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Heads Up: Warpaint on Making People Dance, Abandoning the Album, and Reaching Their Prime

Music InterviewWeston PaganoComment

"You wouldn't know it but you're really in your prime," coos the opening line of Warpaint's latest release, 2016's Heads Up. That sentiment, along with the band's first single to chart in the US, "New Song," has lead the aptly named album as a bold statement from a group of artists now fully embracing the sort of tight, danceable pop they had only flirted with before.

Warpaint's meandering art rock has always been equal parts groovy and moody, though this third full length sees Emily Kokal (vocals, guitar), Theresa Wayman (guitar, vocals), Jenny Lee Lindberg (bass, vocals), and Stella Mozgawa (drums) hone their craft into its most accessible form yet. In the year following its release, Heads Up has gone on to result in, among other things, an opening slot on Depeche Mode's global Spirit tour, and even an awkward encounter with Shia LaBeouf, though the album was nearly never made at all.

Following their recent performances at Chicago's Lollapalooza and Subterranean (pictured below), Transverso spoke with Wayman over the phone to discuss this and more, catching her in a particularly zen moment immediately following a session with Depeche Mode's tour masseuse.


TRANSVERSO: What's it like touring with Depeche Mode?

THERESA WAYMAN: It [has been] incredibly fun, and it is such an honor to be opening for them. The reality of it didn't quite hit me until we got to that first venue – they have this whole world that they set up. They weren't one of my main influences growing up, so I have appreciated the magnitude of what was happening this whole time, but I didn’t quite get it as much as Jen, who has been heavily influenced by them.

With Heads Up being about a year old now, how has your perception of it and what you accomplished changed over the course of that time?

Well I'm still really proud of the album, and I think I'm I am even more proud of it than I was when it came out because I've got some distance and I realized some of the things that I was stressing over weren't as big a deal as I had thought at the time. It’s nice to have that experience, as opposed to [feeling] like something still isn't right. I just feel really at peace with that album. I like it a lot, and I don't listen to it that often. I don't really listen to any of our recorded music that much, but I feel like they’re some of our strongest songs, and I love playing them live.

I feel as though they walk the line of being accessible and yet their own unique thing. I think we have other songs and other albums that do that too, but as a whole I think we accomplish that more with this album and I appreciate that. That's pretty much been my goal with writing music for a while now; to kind of figure out how to perfectly be obscure yet understood. I don't know why I have that drive, but I do. I think some artists are completely okay with not being understood, that's not their objective. Other artists really want 100% to be in the mainstream and be understood. I just like finding the balance somewhere in between.

Heads Up does seem decidedly dancier, poppier and more accessible than your past work in some ways yet still does a great job of maintaining your kind of signature vibe and brooding quality. How much of that was you know a conscious will to adapt and how much of that is just a natural evolution?

It's just a natural evolution for me, personally. Like I was saying, I really feel a drive to be understood and not to be too left that only a small percentage of people understand it. I think that you can be unique and individual and still be understood if you work and find a perfect channel for that. So I guess that was a conscious effort to be that way. “New Song is quite a bit more accessible than anything [we had previously done], but even if you have a song that has a weird abstract kind of format, like “By Your Side” or “So Good,” I think it's great to still be vivid in the sounds and choices of guitar lines and bass lines and how long you're staying in a section. I wanted all that to be really succinct and really vivid even if there was an odd structure that you're playing off of.

Taken from Warpaint's new album 'Heads Up', out now: http://smarturl.it/HeadsUp Directed by Warpaint Edited by Warpaint and Mia Kirby http://warpaintwarpaint.com https://twitter.com/_warpaint https://www.facebook.com/warpaintwarpaint/?fref=ts https://www.instagram.com/warpaintwarpaintofficial/

I remember hearing you originally planned to release these songs as kind of a series of singles instead of as a full record. What changed that ultimately resulted in this album coming to be?

Well we started writing these songs with that in mind, but we weren't all on the same page about that, actually. It ended up being that certain people needed more time away to not be writing, [so] you didn't want the pressure of that. So some songs got written during that time, either individually or off in pairs, and then we just kind of kept them and didn't act on finishing them. Then we just decided we would just come together and do an album, and then that made more sense. But that idea is still out there and lingering for us, and I think that we might try to do that. We actually have already written a couple of songs over the summer, and we're going to continue while we’re on this tour.

We have a lot of downtime on the tour – well, more than normal – because of Depeche Mode. They have the luxury of being able to [take days off in between shows], which is not what we [usually] do, so we have some time to write together. We're just going to collect songs and see what happens, and maybe do some individual releases or an EP or two. I think we want to just create more content for ourselves and keep putting music out but not have to have it be this one big project, and just try a little bit of a different approach.

This album was produced by Jake Bercovici (Julian Casablancas + The Voidz), whom you also worked with on your debut EP, 2008’s Exquisite Corpse. Was this a sort of full circle moment?

Yeah, definitely. He's grown a lot since then and so have we. We co-produced it – a lot of this stuff was actually produced on our own in our own studios. Stella and I started “So Good” – the bass and original electronic drum beat [and] Jen’s guitar [were] originally all recorded at Stella’s house. We all have these kind of set-ups in our places and we've been using them, so that was our own production. Same with “New Song.” And then there were things added once we went into the studio and all of us decided to finish this album and finish the songs, so it really was a collaborative production.

But it was definitely full circle working with him and realizing that when you start with something that works for you why not stay with that thing, you know? That became really evident, it was like coming home. I think we're going to continue to do this because we already have too many minds in this project and too many opinions to really add another, let alone someone that we don't know. Then we [would] all have to establish our own relationships with that person, otherwise we're not going to feel comfortable, and you have to feel comfortable when you're making music. I don't think I would really want to invite some unknown person in this scenario, at the moment it's already strenuous enough with our relationships. That being said, it’s good for us to have someone who's objective and can kind of police us a little bit and keep us happy and in check and even, because our band is really about being an even collaboration.

I appreciate how your live sets still include a surprisingly large amount of songs from the Exquisite Corpse EP, as bands don’t often perform much from nearly decade-old debut releases. That being said, you seem to only play one track off of your first full album, 2010’s The Fool. How do you decide what makes it to the stage in 2017?

Well there are many factors that go into picking them. One is we know there are certain songs that our audience likes more, so we pick those. We try to keep a pretty balanced set in terms of grabbing, like, two on average from each album, including the EP. Sometimes it gets weighted in another direction if, say, we know that somebody has really requested to hear “Stars,” but we also still want to play “Elephants” and “Beetles” as well. Then we'll have a debate about it, and every now and then it will just end up that we are playing three of those EP songs because somebody wants to hear “Stars.”

It's not usually weighted towards EP, per se, but we always play EP songs. And that's actually been happening a lot more recently, too, because we didn't for a while. We played “Elephants” pretty much our entire career as a live band, but “Stars” we didn't play for years. “Beetles” we didn't play for years. Those are the main ones. So then we started playing “Krimson,” and we just found a way to start the set with “Heads Up,” and then mashing up into “Krimson,” and so then that’s another EP song added. It works as a great start to the set, and then if you want to play “Beetles” and “Elephants” then you’ll have three songs again. So there are so many factors that go into it. So yeah, I think it's been heavier on EP lately, but it hasn't always been like that.

Official music video for "Stars" by Warpaint, taken from the Exquisite Corpse EP (Manimal Vinyl). Filmed in the ashes of the Angeles National Forest by Adam Harding. Edited and directed by Adam Harding and Burke Roberts © 2009 http://www.adamharding.com http://www.bizzurkearmy.com http://www.myspace.com/worldwartour http://www.warpaintwarpaint.com/

Has the live aspect of your music affected the writing or recording at all? Are you ever surprised by how a song is received live? I hear you’re starting to get mosh pits now.

Well the reason we made this album more dancey is because we like playing songs live that people dance to, and that we can dance to while we're playing them. I think that's one of my favorite things to do, so I would continue to want to make songs that have a pretty a good groove. We've had a couple of mosh pits. They always happen at the weirdest times. Or crowd surfing, [we’ve had’ people crowd surfing to “Undertow,” or one time it was “Set Your Arms Down,” this really heroin-y slow song. [Laughs] I never understand why or how when our fans start moshing, but it can get pretty rowdy sometimes.

In San Diego there was a fight and somebody got punched. We have some fans in the front row that get there early and stake out their spots, so if somebody comes and tries to take that spot that's not really a good scene. One time we were in Austin and Shia LaBeouf came to our show, and he made his way up towards the front, but he didn't realize that the people up there weren't just going to let him in. I don't even know if they knew who he was, but they were not happy, and so he kind of pushed out. That was another one of the tense moments that's funny.

That's hilarious. Did you recognize him from the stage at the time or did you find out after?

I didn't at first because he was wearing a hat and stuff. Then I saw the commotion and I was like ‘What's going on?’ It took me a couple of looks to see that it was him. I try not to get involved unless something really goes wrong because I don't want to stop the show.

Whenever I attend your shows they seem pretty peaceful. At Bonnaroo 2014 I remember there was a guy in the front row who wouldn't stop throwing roses at you.

Yeah, I remember that. [Laughs] That's nice, I don't mind that. People like to throw bras, too. That’s happened so many times.

I really enjoy playing live and I think one of the most important objectives to playing live show for a band is to make them dance and have a good time and maybe even do a mosh pit and stage dive. The shows that I've been to that I've enjoyed the most, that's what's happening. Like Little Dragon or Thee Oh Sees – I mean Thee Oh Sees just play nonstop. They go on, they just rule the whole time, and then they get off the stage. They don't do an encore, and the people, they’re just out of their minds. And that's the point. I don't really think that live music should be too heavy. I think it should be a physical body experience where you're just really enjoying yourself. I also enjoy going to The Fonda Theatre in L.A. where there's a balcony and you have seats and you just sit and just soak up something, maybe a little music that isn't just about dancing and getting wild. So there's other aspects, but I think for the most part I just love making people dance. I want to do that more and more.

Produced and directed by Robin Laananen Featuring work from the book: US / Then buy here : http://www.setantabooks.co.uk/warpaint/ US / THEN is a deluxe hardback photography book published by Setanta books featuring images of the rock band Warpaint.

During “So Good,” which I think is one of the strongest tracks on the new record, you and Jenny trade instruments onstage. Did you trade places in writing and recording that one as well?

Yeah, I basically had written that song on guitar. It was just generic chords, just to facilitate the melody, and I didn’t want them to be in the song. I wanted to turn it into a dance song, so I knew what kind of beat I wanted to have on there, and I gave Stella a general idea of what I was thinking and she programmed a beat. I had an idea for a bass line so I just did it instead of waiting and giving it to Jen, and she's happy to switch and she likes to play guitar. So it worked out perfectly and I we just gave her the song. She came over I recorded her guitar. And then Emily put some on later when we were all in the studio finishing the album and making the album. That was earlier, during the days of working on releasing singles, and that was that was when that song came about.

And “New Song” as well, Jen recorded that day. I actually recorded the drums on [“New Song”] because she just needed something to play to. I recorded a little loop and then she edited [it] and made it tighter and wrote the bass line to it. It was weird, because “New Song” was written when we had the singles ideas in mind, and then Emily kind of came up with her melody for it at some point, and then that song was completely forgotten about, pretty much shelved, because there were too many different ideas about which direction it should go. So we kind of set it aside, and then Jake ended up hearing it later in the actual recording process and and was like, ‘What are you guys thinking? This song so cool, you have to do this song.’ So that's funny, because it seems we really wanted a song like that on our album, and really we weren't even going in that direction so much, and it's just kind of happened.

Heads Up’s opening line is “You wouldn't know it but you're really in your prime.” I'm always amused by how every press release for every album for every band always claims it’s the artist's best work ever, but obviously that can't always be true. Sometimes you may not realize when you're in your prime, or other times you may think you are but you're not. If Warpaint ended today, would there be a certain record or a track that you would look back on and be especially proud of, and if so, did you know it would come to hold that sort of significance at the time?

Well, [opening track] “Whiteout” is a great example, I think. I am extremely proud of that song. I didn't write that lyric, Emily did, but I like that collaboration, the way that that song came about. I love the song itself. I think it's a mature song that sounds great, [it’s] got great harmonies on it. I think we're all sort of, in a way, at our best in that song, in my opinion. I don't always toot my own horn about out music – there’s stuff that I don't like, there's stuff that I feel like falls short. But I feel good about that song. Even when that song was happening I felt that way, and sometimes I think you just know when you hit something that you feel good about. Sometimes you don't realize that there is this inbuilt charm in something that you've written, because at the time you might think that there's something wrong with it, and then you hear it a few years later and you [realize] oh, that thing that I thought was wrong actually made that song special. So I think it can happen either way. With this album I do feel as though I knew while we were making it that I was proud of it. There are still things I want to work on, but I don't question this one as much as I do the other stuff.

So yeah, I do think we're in our prime. I really do, actually. I think that we've paid a lot of dues, and we're a band that's growing slowly and getting better slowly. I think we're all, a little bit, late bloomers, and we've been at it for a while. I think we genuinely love to make art and music, and all those things are positive things, they’re good things. We’re not in it just for fame or money, we’re just doing what we do, and we're just getting better and better at it. So I think that we deserve to be able to know that we are kind of in our prime at this point.

TW Walsh on Reclaiming the Humor in Music, Collaborating with David Bazan, and Exercising 'Terrible Freedom'

Music InterviewAarik DanielsenComment

If you’ve dipped even a toe into the artful end of the indie-rock pool over the last 15 years, you’ve heard the work of TW Walsh.

The Boston musician, full name Timothy William Walsh, is perhaps best known as a frequent running mate to songwriter David Bazan, having contributed mightily to Pedro the Lion and Headphones. Bazan immortalized Walsh in verse on the 2004 song “Bands With Managers,” crooning “Vans with 15 passengers are rolling over / But I trust T. William Walsh and I’m not afraid to die.”

Walsh has rewarded that faith in a number of contexts. He is a thoughtful presence behind the boards, mixing and mastering projects for the likes of Sufjan Stevens, Ben Gibbard, Cold War Kids, The Shins, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. But Walsh’s distinct fingerprint is perhaps best observed on his latest, Terrible Freedom, released in late April. For one thing, the respected collaborator did everything on the album himself. For another, the songs are the most fully realized of his career. Building on the momentum from his 2016 release, Fruitless Research, Walsh delivers a set that is painfully insightful and darkly funny.

With its slinky grooves, shimmering synths and magnetic melodies, Terrible Freedom sounds like the lost soundtrack to a Paul Thomas Anderson film; something from the era of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, back when the auteur was scoring his films with 1970s and ‘80s pop hits, before turning to the 21st-century sturm und drang of Jonny Greenwood. For all the retro vibes, Walsh’s singing is as present-tense as it gets. You are in the room with him as he unspools yarns that provoke a knowing smirk in one moment, and make you squirm in the next.

Transverso recently caught up with Walsh for a wide-ranging conversation about drumming, reclaiming the role of humor in music, and Lo Tom, the band he recently formed with Bazan and Starflyer 59’s Jason Martin and Trey Many.


TRANSVERSO: You’re on a good streak with Fruitless Research coming out last year and Terrible Freedom this year. I know that in life, or in art, our experiences build on each other. Was there anything about the process of making Fruitless Research that you feel like led you to what you did on this new record?

TW WALSH: I think over time I’ve been developing a set of skills I’m iterating over these processes for arranging and recording music, using computers and analog instruments and MIDI. Just over time, I think since drums was my first instrument — even though I’ve often had drum machines on my records — I’ve usually felt like I needed to put live drums on a record because I enjoy playing drums. 

So on Fruitless Research, it was about half and half. But on Terrible Freedom, ultimately I liked the consistency and I liked the control I had over the sonic palette when I was using drum machine samples.

If there was any kind of iteration or development sonically, there was a couple things: One, just making a commitment to using synthetic drum sounds and the other was to — with Fruitless Research, a lot of the sound came from this distorted, highly compressed, saturated kind of sound. And with the new record, it’s more like the aesthetic of ‘80s pop music where things are clear and crisp and digital-sounding, but at the same time still warm. I think those were the two factors that were kind of an evolution.

