There’s always been a spirit of defiance to rock ‘n’ roll — think Elvis’s hips on Ed Sullivan, the Sex Pistols swearing on Bill Grundy’s Today show, Sinead O’Connor shredding the Pope on Saturday Night Live — but it’s rare that any artist faces bona fide criminal prosecution simply for writing a rock song, regardless of its content. But in Tehran, Iran, where our newest eMusic Selects band, Yellow Dogs, was formed, rock ‘n’ roll is a legitimate crime punishable by law. It’s no wonder, perhaps, that the music they produced is so tense and nervy — the sound of four kids ducking in and out of dark basements and constantly looking over their shoulders. We caught up with Yellow Dogs at their apartment-slash-practice-space-slash-studio in Brooklyn to talk with them about how they got together.

The group’s origin story is classic punk rock — hanging out in a skate park after hours with the only people in your neighborhood you feel are like you. In the video below, Yellow Dogs talk about how they got together.

Needless to say, in a country where playing rock ‘n’ roll is outlawed, buying instruments can be a bit of a challenge. In the video below, the band talks about the trick of tracking down instruments in Iran.

You would think that, given their circumstances, Yellow Dogs would be more covert about their hobby. Not so, they explain in the video below.

When it came time to release Upper Class Complexity, Yellow Dogs wanted to make sure they had an album that best represented their personalities. They talk about that, and some of the old gear they have in their studio, in the video below.

(Follow The Yellow Dogs on Facebook!)

File under: Bright and shining power-pop — heartbreak on the FM dial

For fans of: Big Star, Sloan, Cheap Trick, The Posies, Matthew Sweet

From: Los Angeles

Personae: Justin Kennedy (vocals, guitars), Louie Schultz (lead guitar, backing vocals), Douglas Randall (drums)

When we last left Army Navy in 2008, they had released an attention-grabbing, hook-laden bright-n-shiny debut, were racking up placements in high-profile films and seemed to be on a trajectory aimed decidedly upward. But plenty can happen in three years, as it turns out: in the wake of their debut’s modest success, Army chief Justin Kennedy found himself swept up in a whirlwind relationship, the kind that kills at the same time as it thrills. As friends left him and the circumstances surrounding the affair became increasingly dire — to put it plainly: one of them wasn’t exactly unattached — Kennedy started losing track of himself, operating only from feeling to feeling. That the whole thing should end in catastrophe wasn’t especially surprising; what is surprising is the fact that such incredible heartbreak could power the clear-eyed, crystalline songs on The Last Place. Strewn with an equal measure of regret and panic (never more so than in the line, “There she goes/ Goddammit, he knows”), The Last Place finds Kennedy moving from infatuation to desperation to — at long last — acceptance and peace.

eMusic’s J. Edward Keyes talked to Army Navy frontman Justin Kennedy about kissing Elton John, Shrek’s deep pockets, and the downsides of dating a married celebrity.

On how The Last Place wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Shrek:

So we spent a lot of time touring the first record. We did everything we could — we played lots of great shows with the Lemonheads and the Dodos — just building that first record. Toward the end of that cycle, around 2009, I felt like it was at the point where we could start looking toward the new record, and songs started coming really fast. But as we started writing, we ended up in a place where we needed an influx of cash [or the record wasn't going to get made]. And out of the sky came this awesome placement in the trailer for Shrek Forever After. The people who were putting the movie together somehow had heard our cover [of Maxine Nightingale's "Right Back Where We Started From"]. We got the call about the placement and I called Adam and said, “Okay, we can make the record.” After that, we were gung-ho. We spent the next six months in the rehearsal room, working on parts and getting the record together.

On the harrowing affair that inspired the bulk of The Last Place:

You know, I really didn’t want it to be the theme of the record. I was actually working against it at first. “Ode to Janice Melt” was one of the first songs I finished, and there’s lots of hints and inside jokes in that song [about the affair] written to someone who may or may not ever even hear it. I knew that song was going to be on the record, and it wasn’t my idea to sort of get into [what happened], but it was just one of those situations where a lot went on and there was a lot to think about, and I think I was still dealing with a lot of the emotions. I kept finding more things to write about, and more ways to write about them, and it felt good. It was cathartic for me to write about them. Some of them are love songs, and some of them are hate songs, and once I got to the point where I was okay with it, it got more interesting for me to write about it and to think about it and to pick it apart.

In the end, I was really happy about it, even though it’s so scary to write about something so personal. In the past, I used symbolism to mask a lot of things. On this one, a lot of it is really direct, which is nerve-wracking. It’s almost a little too much information — but at the same time, that’s where you get down to the real shit. When I was singing the songs on the record, it was definitely the most intense singing I’d ever done, because I was relating these events that really happened. I could visualize it happening as I was singing, and I think that comes through.

On being at the center of an emotional tornado:

It probably only lasted half a year, but it was really crazy. I mean, I lost friends over it. It was such an intense thing that happened; I couldn’t not go back to it and try to look at it. Because at the time it’s happening, it’s so nuts you can’t even deal with it. You lose track of yourself to a certain degree; you’re almost of two minds. And so the timing of this record was perfect, because I was finally ready to deal with it at that point.

Writing a record like this, you hope people have felt the same things, but at the same time I was like, “God, is anyone going to be able to relate to this?” So I talked to the band, and said, “I don’t know if I should write a record about this — should I, or shouldn’t I?” And they were like, “Dude, definitely. We know how much this affected you, and it’s gonna make these songs that much more honest and real.” And after they heard how “Janice Melt” turned out, I think they knew there was more to go through and look through. They were fully supportive of me just going for it.

On The Last Place as a start-to-finish narrative:

There’s definitely an arc. The early part of the album is about the early part of the relationship, but when you get to the end [of the album], I’m finally able to see myself moving past her — I sing about, “Replacing my muse.” I was writing to get her out of my system, and to find other people who filled that place. “Wonderland to Waterloo,” that’s where I get to the point where I’m like, “She’s gone. This is where I’m at, and this is how I’m gonna move forward.”

On getting kissed by Elton John:

I wanted to make music but I needed a job; a freelance job where I could make records and take time off. So through friends I got a job working as a wardrobe stylist. It’s a really strange gig — you’re working with every big celebrity out there. I’ve worked with Morrissey a couple of times, which was amazing. He was awesome. I’d heard he was a dick, but when I got there and I heard his sense of humor, how dry it was, I wondered, “You know, I wonder if everyone is just misreading his jokes.” I mean, he’s a little crazy, but in the best possible way.

I ended up working with Elton John for a day. And, again, I was expecting him to be a total asshole, like a total princess, but he was super funny and kept cracking all these dirty jokes. They’d set up a grand piano at the place where they were shooting the pictures, and he’d sit down and just start playing old, like, rock ‘n’ roll and old soul songs. It was one of those shoots where, watching it, you’re like “This is an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime experience.” To top it all off, he gave me a kiss right on the mouth when he left!

On what he learned from his days in Pinwheel with Ben Gibbard:

We were a band for like four years. I guess I kind of learned how to write songs in that band. Ben wrote songs and I wrote songs, and having two songwriters in a band, there’s a little friendly competition going on. We were always trying to be writing to outdo each other. When it ended, I took a break for a while. It’s like going through a bad breakup — you have to take time off. Ben had started Death Cab while Pinwheel was going on, so he was set up at that point to continue and I wasn’t ready to.

Ben and I still keep in touch. We haven’t talked in a while — he’s a pretty busy guy obviously, but we’re still pretty close friends. [Guitarist] Chris [Walla] used to be my roommate for a long time, and [bassist] Nick [Harmer] was in other bands around town as well, so I’ve definitely known those dudes for a long time.

On what song he’d like his old flame to hear, if he could:

I guess I’d like her to hear “Janice Melt,” because there’s humor in it, and it’s speaking to her in a roundabout way. I mean, if she saw the title alone, she would know the song is speaking to her. And there’s inside jokes in it. You have to make light of the situation and move on. It’s one of those things where we both knew it was a good and bad thing while it was going on, and that’s what I was trying to talk about in the song. There are certain lines in a lot of the songs that I think speak directly to her. And if she never hears it, totally fine — I didn’t make the record for her, I made it for me.

On whether or not he’s worried people will use the lyrics to deduce the identity of his paramour:

[Long Pause] Uh, I wasn’t, until right now.

File under: Frenzied guitar riffs, looped vocals and floor-tom grooves

For fans of: Neutral Milk Hotel, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Grizzly Bear, Local Natives

From: Brooklyn

Personae: Alex Schaaf (vocals, guitar), Jon Natchez (bass guitar, sax, trombone), Michael Tapper (drums)

File Under: Frenzied guitar riffs, looped vocals and floor-tom grooves

Alex Schaaf started Yellow Ostrich as a dorm-room solo outing while in college in Wisconsin, where he cranked out a couple of whimsical electropop albums and EPs made mostly with just a drum machine and vocals. He doesn’t like to spend much time on one project: Those first releases — among them an EP inspired by Morgan Freeman’s Wikipedia page — were each made in just a few days’ time. But when he started recording The Mistress in early 2010, he tested his patience and stretched the process out over a few months. The results were worth it: The new LP is still simple in its instrumentation — mostly guitar, looped vocals, and floor toms — but it’s a bigger and tighter sound made with a little bit of outside help. Since Schaaf left small-town Wisconsin for Brooklyn in August 2010, Yellow Ostrich has become a three-piece, rounded out by Mistress collaborator, drummer Michael Tapper (Bishop Allen, Fool’s Gold, We Are Scientists), and multi-instrumentalist Jon Natchez (Beirut).

eMusic’s Laura Leebove met up with Schaaf at Brooklyn’s Roebling Tea Room, right above the band’s tiny practice space, to chat about The Mistress, going through a Dave Matthews Band phase, and his first real tour.

