you always say I’m going to be doing All Ages shows for life and all that stuff and once you get older, you get a beer and you go to a bar.

Stef: I totally don’t agree. I would play a ton more All Ages show if it was possible.

Aaron: I’m not saying we wouldn’t do it; I’m just saying we don’t know the little teeny spots.

Stef: I miss basements more than anything.

Aaron: 1021 and Foxfire ended right around the same time.

Jeff: We played the last show of both those places.

Aaron: And those were our two spots. You go and do the basement shows over in Dinkytown.

Jeff: It’s a big huge apartment complex now.

Stef: So many amazing shows [at 1021]. Song of Zarathustra. Locust.

Aaron: It isn’t the same as it was, but I don’t know the extent of what’s out there right now because I don’t really research it or I’m not involved in it as much.

Stef: The fucking Alamo House: [Buildin Better] Bombs played there for New Year’s and seeing that house was amazing. There was kids out there you never see, which is the same thing. It’s over on East Hennepin. We played there and there were all kinds of young-ass kids there, all kinds of punk rock kids you remember from the shows. We’re totally playing that shit again; that shit was awesome.

Jeff: I want to do a show at the Church.

Aaron: That’s right on 26th and Chicago.

Q

Jeff: I have an office job, but literally, half an hour a day if not more combined, I’m literally visiting our website going, ‘Holy shit. I can’t believe we’re doing all that.’ It’s exciting, man! It’s the kind of thing you dream about when you’re 14 and going to Hopkins West Junior High School and now we’re doing it. It doesn’t feel real.

Stef: I’ve been on some pretty fucking fresh tours and this is the one that I’m stoked about the most. Because it’s my first [headlining] tour.

Jeff: It’s cool that Sims is going.

Aaron: It’s weird how all this happened. For us, we finally just let our guard down and were not expecting anything and that’s when stuff actually works out. Does that make sense at all?

Stef: That makes perfect sense.

Q

Stef: Best thing ever. I got the list of 10 things I want to do before I die, and I’ve checked off four or five of them already and one of them was to make a song with the Bouncing Souls guy. Seriously and I met those guys on the Warped Tour. And Sean [Daley, Slug] put me at the poker table with Lars from Rancid everyday. And right at that poker table is where some of the Bouncing Souls guys would hang out and I was talking to the bass player a lot, just talking about fan stuff and I found out that Greg [Attonito] who’s the singer, had caught a couple of my sets. He’d just been walking by the hip-hop tent. I heard about that and got the bass player’s number in New York and I called him and I said, ‘Hey, is there any way I can get Greg’s number from you?’ And then I sent Greg a version of the song with me singing the parts I wanted him to sing and he was into it. He played it for the band and the band was into it. And that’s just how it worked.

And Craig and I had been talking about doing a song for a long time. Me and Craig and this guy [Aaron] might make a record together. Last time he was in town we talked about it. We have to start doing that. And Maggie from Digitata: I’m just a huge Digitata fan so that worked out good. That song with Mike is a song that’s been through some revisions but was actually intended to be on Ipecac. So we just wrapped it up.

Sean! Yeah I was just stoked to make a song with fucking Slug, dude! We made two and they both turned out to be good. And we made two more and we actually have an idea for a project called Hotels which is the two of us making songs in hotel rooms.

Jeff: And one of your [Aaron] beats Slug is on, right? Just as stoked as I was to hear my friend Stef rapping with Slug I was like, ‘Aaron has a beat that Slug is on!’

Q

Jeff: [Stef] sang on like three or four songs. He helps us with the niceass gang vocals; we often need another voice in there to fill it out. Sometimes Aaron and I aren’t strong enough; we’ll write parts that we can’t sing, like in higher octaves.

Stef: I helped them demo Mazatlan and I love that recording of the record. I thought it was the shit, but my tastes are a little too dirty and punk.

Jeff: We played that for people and we were really into it, like I gave it to some people who were interested in putting out Mazatlan, when we were trying to find a label. And I was so proud of it- I was just thinking they’re gonna come back and say, ‘Yes, we’re gonna take it.’ But a couple people were like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know; the songs are good, but it sounds a little dirty.’

Stef: I was so into how dirty it was. Even to this day, I listen to [John Tranberry’s] version except for ‘No Complaints’ and ‘Keep It Live.’ In my iPod it’s the Tranberry session plus my version. And you were rapping a bunch.

Aaron: We tamed it down a bunch. Stef helped me; he was the vocal coach on Mazatlan and he came through and gave me tips on delivery and stuff like that.

Stef: The Cenospecies record has a Plastic Constellations record sample, too. The connection’s been there for a long time.

Q

Aaron: We quote Sims because he quoted us and on the record I’m making with Mike [Mictlan]- I gave him the idea that- I made a beat and I did some lyrics that I’d written [for the last song on] our record, go with this. So he changes it a little bit, but he raps some of our shit. Lyrically, I respect these guys and they’re like giants to me, so we take from each other.

Stef: Doomtree and every band related with Doomtree in some way, there’s always been crossover. Sims used TPC lyrics and Swiss Army lyrics. I used TPC lyrics and Lifter Puller lyrics. TPC used Sims. It’s really super-obvious. It’s the way it should be; it’s obvious to the point where everybody knows.