I’m always fascinated by the way that whatever instrument somebody picks up first affects the way they think about songwriting. How do you feel like starting as a drummer has made you a different songwriter than you would be if you picked up the guitar first or picked up the piano first?

I feel pretty fortunate, because I think that drumming really gives you a good foundation in rhythm obviously. And also with phrasing. You learn syncopation early on — and how that develops is in the feel of the music, right? In rock and roll music, I really do believe that the beat is the most important thing.

Often in my arrangements, I’m building the entire song around the beat or the groove. It allows me to phrase my vocals around the beat and vice versa. It’s definitely informed my songwriting because I really focus the arrangements around the rhythm section, around the bass and the drums. It gives the music a unique feel, just because that’s the direction I’m coming from. 

You’ve obviously been a key collaborator on other people’s records. You’ve had people make significant contributions to your records. What was it like this time around to do everything by yourself?

 I’ve tried to make most of my records on my own, and I think that I had some personal failings, either in being able to sustain the attention or the energy it required or just running out of steam. I do music part-time, so I’ve had to make concessions in making records.

The last time around with Fruitless Research, I knew that I had a vague vision of something I wanted to do that was a little bit different than in the past. But I didn’t really have a clear vision of how to achieve that. So I asked Yuuki [Matthews] to help out, and it was just great. It was an ideal situation, because I could put in the amount of effort I could muster to get the songs to a demo, kind of rough form and then Yuuki would take it the rest of the way home. 

That was really good because, just at that time in my life a couple years ago, that’s what I needed because of where I was at in my life. Something just clicked since then. And I made decisions from a technology perspective, as far as the tools I was going to use for a record, which made things more streamlined. And also I think I just have more confidence and a sense of ease about creativity. It was a good confluence of those two factors.

When you’re working with somebody else, obviously they can open you up to new things. They can also — and I think it’s a positive limitation — there’s the limitation of having to work with somebody else, having to communicate with them, having to defer to them in some ways and consider them. Working by yourself, did you feel like you needed to try to impose any limits or any sort of self-editing?

 I think I’m a pretty disciplined person. The limitations, they just develop naturally. I don’t like having to sort through 100 different tracks in a music session. I think a lot of people find that empowering, just to be able to throw a bunch of stuff into the pot and then try to make sense of it later. For me, I really like to arrange, and even mix, as I go along. Every component I put into the song is going to be a key component — I try not to add anything extra.

As you go along and you’re writing the parts for each instrument and you’re building upon what you’ve done before, you just fill in the holes and you build the arrangement in a way to where there’s not a lot of duplication, there’s not a lot of conflict in the sound.

I think one of the issues in the past for me was I felt maybe too exposed. If I was doing everything myself, there was nothing to hide behind. You’re really just putting yourself out there. And I so think with this record it was really, in some ways, the easiest record I’ve ever made in that I just did exactly what came naturally in every situation.

Towards the end of the process, I started to get a little worried. Effectively, if nobody liked the record — this record is so utterly just who I am. So if people didn’t like it, I felt a little bit worried about that sense of rejection that I might feel because there’s really no separation between this record and me. That was one thing I was worried about.

We’ve already talked about your drumming experience. And obviously you’ve worked up facility to whatever degree on all these other instruments. When you think you about the different things that you played on this record, is there one instrument that you still feel uncomfortable on, awkward on, like it hasn’t caught up to the rest of it?

For me, the least fluid instrument is keyboard. Which is funny because that’s probably the most prevalent instrument on the record. For me, for whatever reason, my hands know what to do when I’m holding drumsticks. And my hands know what to do when I’m holding a guitar or bass. These patterns, there’s like a muscle memory there from having put real time in there. And I’m definitely not a technical player on any of those instruments; I’m more of a feel player.

But with piano, it’s really easy to mess up. The notes are very close together. The shapes that you need to do in order to do two drastically different chords are very similar. There’s a lot more room for error. And there’s a lot more possibilities on piano. You have 88 keys there and you have 10 fingers that can be each hitting a note at the same time.

With guitar, you can really only — maximum — hit six notes at a time. And with bass, you’re usually only hitting one note at a time. So it takes a little bit less parallel processing. Piano, for me, I just haven’t put in the hours to get really super proficient at that. I didn’t really even start experimenting with piano until I was well into my 20s. I’m a little bit behind on that.

You already referenced the ‘80s sound to the record. There’s a lot that I like about this album, but one of the things I really dig about it is that it does seem to reference — I hear ‘70s rock, I hear ‘80s rock, I even hear some John Carpenter synthesizer here and there — but it doesn’t sound like any one thing. You can’t just peg it down to one influence. I’m curious, what do you hear on the album in terms of music that you’ve absorbed over the years, music that’s been important to you over the years? What side of your musical education do you really feel is coming out on this album?

I actually don’t feel like it’s one particular side. I feel like for the first time I was able to present a holistic picture of my aesthetic and my tastes and my worldview. That’s what the picture is. It’s this complete picture of my life up to this point.

I was born in the mid-’70s; I grew up as a young child listening to my dad’s record collection and classic rock radio, which was focused on late ‘60s and the ‘70s — Zeppelin and The Stones and The Police. Ultimately Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, Neil Young.

And then in the ‘80s, MTV came along and it just opened a new window into the world of early rap and a little bit of punk and New Wave and dance music. MTV was really egalitarian; it would put on whatever videos were available and, at that time, it was just a real crazy cross-section of popular culture.

I started getting exposed to music that had lots of drum machines and synthesizers. I think that stuff shaped my taste and my worldview in a way that is more profound even than classic rock. But I hadn’t figured out how to represent that in a way that was genuine and respectful but still tongue-in-cheek, as so much of the music back then was. It just required a level of maturity and openness I don’t think I had until making this record to present it all in a way that wasn’t genre music, that wasn’t specific.

Thinking lyrically about the record, albums — whether it’s fair or not — they get read through a certain context. If you made a record in the first half of the 2000s, it was your 9/11 record. And everything that comes out the next four years is going to be looked back on as people’s “Trump record.” I just wonder, did you feel like anything about the present moment creeped into the record lyrically or aesthetically? Or do you feel like it’s not fair to read any of that kind of stuff into it?

I think 100 percent that’s the case. In fact, I feel like it’s a bit of a mission of mine, or a calling, to present a thoughtful reaction to where we are culturally and even globally. It’s difficult to do that in an artful way that doesn’t hit people over the head in a really ham-fisted presentation. Whether it be writing really topical material that reacts to very specific events or getting too dogmatic about it.

The key thing I want to get across is that it’s OK to feel the pain that the world is experiencing now, and we are as a country. The way to do that is to confront it and confront the fear and build the character that you have to embody to be able to hold that pain and hold that fear and find a way through it.

I didn’t really approach it from an intellectual standpoint, more trying to represent the way I feel about it and maybe other people will identify with it and find clues that help find a way through it.

I appreciate that approach. I feel like I picked up on that, and I just wanted to be sure about it. There are exceptions, but you read books or listen to records from a certain time — it almost feels like when it’s so specific, when it’s so topical, it feels really dated. But there’s something about a piece of art that tells you what it felt like to live through that time that feels a little more enduring to me. I guess that’s the approach you felt like you were taking.

Yeah, I think so. I think there’s two ways to create art. One is to make something that’s representational. It’s a picture of something that you can identify.

The other way is to create art that’s experiential. And it feels like instead of a representation, it’s a transformation or it’s an immersive, experiential representation. That’s more what I’m interested in — something that’s intangible, but it’s recognizable and there’s some different kind of knowledge or experience that’s transferred.

Are there any moments on the new record, small things, like a little turn of phrase here or maybe a little instrumental passage there, that you’re particularly proud of? Maybe something small that might get missed on the first listen but you really enjoyed putting into the song?

Musically, I like the application of subtle humor. One of my favorite musical things is on the song “Dead Landmines,” there’s this effected bass throughout the song. There’s an envelope filter on it; there was an effects pedal in the ‘70s called Mutron filter — it has this kind of wa-wa effect almost. But then it got really overapplied in funk music.

There’s this kind of silly, almost funny, effected bass throughout the whole song. At first, you might be taken aback by it. Some of my friends and peers were — it made them laugh. Ultimately it wins you over and it becomes this hypnotic, trance-like, almost the hook of the song. I like that idea that something that, on the surface, could be silly and humorous becomes a vehicle for something deeper.

As far as lyrics, again, a lot of lyrics make people laugh on this record. It’s difficult to do that in a way that just isn’t totally silly, but there’s a line in “Dropout” that goes “The graveyard doesn’t care for your type / When you’re eating your bananas way before they get ripe.” I thought it was hilarious to put a reference to bananas in a really serious, kind of existential song.

And then in “High Numbers,” there’s something about wearing a tie “with a presentable pant.” I think it’s time for artists to reclaim humor as almost a Trojan horse for the truth. It’s being underutilized, and I think that there’s a way to do it that it’ll make you smile, but later it’ll hit you in a different way.

I have to make sure that I ask you about this Lo Tom record that’s going to come out in July. You’ve obviously known David Bazan forever; I’m assuming you’ve known Jason Martin and Trey Many for a while too. Why does this feel like the right time to put something out together? 

You’re right — I’ve known Dave for almost 20 years now. And I met Trey and Martin through Dave; I’ve known them all for at least 15 years. I’ve collaborated with Dave consistently since I’ve met him and even after the band Pedro the Lion broke up. I’ve played on Starflyer records here and there. I don’t remember actually who came up with the idea to do a project like this. But one of us did and we didn’t really have a plan for it. Let’s get together for a weekend and try to record something.

Martin and I did some preparation in advance of that first session, and we each wrote a bunch of music. Then we chose four songs to go into the studio with. We had a lot of ideas about how we should go about tracking the stuff; not a lot of bands track live, everyone playing at the same time, anymore.

We weren’t sure if we could pull that off, just because we weren’t doing a lot of preparation — we weren’t even going to be rehearsing at all. But we decided to try it; we thought it would be an important thing to give a shot anyway. We went in there and we were able to do it. Ultimately it’s an excuse to get together and hang out whenever we can. And it started out that way; it’s become something a little more serious. It kind of remains to be seen how it will all play out.

There’s a few songs on the record that are particularly catchy. The band — it’s just a straight rock and roll band: two guitars, bass and drums. It wasn’t intentional, but we didn’t have a lot of time to do this stuff, so it’s very just straight-ahead rock and roll. It could be something that people really identify with, people who liked rock music and indie-rock in the early 2000s, people who like riffs and are just looking for something that has kind of presentation, but maybe a little bit more substance.

I don’t know — it’ll be interesting to see how people react to it.

What Now: Sylvan Esso on Radio, Politics, and Beating the Sophomore Slump

Music InterviewWeston PaganoComment

What now? It's the question posed by many a sophomore record, and Sylvan Esso's new LP of the same name has the challenge of meeting the extremely high bar set by the North Carolina duo's self-titled debut in 2014.

As the first two tracks slowly blink open their glitchy, vulnerable eyes to the crackle and spasm of both vinyl and CD skipping, Amelia Meath coaxes "I was gonna write a song for you / Gonna sing it out loud," in What Now's opening breaths. To add to the mystique, each of the ten tracks were released a week early via ten separate vinyl singles hidden in record stores across the world. Then streamed on their site for a single day, the songs came to contextually mimic the fleeting, digital reality they already explore sonically.

While Meath is spinning lyrics ranging from delaying ones own death for unexpected love to a knowing diss track that sets the radio model in its blisteringly clever crosshairs, Nick Sanborn weaves them within electropop soundscapes that seem to carry unspoken contemplativeness of their own. There are only two intersecting parts, yet they combine in crisp, impeccably moveable depth.

"Do you got the moves? / To make it stick, yeah / To get the clicks, yeah," Meath challenges on lead single "Radio." Not only do they have the moves, but if you have the pleasure of seeing Sylvan Esso perform you'll find them as organic as the vocals, never made rigid or polished despite the synthetic texture of the music they're set to.

Transverso called up Sylvan Esso to discuss What Now, radio, and North Carolina politics.

Director: Elise Tyler What Now out 4/28 via Loma Vista Recordings.


TRANSVERSO: Your new single "Radio" is a really clever commentary on the music industry and radio model. Did you find yourself becoming disillusioned after your debut?

AMELIA MEATH: Not really, mostly because we knew what we were getting into in general. There was like a sense of deepening of feeling, like all of a sudden we were in a new system, but everyone knows what the music industry is like. You know what you’re getting into. You’re selling a product and the product is your feelings, so you turn it into a song.

NICK SANBORN: The product is your feelings - that should've been the name of the record! [Laughs] I think that song, there is a lot there, because it's not just getting mad at the commercial radio market and all the nonsense that comes with that, which it is, but it's also kind of acknowledging our place in that. You know we're just as complicit as anybody else.

AM: Yeah exactly, and also acknowledging our participation and excitement around those ideas that I'm talking about.

I really appreciate the irony of the track fitting into that radio-friendly 3:30 timeframe you reference but also being decidedly FCC unclean.

NS: [Laughs] Thank you very much!

AM: You know the funny part about that is it's actually pretty clean. I say "dick." You can't say "sucking dick," but we had to bleep out [when] I say "folk girl" in it and people keep thinking I’m saying "fuck girl," which is also like a cool, new thing to say instead of "fuck boy." But we had to bleep it.

NS: [Laughs] Yeah we had to make a bleeped version...

AM: ...for radio so it sounds much dirtier than it actually is, which I kind of like.

You currently have "H.S.K.T." airing in an AT&T commercial. With many describing advertising as the new terrestrial radio, is that an idea you agree with?  

NS: It's interesting, I haven’t heard that before.

AM: I haven’t heard that either. That’s interesting. That’s a cool idea. I don’t think that’s true though, because it’s not like they say "This song is 'H.S.K.T.' by Sylvan Esso" at the beginning or the end. If they did then that would be true.

NS: Right. But in the era of Shazam I guess it's weird. I think, more than anything, what radio used to do (and still does way better than a lot of people think it still does) has just spread out into so many more types of media. People just choosing to just take music in or to take creative, you know... Oh god, I don’t want to say the word "content..."

AM: Ooo do it! Do it! Say it!

NS: They’re taking in content...

AM: Yeahhhh!

NS: ...in just all kinds of different ways. So the idea that somebody would call advertising the new terrestrial radio, that’s really interesting to me. But I'm not sure that it is, it's just a different, it's just another great equalizer, you know? That’s the thing I think we are really kind of missing right now, that there is no Johnny Carson, you know? There’s no one cultural touchstone that we all share anymore, and even the ones we do all share I think we perceive them in decidedly different ways. So it’s interesting, I haven’t thought of advertising like that. It’s interesting. That’s a good… I’m going to think about that for a long time once this call is over. 

Order "Radio / Kick Jump Twist" 12": http://found.ee/SE_Store Listen on Spotify: http://found.ee/SE_KickJumpTwistSpotify Director: Mimi Cave Production Company: Doomsday Entertainment Producer: Heika Burnison Director of Photography: Kai Saul Dancer: Gary Reagan Choreographer: Danielle Agami, Ate9 Company http://www.sylvanesso.com TOUR DATES May 2 - Berlin, DE - SchwuZ May 3 - Amsterdam, NL - Bitterzoet May 4 - London, UK - Village Underground May 5 - Paris, FR - Point Ephemere May 12-14 - Atlanta, GA - Shaky Knees Music Festival May 26-28 - Boston, MA - Boston Calling Tix available at: http://found.ee/sylvanesso ℗ and © 2016 Loma Vista Recordings.

Did you guys tackle this record any differently then your debut? Did you fear a sophomore slump at all?

NS: Of course. I mean, we did the thing that I’m sure any other band whose first record is somewhat successful does. Which is, you know, you kind of have a little very selfish meltdown.

AM: Or a very long drawn out one that last many months.

NS: [Laughs] Yeah, maybe not so little.

AM: You know, like a torrential rain. [Laughs]

NS: Yeah, and you know that is the same as anybody else, we were absolutely kind of crippled by our own worry about ruining it or whatever the fuck we could be worried about. For a while I think the real shift for us happened when we kinda realized, well, we kept trying to do [things the same way. We were] like, "How did we do this last time? What did we do last time?"

AM: Which just doesn’t work. You can’t. We just figured out that you couldn’t force it.

NS: We just figured out that we were different people.