On his day job, digitizing old film and photos:

It’s a day job, but it’s interesting. I take 8mm film, so it’s home movies from the ’50s or the ’40s. I’ve gotten a few porns — some professional, like nasty ’50s [stuff] and some, like, y’know, “This is my grandparents’. I didn’t know and I brought it in and this is what it was.” It’s mostly people vacationing at Disneyland. [When it's porn], usually we call them ahead of time and warn them — “You probably don’t know this” — because if you have 8mm film, most people can’t play it, so they have no idea and they bring it in.

On playing his music with a live band:

When I did The Mistresss, I did it with the idea that it’d be able to be played live with two people, maybe three, so that made it easier because I did it with vocal loops. I kept it to only a few vocal loops, guitar and drums, basically, which is two people. So me and Michael can do most of the album relatively replicating it, not that that is what we were trying to do to get it exactly, and then Jon finishes it off and adds this touch of horns and stuff so it’s been really natural. It’s a much different sound than the album. It’s fuller and more lively I think.

On learning to play guitar just a few years ago:

I played piano for most of my life, I started that in kindergarten. In college I took classical piano lessons. It was just music but it was a mix between performance and theory and composition [in college]. I didn’t start playing guitar until like, sophomore year, so three years ago, I picked that up because in all my bands I had been playing piano, but I got tired of that. I wanted to play guitar in a band — I wanted to be a rocker, because it’s possible to rock with a piano, but it’s harder. So yeah I just learned guitar. I’m still not great at it but I can play my songs [laughs]. Once you get the basic framework of how a guitar works, I can fake my way through most stuff. I just subscribe to that Neil Young thing: He can solo on one note, it’s all soul and it’s not technical, which I think is the way I’m taking it since I’m not good yet [laughs]. I’ll just, yeah, that’s what I’ll say. I choose not to be technically proficient!

On collaborating, and not recording any of The Mistress in a studio:

I knew with that album that I wanted to take my time and not do a quick, week-long thing, so I did a lot of the drums myself first, and then I had some friends play some things. So I would go to where they were or whatever, or have them come in. I was taking guitar lessons and my guitar teacher played on one track. I just wanted to have it be more collaborative than my previous things which was like, me in front of a computer, so [this was] going to the movie theater and my room and some other rooms. And when I got [to New York] I did a little guitar on one song. I’ve never really done anything in an actual studio, ’cause I couldn’t afford it. I still can’t really afford it. I’m sure we will someday, but at that point it made sense.

On why he likes to quickly churn out project after project:

I like the rushed-through stuff because I feel like it’s more cohesive and totally more from the subconscious because there’s no time to think about it — you just have to do it and put it down. And if it all comes in three days, then it’s all gonna come from the same place. But when you take longer it’s hard to find a balance between taking longer to make sure it’s good and it’s what you want to do, rather than what you happen to be in the mood for that one night. I started it in February and by May I had mostly finished it, but then I didn’t do anything with it until August, when I started mixing it again, because it let me think about it. A few months later, if I still liked it, it’s a good sign that it was good because I tend to move on quickly. [The 2010 EP] Fade Cave, I didn’t like weeks after I did it, but in August I liked this, then I put it online. Weirdly, I’m already moving on and I think we can do better but I’m still satisfied with it. There’s not much I would take back.

On Dave Matthews Band and indie rock:

When I was in middle school I was in a huge Dave Matthews Band phase. It’s embarrassing to look back on but it was there, it happened, and then I got into really melodic pop, especially piano, like Ben Folds-type stuff because that’s what I was playing. So I didn’t really hit the indie rock stuff until later in high school, but it was just doing that and I was in bands and choirs growing up…I love voices and harmony and stuff. In high school I was in the a cappella vocal jazz choir. It’s cool to think of the voice as an instrument …’cause if I had only listened to Pavement and stuff like that where it’s guitar, and the band is the band and the singer’s just kinda singing his lyrics over it, that’s awesome, but it’s also cool to take the singer and make him do other stuff inside the band rather than just on top of it. So I think that’s where the choirs made me have that idea. It’s so easy to make [the voice] unique and personal because you can work with it and improve your voice and stuff but you have what you’re born with.

On his first real tour:

We start March 3 in Buffalo and go down and end in Seattle. I’ve done not much touring [laughs]! I did one tour with my college band where we went from Wisconsin down to Georgia and up to here and back over, for like two weeks. That was the only tour I’ve ever done. Jon has been touring since he was like 16 or something, that’s like, almost 20 years of touring, and Michael’s been touring forever because he was in We Are Scientists, Fool’s Gold, all these bands, so they’ve got me on the experience. I was like, “Tell me what to do…” I think it’s just a matter of whether we’ll get along. I think we’ll get along, we’re all pretty mellow guys, so it should be good. It’ll be nice. It’s a really long tour, five weeks, but it’ll be good to get the experience. I figure if we’re gonna do it we might as well do all of it so then I’ll have experienced the extreme.

For fans of: P.J. Harvey, Lush, Noisettes, Metric, Yeah Yeah Yeahs

From: Brooklyn, Tel Aviv

Personae: Sharron Sulami (bass, vocals), Yuval Lion (drums), Itamar Ziegler (vocals, guitar), Yuval Ziegler (guitar)

[eMusic Selects is a program designed by eMusic to give exposure to unsigned or undersigned bands. This month's selection is Pink Noise]

Pink Noise make cinematic art rock — layers of piercing, mathematic guitars over subtle electronic programming, fronted by Sharron Sulami’s smoky, frantic alto that channels the likes of PJ Harvey and Karen O. The band in its current incarnation formed in Brooklyn, where they live now, but their members met in Israel — Itamar and Yuval Ziegler are brothers, Yuval Lion and Sulami met during their time in the Israeli army’s orchestra. They all moved to New York in the late ’90s, and played in different groups together before forming Pink Noise in 2003.

It’s fitting that on their Here is Happiness EP, Pink Noise cover “Next One Is Real.” The song was originally recorded by the Israeli post-punk band Minimal Compact, who paved the way for others leaving their country to reach a wider audience. (It should be noted that Minimal Compact also have a frontwoman who learned to play bass for the band.) While they make frequent trips back to Israel, Pink Noise have found a community in Brooklyn that’s introduced them to neighboring artists like Holly Miranda (who contributes vocals to “Redwoods”), and TV on the Radio‘s Dave Sitek, who produced several tracks on Here Is Happiness, as well as their forthcoming LP, What Would Happen If Someone Finds Out?

eMusic’s Laura Leebove sat down with the band in Williamsburg to talk about their Brooklyn peers, the music scene in Israel, and working with Sitek.

On the community surrounding the South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, bar and music venue Zebulon:

Yuval Ziegler: The whole scene that revolves around the Zebulon area, they’re good friends and they keep a very open, experimental place that lets musicians go and do whatever they feel without necessarily having to pack the place. So a lot of our connections came from meeting people there, playing around, playing together. A lot of the artists work behind the bar over there. It’s that kind of place.

Itamar Ziegler: There’s a lot of respect to music there.

Y. Ziegler: There’s a lot of experimental stuff — people feel free to collaborate there. Even people that are in bands that we already know, they just come and collaborate with other people. Everybody knows each other.

On recording with Dave Sitek:

Sharron Sulami: I think that what he gave us at that time was just having fun in the studio — going in and playing different instruments, trying everything and waiting to see what would happen after…

Y. Ziegler: There was the feeling and the opportunity to try everything we feel like. And the other thing is Dave just knows how to get the big sound out of everything — the huge space and the nice drums.

Sulami: And our record before that, we decided, before we did that, to do it just live in the studio so we walked in and played it, and whatever was there, that was it. That was the concept of the last record. So this one was the other way around.

I. Ziegler: With Dave we got back to doing the colors and layers of things.

Yuval Lion: He’s fearless. He just goes for stuff he hears and then…he kind of constructs everything.

On the rock scene in Israel:

Sulami: It’s better now than what it used to be.

Y. Ziegler: There’s the two different rock scenes: the local, regular scene and the one that’s more aimed toward Europe and the U.S.

Lion: With MySpace and the Internet, a lot of bands that were underground, they started spreading out and have been playing out. They book their own shows and they’re not necessarily leaving Europe…A lot of people that sing in English play out in Israel a lot of times. Sometimes they’re on the radio, too.

Sulami: Like we’re playing this show at a festival in L.A. with Monotonix, which is another band from Israel, so it’s gonna be two of us and another band, so that’s gonna be fun. There is good stuff coming out — and there is shit, like anywhere.

On the Israeli band Minimal Compact:

Lion: It’s an Israeli band that worked in Europe in the ’80s — one of the pioneers of bands from Israel working there. Great music, it was kind of like, new wave, avant-garde. You’d hear about them, they’re a very interesting band, and they were about to really make it big and then a lot of stuff happened. They were in Europe in the mid ’80s, late ’80s, and from that band two people returned to Israel and they —

I. Ziegler: — had very successful solo careers.

Lion: It’s just a lot of great music from that band.

Y. Ziegler: In Israel, for a long time, it was kind of frowned upon when you make music which is not in Hebrew…And [Minimal Compact] were one of the pioneers going out of the borders and trying to reach [an international audience].

On singing in English instead of Hebrew:

Y. Ziegler: It was very natural to us and I think for a lot of kids our age, we started writing in English. And now it’s very common.

Lion: We formed here. We didn’t write in Israel as this group.