Aaron: I’ve always been really intrigued with lyrical- where you take just a little teeny thing from something else and some people get it ‘cause they’ve heard it and I think that’s really cool. And I think we all like that. So when it’s your friends, you don’t have to worry about someone coming at you like, ‘You mutherfucker!’

Stef: That’s what I was worried about when I sampled the Song of Zarathustra and Killsadie songs ‘cause I’m barely friends with Travis and I’m barely friends with Knol [Tate, formerly of Killsaide, currently of Askeleton]. I don’t really know anybody else in those bands.

Jeff: Dude, we hung out with Knol for like six hours in Ohio.

Q

Stef: I’m gonna see if I can get a Jay Clark [formerly of Killsadie, currently of Pretty Girls Make Graves] remix, actually. I haven’t talked to Jay yet, but I hear he’s been making remixes for people.

Q

Jeff: It’s good that we had to wait in a lot of ways. I think when we talked to you before we were kind of bummed. It’s really for the best because it really gave Frenchkiss the time to put some resources behind it.

Aaron: I think we all kind of stepped away from it after we were done but I was just listening to it last week and I still think it’s good. I’m just glad we got to make an awesome awesome record.

Isaac: We were listening to it on the way back [from Madison] and we listened to Mazatlan, and the difference between the two is amazing.

[general cheers for Joe Mabbott]

Stef: I’ve been trying to figure out how we can get a City Pages or Pulse feature about Joe Mabbott. He makes- in the last four years, in the top ten lists of the records, he’s always got at least four of them. He’s the shit. He’s so good.

Jeff: We’ve been trying for years to make an album that really was us and we’ve come close, but I feel like this record is us and without Joe it wouldn’t have happened.

Jeff: It’s also the way it was written because Mazatlan was written over like three years because we weren’t doing shit. We wrote like three songs over the course of 2003, I think. And Mazatlan came out and this Frenchkiss thinig started happening and we were like, ‘Oh shit. We have to write ten songs in like six weeks.’

Aaron: We had like sheets of timelines. Everybody get out your timeline.

Stef: This guy is such an organized dude; he keeps Doomtree held together. I don’t want to give anybody [sole] credit, but dude handles his business.

Q

Aaron: It’s a double-edged sword because it’s such an awesome thing to finally make a cohesive record that you can listen to all the way through that we think works, but then when it came time, even on a small level, to pick a single to send off that’s going to get reviewed by even ‘zines and stuff, we were like, ‘We don’t know, man; listen to the whole thing.’

Q

Stef: It’s freaking brilliant. I can’t get over how good this record is.

Aaron: The balance- me and Jeff have always just kind of done our own thing and throw it into a song, but somehow this time we collaborated more. And it’s awesome; I’m so excited about it.

Stef: I know Beak, and I know that you have some pretty drastic ideas of conceptual-

Aaron: I wanted to call our record Dragonslayers.

Jeff: You actually pushed on me a couple of times.

Stef: I’m really into Crusades. Not The Crusades, just Crusades.

Q

Aaron: I think we took it to almost an extreme. I really liked- I’ll give Craig Finn as an example- I love how he ties stuff in: you get pieces from other stories and stuff. And I think we took it to an extreme of, ‘This is gonna be one huge story.’ I say the same line at least three times on the record.

Jeff: Aaron wrote an actual arc that the songs follow. So like, ‘When we come out of the instrumental, it’s on a beach somewhere.’

Aaron: It was an entire movie in my head.

Q

Stef: The difference between the Hold Steady and the TPC approach is Craig draws from life and then adds to his stories with characters, whereas Aaron is just flat-out taking Plastic Constellations and Doomtree and giving us all swords. It’s a really cool approach.

Q

Jeff: Track 5, ‘Sancho Panza,’ actually is about my wife. It’s my version of a love song, actually. But I knew that I couldn’t stop using we, so I made it about the two of us. Obviously my wife is a big part of my life, but our relationship’s changed a ton since the band started really deciding that we were gonna go for this and we both- this was after our friend Matt Davis died [in 2003]- I think all of us had this realization that you have one chance basically to do something and so she’s been totally supportive. She plays a huge part doing the website. Allison.

Stef: Me and Allison used to be in a band together.

Jeff: Allison played bass and Stef played drums.

Aaron: That’s how Jeff fell in love with Allison!

Stef: [He said,] ‘That’s what I want: a punk rock bass-playing girl.’ Man, I wish I could write a good love song.

Jeff: If a rapper writes a happy love song, you lose your mystique.

Stef: But that [‘Sancho Panza’] doesn’t come off like a normal love song. And I wish I could write a positive, happy love song that doesn’t come off so dark. There’s the ‘The Kill In Me;’ the only girl song on my new record is about chopping her head off and burying it in the back yard so we can sleep. [laughter] It takes all kinds.

Jeff: I’m waiting for Atmosphere’s next record after Slug find love to be like the happiest record ever.