AM: Totally, and also if you try to do the same thing you did last time then you don’t make something new.

NS: Yeah, and I think the real thing for us was [realizing] we are just very different people then the people who made the last record so there is no way we can do that again. And then you realize that kind of the two major reactions that you can have to that problem, or that people tend to have, is that they make the same record again, or that they make something purposefully weirdly different, and those are both kind of flawed reactions in opposite directions. So the only thing you can actually do is just figure out what kind of music you make now, and who you are now, and what you need to say now, and the minute we did that it all got kind of a lot easier and we stopped worrying about it so much.

AM: Yeah.

This is also your debut on Loma Vista. How has that transition worked out?

AM: It’s all pretty cerebral. The transition was just us talking to a bunch of different labels and us being like, "Okay, you can borrow our record for 25 years!"

NS: [Laughs] Yeah it’s a weird thing. I mean, it's weird to talk about it because I don’t want to downplay how helpful they’ve been, because they’ve definitely been fantastic so far and a great help in kind of executing the thing that we want to do. That’s on one half of it, and the other half it's kind of like, this is your first time with your cookies being sold at Starbucks, you know? It's tough to encapsulate all those differences without putting too much weight on them.

So you already sold out of some vinyl colors for What Now and you also sold out a lot of shows. I know it's still early, but do you feel the reception has been what you thought it would be?

AM: It’s bigger than I thought. Or it’s bigger than it has every been before, which is exciting. I am excited to go out on tour and actually see what it’s like, because that’s really the only time you really get it, is when you’re in front of people.

NS: I’m really ready for the record to be out.

AM: Oh my god, me too.

NS: It’s so cool that we sold way more copies of our record than we had planned on. That’s obviously a huge victory for us and we are just so grateful to our fans and everyone who bought it. But it also just still feels preemptive. Maybe that’s like the Midwesterner in me, but it feels like, okay, great, but they could all still hate it when they get it, you never know!

AM: I love that that’s part of your reality.

NS: Of course, I don’t understand how it isn’t part of your reality! But yeah, it has been way bigger than expected or that we had planned for for sure and we feel insane about that. I think anytime you kind of leave for a little while and stop playing shows and stop, whatever, tweeting, I don't know...

AM: I never stopped tweeting!

NS: [Laughs] You know anytime you kind of take a little time to not do things publicly, I think we worried like everybody else is that you’re going to come back and nobody is there anymore. So it is immensely reassuring that not only do people still give a shit, but there are more of them now than there were then.

AM: Yeah, that’s nice.

I saw your SXSW set and the new material seemed to integrate really well. How has the process of adding a new album to your performance been so far?

AM: Yeah, yeah it was fun.

NS: Really fun. It’s interesting because it's not totally in the exact same vein - there's a few more moving parts in a lot of it. It's kind of been cool trying to figure out how exactly it wants to live in the live set, you know? Which I am really excited about, because we are kind of expanding parts of our rig and how the show is going to be for the shows coming up starting in May. I’m just excited to figure out what space they're going to live in once we’ve played them 100 times.

Dir: Mimi Cave What Now out 4/28 via Loma Vista Recordings.

I don’t know if you still have it on there, but when I saw you at SXSW you had "F THE NC GOP" written across your gear. I assume this is response to the discriminatory bathroom bills in North Carolina, right?

NS: Amidst many other things! We can talk about [former NC Governor] Pat McCrory's power grab in his final week in office to take power away from Roy Cooper’s incoming administration. We could talk about their unyielding gerrymandering of all of the congressional districts...

AM: Yeah, North Carolina is no longer legally a democracy.

NS: Oh yeah, we can talk about how we fell below the necessary requirements for a true democracy! [Laughs] We could talk about their continuing assault on voting rights.

AM: Yeah, and not to mention this bullshit fake-out fixer-upper of [bathroom bill] HB2.

NS: Oh god, that’s the fucking newest. And the NCAA caving on that, oh god.

AM: Heartbreak hotel.

NS: It’s just nonstop, and there are so many pieces of it. It's like a lot of politics right now, where everyday you wake up and they’ve done something new that would’ve been the most outraging thing of an entire administration before, and now it's like every morning.

AM: Fuck 'em.

NS: Sometimes when you only have a limited about of space physically you just got to get to the point. [Laughs]

To what degree if any do you feel artists are obligated to use their platform to address political and social issues?

AM: I don’t think that anybody is obligated to do anything because it's art, you know, you can do whatever you want. But if you have a platform, personally, I have a platform, and I intend to use it because that’s my prerogative. I think a lot of times, particularly as a women, people like to say a lot of things that women have to do when they’re performers to be a good role model, and I think it's all just rude and another way of trying to control people.

NS: We're actually an interesting case because we are almost entirely uninterested in making overtly political music. That isn’t to say that the music doesn’t touch on the emotional realities of living in a political world, that is certainly a big current, I would say, but I would be shocked if there was a day I woke up and thought to make a song about a particular bill or person seemed like the right idea. That’s just not our vibe, but at the same time we are very active with the band's kind of voice and our personal voices.

What is your favorite track from What Now and why?

AM: My favorite song is always the last one that we wrote, so in this case it's probably "Song," which you can tell we wrote so close to the end we didn’t give it a name.

NS: [Laughs] Yeah usually we have these kind of fake names for songs.

AM: And then we [come up with] the real names and we just didn’t for that one.

NS: Well we tried a lot of different names. They were all terrible.

AM: We tried a lot of different names and they didn’t work. I don’t know though, this one is horrible.

NS: But it’s more true.

AM: I am really proud of that song, I like it a lot, I like the ideas it talks about. I like that it's love song to songs in general.

What's an example for an alternate placeholder title for one of your past songs?

AM: We called one "Zelda."

NS: "Rewind" was called "Zelda."

AM: Just because one of the parts of it sounds like a peaceful level of [video game The Legend of] Zelda. [Hums melody]

NS: Yeah that opening, my sample voice in those chords, we immediately felt like that was a Zelda level, so that is what the track had become called. Most of the other ones are pretty direct; "Radio" is obviously "Radio," "Sound" is obviously "Sound," "The Glow," and "Kick Jump [Twist" were also the same.] Oh, "Just Dancing" was called the very inventive title "15" forever.

AM: 'Cause it was the 15th thing.

NS: If I don’t know what a thing is about yet I number it, this is really exciting. [Laughs] We almost called that one "15," but we didn't, thank goodness.

So what would be your favorite track?

NS: I think my favorite one is the first one. I think "Sound" is my favorite song. I’m just really proud of every piece of that. That came together in like an afternoon, and the minute we wrote it we knew it was the first song on the record. I feel like every sound in that song has purpose and meaning to me, and I feel like it’s the most enmeshed the two of us can be in a recording. That is like a really the prefect union of the two of us, both how it is written and everything. I am really proud of it.


What Now is out now via Loma Vista, and you can buy it here. Read our other interview with Nick Sanborn about his solo project Made of Oak here.

Whatever It Is in Control: Yoni Wolf of WHY? On Privacy and Positivity Through 'Moh Lhean' and Beyond

Music InterviewWeston PaganoComment

WHY?, the brainchild of Yoni Wolf, is more than just a vaguely posed question. A near perfect reversal of YHWH, the Hebrew Bible's transliterated name of a God too sacred to speak, it's also a vessel for Wolf's unique rap rock hybrid through which not much if anything has been off limits at all.

Deftly intertwining naked, confessional shock and ceaselessly nimble lyricism, Wolf's output is occasionally just short of sensationalist and often brilliant. It's a stream of consciousness if stream of consciousness had meticulously perfected off-kilter flow, with not even the most deadpan of deliveries betraying a true poeticism not commonly realized.

For his sixth LP under the WHY? moniker, Moh Lhean, Wolf returned to his home studio of the same name for the first time since the project's 2003 debut, Oaklandazulasylum. 14 years later it's more of a family affair, as what was once a solo catharsis now finds Wolf joined by his brother Josiah and Josiah's wife Liz, among others. Five albums later, the resulting recordings are far less lo-fi as well, layering the mystery of their album title with some of WHY?'s most melodic and textured tracks. The overall feeling is noticeably calmer and less cynical for the most part - Moh Lhean finds Wolf ever so slightly more zen in his philosophizing.

"While I'm alive I'll feel alive / And what's next I guess I'll know when I've gotten there," Wolf decreed on his 2008 magnum opus Alopecia. Despite bouts of illness and isolation he is still very much alive, and Moh Lhean finds him seemingly closer to coming to terms with the rest. “One thing, there is no other / Only this, there is no other... / Just layers of this one thing,” reasons opener and lead single "This Ole King."

Transverso caught up with Wolf on the phone to discuss Moh Lhean, health, hands, and surprisingly, Wrestlemania.

'Moh Lhean' out now! Order the album here: http://joyfulnoi.se/mohlhean Stream on Spotify: sptfy.com/mohlhean iTunes: http://apple.co/2ltTBgV Amazon: http://amzn.to/2ltRtG9 Google Play: http://bit.ly/2lKlIe9 Tour dates and Tickets: http://whywithaquestionmark.com /!\ IMPORTANT /!\ To watch 360 degree videos, you'll need the latest version of Chrome, Opera, Firefox, or Internet Explorer on your computer.


TRANSVERSO: Following last year's Testarossa tour with Geti you’re now back on the road with WHY?. How has it been so far? Is there a different dynamic touring with family?

YONI WOLF: Well Geti's adopted family in a way as well, we're close friends and we’ve spent a lot of time around each other over the last 10 or 8 years or whatever we've known each other. It's great rolling with my brother and playing with him is great too, as well as the other guys. It's a family vibe, but it always kind of is on tour, you know? You’re close to people, it's an intimate thing that you do. You’re always in intimate close quarters whether you’re in a van or a bus or whatever, you’re sort of around people all the time.

The press release for your new record hints that Moh Lhean was sort of born out of a “severe health scare” that you endured recently. How has your health influenced your music and are you doing better now?

I wouldn’t say that that’s accurate, the record was not born out of a severe health scare, but I have had some health problems, a lot of health problems in the last 12 years or something like that. I am stable right now, but struggling always to figure it out. It’s been an influence on the last two albums, this health stuff, definitely. The album Mumps, Etc that came out in 2012 [was] a lot and I think this one is to an extent - not as much as that one is but it’s a part of my life so it’s something I deal with. I’m sure it seeps in, you know?

One of the most interesting aspects of the new record texturally is the background chatter and vocal samples. A lot of these are your doctors, right? Were they aware they were being recorded?

The vocal samples like at the end of “Proactive Evolution”? Yeah, a couple of them are. I think they were not necessarily aware. I think one of them was and one of them wasn’t. I don’t think they would care. Maybe they would, I don’t know.

You’ve spoken about how personal this record is and how you don’t want to explain the album title, for example. How do you balance the privacy of your music with doing press?

I don’t know. I mean, I think you just talk about what you’re comfortable talking about. I’m just trying to kind of play it by ear in the moment [and] think about what feels okay to talk about what’s not right to talk about, you know? I’m pretty open, I’m fine.

Some were surprised by that interview you did on a conservative radio show a few months ago. How did that come about?

It came about because the guy’s assistant or guest coordinator or whatever booker guy hit me up on Facebook, I think, and asked me if I would be on the show. I looked at the link and I was like, well, this is interesting, this is different from what I’ve done, hell yeah, let’s do it. [Laughs] So that’s how it happened. I think the booker was a fan.

It had some awkward moments. Was it what you expected or do you regret it?

Oh no, I didn’t regret it at all, I thought it was fascinating, I enjoyed it a great deal. I mean, as far as press goes that’s like best case scenario, that you can get into something weird and interesting like that from a different perspective from where you come from. I grew up steeped in more or less Evangelical Christianity - Messianic Judaism was definitely the Jewish flair - but I’d say, moralistically, Evangelical Christianity, and so I was used his whole spiel and everything. I’ve heard that since I was growing up, [the] sort of the stuff he was saying. Anyway I enjoyed it.

Moh Lhean leaked a month before release. What was you reaction to that?

Oh I don’t know, somebody told me that at some point. It was like, oh well, you know, that’s how it goes. It’s inevitable, so no sweat.

It's interesting you say that because you touch on the issue of acceptance on “One Mississippi,” singing “I’ve got to submit to whatever it is in control.” As far as Moh Lhean and this time in your life are concerned, what have you found to be in control? 

The kids on Reddit. [Laughs] I don’t know. I mean, I wish I knew.

Throughout your body of work there's this reoccurring motif of hands. Depictions of them, either your own or from fans, have repeatedly been present in your cover art, and Moh Lhean carries on this tradition. “Easy” has a line “I lost my only hand in Chicago” and “One Mississippi” then touches on it being a phantom limb. You also have a song “These Hands” and “Gnashville” says “Sometimes I claim to know a guy but I can't tell you what his hands look like,” which I’ve always especially liked. What is it about hands that so fascinates you?

It’s about control. I mean, I don’t know, I go on instinct, so if I’m writing about that it’s not something I think out. But, if I was to go back and analyze it most of the time I would say it has to do with control. Either that or maybe it has to do with creation, you know, the creative process, but that’s just me analyzing it after the fact. I don’t think about that while I’m writing instinctually.

Moh Lhean's cover could be interpreted as a waving hand or an arm of a drowning man reaching above the waves. What was your aim there?

Yeah, I guess in my mind I think of it as kind of like when Hulk Hogan gets knocked down a bunch of times and then at some point he’s had enough of it and his arm goes up and it starts shaking and starts sort of pointing up in the air and slowly but surely his whole body stands up and then he body slams whoever is trying to attack him as though he’s impervious to their punches for a while. So that’s sort of the start of that, if you’re familiar with that. You’re gonna have to do some research for this article and go watch Wrestlemania V from 1986 or whatever, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

I’m actually not a wrestling fan right now, my friend Mike Eagle is like huge into wrestling right now, but I was as a kid. We used to watch it every Saturday morning, and then the Wrestlemanias once a year or whatever on Saturday night, we would watch those. So yeah, I’m just familiar with the classic people from the ‘80s: Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage, Ultimate Warrior.

One of your lines that has resonated with me most over your entire discography is “Preemptive nostalgia of the possible but doubtful” from “Paper Hearts.” Five years after that track was released is there something that was doubtful then that you’ve since accomplished and can now feel nostalgia for?

I don’t know, that’s an interesting question. I have a lady friend now, thats something that I wouldn’t have thought at that time maybe that I would have, you know? That was a very lonesome time. So yeah, that’s something, I guess. Something big.

Is it a struggle to revisit those older songs from darker times in your life through current live sets?

In general, yeah, a lot of older songs I don’t like to do so I sort of pick and choose which ones feel okay to do and which ones I don’t want to revisit. It’s an issue [but] I wouldn’t say anything’s like permanently off limits, it’s just whether I feel like doing it or not if it’s gonna feel like it drags me down. Anything that has sort of a negativity to it or a pessimism to it. I mean, I do some songs like that, we’ve been doing “The Vowels Pt. 2,” I would say that’s a pretty dark track, but it’s kind of fun to do. I can’t say how it affects me one way or another doing it night after night.

I’m phasing into more positive material, I think, with Moh Lhean, and I’m not saying in the future I want to make all praise and worship music, but Moh Lhean definitely has that connotation and that feeling. I think that that’s good to have, some of those positive vibes going in the shows, because when you sing something night after night it affects you, you know? It affects you physically, it affects you psychologically and emotionally. I’m trying to phase into positivity into my life, so I think the music has to reflect that, and I think Moh Lhean is a good step. 

Austra Talks 'Future Politics' and Daring to Reject Our Dystopian Fate

Music InterviewWeston PaganoComment

Beyond the dancefloor beat and pulse of Austra's electronic grooves and the operatic siren calls vocalist Katie Stelmanis guides them with, Future Politics has something to say.

For the project's third LP, released the same day Donald Trump took the oath of office, Stelmanis decamped first to Montreal and then Mexico. She filled the isolation that solitude paired with a language barrier creates with radical literature like Alex Williams and Nick Srnice's #AccelerateManifesto, which asserts the possibility of globalization and technology ushering in a paradise so advanced that society no longer requires labor or capital at all.