I. Ziegler: As teenagers listening to music, English was the language of music.

Y. Ziegler: The world got a lot smaller in the last 20 years.

File under: Pitch-black, skeletal and gorgeous goth-folk

For fans of: Cat Power, Beach House, Leonard Cohen, Family Band

Personae: Kim Krans (vocals); Jonny Ollsin (guitar); Scott Hirsch (bass, lap steel guitar); Luke Fasano (drums)

[eMusic Selects is a program designed by eMusic to give exposure to unsigned or undersigned bands. This month's selections are Strand of Oaks and Family Band]

The arresting, winter-bitten folk songs of Family Band feel like dispatches from some older, crueler place and time: a typhoid-wracked 18th-century town, perhaps, or a medieval village gripped by witch trials. In reality, it is the project of two latter-day Brooklyn expats — Kim Krans, a visual artist, and her husband Jonny Ollsin, a virtuosic guitar player who had logged in 17 years in a series of punk and thrash metal bands. The couple bought a cabin in upstate New York, and Krans, alone in that cabin, began writing the first songs of her life — haunted, elemental songs full of deeply enigmatic lyrics that felt like telegrams from the unconscious. Her voice — icy blue and pond-still, rich with smoky dark notes — only made the music more darkly enticing. As Ollsin tired of his life in metal and Krans’s songs grew in power and quantity, a tentative musical project was born, one that solidified the moment bassist and lap steel player Scott Hirsch saw the couple perform live and was electrified. Together, they have made a gorgeously bleak diamond of a record, one that has raised the hackles of anyone who has heard it, and you can count us among that lucky crowd. All of which is to say that we couldn’t be prouder that Family Band are the latest band to joining eMusic Selects.

eMusic’s Jayson Greene caught up with Krans, Ollsin and Hirsch (drummer Adam Cimino, who peformed on the record, has since been replaced by former Yeasayer drummer Luke Fasano) outside a Brooklyn pub.

On the gradual realization that you’re a band:

Krans: Jonny and I have been together for six years, and we’ve been tinkering around with the idea of making music together, but it wasn’t really happening. Or it was, but it was very unofficial. I would say it’s within the last two years that we were playing together, recording, playing more shows.

Ollsin: Really, I feel like Family Band solidified when we met Scott. Before that, it was like a couples thing, and we could kind of brush it off more. When you have somebody else involved, who’s not in that relationship, you can really focus on the music.

Krans:: You kind of have someone else keeping you in check, so it doesn’t become too much about coupleness, you know? In our lives, our coupleness is very awesome, but it’s also very helpful to have other people around so we don’t end up just watching movies [laughs].

On leaving a life in metal:

Ollsin: It was difficult in a lot of ways, because I think I had my ego and identity sort of wrapped up in that world for the last 17 years. I had been doing the same thing, essentially, since I was 15. I’ve always played other music and listened to as much other music as possible, but all of my bands had been progressive thrash bands! Before I moved to New York, my whole social scene was based around being part of that world. But as we get older, I don’t know, interests change, and as I transitioned out of metal, I began to realize how much fun I was having with Family Band. Starting Family Band with Kim wasn’t at all difficult, but deciding to make it the primary focus of my musical endeavors was a little bit more of a big decision. And now, I have no regrets at all. I’m so psyched to be making this music. I’m not done with metal, but I had to make that extreme of a break with the lifestyle and the identity of it, because it was sort of all-encompassing.

Hirsch: But what I love is that that musicality is still very much with us.

Ollsin: I think I approach guitar playing from a metal-interlude point of view in many ways.

On the dark genesis of the song “Hatred,” and the creepiness/sadness of other people’s stuff:

Kim: That song was written immediately after we got our land upstate. There was a giant trailer on the land that was abandoned for seven years or so. The people basically just walked out, and they left all the food in the refrigerator, things on the table, clothes, pictures — their whole house was just abandoned. We were all excited, we had just gotten our five acres, and we had this whole outlook about what upstate could be like for us, but we needed to deal with this really ugly thing first — like, this giant, rotting house — and it was brutal going through their things, throwing them out. Just thinking about what happened in their life. It looked like they left for the weekend and just never came back. It made me think about us; people could potentially go through our house at some point. It was an exciting renewal of the space, but it was also really dark and shitty. We took stuff to the dump and we burned a bunch of things, and the fire went on for days and days. Our friend made a Super 8 video of that song from that whole process. After all that, everyone left, and I was just at the cabin, which was hardly built at all, but it was close enough that I could sort of live in it. And I had this really sad feeling of taking over someone else’s space. That song came directly out of that place.

On the awesomely terrifying video for “Children”:

Krans: Making the video was kind of like making the place that I had envisioned when writing the song. That is just a bad-feeling song, there’s all this tense stuff that happening. And when I was writing it I was picturing this couple in this different period of time and place going through something really brutal. The masks and costumes were there because we needed some sort of visual way to sort of get the people to transform into something darker and weirder. Our good friend Luke Meyer, who has a place upstate as well, shot that. He works for Seethink Films, and he’s the same guy who shot the Super 8 footage of our trailer wrecking.

On approaching everything from a visual artists ‘perspective:

Krans: This is my first band. I joined a band when I was 29, which is a little bit silly from a business point of view [laughing] but it’s really paying off. Writing the lyrics is awesome to me, and working on the songs collaboratively is a new thing, and making the video is a new kind of artwork.

Hirsch: I love it when we’re working on a song, and Kim says, “This is the wrong color.” That’s a really cool musical thing to be involved in, because then you have to interpret that, and that’s awesome. And it totally makes sense!

Krans: It can be a little annoying. Like when I say something like, “This part of the triangle is less high than this other part!” I write the song in a skeletal way, figuring out the chord progression and lyrics and the melody. It feels like a very private process for me. They are very based on a setting. They’re usually an imagined place. I start with that. And there’s something happening within that space. I do it by myself, trying to get whatever it is that is driving to make the thing out, to have some sort of resolve. Then I bring it to Jonny.

On roots and musical influences:

Krans: I grew up in upper-peninsula Michigan, which is cool for the landscape, at least during the summer, but then the winter is like, eight months long, and there is no culture. My town growing up probably had about 300 people. I mostly listened to the Oakridge Boys, Kenny Rogers — my family’s record collection was pretty country. Sometimes we’d listen to some Kris Kristofferson, which was really cool, and my dad was really into Bob Seger. I feel like I didn’t have that much music in my life until I was a teenager and started being crazy about Will Oldham and Smog. I love singing-based music — a Townes song, a Leonard Cohen song. I really love Superwolf, Will Oldham’s album with Matt Sweeney — it combined Matt Sweeney’s guitar laying and Will Oldham’s singing in a way that I was so thrilled about. To me, Will Oldham had never sounded better, and I had been a 10-year fan. I’ve heard that album was really difficult to make, but I kind of used it as a way for me to think about me and Jonny making music together, because we were working from similar places in my mind.

On “Death Games”:

Krans: That was my first song! [Laughs]. That song is really, really weird. I try not to be super-conscious of trying to get somewhere when I’m writing something. I will sing the same part over and over again with many different lyrics until something goes, “Oh that weird line showed up.” But that song is particularly dark. Again, I think it’s like dreaming into a really bad scenario. I don’t even know…I don’t even know how to say it in an interview. I think that song is about the bottom, the very bottom layer of when you’re dealing with yourself in a dark state and you’re trying to like protect your thoughts from getting too far into your person. You have to have techniques, like, “Keep your hands busy, go for a run.” It’s kind of like the song pays homage to those tasks you use to get out of darker places. I wrote that song in a super bummer time, when I was like, “How do you craft your life to veer away from your tendencies that you know are there?” As you get older, you sort of get to know yourself, and you figure out your own ways. Some people get real wasted; some people stay home and get bummed out; some people get real laid. We all deal differently.

On “No Sounds”:

Krans: That song is just about imagining negative things as far as you can imagine them, the sort of narratives you can dream into when you’re by yourself. When you’re feeling like you have something that’s so good that the risk of it not being in your life is a huge factor. I felt that way about the land upstate. It was the first thing in my life that I was like “Oh my god, this is so awesome,” but at the same time, what if something happened, what I didn’t have this anymore, all these what ifs. I feel the same way about my marriage. This is a thing that I love and want. How do you keep it, how do you tend to it? It’s sort of like being suspicious of good things. There are so many bad things happening, and yet it’s somehow all cool on the home front, you know?

File under: Moody, stark goth-folk — with synthesizers

For fans of: My Morning Jacket, Will Oldham, Neil Young

From: Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania

Personae: Tim Showalter (everything)

[eMusic Selects is a program designed by eMusic to give exposure to unsigned or undersigned bands. This month's selections are Strand of Oaks and Family Band]

In 2003, Tim Showalter’s house burned down, his fiancée broke up with him, and he resorted to writing songs on an acoustic guitar while living on park benches in suburban Philadelphia. Those events informed the entirety of his arresting debut, Leave Ruin, an album about loss and brokenness and lack of faith. But as affecting as it was, Showalter is leery of being stuck in the past. After all, the first word of that record’s title is “leave,” and one of the first thing he asks when contacted for this interview is, “Can we kind of re-do my bio? I don’t want to keep being the sad sack whose house burned down.”

These days, Showalter is happily married and comfortably settled in Philadelphia, and he’s staring down the release of his second record, Pope Killdragon, an album that’s even stranger and more singular. Where Ruin was stark and autobiographical, Killdragon — which features odd, laser-beam synthesizers and one bona fide stoner metal track — is wild and fantastical. Showalter either invents characters whole cloth, or takes an approach to history so liberal even Tarantino would give pause (John F. Kennedy authors a fable about a knight; Dan Aykroyd carries out a revenge killing for the death of John Belushi). It’s a bold, eerie, mighty work — though the man responsible for it couldn’t be more affable or good natured. During the course of our interview, he laughs almost as often as he speaks.

eMusic’s J. Edward Keyes talked to Showalter while he was visiting his parents in Indiana.

On the best way to pick up chicks:

The way I met my wife — we were at a party where I was living, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and there were a bunch of people around. I was really upset, and probably drinking a lot, so I left the party and I walked to this video store that illegally sold fireworks — it had blown up two days earlier because the fireworks had gone off accidentally. So I went in and filled a bookbag full of bricks, and then I walked back to the party and dumped them all out on the table and told my friends, “I’m sick of you guys!” And then I looked at this girl and said, “But you? I wanna take you on a date.” And then I just kind of disappeared.

