Category: Interviews (Page 5 of 11)

Interview: The Belle Brigade

June 3, 2014 / aftertheshow

I checked in with Ethan Gruska of brother-sister duo The Belle Brigade about their new record, playing two shows a night on their current summer tour, and being on the Twilight soundtrack.

After The Show: Since you’re opening for Ray LaMontagne and playing in his backing band on this long summer tour, how are you keeping up your energy/stamina?

Ethan/The Belle Brigade: Warming up before shows and giving ourselves good vocal rest will be key!

You felt your first record was a little too polished and reminiscent of the past. What did you learn from working with Tony Berg on Just Because?

We cut the record at Tony’s studio in Brentwood and it was amazing to have him around for advice and guidance but we didn’t make this record with Tony… We actually co-produced this record with Shawn Everett who has done a ton of work with Tony for many years. Working with Shawn was amazing. He is such a talented and creative engineer and was totally on the same page about trying to branch out sonically. He is fearless about trying something new, has a totally open mind, and is so calm, warm and patient. So is Tony! Being in that environment was amazing.

Older songs like “Belt Of Orion” and “Where Not To Look For Freedom” are so strong lyrically. How has your songwriting process changed from your first record to this new one?

The songwriting process was actually pretty similar to the first record… We wrote the songs acoustically and then made simple demos of the them before we went into the studio. I think the main difference between these songs and the songs from the first record is how we approached them and treated them once we got into the studio to really record them. We were much more open this time to changing them and re working them. I think the biggest difference in these new songs besides production is a little bit of freedom lyrically… We tried to be a little bit more visual and less attached to a story line than a lot of the songs on the first record.

Ethan, your voice sounds similar to Barb’s and I sometimes find it hard to figure out who’s singing what. As a vocalist, how do you approach your singing in the context of the band?

Yea, sometimes it’s hard for me to tell who’s singing what when we listen back to background vocal stuff :). It’s really fun to be able to blend so much with somebody and honestly I don’t think too much about a vocal “approach” while singing with Barb because our voices naturally go together and our harmonies usually fall into place pretty quickly.

How difficult from a business perspective (like contracts, legal obligations) was it to leave Reprise/Warner Brothers and move to ATO Records?

We were really lucky with that and were treated very well by WBR when we parted ways… It took a little while but we left with a lot of mutual respect and no hard feelings.

How useful was your experience studying music at CalArts? Are you happy with the foundation in theory/analysis/ear training/arranging you got there?

Both our experiences were very different there but in both cases they were very positive! We met a lot of great people and it’s the type of place where if you seek something out there’s gonna be someone there who can impart some serious knowledge… They have a great theory and ear training department! Learned a lot in those classes.

Was being on the Twilight soundtrack as big of an exposure boost as you had hoped? That song is by far the most played of yours on Spotify, but you still played a residency at The Echo earlier this year.

Yea it was a great thing for us to get a song on there and definitely got us a little more exposure, but these days when a bunch of people stream one song or even buy one song it definitely doesn’t mean they are going to go listen to or buy the rest. We knew that going into it and didn’t expect it to be our big break at all… It was just really cool to have a song in a big movie like that 🙂

Thanks Ethan! To catch The Belle Brigade on tour this summer, head over to the band’s website.

Interview: Palomar

May 28, 2014 / aftertheshow

Rachel Warren of Palomar gives some thoughtful, revealing answers to our questions ahead of Palomar’s show on Friday May 30th.

Palomar will play (in the band’s original lineup) at The Bell House in Brooklyn.

After The Show: How has your approach to the songwriting process changed over the years? The music is slower, but what about lyrically?

Rachel/Palomar: I think when we first started out we just wanted to play a lot of the songs super fast–even ones that really would be better slower–because we thought it was way more exciting for us and the audience. I wrote a lot of ballady type things even back then, but when you play a ballad at 180 on the metronome, then you have….an early Palomar song. So the biggest change musically probably happened when we got Dale as a drummer, because he’s much more laid back than Matt Houser is.