It's no coincidence then that Stelmanis felt compelled to pen tracks like "Utopia" and the album's eponymous single, stunning manifestos of her own, uniquely distilling self-aware disillusionment in MIDI keyboard and impeccable production. Adjacent to songs dealing the with the more traditional themes of love and depression, Austra seamlessly blends the vulnerable and personal with a daring big picture - for Stelmanis there is little need to discern between the dystopias of internal demons or societal ills, and Future Politics bravely aims to, if not remedy, at least acknowledge both with a hopeful catharsis.

Transverso spoke with Stelmanis about her inspirations for Future Politics as well as the relationships between the organic and synthetic, art and politics, and more.

Taken from the new album Future Politics, out January 20, 2017 on Domino. Pre-order now: http://smarturl.it/AustraMusic Future Politics is available on limited edition deluxe colored vinyl with exclusive signed art print, CD, and digital download.


TRANSVERSO: So you began with what was essentially a solo effort on your debut Feel It Break (2011), transitioned into more of a collaborative band dynamic for Olympia (2013), and now it seems you’re back to doing most everything yourself again on Future Politics. Was this a sort of full circle for you?

KATIE STELMANIS: I don’t necessarily see it as a circle, it’s more of a constant process and development. I don’t think I’ll ever make a record in the same way twice, and this record by circumstance, where we all were geographically, and also I suppose spending five years on the road with my band and collaborating with people, I kind of felt like I needed a break and needed to be independent again. I also needed to force myself to relearn and become a better producer and songwriter, which meant doing a lot more of it myself.

Your live show has also evolved from a sort of dance party to more of a band performance, and you've said you experimented with trying to create background music for this record. What purpose do you see your art taking on, ultimately?

I feel like I wasn’t really able to define its purpose. It's sort of defined itself through the climate in which I’ve put out this record and the way people are responding to the way it feels at our shows. I think that I essentially wrote songs about feeling sad and disenfranchised with the world around us and the record came out at a moment where kind of everybody is feeling like that, so the shows have ended up being almost this cathartic experience. At least for me and maybe for some people in the audience as well, just because we're able to kind of bring people together, and I think in this collective sadness people are able to feel that they are not alone. But the show itself, we do a lot of new stuff, but then we also like remix a lot of old stuff, so we have a nice variation of some more emo moments and some full on rave moments, and I like to perform both of those things. I like to have dance parties as well, still. [Laughs]

One track that really stands out to me is “Deep Thought." I admit it fooled me at first - it’s a harp instrumental that's actually made entirely through a MIDI keyboard, right? I'm intrigued by the relationship between the synthetic and organic in your work.

Yeah, the original title of the track was "Computers Have Feelings Too," and I'm kind of mad that I ended up changing the name! [Laughs] But whatever, it is what it is. I’ve always kind of had this relationship with technology because I started making music in a climate in Canada where nobody was making electronic music at all. I was literally the only one that I knew doing it, and the Canadian music scene at the time was all about Arcade Fire and sort of indie rock and folk music, and it still is for the most part, but I was constantly being told that I would sound better with acoustic instruments or I should be using real violins or real pianos. And for me it was just so confusing, 'cause I was having the same emotional response to the synthesized instruments, and it was like why does it have to be an acoustic instrument in order for it to be real? As long as it elicits an emotional response then it shouldn't really matter where it's coming from.

Future Politics juxtaposes this overarching theme of a utopia brought about by technological advancements with a track about "Gaia" and returning to natural roots. On a broader scale, what is your perspective of the relationship between technology and nature?

I think that technology really has the potential to really complement nature and work alongside nature if its being used in the right way, but unfortunately I don’t think right now the power of technology is being harnessed in the best way at all. We’re wasting all our energy for small short term gain because everything is just based on finance, but I think that if that weren’t the case the potential for technology could be pretty amazing, and so that's really what I’m excited about. I’m excited about the ideas of where we could be technologically if money were no object.

What is the music industry like in this futuristic, utopian society that has moved beyond capitalism?

I don’t know, that's a good question. I just think music would be extremely cool and exciting 'cause now I find the music industry can kind of hinder artists because you ultimately just have to sell something. But if there's no need to sell anything then I think you can be a lot more creative. They say that streaming culture has allowed artists to become more experimental because it's less about having a single on the radio and selling records.

Taken from the new album Future Politics, out January 20, 2017 on Domino. Pre-order now: http://smarturl.it/AustraMusic Future Politics is available on limited edition deluxe colored vinyl with exclusive signed art print, CD, and digital download. Pre-order on iTunes: http://smarturl.it/FuturePoliticsDL Pre-order on Domino Mart: http://smarturl.it/FuturePoliticsDM Stream Utopia on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/UtopiaStream "Katie came into the video project with a lot of ideas about the future.

In the "Utopia" music video there is what seems to be some sort of Amazon Echo parody called Rainforest that has a sort of power over the character and environment depicted. What can you tell us about that?

Yeah, pretty much. Originally we wanted to create a scene in the future that, to me, is where we are probably headed. At least in Toronto, for example, there are more condos built per capita in the last 10 years than in any other city in North America. It's like Toronto is being taken over by this bland wash of glass and tall buildings, and it just feels very impersonal and lonely and sad. So we wanted to try to create a universe that is the future but at the same time we wanted to address the fact that its also what we’re kind of living in now, which is why we wanted to use both familiar and unfamiliar technology. And it's interesting, when talking about what future technology would look like you often resort to what future technology looked like to people in the '60s or '70s, you know? They’d always be talking to people on TV screens or they’d have these monitors or computers that they would talk to and it's like we have all that now. So it's just really interesting how with the technology that gets imagined in the sci-fi world becomes the technology that actually exists like 30 years later.

Many have misinterpreted the device's presence to be product placement. Did you anticipate that confusion?

Yeah, we definitely thought it would happen, and at first when we made the video the label kind of freaked out and was like 'What are doing? You can’t have that in the video!' or whatever, but I definitely think it doesn’t take too much effort to think about it a little bit harder and figure it out. [Laughs]

In the "Future Politics" music video I noticed there are several characters struck by nosebleeds, which reminded me of the scene in "Lose It" in which you get a nosebleed as well, and "Utopia" even begins with drops of blood on some stairs. Is there a certain significance to this ailment?

To be honest, no, not at all. [Laughs] For the blood in "Lose It" thats entirely from the brain of M Blash, the director, and I would say the same for the "Future Politics" video, that's entirely from the brain of Allie Avital. So I don’t know if somehow the music that I make has inspired blood dripping visually so directors always want to do that in my videos, but there's definitely not some greater connection that I am aware of. Maybe somebody else will analyze it and figure it out.

So Future Politics came out on Inauguration Day, thrusting its release amongst often contentious debate about what obligation, if any, artists have to address social issues. What are your thoughts on this?

I would say in desperate times, which I believe we’re in now, I think it's very important for artists to at least contribute to the conversation someway, being in a position of power. To be in a position of power and not have some sort of opinion or statement or some sort of responsibility for your power, I think it's kind of not okay. But it's also just [about] what is your significance as an artist? If you’re not sort of commenting on the world that you live in when people look back on the art that happened in 2017 are they going to be thinking about the new pop single about lipstick or are they going to be thinking about the artists who were commenting on the political climate? It's sort of about where you fit in history and your role in helping to document that history.

There is also a sort of parallel discussion of how a Trump administration may or may not spur on a generation of great art. What do you make of that?

I don’t think its a positive argument to make, that Trump will result in great art, because it just kind of discredits all the tragedy that a Trump presidency is going to cause for so many people, so I don’t necessarily want to say that. I made a record that, to me, a lot of the songs weren’t any different from any love song or any song about a breakup, I was writing music in response to how I was feeling about things I was reading about or things I was experiencing in the world. And the things that I were reading about are problems in society itself, and so I think because the songs were sort of approached from this very personal and emotional perspective that people are able to respond to it and relate to it in a context of the current Trump presidency. Playing "Future Politics" would absolutely not have the same significance in the US three months ago at all, but it's ended up being quite cathartic to play that song here and especially this week because it means something a lot bigger than it was ever intended to.

Austra - I Love You More Than You Love Yourself (Official Video) taken from the new album Future Politics, out now on Domino.

You’ve said in the past that you think musically first and that lyrics are usually an afterthought or serve only to sound melodic vocally, but you also seem to have a lot of meaning condensed into these tracks. How do you grapple with having so much to say and fitting it into the confines of a composition?

It's kind of always different. With a lot of the songs on the record the lyrics came really really quickly and they came right at the start and they helped shape the song itself. I would say that about a song like "Gaia," for example; I think I may have written the lyrics for that song first. And then other songs I'll sing them but I'll have like one long line that when I’m just sort of jamming out the lyrics or jamming out the vocal melody I'll just say something that I kind of stick to, and then that’ll shape the entire song. That would’ve been a track like "We Were Alive." I probably said 'We were alive' when I was singing it and decided to use it, to just put it in a different context. There was a lot more emphasis on the lyric writing on this record for sure than there ever has been before, but I guess sometimes it's a very difficult process, and sometimes it happens really quickly, but it's never really the same twice.

In regards to your vocals does your classical training and operatic style have any unique effect either positive or negative on being in a contemporary touring band?

Well definitely my job is much less intensive than it would be if I were still singing opera. I can sing the type of music that I do and I’ve kind of managed to lock myself in a groove of being able to do that, but the amount of endurance to since opera is just a completely different reality to what I’m doing now. I don’t warm up at all, I don't really even try, I just get up there and sing, and I think that I’m just lucky in that I know how to sing in such a way that it doesn’t damage my voice, so I’ve never had any major problems on the road. I guess I kind of learned how to ride a bike the correct way, you know? I developed these good habits when I was young such that I’ve been able to somehow translate them into what I’m doing now. I’m sure one day my voice will be shot, but I’ve been lucky so far, so I should knock on wood. [Laughs]

I read that there were some internal struggles regarding your choice of cover art for Olympia. For Future Politics you have a really striking image of Luis Barragán’s architecture in Mexico. Was this more of unanimous decision?

To be honest there was alternate art for Future Politics that I wanted to use but nobody was super stoked on it so they offered to fund another photo shoot. So I was like okay, we’ll take the photos and decide what we like better, and the Luis Barragán photos ended up being a million times better, so that was an easy decision. But even in the original art I had this idea of wanting to put a character on the front cover. I decided that the character's name was Revolution Rhonda, and she was going to be sent from the future to save us from our dystopian fate.


Future Politics is out now via Domino. You can buy it here, stream it here, and see tour dates here.

Wild Beasts on English Expression, Carnal Desire, and How 'Boy King' Reconciles the Two

Music InterviewWeston PaganoComment

Photos by Andrea Calvetti (Above, from left to right: Tom Fleming, Ben Little, Chris Talbot, Hayden Thorpe)

"After five records there had to be an element of 'what the fuck?'" reads the press release that announced Wild Beast's latest offering, Boy King. The art rock four-piece hailing from Kendal, UK delivers that sentiment in spades on an album that sheds all that is calculated and coy for unabashed, knowing virility.

The day after the United States elected its own boy king, Transverso Media sat down with Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming, the vocalists and multi-instrumentalists who share frontman duties, to discuss English expression, carnal desire, and coming full circle in their combination of the two.


TRANSVERSO MEDIA: On “2BU,” one of Boy King’s best tracks, Tom sings “Now I’m the kind of man / Who wants to watch the world burn.” Have you been enjoying politics lately? 

TOM FLEMING: This whole record is a bleak response to a bleak time, really. I think that song in particular is about class envy in the UK, and a kind of destructive, masculine rage leading to absolutely nothing, which I think is a big thing on the record. [Before playing "2BU"] I actually shouted out in San Francisco, the last show we did, “This is for you guys, I want to bully the bully," but [I thought] that might be the last opportunity I got to do so, and it turns out it was, because [Trump] won. He’s not too bullied anymore, is he? [Laughs]

As a touring band from the UK, have you been affected by any of the political changes lately, from US visa policy updates to Brexit?

FLEMING: Well, nothing yet, ’cause [Brexit is] yet to happen, but it’s possible. We’ve lived our whole adulthood as free European citizens with essentially free movement and freedom to operate both physically and financially in other countries, and [could] live there if we pleased, and that might be under threat. So yeah, I guess in terms of impact it’s more psychological, but I think there certainly are a few parallels; If you look at a map of the US it looks very much like the Brexit map. It’s the same kind of resentment of political classes in our country that have led to most of the things in the country as well, and obviously in the States there are more international ramifications than the UK, but it’s still a dark time.

You often mention the English tendencies towards being apologetic with less emotional projection. American audiences, especially hearing Boy King, may not understand this background. Can you elaborate on that?

HAYDEN THORPE: I guess the album for a British band is quite forward. It’s quite unapologetic. It’s perception to a British person might be arrogance, but I think essentially it’s a broken heart record. There [are] two ways of responding to a broken heart, and in some circumstances that’s either to recoil in pain, or to kind of approach that broken heart with aggression and to kind of confront the world and to kind of express that pain in a bit more of a kind of an outward manner, and that’s kind of, in many ways, quite un-British. And the circumstances of us going to Texas at that time and where we were at in our lives and where I was at in my life and as people it was a pretty healthy dose of Americana, I think. I find it very nourishing and engaging being here how people act with one another; It’s so, for me, invigorating. In Britain you have a conversation with someone and in five minutes you will know their kind of class, their schooling, their financial position, and I guess maybe there [are] different codes in America for it, but certainly the expression of individuality here seems to be very much different in a way that being an outsider is nice, you know? I do think the healthier kind of America is very good to outsiders. Nerdiness and geekiness isn’t a thing in Britain, it gets beaten out of you at a young age.

FLEMING: [Laughs] I like to think our record is a pretty good typifying of that kind of pervy repression of the UK. There's a sort of calm surface, and what seems like a conservative outlook can actually be quite an odd place just beneath the surface, and it feels from the outside that America is much more of "This is what it is, fuck you!" which is fine, but the more I come here the more I realize I’m not from here. Even though it's familiar to me in certain ways it's definitely very, very different.

So is there a noticeably different reception to the record and the live show on different sides of the pond, then?

THORPE: Again it comes down to expression. British expression is sort of stiff upper lip; you don’t want to cruise too far outside the shallow waters ‘cause you might be seen as weird, you know? We made a career out of being weirdos, so we’ve always kind of ventured out into those waters, but you get the sense that here people are just a bit more vocal, both metaphorically and in speech.

FLEMING: [To] an American audience it takes the British audience maybe five minutes to get there to the same spot, the way America always turns up. And that’s not to denounce the British audience, it’s been amazing to us and it’s definitely our people as it were, but it’s just a completely different way of projecting.

THORPE: I’m kind of hesitant to talk in huge sweeping statements here because when we talk about America we’re talking about a thousand Americas, as is plainly apparent, and when we’re talking about Britain we're talking about many microscopic Britains that can really differ from town to town. Towns from coast to coast are a sort of ancient formation of towns; you can go eight miles and have a completely different accent, completely different food, and have a completely different way of being. We sense that ourselves, we play shows in the south of England and in the north of England it’s different, then you go to Scotland and it’s completely different again.

FLEMING: It does vary from town to town, and in Scotland, Glasgow is very different than Edinburgh, for example, and they’re like 30 miles apart.

One really unique place you've been is Texas, when you went to record Boy King with producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, The Walkmen, Modest Mouse, Spoon). Is it true he keeps a Grammy in his toilet?

FLEMING: He does, yeah. Knowing him I don’t think it’s an obtuse move, I think thats just where he has the space. He just works so hard all the time that he doesn’t really have the time to reflect on past glories. Obviously I think he’s done rather well as a result, he made a great record, so why not? But yeah, it’s true. 

THORPE: Yeah, I’d always beware of the gold disk in the work space. You don’t need that visual prompt.

FLEMING: Yeah, it’s fine to be proud of it, but you don’t need it where you work.

I hear a bit of St. Vincent in “Alpha Female”’s guitar. Is that his influence?

THORPE: Sure, I think by osmosis, for sure. She is a guitar hero in the classic sense, she’s sort of audacious and quite gifted in a quite visionary way, so absolutely. Actually we’re quite taken by the fact that we were using the guitar as a macho object but were inheriting so much from this woman playing; theres a natural shape to that especially with songs like “Alpha Female,” these sort of sickening slick lines. We’re talking about tools and machines here, that’s what we inherited. When you boil guitars down it comes down to electronics, and we kind of shared some of the same circuit boards, I guess.