We dated for about five years, and I proposed at this beautiful area called Assateague Island in Maryland. I had put the engagement ring in my reading glasses case — but I forgot to bring a book with me. So I pretty much had no legitimate excuse to bring out my reading glasses while we were out on the beach. So I just ended up just asking, “Uh, can I see my glasses case?” And then after she gave it to me — and I don’t know what possessed me to do this — I just walked to the ocean and stood in there, knee-deep, for about a half hour, just staring into the abyss. I guess the whole decision just rushed over me. And I looked like a weirdo, again. So, full cycle.

On the shift from autobiography to fantasy:

This record is much harder to explain than, you know, me just being heartbroken — or whatever the first record was about. I wanted to treat this record it like a band in the ’70s making a record — I wanted to build a mythology around it, almost like a Lord of the Rings journey running through it. So that even if I’m the only one who has nerded out to that extent on the record, I wanted to know that I could probably make a graphic novel based on the record. I feel like these characters are just as much “me” as on the last record, but they’re me as if I was a character called Killdragon, or as if I was a giant that lived after a nuclear war. And I still had the same problems in my life — because these fantastic characters are still dealing with missing their mom, or trying to grow up. They’re going through the same normal emotions, they’re just giants, or John Belushi.

On who, exactly, Pope Killdragon is:

On the night Pope John Paul II died, I must have been either really lonely or I was drinking or I was in kind of a weird unstable point in my life, and I realized that you can change your name when you become the pope. At that moment, I decided that I would change my name to Pope Killdragon. That’s where this fantasy began. Killdragon actually showed up on my first record in a song called “Sister Evangeline.” That song was originally intended to be on this record.

Killdragon is essentially my outlook on the world — it’s not necessarily a religious fervor, where he’s looking for Mary or Jesus or whatever, it’s more the purity of it all. He doesn’t necessarily want to be a religious person. I think he’s lonely, and he wants everything to not be so chaotic and falling apart all the time.

On the sudden appearance of synthesizers:

I knew the lyrics for this record, and I didn’t want them to be backed up by banjo and mandolin. It wouldn’t have worked for me. I wanted them to represent a certain time in my childhood. I’d watch movies, like Flight of the Navigator, and those were the kinds of synthesizers those composers were using at the time. So they were used not so much to be instruments but to be a nostalgic reminder. They still sound futuristic to me, yet they still sound nostalgic.

I actually feel like my first record was a step away from my musical taste. It was so based around organic and wooden instruments, but really, my first band consisted of synthesizers and a drum machine. I’ve had this lifelong love of keyboards — I’d look at music magazines or music stores and drool over these keyboards. I’d buy books about vintage keyboards. I loved them for so long, they’re something I can relate to so deeply, so I was really anxious to incorporate them into my music. I mixed this record at my friend’s studio in Akron, and he probably had $70,000 worth of vintage synthesizers there. It basically was the equivalent of me in 3rd grade going into the store and seeing that big shelving unit of NES games, and being able to get whichever one I wanted.

On JFK in Carbondale, Pennsylvania:

I wrote the song “Sterling” right after my grandpa died. My grandpa was kind of my second dad and, really, my hero in life. He was almost a demigod — he was always so strong and so smart — it was just a huge loss. At that same time that I lost my grandpa, I was living underneath this legendary hotel in Wilkes-Barre called the Hotel Sterling. It was this beautiful hotel that had been there forever, and actually JFK stayed there one night. All of that song is referencing places around the Wyoming Valley — Carbondale is the town north of Wilkes-Barre, it’s the last stop of the train that runs through the valley. It also cross-references Sister Evangeline in the line “pledged toward celibacy.”

So, suddenly, through all of this weird blending, Kennedy kind of became my grandfather. He was this person that was sitting at the Sterling with me and giving me life advice, and he was also taking me on a tour of the valley — which becomes a mental map of my life. There’s a line in the song, “So we sat down on the ledge/ and looked down toward the West.” Well, if you look West from the Hotel Sterling, that’s where my house burned down.

On the revenge fantasies of Dan Aykroyd: The genesis of “Daniel’s Blues” was that my dad loves the Blues Brothers. Just like the synthesizers, this is a nostalgic thing for my life — always having the Blues Brothers movie on, I remember the vinyl my dad had of the Blues Brothers soundtrack. At one point, I thought about Dan Aykroyd the night John Belushi died, and what he might have gone through. I thought, “If this happened to my best friend, I would temporarily lose my mind.” So I guess I thought about what I might do if my best friend died, and I thought, “Well, I would go and kill the drug dealer that sold the speedball to John Belushi.” I also kind of invented a chronological timeline where he meets Bill Murray — and a lot of people have come up to me and corrected me, saying “Well, that didn’t happen then.” I don’t really care — I just like the story.

On how a folk guy writes a stoner metal song:

I wrote the riff for “Giant’s Despair” a long time ago. Giant’s Despair is this overlook in Wilkes-Barre where these pornographers tried to build a mansion. They ran out of money, so there’s just this concrete slab that overlooks the whole valley. Everyone tags it and graffitis it, and it’s where I would sit and perch above the whole valley. It’s incredible, but it is called Giant’s Despair. In a lot of ways, this song was the biggest risk I think I took on the record. I didn’t want it to sound funny, like a dork making a metal song. But I needed a song to show musically what the album was saying. I didn’t want to sing on this song, so I just put nine guitars on the song, Billy Corgan style, and it just explodes. Even when I was recording it, my friend said, “Are you sure you wanna have all these guitars?” And I said, “I can’t not have these guitars on here.” As the guy who came from a banjo record beforehand, I know it’s a leap, but it needed to be on there just as much as the synthesizers needed to be on there.

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.

From: New Orleans

Alynda Lee embodies the folk ideal. At a time when much “folk music” has become the province of self-serious beardy auteurs content to ply their heartsick wares on the coffeehouse circuit, Alynda has a worried mind and a restless heart. She ran away from her Bronx home at age 17 and, like Woody Guthrie and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott before her, started riding freight trains, making acquaintances as she roamed from town to town and sleeping out at night underneath the big open sky. She eventually ended up in New Orleans, where she made money by playing washboard for a street band called the Dead Man’s Street Orchestra. Over time, washboard became banjo and Lee went from side player to central figure, forming Hurray for the Riff Raff to give voice to the song in her heart. She told her fascinating story by phone to eMusic Editor-in-Chief J. Edward Keyes.

[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, Alynda, let’s just start straight out with where you were born and what you remember about the time that you spent there.

OK, well, I grew up in New York. I grew up in the Bronx. I’m Puerto Rican. It was a Puerto Rican and Irish neighborhood, and the minute I could take the subway by myself, I headed to the Lower East Side because I knew that’s where all the weirdos were, where all the punks were. I was always taking an hour subway ride out there. And that’s really where I feel like I grew up because I spent so much of my time there—all of my friends were there. That’s where I learned a lot about New York and about the world, really.

So were you like 13 or 14 at that time, or even younger?

Yeah, I was about 13 or 14. I was a pretty rebellious little kid. And I met tons of different people. I feel like growing up in New York was really good for me, because you just have so much at your fingertips, ya know? And you definitely are exposed to a lot of things that make you grow up pretty fast. But at the same time, if you can keep your head on straight, then it really prepares you for making good decisions. I left when I was around 17, but not really because of anything with my family. I grew up with my aunt and uncle who raised me, and they were really really great parents, you know? But it was mostly just about how I felt like I didn’t know how I could grow in NYC. I felt stifled there in certain ways, even though I loved it.

What were some things you thought were stifling you?

Just how big it was. At the time, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life. And that’s such a big part of growing up in NY, you know? What are you gonna do with your life, where’s your head at, and what are your goals? And I didn’t know what I wanted yet, but I kind of knew it wasn’t there. There were plenty of times when I felt like I was just lost, you know? Because at the time, I didn’t play music and I didn’t graduate high school. I just felt like, if I wasn’t gonna go to school, I needed to be really passionate about something.

To just stick in NY for just a couple more minutes, what was it that—you said that you just “knew” to go to the LES. How did you know that?

It was because of the punk scene there. From a very early age I was really excited to go see live music. And there was a place called ABC No Rio–it’s still there—that has Saturday shows in the afternoon every week. It’s mostly a young audience that goes, and they’re really cheap shows—it’s about $5. And they’re all punk bands. And normally it’s a bunch of kids your age playing. That’s where I really first started seeing bands and really that place was where I met all of my friends. When I look back on it I totally see it as just a pack of wild kids.

So your aunt and uncle were cool with you just going down there? I’m assuming you blew off school most of the time to go down there?

They weren’t OK with it. They definitely were trying to make sure that I was doing the right thing. They were very confused about what I wanted to be. My aunt has always been a really supportive, understanding person even though she was kinda like “What are you? And you wanna dress like this? And I’ve never seen anything like this before.” Because I was dressing like a crazy punk kid and she’s an old-fashioned Puerto Rican woman. I look back on it and I’m definitely sure that she was worried about me. And I definitely got scolded and punished and things like that. I was a force to be reckoned with, for sure. I was really stubborn and I wanted to be around these people who I thought were really inspiring to me.

So how did you break it to your aunt and uncle that you were gonna leave at 17?

Well, I didn’t tell them. I ran away. And that’s definitely, when I look back on it, it was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make. I really regret how much it hurt them and how much it worried them. And like I said, they’ve been so supportive and understanding. And now we can finally talk about it and they will say to me that they’re just happy that I’m happy and that I found my way. Because I was so lost for a while.