Q

Stef: First of all, my record is dedicated to my uncle [Melvin Dortch] who passed. That song ‘Paul Kersey to Jack Kimball’ is about my uncle. On his girlfriend’s birthday, he walked across the street to buy her a birthday card and got hit by a car and then hit by another car and dragged 100 feet and killed and nobody stopped and nobody’s been arrested or caught. The whole first verse of that song is about how pissed off I am- it’s pretty much written to that guy, whoever it was and the second verse is about how nobody gives a fuck about anything anymore. That you can feel okay killing somebody and not turn themselves in. And ‘Paul Kersey to Jack Kimball’ is a direct reference to Charles Bronson in the Deathwish movies. His name is Paul Kersey and when- it’s kind of ridiculous- but in the first movie where his wife was raped and murdered and the second movie where his daughter is raped and the third movie where his best friend’s wife is raped and murdered- it’s kind of ridiculous, but whenever something really horrific happens in his life he changes his name from Paul Kersey to Jack Kimball and pulls out his gun and gets vigilante. So that’s a super-obscure reference, but I dedicated my record to my uncle and Charles Bronson and Matt Davis, also. Charles Bronson just because me and Turbo Nemesis have a really good relationship with Charles Bronson. Like from how horrible and chiseled his face is to the way he flat-out changed his life. He was a coal miner until he just decided one day [that] he wanted to be an actor. He just up and left his job and became an actor. He didn’t start making the Deathwish movies until he was like 47. I make reference to Charles Bronson a good 30 times on this record and I mention Bronson on Ipecac four or five times, too.

Q

Stef: I don’t know where it came from, or why, but it just feels like important parts of the song to me. You can’t just- especially when some of your songs come off so abstract on the first or second listen- if you can give a run down of where your head’s at while you’re recording it, it gives more real life to it. One thing as a performer and as a rapper especially- not so much as a musician, but as a rapper- the posturing of the rapper has to be completely buried. Rappers, a lot of rappers do their best to look as cool as possible and sound as cool as possible and hold the mic just so and make sure their adlibs at the beginnings of songs are so, like, keeping their image held together. All that stuff. To me, I’m gonna put the jokes that my friends are gonna get in that stuff. I want that part of my life out there as much as I want my lyrics out there. If I’m working with a different engineer than Joe, that I don’t like, I’m not gonna be calling him out, but I definitely refer to Joe and talk to Joe on the record between every song. If the take turned out good, chances are if I talked to him before the take started I’ll just leave it on there. It just feels more realistic to me. It’s a good way to create whatever story or create whatever energy you’re trying to create with the song but still keep it grounded in real life. It’s got to be.

Q

Stef: That’s one thing- I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately for this next record- and everybody’s like, ‘What’s up with punk-rap?’ There’s still people that don’t get it. There’s nothing to get. If people were uninformed and read my bio, they’re gonna be like, ‘This dude likes horrible music,’ because everybody knows that you can’t mix rock and rap. It doesn’t work and it sounds stupid. It’s not the actual mixing of the elements of music, it’s the feel behind it: it’s where you’re coming from. That’s the stuff that mixes. If you listen to my record and don’t think, ‘This is a punk rock guy,’ it doesn’t sound like a punk rock record; it sounds like a rap record. That’s just how it is. And these guys are kind of the exact opposite. They’re a very great rock band that just happens to have some of those elements.

Jeff: I think you make a good point when you say there’s nothing to get. There’s people who- I don’t know why; maybe people grew up differently than us or are older than us- but they think there is something to get. And so, we got called out for our last record calling us white-boy rappers and shit and rap-rock. 311 was mentioned in several articles and we were like, ‘What the fuck?’

Aaron: We’re getting that now when we tried to make a cohesive rock album this time and stopped with some of the rap stuff and now we get called mall-punk.

Jeff: Is what Pitchfork said. And the guy who wrote it loved it! But you couldn’t tell. He called it mall-punk! It happens.

Aaron: But we’re not used to getting reviews beyond our local press.

Stef: I’m about to get pegged as rap-rock. It’s gonna be real bad this year. The biggest feature that I have coming out is in Alternative Press and that already is going be like, ‘Why isn’t this kid king of the Warped Tour?’ ‘Cause I’m a rapper! That’s why.

Jeff: Listening to your record, I’ve said to a couple people, ‘Okay, this is the record that was just waiting to be made.’ You know what I’m saying? Like, okay, yup. I don’t really know how to put into words what I’m trying to say. Somebody was gonna make this record and you did it first. And you’re gonna do it better than anyone else.

Q

Aaron: Sample the records that you have. And Stef sampled the records he had. That’s what he had. All the records I have are indie rock records so all my beats have indie rock drums.

Q

Aaron: Ten years down the line think what stuff is gonna be like.

Jeff: We’ve toured a lot in the last year and a half, we’ve been to a lot of places, but I feel like Minneapolis is pretty unique in stuff that’s going on. You go to other cities and stay at someone’s house and look at their record collection, there’s usually one or the other. Maybe there’s some.

Stef: In Minneapolis, you can have a bill that’s Doomtree and TPC. You can have a bill that’s like the Fuck Yeahs and Brother Ali and people won’t blink an eye. If you try to do that in Chicago … like there was a Dillinger Four/Atmosphere/Sage Francis show in Chicago and there was like fights and shit. People had no idea what the fuck to do with it.

Q

Aaron: We’re at a point where we don’t really know what’s gonna happen next. We have no idea. We know what our record sounds like, we don’t what people are gonna think.

Jeff: We’re all in a similar position in that we all, like right at the same time, finally have two established labels behind us. So we just kind of make out shit, hand it off to them and see what happens.

Stef: And Doomtree is playing such a gigantic part in everybody’s like as a crew. Like I can’t imagine anything better than what it is right now. Everybody’s pieces are finally falling together. Everybody’s getting it. If that’s me or TPC or Sims or Mike or Dessa or pretty much anybody. Everybody’s got it- everybody’s got the pieces falling into place.