Between “Tough Guy” and “Alpha Female” there are two incredibly exciting guitar solos that are highlights of the record, and they take on a sort of dueling quality back to back. Was that an intentional juxtaposition?

FLEMING: There is something in that, yeah. “Alpha Female” is maybe a bit more genuine, whereas “Tough Guy” is a bit more embittered. Like we were talking about it’s about taking that pain and shoving it deep, deep down and not showing any of it, and I think that’s sort of what “Tough Guy” is doing, whereas “Alpha Female” is a bit more positive. But yeah, certainly there’s always a play on gender going on in the record, and I hope people notice that the display of machismo is supposed to look like a performance, and not a very convincing one at that. And so the foreground of the guitars is very deliberate; let’s use them to play with that trope, let’s demonstrate that A) we can do that and B) that we know what we're doing with it.

Get My Bang” is about American consumerism, not sex per se, but as a single on an album as sexual as Boy King many are going to miss that. Is the interchangeability of these themes a statement in itself?

THORPE: It wasn’t so much American consumerism so much as just consumerism in general, in terms of we have Black Friday now in Britain. We inherited it off of you, but we took it gladly. It’s more about the sense of gratification and the unashamed lengths you will go to to seek that gratification, and in a suppressed society where, for good reason, you can’t kind of be cavemen and -women, it expresses itself in other pores. I just remember watching the Black Friday footage head in hands; people beating each other up for a flat screen TV, this is what western civilization has come to this end for? I just felt you are either not having enough sex or you’re not doing enough exercise, something has got to give here! [Laughs] That is not a healthy way, and I guess humans are bad at finding healthy ways of kind of getting out these carnal sensations ‘cause we’ve kind of been told the lot of them are sinful or unforgivable, and I guess that song is about stripping yourself of that inhibition and saying, “Fuck it, this is how I get off!” And that’s a song about self-interest, which is healthy and good for people to follow those self interests sometimes. For god’s sake, you need to release, you know?

Creating a record does seem marginally better than beating the shit out of someone in a Walmart.

FLEMING: [Laughs] Hopefully!

THORPE: I feel very privileged that we get a safe space where we can sort of act these things out. I mean, the stage is a fucking boxing ring; you come off and you do have s a kind of transcendental sensation. You feel bigger and mightier than you actually are, and therein lies a lot of the historical problems that musicians face with how am I supposed to quantify being, feeling like that guy, and shrinking to normal size again. There’s always a kind of navigation. 

Wild Beasts - Get My Bang (Official Video) from 'Boy King' - the new album out now. Order digital: http://po.st/BoyKingDL Order CD/LP/LPX: http://po.st/BoyKingStore Listen to Wild Beasts on Spotify: http://po.st/WildBeastsSP http://po.st/MyBangStream Directed by Olivier Groulx The video for 'Get My Bang' was shot in Belgrade and directed by Olivier Groulx (Arcade Fire, alt-J, Scott Walker) featuring vocalist Hayden Thorpe's twisted routine of Justin Timberlake-meets-Trent Reznor choreography.

Do you worry some people might completely miss the point of this record similar to how "All The King's Men" was misinterpreted at times?

FLEMING: Potentially. I think it’s been a bit more divisive than we appreciated. I think some things have been taken at face value which weren’t intended, but I think ultimately if you leave ambiguity in you have to trust people to get it, and I think it would be a big mistake to let the tail wag the dog, in that respect. Not to sound arrogant, but I think that, generally speaking, you trust people to sort out what’s what.

THORPE: I think it has in some sense but that’s okay, that’s sort of our job. You gotta hold your nerve at the borderland, and how else do you get the kick you get from doing what we do without that sort of sense of risk and danger?

FLEMING: There is a narrative that is fueled by the sort of self-reflecting echo chamber of social media that every artist has to think the same, that every artist has to be super right thinking [and] intersectional, and it can’t possible true. I think we’ve got a pretty impeccable track record in that regard, but people are very quick to jump on if they think something is kind of out of line. But there is a kind of satire going on.

THORPE: Well it’s a satire, but at the same time its a very heartfelt record, and that’s the only thing I can go back on. It’s my full heart, it’s not me trying to be clever, it’s not me trying to outthink someone, or trying to outsmart someone, it’s a heartfelt, true record. That’s the ultimate spine of it, and if anyone doesn’t feel that in their heart, then thats cool. I mean, I can’t make someone feel that in their heart. The analogy I always think of is when the plane is going down, you put the oxygen mask on yourself first; it’s like no, this is my medication, this is what I need for this sensation, this is my crisis, this is my oxygen mask, and if people don’t feel that that sort of suits their crisis or their place that’s totally cool. But I think one thing that it shocked people on that they maybe need to grow up with a little is that nice boys and girls like to do nasty things, you know? That’s just a fact of human nature, and I’m sorry if that’s a shock for you, I’m sorry if you have to find it out through us, but I tell you what, the internet is probably a far harder school than we are. [Laughs]

It’s interesting how in some ways there’s a sort of full circle in those lyrical themes from Limbo, Panto to Boy King, but the ways in which they’re conveyed and the music they’re set to have changed drastically.

FLEMING: I’m so glad you noticed the similarities between Limbo, Panto and this one. Some of the lyrics on Limbo, Panto could be on this one, which we didn’t really notice, and then we listened back and were like, “Oh yeah, that’s just the first record.” I think certainly the change in instrumentation and presentation has kind of been following our curiosity; we’ve had half an eye on what’s going on around us and half an eye on what we were going to do anyway, so we tried to incorporate stuff that without just kind of following trends and trying to hit every box that people expect us to do. 

THORPE: When we made this record first time round Limbo, Panto could’ve been this record, it’s just that we decided to turn left, and eventually we circumnavigated the abyss and came back to that point again. But I think we had to go that way round to inherit the craft and the deftness to pull this off, if you can say we pulled it off, and we obviously think we have, but…

FLEMING: [Laughs] That’s for you to decide.

THORPE: …to kind of keep the plates spinning that we’ve been spinning has taken a kind of an apprenticeship.

Obviously it’s still early days, but in moving forward do you think you’ll follow up Boy King with yet another left turn to continue reinventing, or do you find yourselves wanting to explore this direction a little longer? 

THORPE: It kind of feels like talking about breakfast with a mouth full of steak for dinner; there’s a sense of having to digest and metabolize what you’ve made. I think we have in some ways reinvented a method for ourselves. 

FLEMING: It always happens by accident, that sort of thing; we just realized the last couple weeks of recording, "Oh, we should’ve done this all along!" But, then of course, it would never be as good if you hadn’t, like [Thorpe] said, completed the apprenticeship.

THORPE: But every record anyone makes is a completely remarkable feat of human endeavor, you know? It takes a huge amount of things to align and to come together to get this shit into something kind of passable, so we're just kind of enjoying the fact that we’ve made something which we feel is kind of speaks for us in a life affirming way. I guess you’re looking to do something thats kind of life affirming, and taking this record out feels that way, which is how it should.


Boy King is out now via Domino. Read our review here.

From Department of Eagles to Golden Suits: Fred Nicolaus Talks ‘Kubla Khan’ and More

Music InterviewWeston PaganoComment

Photo by Andrea Calvetti

When we last saw Fred Nicolaus, the affable, bespectacled New Yorker behind the Golden Suits moniker, he was scouring Manhattan's bookstores for every last copy of John Cheever's collected stories. There were 46 of them, and he put them all in a sack.

While literary influences are still palpable throughout his solo project, the name of which he mined from the lines of one of Cheever's stories, Kubla Khan finds Nicolaus increasingly confident and intent in his own range of emotions. Wrought in search of self-expression amidst the indefinite hiatus of Department of Eagles, the dorm room joke turned psychedelic folk gem he co-fronted with Grizzly Bear's Daniel Rossen, Golden Suits is Nicolaus at his most pure.

"I want to dance with you tonight / Get my gold feeling," he declares near the start of the new LP. From the sunnily biting "Useless" to the bristling, electric shocks of "Don't Let Love Go By," his brand of melodic alchemy is always an honest, warming one, not least when it's coming directly from the stage.

Before his recent performance at Chicago's Schubas Tavern, we ducked into the basement greenroom to discuss what he did with all those books, how German soccer somehow fits into it all, and more.

Provided to YouTube by Ingrooves Kubla Khan · Golden Suits Kubla Khan ℗ ℗ 2016 Hit City U.S.A. Released on: 2016-10-07 Writer: Fred Nicolaus Auto-generated by YouTube.


FRED NICOLAUS: I think it said on your [interviewer Weston Pagano] Twitter profile that you’re a fan of [Italian soccer club] Juventus?

TRANSVERSO MEDIA: I am! I was actually contemplating asking you about your [English club] Arsenal allegiance.

Oh yeah, well I grew up watching the German national team ‘cause my dad’s German - there’s actually a line kind of about the German national team on this record - and so when [German player Mesut] Özil signed to Arsenal I just started following them. So I’m not like a true blood Arsenal fan, I just kind of like them. Also at the time [Per] Mertesacker and [Lukas] Podolski were both playing for Arsenal, so it was just a natural choice. I’m sure that’s what the interview’s about; let’s get really into [soccer!] [Laughs]

That's amazing. What’s the line on the record?

Well there’s a song towards the end of the album called “Bells,” and there’s a little German poem at the end. It’s not really a poem, but like a spoken word thing. My dad’s German and I speak a little bit of German, and so there was a hole in the song that needed to be filled and I thought it would be funny if I could get my dad to speak some German on this record in some weird way. And so I just wrote this kind of nonsense poem. The first line is, "Freude schöner götterfunken," which is the first line of “Ode to Joy,” which means “Joy, beautiful spark of the gods,” and the second line is "Für das tor wird Götze suchen," which means “For the goal [Mario] Gotze will look.” So it’s like a stupid joke about Germany and German soccer.

That's interesting because, obviously you no longer do as much sampling as you did during your Department of Eagles days, but I heard that and wondered if you had maybe sampled a German film or something.

Nope, just my dad. He speaks really old school German ‘cause he learned when he was a kid, and he has a very deep voice, so it almost sounds like a sample, but it’s not.

Is that the same golden watch from the cover of your first album on your wrist still?

Oh no, this is a different watch. I do have those watches, [but] I decided it was time to put those away. I did wear those watches on the first Golden Suits tour, but I sort of half-collect watches so I try and buy a lot of them.

I saw that your tour van broke down in Milford, Connecticut the other day and you had to cancel your Boston show.

Oh god, that was the worst. Yeah, that was awful. I’d never canceled a show before, and it was the first time I’d ever had to do it. We broke down - that’s happened before - but we went to a Firestone, which is a garage chain, and the guy said it would take “like 45 minutes or an hour,” and then it ended up taking five and a half hours. We were just sitting there, alternately going to this kitschy Mexican restaurant and going back to sit and watch Star Trek while the car was getting repaired. It was awful. The rest of the tour’s been good though! [Laughs] But that was bad.

I really appreciated your Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway parodies of the situation.

[Laughs] Oh yeah, that added a slight amount of levity to a shitty situation.

This video documents my attempt to buy every copy of "The Stories of John Cheever" in Manhattan in one day. It was directed by Devin Hahn and myself.

I notice you often have that literary-based approach, whether it’s referencing those authors or hoarding 46 copies of John Cheever’s collected stories in the music video for "Swimming In '99." Do you still have all those books?

No, I gave them out on tour. I basically took them on the tour for [my first album] and so anytime anyone came up to me and asked me about it I was like, “Do you want one of them?” So now I’m kind of hoping they’ve made their way to secondhand bookstores around the country. It would be my dream of dreams to see one in a bookstore someday. I don’t know if that will happen, but we’ll see.

You could do a sort of golden ticket thing where you leave something in each copy.

I stamped them. They all have a stamp that says, like, “This was bought as part of this stupid video,” and so I’ll recognize them if I see them. [Laughs]

On the cover of your new album there’s another book, “The Life of Sir Thomas More” by William Roper. Why is that?

Yeah, I chose that book largely because it was so written so long ago it’s outside the public domain. So that book in and of itself is not a specific thing, but the fact that it is a book in general that is a conscious choice, obviously. I don’t know, I always cringe a little bit when I read something about myself that [describes me as a] “literary guy." I don’t always know exactly what that means, but I really really love books, they’re a huge part of my life, and a lot of relationships I’ve had in my life have been based around books a little bit, or a shared love of books. And so I feel like to me it’s not so much like I sit down and try to think of complicated words to sing or try to write [songs] like I’m writing a novel, but books and literary culture are so important to me that it finds its way into the songs.

And on that book is written the album title, Kubla Khan. I’m curious what the symbolism of using that figure is.

It’s not exactly symbolism. It’s a very personal thing. It’s another example of connecting with somebody over a book and the book sort of being the conduit. You know when you’re reading a book and you’re really into it it just becomes this world, and if somebody else loves that book too it becomes like this shared world that you kind of have together? I feel like when I think about books and I talk about books in interviews and songs or whatever it’s about that. It’s not about being serious and intense and literary and wearing glasses, it’s about that shared world of a book, and Kubla Khan is kind of a reference to that idea in a way.

On your first record you were coming off this really bad period; you went through a breakup, went broke, lost your home to a rat infestation, and lost something like 40 pounds. Please tell me things went better this time around.

God, yeah. [Laughs] Definitely. The last record was made after one of the craziest, most fucked up years of my life. This record was made, I wrote all the songs, in the time after that when I was single and not living with rats and in a happier place. I don’t think of this record as being so happy, it’s just that when you’re more comfortable in your life and you feel more settled and free you’re freer to take risks and freer to push yourself a little bit more. It’s not that these songs are so much happier, but there’s more of an emotional range. The happier songs are more joyful and the sadder songs are sadder and angry songs are angrier, so it definitely came out of a more comfortable place. I’m really proud of it, whereas the first record I felt a little shy and embarrassed about it.

One of the lyrics that really stands out to me is the bit about "how strange it is to be getting older kiss by kiss.” It’s a beautiful kind of acceptance; even if it’s not fully understanding it’s coming to terms with things.

Yeah, that line kind of came out with nowhere. I didn’t consciously write it like, “oh, what would be perfect?” but it’s a kind of… I don’t know, you said it better than I did, just write down your answer as mine. [Laughs]

Department of Eagles premiered their new video for the single "No One Does It Like You" yesterday at the MoMA. The video is absolutely incredible, especially the wispy singing ghosts. Directed by, Patrick Daughters and Marcel Dzama.

I also really appreciate your solo moniker, Golden Suits, because - while it’s taken from the Cheever story, "The Country Husband" - it feels like a really nice evolution from Butterfly Emerging, which was your codename of sorts when you were in Department of Eagles.

Right, you’ve done your research! [Laughs] Well, I mean, Butterfly Emerging… it’s funny that we’re talking about this. Do you know we were originally called Whitey On The Moon UK?

Yeah, I actually have the original vinyl copy.

Oh really? Oh wow, that’s crazy. Did you read that little essay [in the liner notes]? That’s funny. I mean, that band started like a college joke, so Daniel [Rossen and I] sort of took great pains to make it clear to the world we weren’t being serious, because when you’re 18 or 19 there’s like this… We were just embarrassed about it, or we felt more free pretending that it was all just a dumb joke as opposed to admitting that we were taking it seriously and trying to be good, and so coming up with a name like [Rossen’s] Iron Chrysalis and Butterfly Emerging was like a way to let everyone know, “This was a joke, I don’t care if you don’t like it, fuck you!”

So that was what those names came out of, but it also did come out of a playfulness that we had at the time, you know? And I feel like so much of the growth of Department of Eagles was a way [to put] that playfulness into something that was much more serious and much more refined and stately and dignified, and I feel like, to some degree, Golden Suits is me kind of moving away from that dignity and refinement into something that’s a little more willing to be silly or willing to be goofy, I guess. I don’t know if that’s what you meant, but that’s how I think of it.

Yeah, I mean it’s really interesting to see because obviously there’s a huge shift between the two Department of Eagles records…

Oh god, yeah, it’s like two different bands, basically.

