Let’s really take a step back and think about the fact that when people are comparing you to Paul Simon or Talking Heads, it really is a compliment. We love that music. At the beginning, though, we were a little bit defensive just because we’re a young band trying to do our own thing. When people would describe our entire band as sounding like “Graceland,” it just seemed so — I don’t know — reductive to compare a whole band to one person’s album. I think Paul Simon’s very cool, and it’s an amazing album. But at the same time, we felt like we were doing a few different things that you don’t see in “Graceland.” It makes you want to snap back and say, “Hey, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Really, it makes sense that people make those comparisons. I understand that comparisons are always kind of incomplete, so I understand that people use that to give people an idea of what the band sounds like.
So what influences are more appropriate?
When the band started, I was really listening to a lot of Elvis Costello and Squeeze. I didn’t necessarily want to sound like them, but to just kind of use their songwriting as an inspiration, because those are bands that totally came out of the punk period in England but were still kind of dedicated to the craft of songwriting in the same old ways. Elvis Costello and Squeeze and XTC are some of the best examples of that. Whether or not we sound much like those bands, certainly they’re inspiration.
We’d met in school when we were freshmen. We stuck together, we hung out, we talked about music, we collaborated on little things. By the time we were seniors, in our last semester, we really decided to start a band, to perform at parties and little shows at school. After we graduated, we decided to keep it going. Even when we had jobs and were pretty busy, we found time to record what would go on to be our album. The oldest recorded part of the album is the drums — we recorded that actually when we were still in school. That’s actually in a building at Columbia, spring 2006. That was the start of it. We didn’t actually finish it until last September, kind of a real studio. We never worked with another producer or in a fancy studio.
One thing about our band — I don’t know if it’s unique — we had a full-length album, 10 tracks recorded, before anyone had written about us. I think the fact that we had that many songs maybe gave our early supporters a little more to go on. You asked if it was a healthy situation. Definitely what I consider an unhealthy situation is when a band gets hyped up off an EP or two songs. That happens all the time — a band gets hyped up off one song. Then all of a sudden you’re in a situation where you have to sit down and record an album and you’ve already got all sorts of psychopaths on the Internet debating your work, saying you suck. You’re already in this terrible cycle, and then you have to make something. Once people started talking about (our album), it wasn’t based on one or two songs. The people who got excited about us then had already heard our whole album.
The only reason I hesitate with the idea of being an “insider” is that I feel like another problem with some of the haters, the criticism that we get, is that people automatically assume that because you dress a certain way and went to a certain type of college that you’re representative of this kind of repugnant, capitalist, 1980s, selfish vibe. It’s really not true. And I think it’s pretty bad that the idea that someone went to a school that’s known for its academics automatically means they’re some sort of rich ass----.
What other people are saying...
deflated from McDonald's - September 09, 2008 at 4:14 PM
They're looking a little long in the tooth.
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