So basically it was the day after I turned 17, I left. I had already dropped out of school, and things were really hard because I knew I was hurting my aunt by feeling so lost. And she was confused as to what to do with me at that point. I just told myself that I had to get out into the world. I’m gonna catch a ride with my friends and figure this out and travel around and follow this desire that I had to see the country. I just had faith that I was gonna figure it out. It was definitely heartbreaking to leave and to know that I was hurting them but also to feel so sure that it was gonna be for the best and that I was gonna make them proud somehow. That’s definitely a lot of what drives me today is just feeling like I’ve gotta make these people proud. They really sacrificed a lot for me.

Did you have a destination in mind when you left?

Yeah, I wanted to go to California. That’s when I started riding freight trains—which was a big romantic idea.

Yeah, that’s amazing! That’s like some 1890′s shit. That’s awesome. That’s like Woody Guthrie—I didn’t think people did that anymore.

Yeah, people definitely do. There’s definitely a culture, but it’s pretty secretive because it needs to be. There’s definitely still ways to do it, and there are ways to be safe about it. It was, again, just a childhood fantasy of like “I wanna go out and see the country. I wanna ride freight trains. I wanna do all these things that I feel like I just gotta do.”

Were there any parts of the country that particularly struck you when you saw them for the first time, or anything that you found really beautiful or were taken by?

Montana was so amazing. That I will never forget. That whole area, the sky is so huge. I mean, I’m a city kid — or at least I was more of a city kid then. And going through Montana, I had just never seen real stars before, and that was a totally amazing experience. And also going to parts of California, being in the forest. Those experiences just blew my mind. When you’re with these people that you love and you know you’re safe with and all you wanna do is this common goal of playing music, none of it really shook me. None of the hard parts really got me too down because you’re just so happy to be alive and to be doing what you’re doing.

So tell me about your arrival in New Orleans — when you got there, how you ended up there, and what your first moves were after that.

I first came to New Orleans with a friend of mine. I came in a van with him. He lived there and he said that I could stay with him. But I’d known him from NY, I’d known him for a while—my friend, Andy. And he introduced me to a lot of his friends and he just told me “I really think you would like it down here. I really think you should come with me and check it out.” And I came and spent some time. I was still a little confused about what I was doing.

Coming to New Orleans for the first time was such an amazing experience. I had never been in a city like this before, where everything is just so beautiful and so magical. The culture of the city really took over me, and I felt like “This place is for real.” I met my friends Barnabas and Kaiwa, who I still play music with today, at the railroad tracks because a lot of people would go hang out and play music at night there. And I had a washboard—it’s the only type of instrument I had. But Barnabas was playing the fiddle, and Kaiwa was just an amazing guitarist. I kind of was just, “where did these guys come from,” you know? They’re these young kids, but they’re travelling around and they’re doing this so differently — I really wanna play music with them. They encouraged me to play the washboard — which is a very New Orleans instrument — and that’s kind of how I started — just playing washboard with them and singing sometimes. After that, a couple of other friends of ours started joining — there was an accordion player, a friend of mine was playing the bucket — it just became this really big spectacle. We were called the Dead Man’s Street Orchestra. It was just this really magical part of my life. This was the winter before Hurricane Katrina.

I was kind of wondering when all of this played out in relation to Katrina.

Yeah, this was the winter before that. The summer Hurricane Katrina hit, and we were all scattered at that point. We were not in New Orleans, and we didn’t have very many possessions, because we were travelers. And we were terrified for the people that we’d met and we’d loved, and for this city that we finally felt was a home that we could live and flourish in.

So you weren’t in New Orleans when the hurricane hit?

I was in Montreal at the time — very far away. I was travelling and playing music to support myself. I was actually very unaware of what was going on. When you’re travelling, you can really get stuck in your tunnel and not read a newspaper. Then all of a sudden you tell someone, “Oh, I’m gonna go back to New Orleans,” and they look back at you like you’re crazy and say, “Have you read the newspaper? Because you might not be able to live in New Orleans.” When you’re riding trains, you’re not really connected to what’s going on — you’re just so focused on your trip and trying to get to where you’re going.

It actually took me a while to go back — probably until November. It feels weird to talk about my experience with it, because I was still an outsider at the time. I can’t even imagine what it was like for people who had their homes here and who had settled down. I just remember coming back and saying, “Where is everybody?” It just seemed so empty. I was definitely sure that I wanted to live here, but it was also hard because, when you’re this vagabond kid, you don’t want to be mooching off people. I was asking myself, “How can I really live here, with the way that I make money? I don’t want to be mooching off these people who don’t really have anything right now.” It was a confusing period. But I knew that I cared about it here too much to just not come back.

At what point did you start playing the banjo?

So, yeah, I started out playing the washboard. And I was very serious about it! [laughs]. Because I didn’t know what else to do! So I noticed in our band that there was no banjo — there was a guitar, there was a violin, there was an accordion. And we were travelling through North Carolina, and I just fell in love with the sound of the banjo. When we came back to New Orleans, Walter — who plays in Hurray for the Riff Raff but who I didn’t know very well at the time — he was a musician that I looked up to so much but didn’t interact with very much. Well, he somehow got word that I was looking for a banjo, and he just gave me his old one. And I didn’t know him at all at the time. It was this crazy moment where he gave me this banjo and I was like, “I’ve got to learn how to play this thing, because Walt gave it to me!”

Do you remember the first song you wrote?

Yeah, it was a song called “Lady Lazarus.” And it was a really dark, heavy song! And I remember my friends just being blown away just because they were like, “Whoah, what is that?” And as soon as I wrote that, all these other songs started flooding out of me.

So let’s talk a bit about some of the songs on this new record, which I think demonstrate a real growth past even what you accomplished on It Don’t Mean I Don’t Love You. Were there any songs that gave you particular trouble?

Well, not ‘trouble,’ per se, but we’d never really played “Take Me” all together.

I love that song!

It was really impromptu, the way it came together. I decided that we really needed something a little bouncier on the record, so — I think it was one of the last days we were recording — I said, “Oh, I have this one, too, I wrote this a really long time ago, let me play it for you.” So I played it and then basically I was like, “OK, got it? Cool, let’s record.” It was really on the fly, and it ended up being one of my favorites, too.

You know, it’s bouncy and it feels very “up,” but the lyrics are very dark.

Yeah, that’s something I find myself doing a lot — “Slow Walk” is the same thing. I’m really influenced by traditional blues lyrics, and there’s just something about the lyrics to those old blues songs — they’re almost deceptively simple. You think it sounds really happy, the melody is really happy, but what they’re saying carries a lot of weight.

You know, “Is That You?” is a fascinating song to me—the imagery is so vivid. I was wondering how the concept developed.

Well, the lines just kind of came to me, and then the meaning grew. I wasn’t even sure the lyrics made sense at first, but then they kind of became clearer as I sang it. I think a lot of it relates to New Orleans life. People in New Orleans are really in touch with death for a lot of different reasons, and the longer you live here, the more encounters you have with it. It’s just a fact of life of living here. I think it has a lot to do with that — with getting older, living in New Orleans and becoming familiar with death — letting go of a lot of people you love, but also feeling at the same time like they’re still with you in some way.

I feel like that same idea comes up in the title track, actually — “My best friend in the whole world / is a man who’s dead and gone.”

That song has a lot to do with feeling very connected — and almost dependent — on musicians that are dead and gone. With people who are really inspiring to you that you never even got to meet, but who you feel like are really inspiring to you. They’re the people who have gotten you through really hard times in your life, but you know you’ll never be able to meet them. The older I get and the more I write songs, the more I develop really deep emotion for songwriters who have touched me. And a lot of them I’ll never be able to meet, because they’ve already passed away.

I also wanted to ask you about the idea that, “too much of a good thing will make you numb.”

It’s hard to say where that came from. A lot of these lyrics come to me, and then I understand them afterward. I think that expression can mean a lot of things, but I think it mostly means that sometimes you just take people for granted. I think it’s a lot about relationships, and how you can have this person who’s so special and so amazing, and you realize that you just haven’t really thought about that in a while.

The last song I wanted to ask you about was “Salli’s Song.”

Yeah, Salli Grace was a really, really amazing girl who I actually met when I was a very young traveler. She taught me a lot of good banjo songs, and we bonded over being young and travelling, and playing the banjo — because you didn’t meet very many banjo players! I lost touch with her over time, but when I heard about her again, it was because of her death. She was murdered in Mexico where she had been living for about two years. She was doing a lot of activist work down there — she was about to be 21. She was a really amazing girl, and she left the world in a really horrible way. I thought about it so much, but I never planned on writing a song about it. I just couldn’t get it off my mind — the way that she died. I just really felt bad for the world that we weren’t going to be able to see what she was going to become. And one day I found myself writing this song for her. She just loved old-time music and taught me a lot of old-time banjo songs that suddenly it became clear that Salli would love it if there was an old-time song about her. She deserved one. And she deserved a song that was pretty easy, so that a lot of people could play it, and a lot of people could sing along.

For fans of: Hooray for Earth, Best Coast, Bon Iver, The xx

For this month’s eMusic Selects, we decided to try something a bit different: we teamed up with the excellent blog Amplified to solicit their input on which bands they loved, and also to produce a final package a bit bigger than what we usually do. We’re thrilled with the results. Not only did Dan and David at Amplified have great feedback when it came to band selection, they also produced a pair of terrific video interviews with our Selects bands, which you can now watch below!

When you’re done watching the interviews with Hooray for Earth and Best Coast, be sure to download both records, and to check out some of the other fantastic video interviews on the Amplified site. Their tastes and ours overlap, and in the last few months they’ve featured such eMusic faves as the xx, Bradford Cox and Bon Iver.

