eMusic Selects: Man/Miracle
Featured Album
Man/Miracle’s debut record, The Shape of Things, is a bottled whoop of joy. Its ten songs form one giddy wave of yelping vocals, skittering Afro-pop guitars, clattering drums, clapping hands, and group hollering. You know that moment in Stop Making Sense where David Byrne and Tina Weymouth start doing this goofy, high-stepping dance in tandem, grinning happily across the stage at each at how unguarded, how caught up in the moment, they feel? Every song on The Shape of Things feels just like that. It’s a distillation of the sheer joy of motion. Or, to put it in somewhat less dignified terms: few things I’ve heard recently have made me want to go “Wheeeeee!” like The Shape of Things.
This is the sort of irrepressible energy that risk goofiness, and from the evidence of frontman Dylan Travis, it’s clear that these men do not fear goofiness. Rambling, genial, and frequently self-deprecating, Travis chatted with eMusic about the meaning of the band’s dichotomous name; how fracturing your spine changes the music you write; about the ethnic diversity of Oakland, and taking part in the world’s Great Ongoing Musical Conversation. “We don’t take ourselves very seriously at all,” Travis insists at various points during this interview — but their music, for all its energy, is about as serious as it gets, and we are couldn’t be happier to make The Shape of Things the latest edition to eMusic Selects.
[eMusic Selects is a program designed by eMusic to give exposure to unsigned or undersigned bands. This month's selections are Man/Miracle and Hurray for the Riff Raff]
So how did you guys get started as a band? You and Tyler [Tyler Corelitz, the drummer] have known each other forever, right?
Tyler and I grew up together in this tiny town called Los Osos, and we were on a tee ball team together and everything. Los Osos is this really weird small town on the Central Coast of California; it’s really small and really boring. I mean, I love it, it’s beautiful, but there’s nothing going on there. Tyler and I went to different elementary schools and shit, but when we got to high school we started playing music together, and it’s been rolling ever since. We disconnected in college and he went elsewhere and I went all over California, but we met up after college and started up the band again in 2007. We started a band called Bird On a Wire in, like, 2004, and then we didn’t play together again until we started this band.
How did you settle on the name Man/Miracle?
It’s sort of like two of the most loaded words in the English language and I think like all band names, you end up sort of re-appropriating the words, or some shit? You end up associating yourself with the band and their music and stuff, and that was the ultimate goal with that band name, like: “Make these words ours.”
Okay, so what does your name mean to you now, now that Man/Miracle is your mantle? Now that you own it, spiritually speaking?
I don’t know! A lot of our songs, when I look at them, have to do with meaning and absence of meaning, and — [stops, laughing] — that’s the band we’re playing with! Sorry about this, man — we’re bringing rice pudding to our drummer, who’s just passed out in the back of our shitty Subaru, dying.
…What?
[Laughing]. Well, we went to this karaoke bar last night, and there was like this midget singing “Erotic City” —
…Wow. That’s some Twin Peaks shit right there.
It was really Twin Peaks. Tyler was — [covers hand, asks someone]: What song was Tyler singing? — Tyler was singing “A Whole New World,” from Aladdin, and then, like, this girl started grinding on him and straight-up tried to give him a blow job in the middle of the bar!
Wow.
Yeah, it was really surreal.
I’m using this story, by the way. It has nothing to do with anything, but it’s amazing.
[Laughs]Go for it, man! Use whatever your want. Our band is all about total degeneracy.
It’s funny you say that, actually, because listening to the record, I would never have guessed that. It’s not shambly at all; you guys are super, super, tight, and obviously very serious about your music. The record sound totally professional. So good job on maintaining that complete illusion, I guess.
Dude, maybe that’s why…because we work so hard on our music. We have to let loose and be total assholes all the time. Everything’s constant chaos around us!
There is a real spirit of that in the music, though, like all the hollering in the background. There’s a real spirit of release in the music.
People always say our shows are cathartic. Our live shows are really — the best ones are truly insane. It’s funny, because people listen to the record, and they’re like, “Oh, these are good pop songs.” Sometimes there are even some mellow moments. But sometimes when we play shows it just feels like we’re a hardcore band or something! Like when we’re playing to a crowd that knows our songs and stuff, we’re just kind of capable of an almost-punk energy. Which is funny, and people don’t expect it. They come expecting a super-clean, super-tight sound, and then it ends up being this weird warehouse show where people are just moshing and shit!
Does the vibe get aggressive at those shows?
Well, I think we have some aggressive songs, but it’s just energy. Our band is about energy. Energy and degeneracy. Our two main calling cards. I guess that’s what our band name should be: Energy/Degeneracy.
I think that’s a big part of our album, too: structurally, our songs are really formal, like a straight-up pop song, and then there will just be this weird, noisy breakdown, and everything will just release. I think a good rock band does that for you.
The vibe I get is very well-controlled chaos.
Totally, yeah.
Do you guys practice really hard putting together the structures so you can take them apart later?
Fuck yeah, man. We practice a lot. That’s the compliment we receive the most when we play live; I think a lot of people get used to seeing indie bands that are punk bands, and you know, they kinda half-ass it, they’re kinda sloppy. People sort of expect that. But yeah, we practice a ton, and our stuff’s really tight.
