So you’re back in New York for the first time in quite a while …. you’ve had a bit of a crazy whirlwind tour lately haven’t you?
Well yeah, actually the last five tours have melded into one Voltron-beast of a tour. We went on our first tour last November and we’ve had little week-long or two-week-long breaks here and there, but… you know, we’ve been touring the United States and Canada pretty much non-stop and then we did one trip to the UK a few months ago.
How’d that go?
It was a lot of fun. It was really quick, we went over there for a week, a week and a half. We did some club shows, a couple of our own and then we opened for a band called Fanfarlo, an English band we did our first tour with. It went well… it was my first time in the UK. I felt very proud going to a new place because I had something to offer, you know.
You were going to share something with the rest of the world.
Yeah as opposed to just being like a tourist with a camera around my neck and some softguarders (?) or something like that.
Did you do any of that as well though?
Yeah, we scheduled our trip so that there was four or five days of absolute non-stop just playing and doing radio things and this and that, but… in the five days that we had we had two very true days off to hang around London and go to Great Bulleen and go to the Tate Modern and go to some parties and hang out with some friends of ours who are in bands over in the UK. So yeah, it was a lot of fun.
So I look through the history of your band over the last year and a half now, and one thing that really struck me is that all these people talk about festivals like CMJ and SXSW as being the opportunity to break a band and get a deal, and you’re an example of a band that’s gone to CMJ and more recently SXSW and gotten a deal out of it. Is that fair to say?
Well, I would suggest that CMJ and SXSW were really helpful for the fans but weren’t necessarily what got us a deal. In our specific case, CMJ was in October and by that point we were really kind of figuring out what labels really seemed to be kind of on our side and the ones that were offering us artist-friendly deals and stuff like that. CMJ was a lot of fun, and it kind of seems like that’s when it was all coming to a head or coming to a boil. But I attribute us getting a deal to just doing a lot of hard work and hard playing here in New York, playing a lot in the streets and in the subways and playing as many stage shows as possible. I think that’s really how the labels here in New York that eventually signed us found out about us.
I don’t often hear about bands making a mark and playing in subways and things like that. Is something that is pretty common in New York?
I think it’s very common to find a lot of street performers in New York, but I don’t think there’s a lot of bands that play on stage that also go down into the subways. And so for us it seemed like a natural fit and a good way to kind of stick our neck out there a little bit – which I firmly believe, if you’re a band in New York, which is one of the most competitive music climates there is, you have to find some kind of way to stick your neck out there.
I think mostly because not only are there so many bands here in New York but there’s just loads and loads and loads of venues and lots of little venues will book you if they think you can bring twenty or twenty-five of your friends out to drink beer. What we realised is that as fun as it is to play to your friends, you have to branch out and meet strangers too, you have to find strangers that want to hear your thing. So for us the natural step was to play in the street. If you play in the street you’re going to meet hundreds of people as opposed to a dozen. And if you can find a few of those people who get attached to it in some way then you’re making some progress.
It certainly is an interesting way to look at it. There are so few artists that you hear those sorts of success stories about and it’s fascinating. Did that come before the stage performances, the street gigs?
We were composing the songs to play live, electric and we certainly did a little bit of that. We did that a lot in the Winter. I think we played our first show in January of 2009. We did that quite a bit, then we said to ourselves, ‘Well, as soon as it gets at least a little bit warm, we want to try to find a way to play these songs publicly without electricity but in a way that kind of reflects the full arrangements’. And we also recognised that the band had certain acoustic instruments that could fill up a subway station. We have instruments like the harmonium, glockenspiel and banjo and of course stuff like acoustic guitar and then Jake would play marching drums and stuff like that. So we wanted to do something more than just acoustic guitar and we felt in that way we could still put the music forward in a true light, in a way that still connected to the electric and electronic composition.
It almost feels like that there’s an alternate, acoustic version of the album as a possibility…
Yeah, absolutely! We play all the songs in different formats… to us it almost feels like there’s three versions. There’s the record… the live, electric stage show I think feels different enough from the record, there’s a lot of different feelings that come across and it’s a little more over-driven and a little more aggressive…then the acoustic versions are a slightly more toned down and just feel more wooden. It’s cool because we still get to experience all three of the different realms. If we’re going to do a radio show, we’re going to do something fairly acoustic sounding.
And you do have the album coming out in Australia, it’s finally being released next month and in a couple of hours it gets released in the UK. Is it quite exciting for you guys that this international exposure is now coming along?
Yeah, we’re really happy that people in the UK and Australia will have a chance now to find the music. We don’t really have any plans for world domination or anything, but it’s nice knowing that it’s available and if someone liked it they would have the opportunity to find it. For us, the process of making a record is kind of like an inward thing of self-exploration but then the process of playing music is one of making connections with people and hopefully finding a validating experience of one thing that resonates with them in any way whatsoever. So the idea of it being available there is really kind of titillating I guess.
And can we expect you down in Australia any time soon to give us that extra bit of interaction?
I sure do hope so. I can’t say that there are any dates set quite yet, but I can tell you for sure that if we were to find some places to play over there, that everyone in the band would want to hop over in a heartbeat.
Well we certainly hope you get down here. We’ve been talking about the street gigs you’ve played and the actual venues but you’ve also played Lollapalooza this month. How was that experience? That’s quite iconic over there.