Hooray for Earth

Best Coast

From: Los Angeles

Personae: Bethany Cosentino, Bobb Bruno

On her Make You Mine EP, Best Coast’s chief member, Bethany Cosentino, seems like she’s trying to make pop music history over in her own image. There’s the shoo-wop girl group song (“Make You Mine,” with its thumping floor tom and soaring background melodies), its ‘early days of indie’ melody-driven heartwarmer (“Over the Ocean”), its quasi surf song with a gnarled riff and dreamy vocal (“Feeling of Love”). But what makes Best Coast so endearing is that Cosentino does all of this on a budget. All of the songs on Make You Mine are fantastically lo-fi, powered by lint-covered guitars, Cosentino ‘s vocals drenched in reverb and floating almost ghostlike over top. It’s a heavenly combination, put over by Cosentino’s skill for crafting instantly singable melodies. eMusic caught up with Bethany at her home in Los Angeles to talk about the origins of the band.

What were some of your first musical experiences?

I got involved with music at a really young age. My dad is a musician as well, so music is something that was always around me in one way or another. I was heavily involved in, like, school talent shows and plays and stuff as a kid. I also did commercials until I was like seven or eight. I remember going to my dad’s shows, and a lot of times he would let me get on stage and sing. I remember once, his band played some New Year’s Eve show, and I sang a song and this kid was tripping on acid and I was really freaked out by him. And then I think the next day I got the chicken pox.

The first concert I can fully remembering going to was 311 at the Hollywood Palladium when I was in, like, the 7th grade. My dad took my best friend and me, and we felt like we were so cool. I can’t really remember the first album I ever bought, but I feel like it was probably Mariah Carey or something — I was obsessed with her.

So when did you first start playing an instrument?

Well I took piano lessons for like two years. I think I started when I was maybe seven? I never practiced, and my teacher would always get so pissed at me, so I quit. Then my dad tried to teach me to play drums, but my coordination was way off, so I quit that too. When I was 13 my dad got me a guitar for Christmas, and then I started taking lessons. I hated the idea of practicing and stuff, but I went to the lessons every week because I had this really cool guitar teacher who would basically just teach me any song I brought in on a CD. I would always bring in things like Nirvana, Green Day and Blink 182 — so those are the first songs I learned to play. Which actually in a way is still relevant, because I basically still only know how to play bar chords/power chords, and those are the first things I ever learned to play.

Tell us a bit about the Bethany Sharayah project — how did those songs come about? You got offers from majors almost instantly, right? What effect did that have on you?

I had never really written music before, but I really wanted to — so I took a stab at it. My first boyfriend had just dumped me and I was super bummed, and filled with a ton of teen angst, so I just wrote like 10 or 12 songs, and when I played them for my dad and my friends and stuff they were like, “you have to record these.”

So I went in and started working with a friend of my dad’s and we recorded the songs together, and he played on the recordings as well. I made a MySpace for the songs, and then started playing shows locally, and it was crazy how fast people were interested in the songs. I was so young, and I was really confused about what I wanted to do in terms of music. I just really wasn’t ready to devote so much time and energy to it. I think it was cool though, because it sort of introduced me to the world of songwriting. I mean, I had never really written a real song prior to those, so I guess in a way it was the start of everything.

Your career is already kind of off and running — tell us a bit about how the opportunity to open for Sonic Youth came about. What was your reaction? How did that help you?

I will never forget the day Amanda, my bandmate in Pocahaunted, called me and told me we had been asked to open for Sonic Youth. I thought she was totally joking with me, and I just remember saying something like, “Oh yeah, right” and then she was like, “No! I’m serious!” And I, like, hung up the phone and told my mom and she was like “I’ve heard of that band!!” It was really crazy.

Thurston is just a big fan of experimental music, and he was a follower of the label Amanda does with her husband Britt, Not Not Fun. I guess he had bought a Pocahaunted release and got really into us, so he just emailed Britt and was like “Does Pocahaunted want to open for Sonic Youth?” and we were all sort of just speechless. I mean, we were a band that just played shows around LA and stuff, and all the sudden we were playing on this gigantic stage in front of thousands of people and we were all a little bit freaked out. It was so cool though! I was really nervous, but as we were playing I just got really into it, and was like so excited to be doing it. To this day I think it’s still one of the coolest moments of my life.

So let’s talk a little about your time in Pocahaunted — can you tell us a bit about that experience, and what it was that brought it to an end?

Pocahaunted was definitely fun while it lasted, but it was really hard to keep a band going once I moved away. We had every intention of continuing, but once I moved to New York, I realized just how difficult it would be to keep things moving at such a long distance.

Did you like making music with someone else?

I did, but the way we wrote music was done in a very improvised way. We didn’t work long and hard on specific songs, or parts. The music was really almost always improvised, though sometimes we would base something off an idea, or a specific sound we both wanted to aim for.

What moments of that experience are you most proud of? And does it surprise you how often the band continues to come up?

I mean obviously, opening up for Sonic Youth with Pocahaunted was a great accomplishment, but mostly I think I just learned a lot about being in a band while I was in Pocahaunted. Up until that point, I had never really been in a band that had real releases and did tours and stuff. Pocahaunted is what introduced me to that world. I am sometimes a little surprised at how much people want to talk about Pocahaunted as something I used to do, but I mean, it was a huge part of my life — and a band that I dedicated so much hard work and time to — so I can’t really just dismiss it.

So let’s backtrack just a little — what was it that brought you to New York? And then what returned you to LA?

I moved to New York to go to school. I wanted to be a writer, and I had this totally romanticized idea of New York and writers, etc. I got accepted to the New School, and moved to New York in the summer of last year. I pretty much hated it instantly, and I just knew it wasn’t the place for me — both the school and New York in general. I can’t really put my finger on why I was so unhappy there — I think it was just really stressful, and once winter hit, I couldn’t stand the cold, and it made me never want to leave my apartment. I stuck it out as long as I could, and was there for about a year.

I decided to move back to LA because I was just really unhappy, and I thought that what I was lacking must have been in California. It definitely was, because I can’t even begin to say how happy I am that I came back.

We talked a little about the songs you first learned to play on guitar, but I was wondering what records or bands do you think were chiefly responsible for shaping your aesthetic? And how do those sounds translate into your songs?

I think a lot of it comes from music of the 50s and 60s — girl groups, Motown. I was basically only listening to that kind of stuff around the time I started Best Coast, and I think it really influenced me to make the kind of music I make. Maybe the sound isn’t totally parallel to the sound of that era, but it’s really what inspires me most.

I borrow a lot of ideas and themes from music of that time, like the idea of love and heartbreak, things like that. A lot of those girl groups songs are really about sorrow and longing to be with someone you can’t be with. That’s what a lot of the Best Coast songs are about as well. They’re not all specific to my own life and my personal experience, they’re sort of just like a little homage to that era.

When I write, I really just try to keep the idea of melody in mind — I want things to sound happy and sunny. I think a lot of that also comes from the ’50s and ’60s stuff I listen to, as well as bands like the Beach Boys and the Everly Brothers, the Four Tops, the Temptations, all the oldies stuff. Even the ballads from bands like that have really upbeat melodies, and everything is always so dreamy sounding. I’d like to think that I have my own way of incorporating those influences into Best Coast.

I wanted to ask specifically about the song “Over the Ocean” — the imagery in it is so vivid. Can you tell me a bit about how it came about?

When you fly out of LAX, you fly directly over the ocean for a few minutes, and then the plane eventually turns and the ocean disappears. I remember the day I moved away, looking out the window and seeing the ocean and thinking to myself, “Oh my God, I am totally leaving all of this behind.” It was this crazy feeling, and I would have the same feeling basically every time I would fly back to New York after a visit. Sometimes I would just stare out the window and watch the ocean until it completely disappeared, and then I would look at the clouds and the mountains until they too disappeared. There is just something really emotional to me about viewing the world from an airplane window. I guess it just reminds me that distance sucks, and that it’s so hard to be away from things you love.

What’s a typical day in the life of Best Coast?

I pretty much wake up and take it easy for a few hours [laughs]. Sometimes I’ll work on music, other times I won’t. I play with my cat for a while, watch some TV, answer emails, get something to eat, and then basically just hang out. My life kind of differs from day to day, especially now. Sometimes I have shit to do like interviews, or I’ll go to Bobb’s and we mix a song, or I’ll work on songs on my own — and then other days I just lay around on the couch until one of my friends calls me and we go do something!

From: Brooklyn, New York City and Cambridge

Personae: Gary Benacquista, Joseph Ciampini, Noel Heroux, Christopher Principe, Seth Kasper

Hooray for Earth’s Momo EP ends the way Brian Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain begins: with a charging bass drum, a flare of distorted guitar and stacked, soaring vocals. Like that record, Momo handily navigates the middle ground between rock and electronic music, layering spaced-out synths over highwire guitars, creating songs that conjure both the past and the future at the same time. Largely the brainchild of primary songwriters Noel Heroux and Chris Principe, Hooray for Earth are masters at swaddling irresistible pop hooks in layers of sinewave electronics. eMusic caught up with Hooray’s Noel Heroux to talk a bit about the band’s origins.

What were your first experiences with music like? What are some of your earliest musical memories?

One of my first clear musical memories is I think from around around age 4 — every night for years I would go to sleep listening to a tape of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, narrated by Hermione Gingold. It’s burned into my brain. Actually I found it on CD recently.

And so when did you first start playing an instrument?

Around the same time, 4ish, I started playing piano — by ear, I never became proficient. Then my dad bought me a little Yamaha synth — which I still have. I started playing guitar at 10, and I then spent all my time doing that for several years. I was playing baseball before the guitar happened, which was godawful — I can pitch the ball straight, but that’s about it. Lot of embarrassing games.

So let’s flash forward a few years — how did the band come together?

Chris [Principe] and I first met in a high school Chorus class when I was a freshman — his version of that story is “Noel would make these funny scrunched up faces and make me laugh, then he offered to join my crappy garage band and went from there“. Chris helped keep the band afloat when I went through my “dark period” [laughs].