Jeff: I feel like there’s people all over this city doing creative stuff. Everyone’s supposrting everyone. Shit’s happening.

Q

Stef: 2005 was the first year of my life where not only did I not have a job, I didn’t borrow money from my mom. She let me know that.

Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) transcript

hey there: just to let you know, this is being presented just as i typed it into the old laptop in preparation to write the article, so you don't get to know what i asked, and i can almost guarantee there are mistakes. but here it is:

Ben Gibbard transcript

I’m just in New York hanging out and getting ready to go over and do Conan this afternoon.

[Austin] was really fucking hot and kind of miserable. The show was passable, I think; a festival’s a festival, I think, and everything’s always a little bit off. And playing outside is kind of shitty--especially when it’s hot—because nothing reverberates and you feel a little bit awkward. But it’s OK; people seemed to enjoy the show.

I’m excited about it; we’ve never done Conan before. I’ve been watching it for years. I’m kind of nervous.

That’s basically it. I think every song starts on a guitar or in front of a keyboard or in front of a computer, and can kind of construct it up from there. And I just try to write without too much editing. When I’m in a writing session or a writing mode I just spend my Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, just working on music and trying to write as much as possible and then let all that stuff sit and after the fact go back over it with everybody else. We go through the songs and figure which ones are good and which ones are bad and do that whole editing thing where I need to change this lyric and we need a bridge here. It’s not stream of consciousness or anything, but I try to write as much as I can and figure out if it’s good later.

I write during the day; I keep a pretty regular schedule just as much because that’s [how] I’ve always worked best. When I was in school, I would have my classes from nine till noon and then do all my work in the afternoon so I would have the night off. After 7 p.m. or so I just shut down. I can’t think about creative stuff; I can’t do my homework. That’s also the only time I get to have to myself. Actually, for about two months [when I was] finishing writing the record, I rented an apartment in downtown Seattle—a studio apartment in a random building—and just moved my piano and a desk in there and some really minimal recording stuff and I would just go there during the week. Just take the bus in there and work on music and then go home. It’s kind of the Nick Cave model. I just liked that idea of writing the music somewhere else—of writing the record someplace where you can leave it there. When I had all my stuff in my house, I’d be in the basement all day, I wouldn’t leave the house. My girlfriend would come home and I’d just be crazed. Because I’d been there working all morning but I can’t leave it or let it go: it’s still down in the basement like a fucking ogre down there trying to come up the stairs and pull me down there.

There’s no way to have that not happen [the music taking over your life] but at least with having the writing exist in another physical place you fool yourself into thinking it’s not happening.

It was a couple of things. Number one, I bought a piano and I own a piano for the first time in my life. The reason I’ve written things historically on acoustic guitar is because it just feels like the most pure [way]. It feels good to pick up [an acoustic]. An electric guitar you have to plug in and let the tubes warm up. It just feels really good playing an acoustic instrument. And having a piano for the first time was just really great. I think it’s also a function of what I’ve been listening to and the fact that I’ve been listening to less guitar music the last couple years. I just never felt that inspired to pick up a guitar and write on guitar [for this album] for some reason. A lot of the songs started out as playing with the computer—not electronic music—but more like finding a sample of something and cutting that up and writing a song around that, rather than something that already existed. To me, for this record, it was far more inspiring and exciting to do things not on guitar. But it’s weird because for me now that’s changed 180 degrees; I don’t if it’s just because we played with Built to Spill a couple of times, but I feel like I’m excited about guitars again. I feel like I got it out of my system. I mean, who knows? Maybe the next record will be all piano; we haven’t even started to think about it yet. At this point, I’m more excited for the next record to be more of a guitar record. We’ll see.

Somewhere between guitars and Pink Floyd. The next record will be six songs and they’ll all be 20 minutes long.

We met with everybody that could be met with and we met with the heads of Interscope and Elektra and Epic and they were just blowhards. Just dudes—and women, too—who would just get up and their whole presentation trying to sell you on the label was talking about themselves. And granted, there are people who’ve done amazing things and maybe if I had recorded Unforgettable Fire I’d have an ego about it too, but just … real blowhards. And we’re sitting there meeting with these people and all they do is talk about themselves and talk about how great their label is because they’re running it. And when we went in to Elektra—first of all, it was pretty obvious that everybody’s head was on the chopping block. You could cut the tension and the grief in that room with a fucking knife. We’re meeting with this label and everybody had their eyes sunk low and I went to ask to use the bathroom and somebody gave me shit about it. What the fuck? And Sylvia Rhone, who was running the company, was just sitting there talking—first off, Ric Ocasek is a really awesome guy, by the way. That needs to go on the record. Any comments about Ric are not directly related to Ric. They had gotten Ric to call me on the phone and try to talk me up about Elektra, but he didn’t know anything about our band, so he was just kind of making a fool of himself to me, and not by his own fault. As if I was gonna go, ‘Oh my god! Ric Ocasek! We’ll totally sign!’ I mean, I love the Cars as much as anybody, but really. So somewhere in the meeting they’re like [whispers], ‘Go get Ric!” So they go and somebody grabs him and pulls him in the room, like his presence alone is going to make this meeting go well. And you know Sylvia’s sitting there and talking all about how they’re all about artist development and they want to do the slow burn and all that shit that major labels say and they don’t mean. And I felt in my own little way like Kanye [West speaking up against Bush] on TV. When I was watching it, you could just see him getting really nervous and I kind of felt the same way when I decided I was going to stand up to this person, ‘cause I’d just fucking had it. Like you know what? Two bands that we’re friends with—Nada Surf and Spoon—and we know what happened. I mean Nada Surf had a fucking hit, and you dropped Spoon a week after their record came out. We’re friends with these bands and you’re sitting here talking how you’re all about artist development and we have two bands that we’re really close friends with that have been dropped from your label. And she was like, ‘We’re not going to talk about that now; we’ll talk about that in my office.’ So we go in the office and she gives us this story about Spoon that’s totally erroneous. All about how, ‘Well, I never met the band so we didn’t have a connection and this and that and it didn’t work out.’ Just basically didn’t try. And I saw Britt [Daniel, of Spoon] like two weeks later and he was like, ‘What the fuck? I was in her office for three hours and she talked all about how great our band was.’ I mean, [did she] not think I was gonna check up? These are my friends. Do you think I’m not gonna get the real story? Once we walked into that place and especially because of Nada Surf and Spoon, it was just a bargaining chip. It was embarassing for everybody there. Especially after what had happened to Spoon and Nada Surf, I wouldn’t be caught dead signing to a label that would do that to people.