…So it’s interesting now to see how Golden Suits perhaps fits somewhere in between those two extremes as a maybe more honest representation of who you are.

Yeah, I mean, I wrote a lot of those songs, but in [Department of Eagles] I was always more of the guy who was writing the poppier songs - like the single off In Ear Park, “No One Does It Like You” was one of my songs - and kind of the more simple, straightforward songs. But they were always processed through Daniel’s, frankly his genius for arrangement. I mean, he’s one of, I think, best people of his generation to come up with crazy arrangements and make songs sound interesting. And that’s a stupid way to say it, but it’s how I feel. And I feel like a lot of Department of Eagles, we both wrote the songs, but it was his aesthetic that made the recordings, essentially, and so I feel like Golden Suits is my songs, which is part of what Department of Eagles was, but it’s my taste, which is I think a little bit cheesier than Daniel’s taste. But it feels good it feels fun to do songs that are more straight ahead punk songs or straight ahead rock songs and not worry about arrangements being so sophisticated, you know what I mean?

It’s funny you say that, because I met Daniel once, and to me he did seem kind of serious and almost shy. I asked him about Department of Eagles track “Forty Dollar Rug” and he laughed and said that was just you messing around, so I always kind of imagined you in the studio sort of pushing him to be sillier.

Yeah, that’s accurate. [Laughs] I mean, Daniel’s really funny, it’s just that he’s also shy. If you go back to those days it’s not like I was wearing a clown costume with him sitting there reading [philosopher Ludwig] Wittgenstein; he’s a really funny dude. It’s just that I think naturally he’s a little more shy or not as outgoing and a little more contemplative, and generally my energy is a little more [makes excited sound], so it’s not inaccurate. Though he did sing on “Forty Dollar Rug”! So he clearly enjoyed it on some level.

Do you still have that rug?

I do, I have it in my closet.

That’s fantastic. Daniel told me you got it at Kmart.

Yeah, he got it at Kmart. It was like this long argument, we had like one of the longest arguments we’d ever had on how much money we should spend on a rug and how much we should get for it. We got a song out of it, so... [Laughs]

From DoE's debut album, The Whitey on the Moon UK LP (renamed The Cold Nose in 2005).

Apologies if you’re tired of being asked this but I’d be remiss not to; what’s the future looking like for Department of Eagles? Have you and Daniel been in contact lately?

Oh yeah, you know Dan actually did a cover of one of the songs on this record and just released it. I mean, he did it as a favor for me, it’s not like he just did it independently, but I don’t know. We’re still good friends, it’s not like there’s animosity or anything, I think it’s just hard. I mean, Grizzly Bear is just so busy as a band, it’s always gonna be like this big thing that he’s gonna work on, so we’re definitely not working on anything, but it could happen. There’s no specific reason not to do it, I’ll put it that way. 

So I understand you rehearsed and recorded Kubla Khan in the same church you and Daniel used then?

Yeah, I did. We recorded In Ear Park in this church in Brooklyn, and it’s just kind of been in the family. Grizzly Bear rehearsed and recorded there [and] Department of Eagles rehearsed and recorded there. Grizzly Bear doesn’t do anything there anymore, but I had access to it because of that connection, and so we recorded pretty much every song off this new album there. It was interesting to go back to it after six years, or something like that, since we recorded In Ear Park, maybe seven, because I think if I had tried to do that maybe four years ago I would’ve felt so stressed about it, like, “Oh, it has to be just as good as In Ear Park, and it has to sound like this, or sound like that,” but I think enough distance had passed where I was like, “Well, here we are, let’s do this!”

It’s a really special place, though. It’s a really beautiful place to record. You just play the guitar and it sounds great. And it’s annoying ‘cause heat pipes are always going off and birds are always flying in and out all the time and you can hear noises in the street, but it’s kind of part of the charm of it.


Kubla Khan is out now on Hit City USA. Buy it here.

Porches' Aaron Maine Discusses Dark Muscle, Escapism, and the Obsolescence of the Encore

Music InterviewWeston PaganoComment

Cover photo by Jessica Lehrman / Live shots by Andrea Calvetti

"Do you believe in us? I'm scared about everything," Aaron Maine asked a tightly packed crowd in the narrow floor of Chicago's Subterranean dive. As he crooned he brandished cut flowers from a bouquet the openers left onstage like a child picking up an aspergillum, while others adorned his mic stand. A dedicated audience sang and danced along to songs about the protagonist's "loner hour," as if to answer they believed in Porches quite a bit despite - or because of - the aloofness they often exude.

Maine's New York-based project ushered in an era of change on their latest full-length, Pool. The group dropped the period from their name and signed to Domino Records. The subsequent new material unveiled a sharper production and more deliberate, danceable sound. Maine's girlfriend, Greta Kline - better known as Frankie Cosmos - left the band to pursue her own work. Maine went blond.

Transverso called Maine a few days after the show to talk about the tour and ask a few questions about the music and dark muscle he's brought along.


TRANSVERSO: How are you?

AARON MAINE: I’m good. We’re in Burlington now. Finally got more than five hours of sleep last night, so I’m feeling pretty fresh, and it’s beautiful here, so I’m feeling good.

Sometimes on Twitter before a show I see you asking for someone to host you. Is that what you did last night?

Yeah. It’s kind of funny; usually we’ll just stay with a friend if we have one in the city or get a hotel, but for whatever reason we just kind of reached out a few times on Twitter. It was sweet, [last night] they set up their living room with all these beds and we got in at 3 AM - we drove after the show in Montreal – and it was just nice to kinda chill there and wake up here where we’re playing and not have to drive today.

Have you ever gotten into any crazy situations doing that?

No. It’s funny, this is the first tour we’ve really done this, and last night was the second time. Some guy who we had never met offered his apartment in Boulder and that was kinda funny, being like, “Hello, thank you for having us.” We didn’t even play a show that night, we were just driving that day, but both people have been super hospitable and accommodating so it’s been fine. We got lucky. You can kind of tell, I guess, by looking at someone’s Twitter a little bit what to expect.

So you work under the names of several different characters. Am I speaking with Aaron Maine, Ronald Paris, Ricky Pepsi, or Ronnie Mystery?

Um, I guess I would say Aaron. Yeah. [Laughs] Or all of them.

A lot of your lyrics seem to grapple with a struggle between escapism and connection. You either “don’t want to be here” or you want to “be a part of it all.” You either want to be up in “The Cosmos” or “Underwater.” What can you tell us about that?

Wow, yeah, you just kinda nailed it, I guess. I don’t know, it’s just sort of… I feel like that’s kind of a big part of life; reacting to your surroundings and how they kind of inform how you’re feeling. I guess I just write about whatever I’m feeling that day. Or if some line pops into my head. I kinda like the theme of escapism. It’s like a constant thing, there’s always some kind of interaction happening between where you are and what’s going on around you and if you’re happy where you are or if you’re not and its seems like kind of an endless well of content. I guess it’s easier than writing about more specific situations. I guess I kind of feel like it allows me to inject some more abstract poetry, or like paint like a more abstract mood. So, yeah it’s just kind how I’m feeling most of the time. [Laughs]

Despite identifying with these alternative settings either in “The Cosmos” or “Underwater,” porches are pretty normal, down to Earth places to rest contently. Until you quietly removed it this year you even had a period at the end of your name which seemed to ground things even more. What’s the symbolism of that?

I don’t know. I’m not in love with the band name, Porches, to be honest, and I can’t really even remember what the thought process was of naming the project that. We probably just liked how it sounds. I grew up in the suburbs and I guess it probably came from just enjoying hanging out on the porch, which seems really conflicting with the way stuff is sounding now. I guess the way I see it it’s just a name.

And the period just seemed unnecessary, I guess, so we just started to not include it. It wasn’t that big of a decision. But yeah, it just seems to make sense to stick with [Porches]. Also, sort of why I’ve come up with all these other names like Ricky Pepsi and Ronald Paris within Porches is to kind of differentiate, even if it’s just for my own sake, the different chapters of the band and the sound and stuff. So while keeping the name I can kind of create what kind of feels like a clean slate by mentioning some other names for myself.

The official music video for "Car" by Porches, directed by Daniel Brereton. The 26th installment of the UO Music Video Series features Porches dancing - and glancing - in synchronization in a surreal setting full of soft, pastel light.

Is it strange seeing people sing and dance along to you singing about escapist things like your “loner hour”?

No, I really love that. I kind of planned on the juxtaposition of that more melancholic content adjacent to upbeat dance-ish songs. I feel like I don’t have that much control about what I’m drawn to write about lyrically, but I do feel like I can kind of choose what way to present that, and I just wanted to, especially with Pool, put some sort of thing out that people could definitely dance to and have a positive time during the live show, or, you know, even listening to it on the speakers and headphones. So it’s cool, it’s exciting. I feel like for a while the live show wasn’t like that, and it kind of demanded this other sort of attention from the audience to get on this weirder, maybe not depressing, but kind of angsty emotional level. We played a lot over the past five years and it takes a little time for the older fans to adjust to the new tempo and overall vibe of how the band sounds now, and it’s really exciting to see people kind of catching on and realizing it’s cool to dance and it’s encouraged, and slowly seeing the new direction catch on with the audiences. It’s really exciting.

Is it for that reason you usually avoid putting past material in the setlist, save for “Headsgiving” and maybe one or two more from Slow Dance in the Cosmos? Is it a conscious decision to move on, or do you just want to preserve the experience of the new material more in its entirety?

Yeah, I guess it’s a little bit of both. I think naturally I’m most excited about the most recent music that I’ve made, so it seems natural to me to kind of play most of that stuff. For a while there was a little more half-and-half - newer stuff and older stuff - and it felt like it kinda worked. There’s a way to kind of work the setlist to where we would start off with the newer kind of subtler arrangements and kind of ramp up to the older kind of like distorted rock songs. We’ve just been kind of learning the new tracks from Pool and that’s what were focusing on now, it’s what the press is focusing on now, so it feels good to play that stuff. And I like to throw in some older songs for, I guess myself and for the audience too, like stuff from Slow Dance. We actually learned "Daddies" and this is like the first tour that we’ve ever played that song live, and that’s an even older song, so it’s kind of fun to be able to pluck songs from different chapters from Porches, but I like playing the new stuff a lot.

I’ve seen a couple of your shows this cycle and “Shape” seems to be the only track off of Pool that you don’t play. Is there a reason for that? Personally, it’s one of my favorites.

Yeah, it’s one of my favorites too, we just haven’t gotten around to arranging it. It’s kind of like a trickier one to pull off live ‘cause it is so sparse and relies so much on production in the studio, but yeah, that will happen eventually. I really do like that song a lot and I think it would be cool to play it live.

I read the Pool track “Glow” was an evolution of a demo from years ago, and on Slow Dance in the Cosmos you had a track called “After Glow.” What’s the connection there? Is the latter a sort of sequel?

No, they were actually written pretty far apart. Most of the stuff on Pool, like “Glow” and “Mood,” I wrote those all around the same time, which was a while ago. Maybe like two years or something, which is kind of crazy to think about. But yeah, I was conscious of calling it “After Glow,” and they’re not really related, but I think you could kind of make them related if you wanted to think about it that way. I like the idea of some sort of weird continuity or reoccurring theme between albums or within albums, so there’s that.

I noticed you haven’t been playing encores. Is that a regular thing?

I’ve always had a really hard time with the concept of encores and the fact that as a band you might come to expect it. You even write, like you decide what songs you’re gonna play for an encore, if there is one, and it just seems like a sort of goofy showy thing; leaving the stage and waiting for the audience to call for you to come back. So last tour in the Spring I always felt like so awkward after and never wanted to do it. So it’s not like we we’re not doing encores, but I’ve just been saying “This is where we would end the set and I hope that you guys want to hear the rest of the set, but if it’s cool with you we’ll just play like three more songs - it would be great to just stay up here and finish out the set.” That’s kind of been the best situation for us so far, to just stay up there and play a 15, 16-song set and eliminate that weird encore thing. It seems like a joke.

Do you think the encore will become obsolete then and start to go away?

I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like it. It just seems like textbook now. I imagine in the past it used to be you wouldn’t expect that, and if it did happen it would be a really special thing, and you would come back out. I just don’t like how calculated it’s become, and it seems kind of flashy to expect it. I mean, I’m down if people do it, that’s all cool, but it always made me feel a little strange. So I’m glad that we figured out a way to kind of ask if they mind if we play a few more songs. I did do one last night, for some reason they will usually put on a song right after the last song to signify that the set is in fact over, but there was no song, and people were really yelling for an encore. So I did go back out and play a solo song which was fun and that felt better ‘cause I hadn’t planned on it and I had kind of told everyone that this was the set. But they really did insist, so that felt right.

How has it been touring without Greta for the first time this record?

Probably what anyone would imagine; it’s difficult to be away from her for long periods of time. She’s been touring this year with her new album, and luckily we have the same booking agent and most off the tours have overlapped for the most part, so where it could really get tricky and we could be away for four months at a time, it’s been like, I don’t know, two-ish at the most. So yeah, it’s hard, but it’s good that she’s doing the same thing and we both understand how it works. It’s kind of difficult to communicate and I guess it makes it a little bit easier to not take it personally if it’s hard to get on the phone or something. At the same time I think it’s been nice ‘cause towards the end when we were playing in each other’s bands it just got so hectic. We’d practice together with those bands each week and then we’d tour together and live together and that was a lot. It was fun, but I think it’s also nice to be able to both feel like we’re out there doing our own thing and looking after ourselves, and learning how to look after yourself is an important part of being in a relationship too. So it’s not perfect, but it’s got its perks and it’s got its downsides.

Porches 'Be Apart' (Official Video) Taken from the new album 'Pool' out now.

Is there a story behind the basketball imagery on the cover of Pool and in the “Be Apart” music video?

Sadly there’s not. There’s not much of a story behind the basketball. We just did some press photos with a friend up in the town I grew up in at a friend's pool. I actually had all the artwork kind of planned out and in the template and ready to go, and then I was editing the photos and kind of stumbled across that little cropped image of my hand with the basketball, and it just kind of spoke to me. I just kind of liked the deflated ball. It’s kind of like [The Creation of Adam,] the painting on the ceiling the Sistine Chapel where the hands are kind of out pointed at each other. I thought it had that kind of, I don’t know… you don’t really know whether the ball is drifting away or drifting towards the hand. And so I guess after that I decided on that. It just kind of made sense to put that imagery in the “Be Apart” music video, and I always enjoyed the way basketballs look in strange contexts. Actually, now I’m remembering, I always loved drawing them as a kid. It was fun to draw, so that’s really it; it’s just surface aesthetically pleasing to me.

You painted the cover for Slow Dance in the Cosmos, right?

Yeah, I studied painting at college for three years and would still consider myself as somewhat of a visual artist. I don’t think you can kind of decide not to be that, but yeah, I’ve always made drawings and paintings and stuff and enjoyed doing that a lot. It’s cool to have one part of the music be the visuals and I can kind of express that side of my creativity through that vehicle.

You’ve also created almost an entire clothing line's worth of Dark Muscle merch and have a strong sense of fashion as well. Is this an extension of your visually artistic expression?

Yeah, definitely. I really like the merch aspect of stuff and I’ve been getting more interested in clothes recently, so yeah, it feels really kind of perfect to have a vessel to make stuff under and a platform to sell it on. I’ve never really liked band t-shirts or merch so much; I’ll appreciate it for the graphics but I’ll never really wear a straight up band t-shirt. So I like the idea of either trying to like erase [Porches] completely the from the merch, or either have it be very subtle, and kind make stuff that I would like to wear. I also think its kind of fun to feel like you’re maybe in on something, like you know you’re wearing a Porches shirt but other people might wonder, “What is Dark Muscle?" I guess it’s just more fun for me that way. I get to play around with the idea of what merch for band supposed to be.

People often frown upon wearing a band t-shirt to see that band perform, but you could wear a Dark Muscle shirt to a Porches show and it would be fine.

Yeah, I like that.

You’ve also named your LLC Dark Muscle and used the term to describe your genre as well. What’s the story behind the name?