Lyrically, I definitely swear way less now than I did…but the basic content is the same–introspective, egocentric–typical indie rock words about love, failed and successful. I did write a few songs for the last album about the fear of having kids and how that would change our lives. Boy was I right!

Sonically, “Infinite Variation” seems like the quintessential Palomar song. Care to share what the song is about/what inspired it?

I took the title from the Bach Goldberg variations actually–the concept that much can be done with little–so it’s really cool that you call this out as quintessential Palomar. When we started playing, many years ago, I wrote lots of songs that had the same couple of chords but in tons of different voicings–because I’d just started playing guitar, so I didn’t realize that they were the same notes. As far as the lyrics–that song was written when I first met my now-husband, Charles Bissell, from the Wrens. He was dating someone else and it’s written to the person he was dating at the time…long story short…Charles and I got married and the rest is history.

Have there been any unexpected benefits of being a mom and a musician? And how do you balance your time between your career, running a household/family, and music?

Unexpected benefits…hm…the kids are not big enough to be roadies yet so that’s not one… I think everyone who has kids struggles with the lack-of-time thing. It’s also true that when you have kids you become way less egocentric. If you’re a band that writes songs that’re largely introspective as we are, it’s hard to make the shift from what you do all day–work at your job where you’re thinking about trying to make a profit for someone else, then going home and being with the kids and thinking about their needs, to then writing lyrics that’re about the 1% of yourself that’s left to think about what your own interests/hopes/thoughts about the world are. So while there are many, many benefits to having kids, I think it’d be hard to find anyone who said that having kids benefitted their music. Though some people might lie.

Overall your songwriting seems abstract, in the sense that most songs are not entire narratives. You don’t supply the listener with the entire context, which makes it interesting trying to figure out what the songs are about. How did you come up with lines like “Boy is it hard being smarter than everyone” and “You must feel pretty safe with all your records around you”?

Hm, that’s a hard question. I think I used to think I knew what people around me were thinking, and what their motivations were and that made it easier to pronounce, articulate, and pass judgment lyrically. Another interesting phenomenon of getting older and having kids is that you lose some of the certainty you had when you knew way less about the world. Decisiveness is for the young, and possibly older drunk people. I also think that something that good lyric-writers (and I’m not talking about myself here, but in general) is make understated metaphors that are unique and true. Songwriters have the chance to let others see a little bit of their world, which is the cool thing about music in general.

How do you decide which songs (like “I’ll Come Running” and “You’re Keeping Us Up”) will feature male/female vocal interplay?

Well, when Matt Houser was our drummer, he had an awesome voice that really blended with mine so we did that way more. When we took on Dale (Matt didn’t want to tour. It gets pretty rough out there on the road with three women!) he was less of a singer and had a different style of drumming. The male/female vocal thing is something that we sort of tried to keep up, but that got harder when we had a drummer that didn’t sing at all. At that point Christina, who has an awesome voice, started singing a bit more which was also good. And there are many great things about Dale–he is a real rock drummer who can support the bigger and rock-er songs we started doing. But as he says, he has a Sears and Roebuck singing voice.

In retrospect, why do you think Palomar hasn’t reached a bigger audience? Perhaps timing or genre trends? I think your music is too thoughtful/smart for mainstream indie (an oxymoron, but I think you know what I mean)?

Well, that may be so, though it’s pretty flattering. We also all seem to have jobs that came first, so it was always sort of a hobby for us…we have been friends for so long–Christina and Brockett and I, that at this point picking up our guitars is just another variation of what we do together…so we’re more friends who decided to play together and did this thing for a long time, than a professional rock band who tried to ‘make it’ or whatever. I think we all always thought we’d just do it as long as it was fun. I also think we could have been more sucessful if we’d played up the fact that we were girls (we could have called ourselves the Palomarettes, maybe.)