You go into these meetings and you put your guard up and you think everybody here’s gonna be stupid and annoying and we were gonna have to go in there and pretend that we liked these people. And we hadn’t found anybody we were really excited about,and we went [into Atlantic] and it was like night and day compared to these other companies. Atlantic has had a huge restructuring in the last couple years. And I honestly can say, at this point in our relationship, that I like everybody there. And I don’t mean I think everyone’s going to do a really good job and they’re really going to move units or anything; I like them as people. The people I have to work with I actually want to hang out with, which is not something I was ever expecting from a major label situation. And we have a long way to go with these people; I’m not trying to paint a rosy pcture here, but I think that right now I feel really good about our decision and the people we’re working with. They’re good people; they’re solid, hardworking people.

And Atlantic was relatively late in the game. By that point, we were still talking about it, but it didn’t seem like anything had come up that was really worth doing. But once we sent [Atlantic] the list of demands we had written up in 1998 when we almost signed to Mammoth and were rejected scoffingly, and Atlantic said, ‘Yeah, we can do all this; let’s do it now.’

The bottom line is that Atlantic is being the kind of label that we want to be on. We’ve put a lot of work into this over the years and we’ve gotten to a point where we know what we’re doing: we know how to make records, and we know how to tour, and we know how to do press. We’re not newbies. And they recognized that and respect it; they realize that we don’t really need an A&R person. We can kind of do this ourselves and we want to sell records and we want to be successful, but we want to do it our way.

When we’re making a record—everything from the first record to this record—it’s very much about being in the moment and making the record as good as possible. None of us when we were in the studio were saying, ‘Well, I don’t know what Atlantic’s going to think about this.’ The label situation really was only positive. We never had anybody come by the studio other than to say hi. There was never any interference on that front. I think we spent less on this record than most major label releases get, and that’s mostly because Chris [Walla] produced it and we’re not paying him $1000 a day. I think about it in this way: We were able to go to a place and make a record the way we want to make it. Do we want to rent a grand piano? Sure, we can afford to do that. Oh shit, we need to have Jason [McGerr] come and re-track these drums. Fine, let’s do it. We want to mix in a good studio, not the Hall of Justice where three of the tracks are out.

People talk about going to a major label for the resources, but really, I would rather borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars from a large corporation that can afford to lose it if something goes wrong than to borrow half that from a label run by one of our best friends. Basically having our friend put his house up on the chopping block in good faith that you’re going to make a record that’s gonna sell. That’s the reality of the situation for me. So when the indie vs. major argument comes up, I say, ‘We wanted to take our time and make a record the way we wanted to make it and not have any kind of financial barriers.” And doing that on Barsuk would’ve meant a far larger risk to our friends than doing it on a major label. I feel like, given our ambition as a band and what we want to accomplish, I would never want to pull our friends into that and have them be responsible for it. This is our thing.

I feel that wherever this band is going, I feel that I have a lot of faith in the people who have been following the band over the years and let’s say hypothetically that this record does really well, exceeds everybody’s expectations. I can’t even quantify it, but at a certain point, you’re getting into more of a casual listener. And whether that’s after 75,000 or 100,000 people, who knows? Everything after that are people who are casual listeners, who probably love the music, but they also probably love Nickelback, and that’s fine—I don’t care. So you can’t pick your fans and you can’t say how much somebody likes a certain thing or how much they should like it. I think we’ll always have a really strong core fanbase of people who’ve been fans over the years. As long as we don’t turn into complete assholes—which I don’t see happening … I mean, my favorite band is Teenage Fanclub and we played a festival in Japan on the same stage as Teenage Fanclub and we got to hang out with them and I always wanted to meet them and they turned out to be exactly what I wanted them to be. Not only were they great, but they obviously liked each other, were really gracious, they were really intelligent and funny. And me and Nick were watching them, going, ‘This is what I want us to be.’ Who knows how long the band will last and what’s going to happen, but for me, it would be so great to accomplish that kind of thing. Those guys are older now, but they’re doing it with dignity and there’s something so timeless about their music. Whether or not that’s in the cards for us, I don’t know. They’ve went from little indie band through being on majors and supposed-to-be-the-next-big-thing and then that not really happening. But it’s truly all about making music for them. And we’re talking about music in ways that we haven’t really talked about before because of the new label situation. Like today: We’re taping this weird concert for MTV which is us, Mary J. Blige, Sean Paul and Nickelback. It’s just weird shit. And it’s gonna be fun; I’m not speaking disparagingly about it. Anything we’re ever gonna do for MTV is not gonna be cool: it’s going to be something like this. There’s no point in waiting for something awesome to happen with this lame multimedia conglomerate. I think the most important thing in doing anything creative is balancing one’s ambition with what’s really important, which is making good records and making good music. And that can happen anywhere: it can happen in a basement or it can happen in Madison Square Garden; it doesn’t matter.