That kind of set up a pattern that stuck with you for the next few years — you have a lot of musical friends. I know your girlfriend is in a band, too. How has that helped you as an artist? What are some upsides to having friends who are so similarly invested in music?

Having musically involved friends is the only thing that makes band-life tolerable for me. My girlfriend being in a great band, Zambri, really keeps me on my toes — and listening to someone write songs in the next room can be pretty therapeutic. It’s safe to say I owe a lot to a few specific friends, as far as creative growth. Also being constantly surrounded by people making records is awesome.

Let’s talk about the “Surrounded” video — how did this come about? Whose concept was it, and how did you meet up with the director?

The video eventually happened because my friend Josh [Ascalon, HFE co-producer] knew director Johnny Woods. Early on, I had seen Johnny’s video for Brooklyn artist Slow Ghost. I was immediately sold on the idea of him doing our next video, but as far as I knew I had absolutely no connection to him, and I sort of wrote it off as a possibility. After a series of coincidences via Josh we were connected and the video just happened.

Who was the first person who said: “I envision…puppets!” How did all of that work out, mechanically? Where was it shot, and how much green screen happened?

Johnny wanted puppets (“friends”), and he quickly found [puppeteer] Leslie Rogers. I think they randomly met at a bar one night, and within an hour they had planned out this whole puppet scenario. The shoot was ridiculously easy — between Johnny, Leslie and the other puppeteers I think the whole thing went down in a couple hours. Afterward, we had drinks at a great bar I totally don’t remember (the shoot was in Philly), then me and Josh drank tall boys on the late bus back to NYC. Overall, the whole experience is a very fond memory.

I want to talk about the scenario in “Surrounded” — clearly, a very particular scene is at work. Can you shed any light on the narrative? And maybe talk a bit about how the song came to be?

I can’t really go into any interesting detail on that one too much — but I will say that on a lot of our new music there’s a theme of “people,” and just being together and doing things together and whatnot. “Surrounded by Your Friends” applies to many life stories of me and my friends.

You guys seem like you’re constantly on the road — any strange tour experiences to relate?

One time we played 13 horrible shows to nobody in two weeks. Then we did it again the next year. And once more the following winter.

You have kind of an unconventional approach to getting synth sounds — can you explain that a bit?

It’s simply out of necessity. I usually only have a Roland HS60 (basically a Juno) to work with — so I do a lot of processing to make new sounds. This time around I had Josh’s MS20 to plink on a bit, and a Crumar Orchesrator which we probably overused. Otherwise it’s just super-processed HS60 or sampled symphonic stuff (I must withhold the origins).

My synth interest comes from my early years of plunking on the dad-keyboard and then later my obsession with electronic music — Eno, Aphex Twin, Autechre — rather than any ’80s throwback sort of action. Although we get down to Tears for Fears or Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark as much as the next person.

Personae: Nils Edenloff, Amy Cole, Paul Banwatt

The Rural Alberta Advantage are Nils Edenloff, Amy Cole and Paul Banwatt. They come from Toronto (singer Nils Edenloff hails from Alberta, hence the name), and Hometowns is their first record, and it is a great one. Hometowns is a classic indie-rock record, both in aim and in result. Their songs sigh and exclaim, occasionally simultaneously, their emotions varied but the sincerity a constant.

Certainly any comparisons to Neutral Milk Hotel have a germ of truth. Moments on Hometowns — “Rush Apart,” “Frank, AB” — could easily hitch a ride In An Aeroplane Over the Sea. There is a shared level of intensity, a similarly convoluted name and, as Edenloff details in our interview below, a love of “non-singer singers,” to quote his phrase. Read on for more on our latest eMusic Selection. We couldn’t be happier.

Nils: I was born and raised in Alberta. Grew up where all the oil is coming from in Canada here. After high school, I moved down to the University of Alberta and took computer engineering, so I moved off the music thing for a while there, and wasn’t finished yet, so once I graduated, came here to pursue music. It took a while before it ended up actually doing anything, but yeah, once the ball started rolling…

Yancey: And so how long has the Rural Alberta Advantage been a band?

Nils: We started two and a half years now. We originally had five people, but it’s been the three of us for two and a half years. When we were recording, we brought a couple of people in, here and there…kind of like a live show.

Yancey: Nils, were you the origin point of the band? Am I right in guessing that?

Nils: Yeah, I guess. I don’t want to say yes, but that’s mostly true. But the stuff we come up with, it’s nothing I’ve pre-formulated myself. It’s bringing stuff into the group. Paul and Amy have more ideas in there that have changed things a lot.

Paul: [Nils] comes up with a bunch of beautiful melodies, and he gives a lot of room to come up with words, draw the rhythm, and there’s a lot of room for me and Amy to come up with interesting things because we’re both in love with the songs, and that’s what’s really rewarding about it.

Amy: Yeah, it’s been great with Nils. Nils will come up with these great ideas and concepts of songs and then Paul comes and shows it to me, and I see what needs to be there, whether it be harmony or extra percussion. I think that’s why we work so well together. We’re all working independently, but we’re all working on this one piece of music, and I never feel like there’s too much going on in our songs, ever.

Yancey: What’s your stature like in Alberta?

Amy: We made some lists on some blogs. [Laughs]

Nils: I get surprised sometimes. Like the other day I was walking down the street on Halloween with my girlfriend when two guys walk by. And I could see them from a ways away, and I immediately just assumed a whole bunch of things about them. But then one of them just walks up to me and goes, “The Rural Alberta Advantage.” Just out of nowhere he recognized me. But yeah, it’s weird, people buying our CDs in Australia or Germany.

Paul: Considering the level of work we’ve put in, I’d say we’ve been rewarded pretty richly.

Nils: It seems like ever since we’ve started with the three of us, good things seem to happen.

Yancey: So, I was curious — on the very cute and very evocative bio on your site you talk a lot about very particularly Northern Albertan summers. How do you define such a thing? What are the traits of an Albertan season?

Nils: Well, I think there is — after having moved out of Ontario, there was a different sort of feel to the season, at least from my perspective. I always had rich memories of — like the first week in September, the frost on the ground, walking to school. And there’s always a feeling when the winter starts. There is this certain smell of the fall and spring, those are my kind of two favorite seasons.

That was definitely something that I know when I came here [to Toronto], I didn’t get that. From those few moments in the year, I always have memories. Those sorts of memories that I have of Alberta drive a lot of our songs. Just remembering those things.

Yancey: So, the rural part is very important to you?

Nils: I have a lot of memories of our cabin in Southern Alberta. So, yes, it’s a part of my growing up.

Yancey: Are you okay with urban living? I mean, is this something that you look at with a bit of nostalgia and it’s something that you miss, or is it just — is it a place that you just miss and need to talk about?

Nils: This is where I came from, and having moved away — all my family lives back there. It’s just something that after having moved away from it, I realized how much it defined me. But only after having moved out here, and it’s those small things that just sort of make you realize what makes you who you are. I realize, the more I’m growing up, that I’m a lot like my dad, and my dad is a farm boy. I realize I’m similar to him, I do have that rural sort of thing. And now I’m a city boy and I really wouldn’t have the opportunities that we have if I was trying to do this there.

Yancey: This is not the case with Paul and Amy, correct? You aren’t from Alberta?

Amy: No.

Paul: No.

Yancey: So, you’re like, what is all this he’s talking about…

Paul: Well, as Nils said, the original lineup was five people. Three of those people were from Alberta. So the original incarnation of the band was three-fifths Albertan. Amy and I were the Team Ontario Contingent.

Yancey: I absolutely identify with what you’re talking about. I grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere in Virginia and I moved to New York from there. What you’re talking about — I know exactly what you mean.

Amy: I felt the same way too, coming from a small town and coming to the big city. I feel that sort of nostalgia is really apparent in the music and I think a lot of people relate to it, and that’s why people like it, I think.

Yancey: I think that’s true. Do you see in any danger in too much nostalgia?

Nils: What? I can’t understand your question.

Yancey: I mean, I’m just thinking — and this is something broader than music — there is a level of provincialism with a small town that can be very limiting and suffocating. I can fondly look back where I grew up now because I’m out.

Amy: That’s it exactly.

Nils: Yes, that’s exactly, that’s exactly what I was going through when I moved out here. I was leaving there. I felt like, look at you guys, you guys stay here, I’m happy to get out. But it wasn’t until I actually came here that I realized how much of me really came from Alberta.

Yancey: Yes, absolutely.

Nils: And looking at it gave me this feeling: this is my life; I have my own perspective on it. Not a lot of people living out here have been through the same experiences that I have been through.

Personae: Brandon Mitchell

Altair Nouveau is one Brandon Mitchell, a young producer of disco-tinged instrumental dance music as in love with 20th-century minimalism as he is with the sound of a blurting Lindstrøm synth. Mitchell grew up with plenty of music around the house, and with plenty of encouragement: His father is an electronic music teacher at a community college, his mother plays the oboe and English horn in an orchestra.

Mitchell’s main love, however, is dance music, and you can hear it plainly in his eMusic Selects EP Dark Energy where he uses machines to construct epic stories, coaxing narratives out of wordless music. With titles like “Street Thunder II” and “Dark Energy,” it’s hard not to build epics in your mind as the tunes pour out of the speakers. We tracked down Mitchell via phone at his home in San Francisco to talk about movies, high-school ska and being mustache-less.

On his upbringing:

My dad is an electronic music teacher at a community college in San Jose, so there were always synthesizers around. He was really into minimalism — people like Philip Glass. That’s one place where I really relate to him. But as far as pop music goes, he doesn’t really respond to it. He doesn’t quite know what to do with it. Whenever I play him pop music he’ll say something like, “Huh. It sounds like they’re trying to do minimalism, but they don’t quite get it.”