Palomar III: Revenge of Palomar was originally titled Lift / Drag — What happened behind the scenes in the band when Kindercore Records folded?

We loved the Kindercore people–they were super nice and smart. We were surprised that the label folded, but ultimately it turned out fine. We got a free record out of it, and putting out an indie record to a small group of fans is not that hard to do, really. I wish I had a more exciting story to tell, with people crying and screaming and contracts being ripped up and set on fire, but it was kind of not a big deal.

Applying “Work Is A State Function” to your life today, how do you get inspired when you have a career in scientific publishing, a field removed from music? Do you feel like “half your life’s the same,” or are you actually satisfied the way it turned out?

Well, I think science publishing is sort of similar to music. They say there are all sorts of connections between math/science and music…but that’s neither here nor there…. I recently had a conversation with another parent as we watched our youngsters play together and I mentioned the band, and he was asking if we ever ‘made it’ because that’s a normal question for a non-band person to ask. I think I’m perfectly happy with what Palomar has done. In a way I think it’s much cooler to be a band that just a couple of people know about, but I’m not sure why… I think because then I feel like the people who like the band are in a secret club together–and clearly that club is smarter and cooler than the rest of the world. Haha.

Thank you Rachel! For updates from the band, head over to the official Palomar Facebook page.

Interview: Daryl Berg

February 7, 2014 / aftertheshow

Daryl Berg is a music executive and founder of Sound Canyon, which specializes in supervision and licensing, music publishing management, and creative development. He shares insights into his current supervision work, having a law degree, and the sync placements on HBO’s Girls.

After The Show: What made you want to start Sound Canyon?

Daryl Berg: It was just time for me to do my own thing…As much as I love music supervision, it’s also fun to do things outside of that…there’s entrepreneurial strategy. We work in supervision because we want to love what we do everyday. I took what I did running music [for the TV production studio] and cornered it to an independent model. Smaller companies are going to need services and can’t always bring in an in-house person.

What type of personality or skills would make someone excel at what you do?

The first thing is to be patient. At the end of the day, budget wise, music is somewhere near craft services: ‘People have to eat, and we’ll figure out the music later.’ That’s not to say you won’t work on exceptional projects like Glee where music is up front, but you understand that if you go over budget, music is one of the first things that will get cut.

So you have to be patient but also persistent and know your role. You have to be really honest – one thing you don’t want to do is over-promise. Be able to find small gems and get things done, and you have to give them a time frame and manage expectations.

What did you take away from serving as Director of Business Development for EMI Music and as VP of Strategic Planning for The Orchard – did the major company vs indie make much difference?

Having an expense account is nice [laughs]. It’s just a different mindset. Even though I’ve been at big companies, I’ve been at entrepreneurial positions at those companies. You’re hired for a certain skillset and then you think outside the box and grow your job description. At a major company, travel isn’t an issue — you no longer have to share a room on the road. But there are people in those jobs who are very settled because there’s a comfort to having all that.

How much has your law degree helped you…was it valuable in terms of the work you do today?

I think the law degree lends a spirit of gravitas to your authority. [The JD] helps me read licenses and paperwork, but it really helped me to think. When you’re a law student and lawyer, you deconstruct things – look at how to address the issues and break it down. You have to look at the big picture then break everything down in supervision, and the same with strategy for businesses. For better or worse, it’s a way of thinking.

Would you recommend that young people interested in following in your steps go to law school in today’s world?

Music lawyers – there’s not as much work for them these days. The deals aren’t there; the big money’s not there. There’s simply less work. My advice may be take a few years and work for someone you respect, get some world experience first. Law school is a very intense experience. Only go to law school if you really, really want to be a lawyer.

What would you say is the most frustrating thing about your job?

Budgets. Everybody wants more money to license more songs, to hire a better composer, but at the end of the day we get to work in music for a living. So if the worst part of my day is that I can only afford X band instead of David Bowie…I’m living a really good life. And when you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t have that comfort level [of a consistent salary].