I think with every records there are certain kinds of ideas and themes that tend to be more in the forefront in my head. I think that the album really only took shape in the last month or two of making it. You know, a song like ‘What Sarah Said’ wasn’t originally planned to be on the record for some reason. Not to sound all artsy or anything, but one thing’s that’s been kind of bothering me lately is this sense of the record as being about growing older. I don’t really see it so much as being about growing older as becoming aware of things in life that maybe you had not spent too much time thinking about before. For me personally, so much of my life now is unrelatable to other people who don’t do what I do, you know what I mean. Like normal people don’t spend their time galavanting around the country playing rock shows. Normal people don’t spend two weeks flying around with Pearl Jam and Tim Robbins in private jet. Most people don’t do that. It’s not a relatable kind of situation and the more those kind of weird unrelatable situation happen, the farther I find myself drifting from people in my life that I care about because you get farther away from reality. And for me, I try to be conscious of and present in people’s lives in my life, like family and friends and, you know, the lady at home. And really taking stock of these relationships and feeling a sense of commitment in my life, maybe because of the fact that I am getting to be that age where I want people to be in life forever. I think that for me, and i don’t know if this is the onset of pessimistic realism, I find myself seeing the end of that. A song like ‘What Sarah Said’ comes out of this story that our friend Sarah was telling us about walking with her husband one day and getting really emotional and being like, ‘God, I’m gonna have to watch you die and that really sucks.’ But there’s something beautiful about having people in your life that you care so much about that you want to see the end with them. And to me, that’s colored, certainly, songs like ‘Soul Meets Body’ and ‘I’ll Follow You into the Dark.’ I see it as an incredibly touching sentiment that your commitment to somebody makes you aware of your mortalitly and theirs.

Obviously, when you have songs about death it can come off really heavy but … even a song like ‘Brothers [On a Hotel Bed]:’ I think that’s where people are getting the idea of this theme about getting older. To me, I don’t feel like people my parents’ age have enough songs about them that aren’t fucking cheesy as shit. Any song that deals with people who are adults and their adult lives and real things people go through tend to be these really sappy, shitty, triple-AAA [Adult Album Alternative], bad, poorly written songs. The fact that it comes later in the record is indicative—I wanted the songs more sunny in the front end and as the record goes on you have songs about being older—I just wanted to write a song about people that don’t get to have songs written about them in an intelligent way.

It’s weird I sometime feel like the songs that I’m really excited about on the record, maybe other people aren’t gonna be, so whenever I find somebody who likes the songs that I like on the record, I’m really excited about talking about them. The thing I like about the line [‘Both a beginning and an end’] is [it’s about] the beginning of a relationship and the rest of your life and the end of all the anticipation. I watched this movie recently—‘Beautiful Girls’—have you seen that movie? By Ted Demme? A great movie! Kind of fell through the cracks. I don’t think it’s even really a cult film. I found it as Best Buy for $6 and bought it and thought, ‘Oh my god, this is great!’ There’s this line where he [Timothy Hutton] is sitting with Uma Thurman and says, ‘I just want a couple more of those firsts.’ You know, the first time that you talk on the phone for two hours and you can’t stop thinking about that person. And that’s the end of that. And that’s fine; that’s what happens. But I don’t think anybody that’s honest with themselves doesn’t—no matter how content they are in their life an relationship and whatever—doesn’t want another one of those. And that’s what happens with people: that’s what happens when people get to be middle-aged and they freak out. Any age, really: it doesn’t matter. You want so desperately for that to happen again; the fact that it happened once you should be content with, but if people are honest with themselves, a lot of people would give up everything they have to have get one of those again.

That record [Transatlanticism] is one big breakup record for me, too and that’s chronicling the end of a four-year relationship. It’s the kind of record that I don’t ever want to write again, for a number of reasons. I feel that I put that to bed in a way that [said], ‘That’s the end, that’s the last of those. I’m never writing another record like that again.’

I did an interview with this woman who was really kind of lame to me on the phone and then she decided she was gonna start taking potshots at me about [‘You Will Be Loved’] and how she thought it was the meanest song and how could you write it. And you know, do you even get it? To me it’s a really touching song; it’s more about saying there are, of course, faults in relationships, but there’s something really exciting about that idea and I’ve seen that play out in my own life. Things don’t work out with people and you don’t know why, but you find somebody that you click with just perfectly and it makes total sense. It makes everything that came before make more sense.