Dark Muscle just came from, I can't remember if I read it somewhere or if I just thought of it, but it’s a line in “Braid,” “I’ve got a dark muscle too,” and it’s just referring to your heart. I guess I like the idea of just thinking of it as a muscle inside of you that’s obviously dark, just kind of just thought it sounded nice. [I] thought it was funny to have the LLC be called that, and it’s just kind of developed from there. I don’t know if it’s a slogan or a brand.


Pool is out now via Domino Records. You can buy it here.

Diane Coffee's Shaun Fleming Learns He Has a Spotify Page and Explains Why 'Everybody's A Good Dog'

Music InterviewSean McHughComment

Panache and personality are two things that Shaun Fleming has in spades. Following earlier stints as a Disney voice actor and Foxygen drummer, his near three year run as Diane Coffee has seen him and his Good Dogs cover a lot of ground and challenge a lot of conceptions. Fleming is a performer at his core, but his approach to the consciousness should be noted as well - a beguiling sort of romanticism with a hint of jocularity - he's a new age amalgamation of David Bowie, Kevin Barnes, Prince, and Meatloaf, but with his own psychedelic sensibilities. Diane Coffee's live sets precede the band's reputation (arguably one of the best live bands on the tour circuit), and Transverso spoke with Fleming before he embarked upon yet another journey of "a lot of peace, a lot of love, a lot of happiness, and a lot of costume changes" this summer tour.

Diane Coffee, 'Everybody's a Good Dog' out September 4th on Western Vinyl Created by Blockhouse Films (http://blockhouse.media/) and Melinda Danielson Director: Andy Beargie Director of Photography: Kevin Winkler 1st AC: Zac Canale 2nd AC: Graham Singleton Editors: Kevin Winkler Zac Canale Andy Beargie Casting and Costume Design: Melinda Danielson Producers: Andy Beargie Melinda Danielson iTunes: hyperurl.co/khcay4 Amazon: amzn.com/B00YW5R4M6 WV: westernvinyl.com/shop/wv132.php Diane Coffee Artist Page http://westernvinyl.com/artists/diane-coffee Website https://www.dianecoffee.com/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/dianecoffeeband Twitter https://twitter.com/dianecoffee1 Instagram https://instagram.com/shaunfleming/ LYRICS: How can I help you?


TRANSVERSO: How are you enjoying the last day before kicking off your tour in Lexington tomorrow?

SHAUN FLEMING: I’m doing alright man, [it's] nice hanging out in the backyard. I’m in Bloomington, Indiana. We actually have a couple days off, so I’m just hanging out at home - I’ve been living here for close to three years now.

How do you like it?

I love it man! I really, really love it. It's definitely a lot different than New York/LA, and all of those other places. But it’s a great spot, it's really cool.

I’ve heard it’s a great spot, there’s a lot of cool music up there – yourself included.

Yeah man!

So Diane Coffee is a singular name, but you play with a backing band – I think you’ve referred to them as The Good Dogs.

Oh yeah, yeah. They’re my Good Dogs.

So do they make Diane Coffee a full-blown solo act that happens to have a backing band, or do you consider it to be more of a collective entity?

Um, Yes. [Laughs] It’s a little bit of both, you know? Diane Coffee – the name is kind of a way to put a label on a feeling. It's that feeling that I get – and a lot of people get – when I’m performing. Its that performance element. It's that same kind of person and you're at a show – maybe you’re quiet at home, but then you’re in that element where that sort of voodoo comes over you and you just start singing at the top of your lungs, moving and grooving. Its that, and it just so happens that [Diane Coffee] is the name I’ve given it. It's something that I’ve definitely embodied, but its also The Good Dogs, we’re all for Diane Coffee, and the audience at a show, they’re Diane Coffee, we’re all Diane Coffee.

Do you ever have shows where people come up to you after a set having expected someone other than who you are?

I mean, not so much any more. There were a lot of people who came when we first started playing that came and were like “Oh, my friend told me to come and see this band and I thought it was going to be some female lounge singer,” but, not so much any more. I mean, band names aren’t really that important – at least to me – they’re usually all pretty bad, including mine. I mean, even The Beatles – that’s just a stupid pun – it's like it doesn’t matter, because they’re made fantastic music, and that at the end of the day is what I think is the most important thing. I mean [The Beatles] could have gotten away with anything at this point. But so not that much any more because we’ve been around long enough to where we’ve gained enough of a reputation that people come in knowing the whole deal.

What can you tell me about Harem Scare ‘Em?

Whoa… Whoa dude! Good on you! Good on you doing your research! [Laughs] Harem Scare ‘Em, that’s my very first – I’ll call it a band, but we were like a cover band. We had one or two originals that we tried, but they were just really, really bad, so we just decided to not do that. So it was high school, and we had a talent show coming up, and we were all like “Hey, we all play music, let’s play the show!” But I could barely play the guitar, so I was just front man vibes. We did [The Beatles'] “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” and we won the talent show. Our principal was like this old hippie, and he was like [imitating voice] “Yeah, we’d love have you do a whole concert of this stuff!” So we were like “Oh god! Okay!” So we learned like an hour of all sorts of – pretty much, we were like a Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Jimi Hendrix cover band – so many things. We did like a 27-minute Beatles medley, which was insane and quite an accomplishment at the time. So we did that, and it was fun, and we were like “the high school band” and it's continued on, and whenever we’re all in town together today we’ll just go to a bar and book a show as Harem Scare ‘Em and do like three hours of covers. It's great, man. I love those guys. Actually, the guitar player’s dad, is the one who arranged all the strings for [Everybody’s a Good Dog]. Steve Hansen is his name. It was great man. It was really cool to work with him, and just kind of have more family connections. I mean, it’s a family album [laughs]. Yeah, so that’s Harem Scare ‘Em – those guys are all great, and they’re just some of the best musicians I’ve ever met.

I noticed on your Spotify profile you only follow three artists – Isaac Hayes, The Isley Brothers, and The Miracles…

I have a Spotify profile!?

You do! And it says that you just follow Isaac Hayes, The Isely Brothers, and The Miracles.

That sounds about right.

Would you count those three as inspirations in some way to how Diane Coffee came about?

Well, I mean yeah, but I’d also count countless others. I mean, I’m influenced by everything that I hear, even if I don’t like it. It's like that would be something that I wouldn’t do, and that’s the only way I would be influenced by that. [Laughs] I mean those guys are definitely… I don’t know why. I don’t really use Spotify all that much, mainly just because my phone is kind of broken – my headphone jack is broken on my phone. I’ve been like listening to CDs in my car, which is cool. So I don’t really use Spotify, and I never really got into it that much, but I know I had to make one for some little promos for Spotify, so I had to have one. We’re kind of veering off point, but yeah, definitely those guys are influences, but I think some bigger influences for this project would be people like Sam Cooke, Diana Ross, people like Prince and Meatloaf and Bowie and The Beatles; these big people who have these really big stage shows and were very flamboyant and broad. I mean, I come from a heavy theatrical background, like a lot of musical theatre and stage shows and I did a lot of improv comedy, so I like a lot of that in performance – theatrics – and that’s something I really wanted at the start of this project. It's just sort of me in general too, it's not like its something that I can just stop doing.

So your stage presence - which is unparalleled in a lot of ways – is that inherent then? Almost kind of conditioned to be theatrical?

Yeah, I don’t know if its been conditioned… that’s the age old question like “Are you born this way or did you come up and figure it out?” I’ve always been wanting to put on little shows and get dressed up and put on my mom’s clothes and all that. Then I sort of came out of my shell in high school, as far as performing in public and I joined a lot of theatre classes and all that. So I don’t know if its always been that way. Wanting to perform and be flamboyant like that has always kind of been something has been a part of my life that I’ve never really gotten to have just free reign and kind of do whatever I really wanted to do until now. [Laughs] I want to make it as big as I can with the means that I have at this point.

Directed & Animated by: Danny Lacy VHS Effects by: Tristan Wheeler http://www.dannydlacy.com http://vevo.ly/YS90Ea

Moving from the live set to the recorded and production side of your music – between your two records, My Friend Fish seems to explore darker musical tones through a lighter narrative lens while Everybody’s a Good Dog almost does the opposite, in the sense that it tackles more complex narrative themes but with a happier disposition. Is that a product of having more time to figure out what Diane Coffee is?

Yeah! Wow! Man, I really like the way you put that! That’s great! I’ve always kind of thought of these two records in the same way. You know, I don’t know if its intentional with that first record – I was kind of in a dark place, just being sick and in new surroundings, just being alone; so that’s kind of how that all came about. But lyrically its still pretty light. But with My Friend Fish I didn’t really know that I was doing a record. It was really quick, and it was more like I was just making songs to kill time. But with [Everybody’s a Good Dog] I got more time to keep thinking about the structure, though for me, [lyrics] are the very, very last thing I do. I always write the lyrics like the day before I put them down.

So, I mean, it's kind of weird – for me I don’t really go into it with an idea, I just kind of go into it with a feeling of the song, and the melody will kind of tell me what the song is about. Then I might kind of have a phrase that’s floating in my head and the whole thing will come from that one little phrase. I just think knowing that I was putting out this record, I wanted to just take a little more time and reflect a little bit more, and figure some more of what you said, more complex narratives. It's kind of hard to say why exactly that happened that way, too. It was just sort of the place I was when this record came out.

That makes total sense. On the same kick – I’ve always been interested in what the process is when someone is laying out the tracklist for a record, particularly the first and final tracks as possible “statements.” Did that notion come to mind when choosing “Spring Breathes” to open Everybody’s a Good Dog and then closing it with “Not That Easy?”

You know, I do like to spend a whole lot of time picking out the order of how these songs are going to appear on the record, but “Spring Breathes” sort of came to me… It's funny, it's like the only song that this has ever really happened to, it actually came to me – that whole intro - it came to me in a dream. I woke up, and I have the funniest voice memo recording of me kind of stumbling through in the middle of the night where I was trying to sing what was going on in my head and like how the song was going to go like [whispering] “Oh yeah, and then it's going to change and it's going to really fast, and then at this point its going to Latin sounding,” you know, [laughs] it was really weird. So I knew that that song – just because of all the changes and just how it was structured – it wouldn’t really fit anywhere else in the record. It kind of had to be first or be last, and that song is definitely kind of about starting over again, and kind of asking yourself these questions about whether or not you’re – in this case its about falling love, again, and whether or not you are in the right place to have another relationship, especially given your career or anything else that may be in your life. And that was kind of the same thing with “Not That Easy,” which was kind of accepting that you are always going to be coming home, and you’re going to have an atypical relationship. So in that way, those two made sense as the very beginning and very end of this huge journey for the record to come that kind of understanding.

It seems like a positive prospect at the beginning – it doesn’t necessarily become negative – but it's certainly more spectral gazing in a sense at the end.

Yeah, for sure. I mean there are bunch of songs that… The record is loosely – there are a few tracks that maybe have slightly differing themes, but for the most part, this record is kind of about examining me personally. My love life, my relationships, entangled with my career, and both things I don’t want to live without. So it's very hard, because they both take up an incredible amount of time and energy, and I don’t want to sacrifice any time on either. You know what I mean?

Oh yeah, absolutely.

And it's something that everyone – it doesn’t matter if they’re doing something else – experiences; there’s almost always going to be something they really love that does the same thing. I’d love to say that I would give everything up for either thing, but its just not true.

I’m sure that’s far more relevant than you could possibly fathom.

[Laughs] I think a lot of people go through that, be it artists, or anyone whose maybe got a hobby that takes up a lot of their time.

I wholeheartedly agree. As far as bookending tacks are concerned – “Hymn” and “Green” on My Friend Fish is one of my favorite beginning/ending pairings on a record.

Thanks man! [Laughing/fake yelling] You’re damn right! You’re damn right!

So with the theatrical inspirations for your live set – you’re a very snappy dresser on stage.

Thank you.

Of course. I assume the background in theatre plays some sort of role in that facet of your live set?

Oh yeah, sure! As far as all the theatrics on stage, I’ve been working a lot with my partner, Melinda Danielson – she goes by Nature’s Whether. She pretty much designs all those costumes. She’s kind of a jack-of-all-trades. You know it sounds kind of bad to say “well she’s just an artist,” you know what I mean? But its true, she does a lot of sort of performance art stuff and then she also does design work for me, and I work very closely with her when we’re coming up with themes for these shows. Like this last one, where I was in this gold costume – and we finally retired that one – but that was all about battling with the masculine and feminine archetypes and halfway through you shed and open up. She pretty much put that whole thing together. So that’s something that we can both do together, and how we both sort of share our artwork. We can both be working, but also have a fun time when we get together. I love what she does. So it's really, really fun to be able to work with someone you love, or with family.

I bet. I’d figure it probably helps further solidify the relationships, in a sense.

Yeah! I don’t know if you knew this, but we did this tour with of Montreal, and David [Barnes, Kevin Barnes’ brother] does all of the costuming and stuff; he’s kind of in charge of that whole world. It's like Kevin’s music and David is art.

Right. Yeah, I saw you guys on that tour.

Yeah man, that was so great. Those guys are so much fun. I love them to death. So that’s really cool that they’re both able to do that – it's like a family affair. So that’s kind of what I’m trying to do with Melinda.

Awesome. I don’t want to try and pull any spoilers or anything – but what can people expect this time around in terms of thematic elements?

You know, this time around – it's still really in the early stages – we wanted to try and get one more thing for summer, but its been hard because we’ve been out on the road so much, so its hard to find time to work something completely new. But the idea behind this new one is that we’re kind of sailors exploring the ethos and we crash land on this crazy island, and we start to learn. It's about acceptance and being able to understand someone else’s culture or ideals and be able to really dive headfirst into that. It's basically like walking in someone else’s shoes. So it's kind of like a journey of discovery and acceptance [laughs] that’s kind of the long and short of it, but still trying to work it out.

Down to the eleventh hour it sounds like.

Yeah, it's like when you’re trying to work out a new song on the road – the only time you have to really practice is like the 10 minutes you have during sound check – so it's like you’re just “I’m going to keep doing this. Maybe it's not ready yet, but I’m going to keep running through it. No we have to fix that, we’ll have to do it tomorrow.” So you’re kind of adding more as you go along, and hopefully it really pans out, but its fun. We ran a version of it just the other night, and it was pretty fun. It gets the audience interaction and it's pretty cool. Its going to be this sort of ever-evolving show; it keeps us on our toes.

So what should we expect from the tour this summer?

It's going to be a journey. A lot of peace, a lot of love, a lot of happiness, and a lot of costume changes.


Everybody's A Good Dog is out now via Western Vinyl. See Diane Coffee tour dates here.

Cullen Omori Talks 'New Misery,' Tour Cancellation, and Life After Smith Westerns

Music InterviewSean McHughComment

If you’re an indie buzz band aficionado of the early twenty-teens, you likely touted Smith Westerns as one of the preeminent “buzz bands” in their class. As it seems is the natural course of most relationships, endeavors, and bands started in high school, the members of Smith Westerns began to develop divergent views when it came to their future direction, and subsequently disbanded.

Since the dismemberment of the band, former frontman and Chicago native, Cullen Omori, set out to grasp the realities of embarking on a solo journey, making demos initially intended as post-band-breakup coping mechanisms, that after some extended basement sessions, materialized into Omori’s sublime Sub Pop debut, New Misery.

In the midst of a cross-country move, Transverso spoke with Cullen over the Bluetooth speaker system of his Fiat rental as he combed the Hollywood Hills in search of his future Los Angeles homestead.

"Cinnamon" off the March 18, 2016 Cullen Omori album New Misery Order New Misery: http://u.subpop.com/1T4Nwo9 Cullen Omori Twitter https://twitter.com/CullenOmorii Facebook https://www.facebook.com/CullenOmoriMusic/ Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cullenomori Sub Pop https://www.subpop.com/artists/cullen_omori Sub Pop Records http://www.subpop.com Twitter https://twitter.com/subpop Facebook https://www.facebook.com/subpoprecords SoundCloud http://soundcloud.com/subpop MegaMart https://megamart.subpop.com/ VIDEO CREDITS   Director:  Abigail Briley Bean www.abigailbrileybean.com  Video Production House: Mitra


CULLEN OMORI: Let me just jump in my car real quick, it's air conditioned in there. So anyway… Alright. I’ve got like this crazy rental car… and it's like a Fiat. The little tiny Fiat thing, so it’s a super… it's got like a computer thing in it that I can use as a Bluetooth so I can talk to you over the car.