What areas do you see in the music industry where there’s some unmet need or problem that still needs to be solved?

There’s a ton of issues. How to break a record in this marketplace is really hard…how to get something into the public consciousness. How to monetize internet success when people aren’t buying anything. People tend to focus on the problems instead of offering solutions.

You wrote about the efficacy of “Dancing On My Own” on Girls – I liked that sync, as well as “Same Mistakes” by The Echo Friendly in the end credits. Given shows where music is important and the soundtrack is popular, I was interested to hear about your goal to create profit from your music budget, treating music as an investment rather than a budget limitation or a necessary evil.

“Dancing On My Own” was a perfect use and perfect moment. A composer isn’t going to compose something as evocative. It’s about looking at your money and asking where you want to invest it. Do we want to invest it in hiring a composer (and then making money on the back-end) or in licensing a song to make that big moment? Does the song advance the storyline?

You (precisely and succinctly) said “The disintermediation of music has led to some mediocrity.” There’s so much music coming at us and pitched from all directions — will we reach a critical mass?

I think we already have. If you’re making something that’s not great and putting something out for the sake of putting something out…you have to think about that. If you’re an artist, [ask yourself] is this the best thing I’ve put out? We also have to think about how we release music. Will you get the most attention by putting out one song on a blog each month, or then releasing an album as a whole body of work? There’s so much hype on everything because it’s easy to hype things.

Thanks Daryl! Be sure to read his (very frequently updated) Sound Canyon Blog and Twitter @darylberg.

Teeth & Tongue: Interview + GRIDS

February 4, 2014 / aftertheshow

Melbourne-based musician Jess Cornelius generously answered some questions about what’s next for Teeth & Tongue (the upcoming album, GRIDS, will be released in early April 2014, and new single “Newborn” comes out later this month):

After The Show: I really like the complex rhythms and lo-fi guitars on older songs like “Vaseline on the Lens” and “Unfamiliar Skirts.” How does GRIDS sound compared to your past work?

Jess Cornelius: Thanks! There are definitely some similarities, but with this album I was experimenting a lot more with layered vocals and harmonies, and using the voice a lot more for rhythm and texture. We’ve also used synths a bit more, and retained the not-so-subtle ‘fake’ drum machine sounds rather than opting for ‘live’ sounds. I also found myself choosing this really harsh, digitally-processed fuzz guitar sound for a couple of the tracks, which I hadn’t felt comfortable with before, but it’s used sparingly!

What is “Good Man” about?

It’s kind of about making poor decisions! And the difficulty of trusting your own instincts when there are so many distractive influences. I didn’t set out to write the album this way, but it seems like a lot of the songs on it follow this theme of being happy with what you’ve got, knowing when to accept things, or when to change things, and when you’re just asking way too much. I guess it’s about finding satisfaction, and not always searching for something better.

How does that song fit into the rest of GRIDS, sonically?

Sonically it’s not quite as integrated in the album as a whole. There are certainly other tracks on the record that use a similar percussive vocal layering, but there are a lot more guitars on the rest of it I think. “Good Man” was one of the most simple songs in terms of arrangement, and I wrote it for a solo US tour because I was quite restricted in what I could perform on my own. Sometimes restrictions really are the best.

That’s cool that you also work as a copywriter & editor, but (ideally) someone of your musical caliber should have the freedom to focus on music full-time. How do you balance the two? Are you more encouraged or discouraged by the music industry today?

I just think the world is different. It used to bother me that some of the great (and relatively successful) musicians around me weren’t able to make a living from music, but I’ve increasingly found it sort of liberating. I really enjoy the work I do and I only do it part time so I’m lucky.