You know, the band does really well, but there are always going to be those people who are anti-sentimental that they just can’t stand what we do or they don’t get it, and it’s weird because every once in a while, I’ll run into somebody who has been through a situtation like that [a bad breakup] and found the records and say, ‘I never liked your band, but I got it.’ And I’m sorry that they had to get it that way. You know, I’m a big fucking softie. I like Cameron Crowe movies. People ask how come I write almost all love songs. But 90% of all the songs ever written are love songs. You know, Stephen Merrit wrote 69 of ‘em. And it’s genius. People can figure out how to make billions of dollars and quantum physics and how to get to the moon and how to clone a pig and they still can’t figure out the matters of their own heart and that’s why love songs will always be applicable. It is the most base emtion and the most least understood thing in the world, and that’s why i don’t think there’ll ever be a shortage of information on the subject.

I think the most important thing is to never specifically refer to anybody. I think the trick that I get away with is that the songs that people think are really personal aren’t. There are songs that are more applicable to my life than others, but hopefully they’re either being presented in a way that they can be universally understood and hopefully appreciated or they’re so specific that it’s the details in the song that are important, and not the actual narrator. As far as personal problems, I’m not going to tell you where my moles are or who was the greatest lay of all time or the worst or whatever; I think that maybe some of the appeal of the band is that the songs appear to be incredibly personal but even if they’re personal songs, people can relate to them in a way that’s exciting and apply them to their own lives, because some of the songs are so specific in their construction. There are certainly elements in my own life or in my friends’ lives that I would never want to put into a song but a song like ‘Styrofoam Plates’ [about an absent father who passes away and the narrator’s lingering resentment], I did get permission from the person first. I told them about it and played it for them and he was really touched by it and moved. I think in a weird way, just in that situation, I think that maybe having his dad—and I’m not patting myself on the back or anything; it’s just the reality of it—it gives them a legacy outside of their own lives. I mean, that song will hopefully resonate with people. Growing up, I was a huge Kerouac fan and to me it was as much about Kerouac as it was about Neal Cassidy and you have this character who lives forever because of their proximity to this person who was able to document them, that’s really exciting to me. That’s the reason why we have a song like ‘Song for Kelly Huckaby’—my friend Kelly: that song will always be around for him and for his kids. And I’m not saying this is all a masterplan, but I’ve always been into that design of deifiying these normal people and it makes them into something really exciting. That’s always been really appealing to me.

I think that Conor [Oberst] does that really well, too [making personal moments into music]; it’s all about the details. To me, you have such a broad palette to work with when you’re writing music and I think it has as much to do with ability and aesthetic as anything else. A great song is a great song no matter what, but I can’t imagine writing a song I didn’t want to be about something. When I start writing lyrics, [I think] ‘What’s this going to be about? How am I going to make this be about something?’ It’s one of the reasons I love Raymond Carver. I love these little tiny, you know—one of my favorite Raymond Carver stories is about this kid who’s walking down the river and he sees this other kid fighting to pull a fish out of the river, he’s trying to catch it and they both help each other catch the fish. They never even get each other’s names;t hey’re trying to figure out how they’re going to divide it up and who’s taking the front or the back, are they gonna cut it in half? And they eventually cut the fish in half and the kid goes home and he want to show his parents the fish and his parents are fighting and he brings the fish in and he’s all proud and thinks that the fish is gonna actually stop his parents fighting. Like they’re actually gonna pat him on the back. They just basically say, ‘What is this shit? This thing stinks get it out of here!’ and they take the fish and throw it in the garbage. And the kid’s just destroyed. That’s a really dramatic kind of example, but it’s about something. And what the story is about is not really dealt with specifically in the plot of the story. And that to me is just so great. I mean, I’m certainly not comparing myself to Raymond Carver. I try to find places to put that in the songs; sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t.

My favorite song on the record is ‘Different Names.’ I don’t know if that’s going to be a crowd favorite, but that’s really exciting to play live. I like the fact that the song—it’s the same song, but it’s two very different interpretation of the same basic theme. And that one, we have a lot of sequencers and stuff going at that point, but it’s exciting because I get to kind of do this Garth Hudson-style two-handed keyboard thing where it’s like playing both keyboards at the same time. It’s surprisingly accomplishable; I wasn’t expecting it to be. I’m really enjoying playing that one and ‘Your Heart is an Empty Room’ is really fun to play, too. Those on the new record are definitely my favorite right now.

It’s been great. First Ave is just fucking great. With the exception of the RF problem in there, which is like this weird kind of thing that happens with the guitars, there are like weird frequencies. Whenever we’re doing this tour cycle, there are certain people and certain places, certain things that, without sounding overly sentimental, it feels really familiar. It feels kind of like home, you know? I know that every record I’m gonna talk to Jack Rabid [from NY magazine The Big Takeover] and I love seeing that guy and I’m really excited to hear what he thinks about the record because I just really respect him. There’s the people like that that we talk to and also the places that we go to play. Seeing Conrad at Frist Ave and everybody that works there and everybody is super-friendly. We’ve been going there for four years now and before we were playing Seventh Street, which I’ve got to say, the day that we moved into First Avenue from Seventh Street I was so fucking stoked. I fucking hated playing in that little place. It’s just so filthy. Like the downstairs? The dressing room? There’s one bathroom and you can’t takea shit in there. The bathroom thing is the biggest deal: in smaller clubs we have this little inside joke called GBBD: Girls’ Bathroom Before Doors. If you don’t hit the girls’ bathroom before doors, you’re gonna have to hold it.