TRANSVERSO: Cool.

So what’s up? Lets talk. Fire away.

Alright. I guess I’ll start out with something general: How do you feel having New Misery out for a while now? How do you think people have interpreted it? Are you pleased, or are you kind of bummed out?

You know, it’s a mixed bag. I spent so much time making the record and, I mean, the record was done and mastered last August, but it took six months to come out and that was kind of annoying, and to have my “maiden” tour blow up the way it did with my van breaking down and the rental van that we got just to go back to the airport got broken into and my clothes got stolen.

That must have been rough.

I mean, it’s a story for sure, and it’s a crazy story, but it's like those things were all kind of real big bummers. I don’t know, I think right now, I’ve always been… with Smith Westerns, I’ve always had really good reviews and this time around its been mixed. I think a lot of people in the US haven’t been getting it in the same that all my European or UK reviews have all been like super super good. You know? Its kind of like people have been missing the point and, I don’t know, that’s kind of annoying. But I’m not trying to write for like critics. Usually, it just so happens that critical people tend to like my music a lot more than like a general audience. This time around it’s a little different, but at the same time… I don’t know. I guess I do. I’m a little annoyed because I feel like I made a record that sonically is really different, but still has a lot of complex, deeper things that people kind of take at face value. Kind of like, “Oh these are songs that some Millennial would write about,” like “Losing the indie spotlight” or “Falling out of some popular band,” when it wasn’t that. It was that was part of it, but there were so many other kind of themes of coming out a self-destructive thing and being so fucked up all the time on drugs, and just not knowing kind of what I was going to do next. And kind of just working through that and while working through that I wrote this album, and that was more what it was about, more so than like “Oh, I’m bummed that I’m not in Smith Westerns any more.” I could give two shits about being in Smith Westerns right now, and I also really hate that I’m getting pegged where people are kind of like “Oh yeah, this is like Smith Westerns,” and it's comparing it to it, and people will send me messages that are like “Can you make a song that’s like this Smith Westerns’ song?” and it's like “Shut the fuck up.”

Absolutely. That has to be irritating.

Yeah. So I guess it's mixed about how its been received.

Sure. I figured that’s probably the downside of once being involved in the “indie darling” or “buzzband” cycle. It seems like it might create this sort of undue expectation of anything that might come after whatever the initial entity was, and that sounds like something that you’re dealing with right now.

Yeah. Well the thing is Smith Westerns wasn’t Coldplay – we weren’t this huge thing – and I like to think of it as I can go on and have a life after Smith Westerns and it doesn’t have to be held up to it. You know? I feel like as the frontman of the band, I’m kind of unfairly labeled as whatever I make, when really it was this whole process of me and Max writing the songs. It wasn’t just me doing everything. So yeah. Also, coming out of a bad situation, Smith Westerns kind of just gelled together and all of us sort of were doing well, and the path was obvious that we would keep making music with it. But after I left, there was no path. It wasn’t like “Oh, I should go and write another record,” and one of the cool things in writing this record was that it was an exercise in letting myself know that for me personally that I can sit down and write an album start to finish all by myself. I could do all the parts that otherwise, Smith Westerns were too afraid to try, or they thought were going to be bad, or whatever.

So it's like an exercise in songwriting for me, and so I still like the record. It's not like anything has turned me off to how I feel about it. I still feel strong about it, I support it, I think they’re good songs that are smart. I think that unfortunately, it's not a record that people… well, you know, I feel like right now with indie music, if you play guitar, you go two ways with it – you can go shoegaze-y or you can go with this '70s light rock shit. Its like jingle rock, and I really wanted to make something different, so I thought at the time a year and a half ago “I wasn’t going to be playing jingle rock doing the '70s stuff,” you know? Everyone has been doing rip-off Todd Rundgren or rip-off Canned Heat or whatever, so I was like “Well, I’ll try something different.” I wanted to make a song with synth. I wanted to try something that has soundscapes that were these songs that could technically be, you know from the '70s or '80s. And I also really wanted to move away from the revivalist idea – I didn’t want to make something where you could be like “Oh, these guys are trying to hearken back to like some era of guitar rock” or whatever. You know? I wanted to make something that was more kind of “my sound,” and I felt like it was appropriate being twenty-something, well when I wrote this album I was 24-25 and I thought it was appropriate. Also, it was my fourth record, so I could really start trying to move away from my influences and starting to really do it kind of “off the cuff.” I thought there was something that – I’m not going to say its my “sound” now – but it was more kind of less leaning on a certain genre, or a certain sound, or a certain band to make it sound right. It was a different experience too, not working with a band; that’s always weird. You know, with Smith Westerns, you could split work together – me and Max would work a lot – having a sounding board to bounce ideas off and change things, which was great, but at the same time, it would become limiting when Max and I had different ideas of where the music should go, and what we should be sounding like and stuff like that.

Right. You mentioned there was a “weird” trend in “revivalist” sensibilities in indie rock and what not – at this point, would still consider it to be “revivalist” or would you just consider it to be “en vogue” or something to that effect?

I mean… I think its very much a trend right now. I think that there are always bands, for as long as I’ve played music, and for as long as I’ve been recording music and can remember – there’s band that will go off of a certain vibe, or a certain genre or whatever. I think that now, however, the attention those bands are getting is huge, and its just part of how things go. It's circular, you know?

Sure, most things are.

And for now, its going to work for people, but I feel like I made a record that kind of was three years too early or three years too late or something, you know? It was probably two year too early, because its not any of those things. And that’s the other thing, too – even if I fail at something I don’t want it to be something where people can be like “Oh, he’s ripping off that band.” I think I did a pretty good jobbing of taking all my influences and melding them into this record. You can’t be like “That’s the Elton John song,” or “That’s the Flaming Lips song” or shit, I don’t know. Its all kind of spread out.

Well what comparisons have you seen people try to ascribe?

The only comparison I’ve ever read about is when people say something like Tame Impala, but I don’t even listen to Tame Impala to be honest. I was singing in a John Lennon-y kind of voice in 2010, so it's not like any of my music is a reaction to current music. That’s not how it works for me.

Its stylized in a manner of which is unique only to you, but do you feel like people take the stylization too seriously? Like with the US audience, you said it doesn’t quite “mesh.” Do you feel that people are taking you having been in a band like Smith Westerns too seriously to be willing to open up to Cullen Omori?

That could be a possibility. I feel that when I was with Smith Westerns, I didn’t feel like I was this huge public figure or anything like that. So, I didn’t feel like if I was, it ever benefitted me. I don’t think I get a huge benefit from being the front man of Smith Westerns. If there are any connotations connected to me being in the Smith Westerns, they’re negative – things that I did when I was twenty years old. They think that I’m like bratty or I’m pretentious, but people forget that there were two other dudes in the band – my brother and Max – who were equally as bratty and pretentious as I was. I didn’t use my name because I wanted to go solo. People weren’t like “Oh yeah, Cullen Omori, check it out.” I used my name because we were mastering the record and they needed to have a name and I couldn’t come up with one that I didn’t hate, you know? So I just used my name. Its one of those things where there might be some bloated takedown when they can’t accept something like when someone [else] has a “clean slate” would - like a musician that they wouldn’t know anything about other than the music. I feel like people also form their own narrative about who I am, and what my music is about, and that’s literally formed people’s ideas – word of mouth – that’s formed people’s ideas of me on some things. It's still all over the place, but I feel like people are building their own narratives for me, and it's not a good one. Unfortunately, that’s how it goes, but I think in Europe or the UK, they don’t have that the same way here. I guess I just pissed off the wrong people when I was in Smith Westerns.

Why do you think that is?

Because at the same time, when you look back at music history or whatever, you these “coffee” guys or like the type of guy that only writes music because they couldn’t find the music they liked to listen to, because “everything sucked” and so they made their music or whatever, and people celebrate that. But I think now, with the internet, Twitter, and the press in general, there’ll never be a next level rock star, because they’re constantly tearing them down. The persona has to be this guy that’s always humble and they can be like “Oh, I want to get a beer with that guy.” There’s no longer the idea of being this presence on stage that’s larger than life. Its like this “cool” real vicious energy and people don’t want that – it makes them uncomfortable and they want to tear it down. And I don’t think that that’s how I am, but I think being a front man and having it all kind of be about me, I think that feeds into the concept that people have this idea of me being a pretentious asshole guy, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m making music that I want to hear, I love performing, I love the aesthetic. My favorite part of this album that you make, you have to create this interview around it, you know? You have your album artwork, you have your videos, and that’s something that I take a lot of pride in doing; I’m a part of that from beginning to the end. I don’t want to say I’m not getting a fair shake or try and complain about it or anything, but I feel like my past isn’t there to help me, it's only there to hurt me. For whatever reason its stuck to me more than anyone else, you know? Like I read about the dudes in Whitney, or whatever.

It sounds like you’re almost just experience this curse of being the frontman despite your main intent to just make music you want to make, as opposed to appealing to a larger mass that may have listened to something you made in the past.

Well, I mean the idea… the narrative that I had was “I want to make pop music,” I think that people go and see that I went away from a band to being a solo artist that wants to make pop music, they think that I’m trying to capitalize on something, or it’s a money grab. That’s not true at all. When I say “pop music,” I mean that I still make music that isn’t dead to a lot of music history, and people that know music know good bands, everyone from the '60s to now; it's all in there, its all in my music. Its not like I’m trying to become Selena Gomez, or anything like that. Its just that I can appreciate something that’s melodic and immediate and trying to work something that is so over the top – like when you think of pop at the top, you think that it's grasping to be as marketable as possible – and try and take that and warp it, like I do with all music that I’m interested in. Its kind of real representation for myself, and its something that isn’t selling out; it’s a cool thing. I think there’s something to be said about making music that a fucking six year-old girl can get into, as well as a seventy year old man, you know?

But [I'm] staying true to my principles, and not selling out in a musical sense, and I think that often goes with not trying to play into that retro-revivalist seventies shit that’s kind of being accepted into the “indie spirit.” I’m just going to do my own thing and play around with what works. Right now, I’ve just been listening to nothing but Ministry, and I want to go really heavy for the next record. I just want to play around do whatever the fuck I want to do. Luckily, I’m in a position with Sub Pop that I can do whatever I want – they are so behind me in every way – even when my van broke down, I went to their office and just hung out for two days, Jonathan Poeman drove me to the airport and made sure I had everything – that I had a hotel and everything after my shit got stolen – that’s something I’ve never had before with a record label. I’ve never had that kind of acceptance and kind of support. It's cool and it makes me want to create, and I kind of feel like this maiden tour that I did that ended up blowing up is just part of my story now. Nothing I’m going to do now is easy – its not like coming out of the Smith Westerns, make this record and coming out at a different place. That’s that. I think part of it not being easy, and part of it being bad luck hanging over me… when I’m backed into corner I think is when I’m at my best, its when I’m my most creative. I have the kind of ability to draw upon whatever kind of emotion or anxiety to really crush whatever comes next, so that’s kind of how I approach it. I kind of let it rip me apart, and that’s where I got New Misery, I was slowly in self destructive mode, and I did not care what was going to happen to me. For a while I realized that the only thing I’m even halfway decent at is making music; everything else, I suck at. Everything else, I am less that amateur at. The only thing I know how to do is put together some chords and write lyrics that people can relate to, and that’s a cool talent to have. Its something I didn’t really appreciate until now, until I made New Misery.

It sounds like you’re trying to maintain a positive yet stubborn rationale even despite your string of bad luck, did that reenergize you at all when it came to working on your demos?

Yeah, it took me a second. During New Misery I felt bad for myself for a lot of the time, I did for a second when all that stuff fell apart on that tour, and I had to clean house a little bit with different people that were working with me and try to really figure out how to do it again. I mean, I’ve being doing it now for seven years – being in the music industry – and I know that I fuck up. You know you’re going to mess up. Its like, what am I supposed to do.

[Cullen calls out “What are you doing?” to a passerby while driving.]

Hey, sorry there’s a guy in a wheelchair being a dickhead. Anyway… It does make me create but it also kind of… what’s the word? I don’t know, I’m a very pragmatic person – like while on tour, that’s why I bought a van rather than rent - but the one thing that doesn’t makes sense is that for me, is that its all stress. Not with the writing part, but everything else that goes into making an album happen. And touring, there’s so much stress, and there’s no guarantee that I’ll ever not be kind of looking at anything other than the next year, you know? I don’t really think any further than that, I still want to do it, but there’s a part of me that kind of just defies the logic of “should I take it easy?” but I say no, I’m just going to keep on doing it. That may sound kind of emotional, like… what’s the word? Like a fucking… motivational speaker, or something like that.

I think that’s conceivably the best attitude you can have facing the stuff that you’ve experienced. In a way, you’re maintaining an indomitable spirit about the whole thing – you’re not feeling sorry for yourself, but at the same time you’re not saying you’re going to go conquer the world in a day. There’s a realist approach to it.

That’s how I do it, and that’s how I’ve been doing it. Its stressful or whatever, but at the same time, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve grown into this role; I’ve grown up doing music my entire life. There’s no formula to follow – everything’s different. There’s no right way to get somewhere, but there’s a lot of ways to have missteps doing it. But I don’t know, I guess right now its like, that toured got fucked in the US, I’m going to Europe to play some shows, and then I’m going to come back to do some more tours. I also really want to start supporting some bigger bands – I think that I’ve been out of the music scene for so long, but back in the day, I had really good relationships with different bands. But now its kind of a different scene – Chicago only has a handful of different bands: Orwells, Whitney, me, and a couple of smaller bands. There’s not much of a scene. What I want to do with music is – I’m not sure what I’m going to do for the next record – but what I want to attempt is really go outside something totally different, you know? Like not have it be '70s guitar riffs and love song lyrics. I mean my mind is constantly going. I’m like manically going and so hopefully something will click and work. I think this record is good, I think New Misery is really good. Its like, I don’t know if the singles were the best representation of what the album was, but I think that for me, everyone that I showed it to at Sub Pop, everyone has a different favorite song on the record. There was no go-to “This is the single of the record,” everyone was willing to give an idea on what they think about it, and that’s awesome, because that means that the record is chalk full of real songs, and that’s something that doesn’t necessarily happen with other bands. But at the same time, I don’t exactly know what people like, there’s no formula. If there was, I would experiment and try to fuck it up.

You mentioned you’ve been listening to a lot of Ministry as of late – have you been leaning toward a certain album more than others?

I like kind of like With Sympathy. I like the stuff where they’re kind of new wave-y. I’ve been reading the Al Joregeson autobiography and its amazing – its so good. Its like he’s this out of control junkie, he’s crazy. I don’t know, that was a part of music I just kind of stopped listening to - something really heavy, like super heavy, trashy. But I’m starting to get back into Ministry, especially the stuff where it was kind of still super poppy, like the new wave stuff was really interesting. Its kind of like the category of music that I’ve been making. I’m a pretty anxious and angry person, and I don’t really present it in my music – my music is more cathartic than it is straight up in your face progressive, and I think that the next thing I want to get away from is how dreamy everything is and how smooth most of the songs are, to get [to a point] that makes it a little bit harder. I grew up around punk bands, and Smith Westerns was very much like a shitty punk garage band, and I feel like that would be a really cool thing to do.

Have you ever leaned over into any RevCo stuff yet?

I’ve listened to a few things, but I haven’t really gotten into. The autobiography is so good - if you haven’t read it, you’ve got to read it – all his stories are so fucking funny.

I’ll have to check it out.

I’ve always been like “Oh, I should read it,” but I wasn’t going out of my way to get it, and then one day I just walked into a place and it was there. One of the stories that he tells is every single time they played a show on tour as Ministry, I think there was a limit to anything over 90 decibels, and they would never do it, they would always play above it. They would get fined every night, and it was like a  $20,000 fine every night. And the label said they won’t pay, they wouldn’t do the tour support, so I guess Al jerked off into a Ziploc bag and sent it to the A&R guy and then the guy calls him and says “Did you send me drugs, what is that? That stuff smells like shit!” and he was like “No! That’s my fucking cum, if you don’t pay us, everyone on the crew will start sending you our cum,” and they got the tour support.

That’s insane.

I know! It was so good, it was so funny.