Lollapalooza was the first festival I was even aware of as a young kid, and that was back when it was like a touring festival. When I found out that we had the opportunity to play Lollapalooza, I froze, you know? In a good way, but I guess it was a little daunting! The good thing is that we didn’t just play Lollapalooza: in the months leading up to it, we kind of did a string of festivals that were kind of ramping up towards it. We got to play the Harvest Of Hope festival in Florida and we played the Sasquatch festival which was an absolutely beautiful festival in Washington state. Then we did Lollapalooza and just about a week after Lollapalooza we played another really beautiful festival on a really nice stage in San Fransisco called Outside Lands.
We’ve done four of them, and we’re getting more familiar with what it feels like to play a festival and now I guess we feel a little more prepared to go over and do Reading and Leeds in the UK.
There you go, you’re getting ready for them all now!
Yeah, exactly. It’s a lot of fun too. The process of playing a festival is really different from a normal show and so far we’ve been lucky enough to actually enjoy the festival themselves as listeners as well. We’re hoping we can continue that trend.
Going to festivals are you getting unique opportunities to see a lot of the bands you’re fans of and bands that have influenced you? That must be a great thing to be involved in so early on in the process.
Absolutely. When we were in Sasquatch, not only did we get to see bands that we really admire, we got to chat with them and pick their brains a little bit. At Sasquatch I got to see Neon Indian and Girls and The Dirty Projectors, Broken Social Scene, The National… same thing as Lolla: Hot Chip, The Arcade Fire… we saw some other bands that we’re good friends with like Miniature Tigres, The Antlers, Jukebox The Ghost… it’s hard to feel a sense of community sometimes in music because everyone is moving around so fast but those are unique opportunities to feel that so it was a lot of fun.
I’ve read a lot about the band and have listened to the music myself and gotten an idea of it, but who has influenced you growing up and who would you point to as an inspiration for the album Weathervanes?
It’s a really simple question but the answer’s complicated in a way, I guess mostly because everyone in the band takes music like we take vitamins. We try to get as much nourishment as we can from lots and lots of different places. I’ve always felt that the biggest influence on the way that the record sounds is really the instruments themselves that we sort of came into in a variety of ways.
For instance, the banjo… I know that some people have listened to our music and they’ve heard the banjo and they think of Sufjan Stevens. And Sufjan Stevens is someone that I really really love but I also love him enough to know that our music is actually quite different from his, simply because – well, for a lot of reasons – but I don’t actually play the banjo in any proper way like he does! The banjo that I have was given to me by my stepfather and it’s the reason I play the banjo. If Sufjan Stevens saw me play the banjo he would know that I have very little understanding of traditional bluegrass playing or I guess the folkier style that he goes for.
The record kind of sounds the way it does because of the instruments we found. The harmonium is something that I had shipped from India. I know that I was really into the idea of harmonium because in high school I was a really big Jeff Buckley fan and Grace was one of my favourite records. There’s some harmonium on some tracks and it sounded quite beautiful. Even like Radiohead have certain tracks with harmonium, like Motion Picture Soundtrack from Kid A. So yeah, this record is kind of a collage, inspired by the instruments we were finding and the dream logging I was doing as kind of lyrical fodder for the songs themselves.
But beyond that, I can tell you when I was putting the band together or conceiving the notion of there being a band, I was finishing up college in Washington DC and there were a handful of local bands there that I was really inspired by. One of them is a band called Le Loup, one of them is a band called These United States and our friend played in a band called Jukebox The Ghost. I think some of our songs certainly, to me, felt like nods to them or nods to the local Washington DC music scene that I very badly wanted to be a part of.
I think when people compare our music to this or that, it’s inevitable. But it’s a reminder that from song to song, each song is coming from a very different place. I think there is a human instinct to put things into categories, and as long as that’s a constructive way for someone to find music then that’s a positive thing.
Since you recorded the album – talking about new instruments – have you found anything new that we can expect to hear from you in the future?
We’ve recently acquired new things since then but I don’t think there’s any pressure or need to assimilate them into the band. For me, my kind of approach to music is that I always want to play on new instruments because it makes the process of writing feel foreign and different and fresh. Sometimes when you’re playing on a new instrument that you’ve never played before, you’ll do something musically that you wouldn’t have done on an instrument that you’re more familiar with.
I recently got a sitar from China. They’re about seven feet long and one foot wide, and it’s a 21-string…like a harp, sort of…but I have one and I’ve just had it set up in my bedroom for a little while, and I’ve been messing around with it. For me, it has to do not necessarily with thinking it’s going to be on the next record but more of a way for me to unhinge my neurons a bit and look at music from another angle and to find something different to do with my hands. Which for me kind of helps music retain its mystery a little bit as opposed to being something that you’ve figured out and you feel like there are a set number of patterns you can follow. But yeah, that’s kind of the drive for me to finding new things to play on.
That’s fantastic, I love hearing things like that. Looks like we’re just about out of time, so we’ll leave it at that. Have such an amazing time at Reading and Leeds festivals, it sounds like you’re all prepared and ready to go!
Thanks so much, we really appreciate it!
Not a problem, we hope to see you down here sometime soon and I really do genuinely look forward to seeing you guys live.
Oh yeah man, I can’t wait to make it over there.
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Weathervanes is in stores now!
Transcription by Nick Mason