How do you put the songs together?
A lot of bands are kind of one-person operations; this main songwriter and lays down his or her vision, and then tells everyone what to do, basically. And some of our songs are like that, but the overwhelming majority of them are really collaborative. I think our sound has evolved really organically, because all of us come from such different musical backgrounds, and we end up bringing that to whatever we do. I think that it comes out sounding pretty unique.
Speaking of different musical backgrounds: there are these really strong, muscular polyrhythms in your music, and that really struck me — it’s not always something you find in guitar pop. Where does that come from?
Well, Tyler’s been drumming since he was, like, three. He really focuses on his drum parts, and we pretty much build a lot of the songs around drum parts, or we’ll all come in with an idea and Tyler will literally turn it upside down and reconfigure it. Like that song, “Back of the Card?” When I first wrote it, it was a total highlife sort of song. But Tyler’s like, “Yeah, well, that’s interesting, but why don’t we give it more of a soul beat?” And then we’ll turn it upside down again: the end of that song is a weird, noisy, cathartic, controlled-chaos sort of thing and the rhythm is just insane.
It’s interesting to hear you mention highlife: I didn’t want to make an assumption, but I definitely hear African pop in the music. Is that something you guys listen to?
Yeah, for sure. We take a lot of inspiration from all kinds of different music from all over. Living in Oakland has really, really put that in the forefront of our minds, I think, because it’s one of the most diverse cities in the United States and you can’t really avoid it. It’s just all kinds of different music everywhere, all the time. It’s so funny being here in Portland and, sitting down in a café and hearing Built to Spill and Pavement, and I’m going “Oh my god, I haven’t heard this shit since high school!” That’s the shit I grew up with, and it’s still so strong, it still has such a presence in my mind. But in Oakland, I live on International Blvd., and it’s like this mish-mash of cultures. I think over 150 languages are spoken in Oakland. I think that Oakland and Long Beach are the two most diverse cities in the United States. There’s just so much immigration and cross-culture influence.
And that’s bled into your music?
God, totally. There are really a lot of bands here that are successfully incorporating that stuff without straight-up appropriating it. I think that’s what our goal was: to not just appropriate but to work in, deconstruct, do interesting things with it. We just did a show with tUneYards — she’s one of our favorite artists right now, and I think she’s really successful at that. You can’t just be like, “Hey, I really like King Sunny Ade; let’s just rip that off!”
We thought a lot about how rock music interacts with itself even across continents…you listen to those Sublime Frequencies comps, and you realize, these people listen to rock music too — there’s communication going on. It’s a conversation.
Living in Oakland, you walk into a Vietnamese sandwich shop, and they’re playing one of those records, and you’re just like, “oh my god, what is this record? Can I buy your tapes from you?”
Do you guys have models for rock bands that have done that, that have integrated the music of other cultures seamlessly?
I mean, Talking Heads were one of the first ones who did that, but even like the Rolling Stones, you know? They looked at musical forms, and kept that conversation alive, first by appropriating blues and rock music but then, like, they made a disco record! They were really smart about their influences. I think the Dirty Projectors are really awesome, that’s what they’re doing right now. I think that we’re much more of a “pop” band; we’re ultimately trying to make music that people can sing along to. The Projectors are, like, — I’m super into them, and I love them — but they are really brainy music. We are a much more visceral rock band.
So you guys used to be called Bear on Bear? Wanna talk to me about that?
[Laughs] Sure, man. Basically, we don’t take ourselves seriously at all. We really don’t.
Is that, like, bear on bear action?
It could be! I think we were talking about, like, what if Karl Marx and Engels had a relationship…[laughs]. I don’t know, it had some Blonde on Blonde in there as well…
So I have to ask you this question, and I apologize in advance: you broke your back?
So that was during the Bear on Bear days…We were just getting started as a band, basically. I was riding my bike, and I went off a very precipitous jump … and didn’t mean to! I flew over my handlebars and landed on my head. I was wearing a helmet, luckily, but it was gnarly. I fractured my spine.
It really influenced the direction of our band for awhile, because for six months I was in a brace, and taking shitloads of Vicodin. I was just listening a lot to Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden and watching Star Trek and shit. Like, that was all I could do. So our music became really contemplative; it mellowed out our music a lot. That phase passed. [Laughs].
I mean, that’s just an intense life experience. Did it make your music any different in a longer-term way?
I think it did two things for me. First of all, and this is a weird answer, but I learned to better use my body, to be more in tune with how I was feeling physically. I felt really disconnected before that experience, and after that I was like, well shit, I need to recover. I learned how to dance a lot better after that, you know? I had to work out a lot, and the process of recovery made me more physical. As a result, I think our music became even more physical, motion-oriented.
Secondly, I think a brush with death will always improve your spiritual self. This is some New Age, hippie shit, but it makes you think twice about what you’re writing about and what you’re trying to say with your music. Everything became much more immediate for me. Just living life in general became much more important to me. Everything came into focus, I guess.