First Ave is one of those clubs that we’ll always go back to. We’re not gonna play anywhere bigger in Minneapolis; if it takes playing there three nights, we’ll play three nights. It’s a very comfortable place, we know the score in there, we know everybody that works there. It feels really comfortable.

And I have some family [in Minnesota], too. And I’ll actually be there for a couple days after to spend some time with them.

We haven’t even started working on [the new Postal Service record]. Jimmy [Tamborello]’s got the new DNTEL record and a record called Jane’s Figurines which is all kind of techno which is really good actually. I think that he was sort of getting writer’s block with the DNTEL stuff so he decided he was going to start making some dance jams and it’s fucking awesome. I think maybe early 2007 is the earliest we’re gonna get anything going. For us, I think we just want to keep it fun and keep the emphasis on why we were doing it in the first place and not get overly ambitious. There’s not really enough time to do one band let alone two. We’ll probably get the record done and do a U.S. tour. And also we borrow Jenny [Lewis] from Rilo Kiley so getting her away from her schedule is difficult. I feel like it’s an indie rock summer camp kind of thing where, in an alternate world, this could be the greatest band ever, but it’s just not meant to be. When we were touring, it was still new and exciting because we were all friends, but we’d never played music together. But then towards the end of all that touring—it wasn’t even a lot—it started getting kind of difficult; we started turning into a real band. With real tensions and everything. And I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore if it’s gonna be like this; I already have to do this with one band.’

As far as Death Cab goes, I think the way I stay sane is only really looking at my life in four to sixth month intervals. So I know where I’m going to be until May of next year. You know, every once in a while people try to get really philosophical and deep and ask how long the band’s gonna last, what’s your next direction. I don’t fucking know; the band could last another ten years, it could end in six months. I don’t know. We get along great, we enjoy each other’s company, we’re playing better than we ever have before; that’s all I can really take stock in at this point. Bands break up; that’s just what happens. My only hope is that whenever we decide to stop playing it’s for a real legitimate reason and not because somebody calls someone else a fucker.

I was just talking to a friend of mine who writes for Spin who was going off to interview this band for a story who will remain nameless, but they’re just a crappy pop-punk band. And he was talking about how they all want to be painters and they’re doing art: no they’re not! What the fuck? I know what my limitations are: I make music, I think I do it pretty well. I’m just gonna stick with that; there’s not enough time in my life to start writing screenplays or something like that.

Nick Harmer (Death Cab for Cutie) interview transcript

hey there: just to let you know, this is being presented just as i typed it into the old laptop in preparation to write the article, so you don't get to know what i asked, and i can almost guarantee there are mistakes. but here it is:

Nick Harmer Transcript

I’m in Los Angeles, Calif.; we’re going to be heading to the airport soon because we’re going to try to fly into Austin, Tex., today. We’re supposed to play Austin City Limits tomorrow. I don’t know, though: the weather … we can’t afford to get stuck there. We’ll be able to get in, but we might not be able to get out. It’s going to be an interesting next 24 hours.

It’s pretty much song by song; there’s not a set sort of pattern that we fall into. I mean, it’s a pattern in the sense that Ben will bring a batch of demos in, you know a good 20 or 25 of ‘em, and then we just sort of sit down as a band and start going through them song by song. You know, talking about ‘em, playing some of ‘em, figuring out which ones we like and which ones sound good. The collaboration kind of starts then when we just weed out which ones we want to start working on. And then from there, some songs get deconstructed pretty far and rebuilt. Some songs don’t change at all. But we always say it’s less like politics and chemistry and more like farming, if that makes any sense. Ben brings in a bunch of seeds and we all till the earth and plant them and kind of nurse them along and see what grows.

Ben had written the lyric and the melody and the beginning part (the piano stuff on it) and we as a band started going over it and came up with the outro part, which was more my collaboration on it. Instead of making it a big rock ending, I thought it would be fun to try bringing it down really simply and just kind of letting it be somber. I just did a lot of the stuff that went into the arrangement of it. That’s what I added to the process. We all chip in along the way; Chris, as producer, makes executive decisions within that context, too.

The Elektra thing was hilarious. They were obviously on the outs as a company and their president at the time wasn’t a very honest person. It’s just so funny because we’re friends with Spoon, we’re friends with Nada Surf: we just wanted to ask them to really confirm or deny anything that [those bands] are telling us and get some real truth, so I don’t know why they would think that they could pull one over on us. But you know, they still tried and it was horribly embarassing for everyone concerned because sitting in the room felt just really not cool. I’m glad we went through it because it just made the conversations that were good and great with Atlantic that much better because you just knew: The Elektra stuff was what we expected it to go like, and the Atlantic thing, well, we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t great.

People just started approaching us. For a long time, we just believed that we would never go to a major, not because we never would want to be on one but because no major would have ever given us the kind of contract that we wanted to have. It was more of a ‘If you’re not give us what we want then we don’t want it anyway” kind of thing. And then people started coming around again, so we would just send out this long list of bullet points of things that we would look for in a contract and things that we would want [in order] to protect ourselves. It was completely generated by having conversations with friends of ours who had gone through the situation, gone through major label situations that were just awful, and you know, living and learning and passing on their wisdom to us. Saying, ‘Be careful of this and don’t do that and make sure that you watch this ‘cause this is a lie,’ and that kind of stuff. So we just put it all together in a big list of things and that list was so laughable ten years ago or five years ago, 1.) because we weren’t a band that had any kind of clout or muscle to move around in negotiations but 2.) jus