It means that when I make decisions about music—whether it’s creative decisions about the music itself, or management or touring decisions —I don’t have to make choices based on what might be popular or commercially viable. It becomes more about doing what you love rather than turning it all into a business enterprise. Of course, it still is a business in a way, and there’s still lots of boring decisions to make, but I’m not writing songs that I think will end up on a soft drink ad just so I can pay the rent. I’ve also found it really valuable to have interests and occupations other than music to act as a bit of a counter balance. Putting yourself out there all the time, in a fairly fickle industry, can be hard on the psyche.

Travelling to the US (and then touring from state to state) is a big investment…do you have plans to play in LA or NYC in 2014?

It is a big investment and the first time I did it solo because of that. It was quite hard the second time (for CMJ) with the whole band, but it was fun, and we got some financial help from the arts funding bodies here too. I would love to come back and play in New York, LA, San Francisco and even Austin again, but we’ll have to wait and see! It’s always a good time.

Keep an eye on TeethandTongue.com + (fyi) “Family Home” will be the last song on GRIDS.

UHH: Interview + “Innocence” Sneak Peek

January 31, 2014 / aftertheshow

Uh Huh Her were nice enough to share a first listen, one minute preview of their new single “Innocence” (which comes out on February 4th) AND answer some questions about their upcoming “Avant Pop” LP, Future Souls.

After The Show: What is “Innocence” about…what inspired you to write it?

Uh Huh Her: Without giving too much away, the song is mainly about lost innocence in a world where most people have seen so much at tender young ages because of…the media, on tv, and social media. Knowing everything at all times is such an all encompassing part of existence now, and the song plays to the scarier side of that.

How does “Innocence” fit into the rest of the Future Souls LP?

It plays into the record in that the questions the songs pose are mostly philosophical in nature. I tend to ask a lot of questions and am constantly wondering…what existence even means, where we are heading and what we are evolving as a species into. It’s super light material. HA. Future Souls is kind of synonymous with those questions.

Anything you want to share about the recording process?

It was very leisurely and experimental and without limitation, so we had a really good time making this album. We got to collaborate with some amazing folks as well, so that was pretty ace.

I love the vocal harmonies on older songs like “Run” and “Say So.” How does the upcoming album sound compared to Common Reaction?

It’s similar in that we went back to a more electro/pop sound with a little added soul and avant garde structures. Some songs are like 5 1/2 minutes long and normally we would think twice about that, but this album we just kind of let it all flow. When the songs end, they end but not because we are trying to fit them into a 3:30 second radio format. We like to call it AVANT POP at the moment.

How do you balance art and business? Will you do anything differently business-wise this time around?

They are hard to balance. Obviously we could use more help in so many areas, however with that help comes the loss of control and sometimes money because you’re shelling the majority of it out for all the “help”. We enjoy the process of knowing our own business from front to back, but some tour support would be nice!!! =)

“Innocence” will be released on February 4th on iTunes
+Pre-order Future Souls at UhHuhHer.com

Joseph King: Inside The Songs

November 23, 2013 / aftertheshow

Photo by Marica Honychurch

Joseph King (former frontman of the bands Deadbeat Darling and Canvas) shares an inside look at the inspiration for his new single, “Don’t Be So Alarmist,” and b-side, “Wake Up Woman.”

King’s debut solo EP, called Wanderlusting (RockArmy Records) doesn’t come out until February 2014, but here’s a first listen + inside look:

“Don’t Be So Alarmist”

“I wrote this song while i was living in Austin last Spring playing a residency. I feel like it’s the tune that set the tone and direction for the album lyrically and sound-wise. I have a (beautiful) female friend who lives a few blocks from me here in Brooklyn…This song is my humble advice to her…”

“Wake Up Woman”

“I was madly in love with a woman throughout the entirety of last year. She was surrounded by people who were very against us being together, and concocted story after story about me to try to end us, many of which had influence over her. This tune is a little nod towards that experience…”

Thanks for sharing Joseph! New Yorkers, you can catch Joseph King at Mercury Lounge on December 11th.