On his high school listening:

It was pretty dorky stuff. Either the sort of stuff that my parents listened to, whatever was on the radio or — because it was San Jose, the late ’90s and a suburban high school — a bunch of ska. Yes, I was in a ska band. But it didn’t have the word “ska” in the name. The band’s name was Bob. I’m waiting for the reunion so we can put that on eMusic.

On studios:

I recently moved to San Francisco and was moving from temp job to temp job, but have gotten one where I’m going to stay as long as they’ll have me. I haven’t really been making music since I’ve been here, though, because I’ve been unsettled for much of the time. I haven’t gotten things set up. Right now, I have to take a synth out from under the bed and plug it into some stuff. It’s a little inconvenient, and I’d like to get back to where everything is at my fingertips. Otherwise it’s just a chore to get started.

On musical aims:

When I started making tracks they sounded exactly how the software sounded. Once I got the hang of things I was able to have a phase where I tried to make things that sounded old — that analog, fat, warm tape-saturated sound. I think maybe I’ve finally gotten that out of my system. I want every track to have a melodic or harmonic hook, and not be such a straight-forward dance floor frenzy. (Not that there’s anything wrong with a dance floor frenzy.)

On being a gear-head:

I used to be way more into gear a few years ago. I was always looking to buy a new synth and upgrading my software. But in the past few years I’ve gotten rid of a lot of it, aside from the Juno-106 synth, which I find to be a reliable workhorse. Part of that is not having a lot of space, but I think nowadays that the fewer things that I have, the easier it will be to get to work without spending forever plugging in cables….It’s kind of like if you were in a band and each year you decided that you needed to completely reorganize the drum kit or started to play guitar with your left hand. Why do you want to switch it up so much and make it hard for yourself?

On what he’s been listening to lately on eMusic:

I recently downloaded something from Oblio, which is an In Flagranti side project. And I just downloaded Carl Orff’s Schulwerk which is the music used in [the movie] Badlands. It’s got marimbas, xylophones and sounds very 20th century minimalist, but it’s by Carl Orff. The guy who did “Carmina Burana.”

On DJing:

I haven’t DJ’ed in a little while because I haven’t found any regular gig down here in San Francisco. I used to play disco at a regular party in Seattle every once in a while, but at the big party that I played at down here I started out playing disco and Italo and I was really proud of the fact that I could just switch it to classic rock — because I was playing “I’m a Man” by Macho, and then followed it up by “I’m a Man” by the Spencer Davis Group. The crowd went crazy, so I just continued playing classic rock for the rest of the night.

On soundtracks:

That’s the one thing that’s been constant with me musically. I remember watching Star Wars as a kid, and loving the soundtrack. A major section of my record collection is devoted to people like Ennio Morricone. John Carpenter is one of my favorites as well.

On song titles:

The track “Cosmos” was named for the TV series of the same name with Carl Sagan. “Lawrence of Arabia” is kind of obvious. “Street Thunder II” was named for the gang in John Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13, and “Death on Four Wheels” was originally written for a documentary that a friend of mine was making. It was about roller derby, and called Death on Four Wheels on Two Feet but she decided not to use it in the movie, so I just shortened the name to go from roller skates to cars.

On the moustache:

I need to get some new pictures up somewhere, because I don’t have the moustache anymore. I need to get the word out about that. I was starting to think that it was becoming like a novelty character in a ’70s movie. I shaved it off once before, but then I started worrying that I didn’t look as good without it, but this second time … I don’t know. I think it might be gone forever now.

Barwick’s career has stayed true to her nature as a musician: she runs alone. She self-released her first record, Sanguine (2007), with help from a digital label to widespread acclaim. It’s a wonderful record and a beautiful document of what it means to really create, not just iterate on someone else’s direction.

As easy as it might be to focus on process, to get bogged down in how she makes her songs, the important thing is that, on a pure listening level, it’s irrelevant. On her eMusic Selects release, Florine, Barwick completely stunned us with these six pieces that veer from Bjork-y future-epics (“Choose”) to ornate jigsaws of sound (“Bode”) to mournful, vertigo-inducing odes to times past (“Cloudbank”) to the staggeringly — and we could not mean that more — beautiful, Reich-ian stalactites of “Anjos.” It’s hard to believe it’s the work of one person.

I visited Julianna at her Brooklyn apartment a few weeks ago, and we spent several hours talking about her life and her music. The entire conversation can be read at 17 Dots (and we encourage everyone to do so — she’s a great talker). The original plan had been to film her make up and perform a song in her home to give people a sense of how this music comes about. But genius that I am, the batteries in my camera were dead. She performed anyway, and as I sat there in her kitchen, two little amplifiers gushing sounds like hydrants, what should have been an awkward situation was instead almost transcendent. I cannot thank her enough for her kindness and generosity.

Below are a few selections from our chat.

I totally fell in love with the looping stuff because it was all these different things that I like. It satisfied the immediacy, it sounds cool, and also the layered vocals are something I like so much. I love choirs, especially boy choirs, and the church that I grew up with was a capella, everybody sang and there were no instruments. So there were some beautiful, amazing songs where people are doing different parts and the men are doing something different from the women and there’s all these harmonies and clapping. That is pretty much where my love of that sound comes from… That got planted firmly in my brain.

Not long after I graduated college I started making [Sanguine]. I was already playing some student shows and stuff. It was messing around a little bit, like playing the electric guitar and putting a ton of reverb on my voice and just kind of standing up there and making up stuff. Like not even singing in English, just making up stuff as I went.

Sometimes I would have things I would work out on the guitar, and then I would always just make everything up. I borrowed a little guitar pedal that was literally this big [makes a small gesture] and white. I don’t remember where it is, but you had to hold it down to make the loop, and you let go, and you just kind of … you know? [Laughs] A couple of times I would let go too soon, and it would just be over. I just started recording all those things into the four-track, and that’s when it eventually became Sanguine.

What was prompting you to just make things up versus structuring something or writing something down beforehand?

In general that’s the way I like to work. If I draw something, I just want to do something and not come back to it over and over and over again. And also the looping thing just sort of lent itself to that. No, I guess I always sort of did that.

What’s funny is that you said you don’t like to come back to it over and over and refine it, but I feel like that’s almost exactly what your music is.

It never starts out that way, though. I’ve never really thought about this before. I don’t know. I think one of the things I can say about that, even when I was playing guitar and singing and so on was just the sound of it, how it sounded was more important to me than planning it out and making it perfect and writing the perfect lyrics. I’ve tried to write lyrics before and I can never commit to them, and it’s kind of a struggle for me. But that’s the thing about it, and I’m like, “Oh, my God, I love the way my voice sounds through this pedal or whatever. I love this pedal on the electric guitar. It sounds so good.” And I would just play, and no one really could tell what I was singing about anyway. It was heavily drenched.

That first time, though, the first time you performed at the open mic thing or some house party or some little event on campus, you had an idea of what you were going to do, clearly. I mean, you didn’t walk in like, “I got my guitar, I got a suitcase full of ideas. Let’s see what’s gonna happen.” I mean, there was some amount of plotting or planning, right?

Actually, the first time, yes, because I had never done that before. We had a Wednesday music night thing. And I did plan. I planned that one out, but pretty much after that one time, I would just do pretty stuff and make it up.

It’s really interesting. I don’t feel like I’ve ever talked to anyone who has approached things that way. I feel like people do that when they become bored of what they are, you know? You have to get rid of this rational part of your brain and go where nothing is plotted, and just what happens, happens, work with this. It’s not exactly improv, because I know you have a structure.

Yeah.

What — this will be a weird thing for me to say — what I keep thinking is that, to me, the idea of just, of just insisting of making things up, it almost becomes a comfort thing and a wall between you and the audience. Versus if a part doesn’t go right, it’s okay because you’re just making it up. And it becomes a means of…

Being a wuss?

No, not being a wuss. I think it’s a thing you take confidence in. To where there’s a certain level of… I don’t know.

I think I totally get what you’re saying because that’s kind of how….I never really got nervous, and I still don’t, because I think part of that is just something that’s innate, but part of it’s just like, I was in every talent show growing up. I was in the high school choirs, I took voice. I had to do recitals, I did an opera-chorus thing, and I wasn’t like a crazy child performer or anything like that, but I would sing for people regularly, so I think that was not a big deal, and I think my approach, like I said, to playing was kind of like, “If I don’t plan it, nothing’s going to go wrong.” That is true, totally. I just messed around.

Usually it’s just blissing out and making something that sounds pretty and just enjoying the sound of it. I really think that’s what it’s about. I talked a few times about the way I love to sing in church and that sound. I’m just in love with that. It’s just fun to sing like that. I don’t take myself too seriously. It’s fun for me; I love to do it.

I don’t want to sound flippant or anything. It really is just like, it feels good to just sing and make something. Part of what the whole looping thing is, is that when I plug everything in, which I never practice, but if I plug everything in, I just make something up. It’s just fun for me. It’s good for my brain to not know what it’s going to sound like at the end.

Personae: Missy Mazzoli (composer), Olivia De Prato (violin), Eileen Mack (clarinet), Lorna Krier (keyboard), Eleonore Oppenheim (bass)

Victoire are technically the first “classical” eMusic Selects artist, but part of what makes them so special is how thoroughly inadequate this tag feels in summing them up. The best artists defy categories, and the five young women who comprise Victoire — composer Missy Mazzoli, violinist Olivia De Prato, clarinetist Eileen Mack, keyboardist Lorna Krier and bassist Eleonore Oppenheim — have made a life’s work of dodging classifications. Their roving musical lives all began in classical music, sure, but they have strayed far and wide from this path, soaking up Minimalism and punk rock and reggae and indie rock and electronic music and everything else imaginable. Mazzoli, who writes the music, did time in hardcore bands in high school and college, has written for orchestra and worked with Downtown legends like Meredith Monk as well as the revered European maverick Louis Andriessen. Eleonore Oppenheim, who performs with the Philip Glass Ensemble, seems to have a different band for every day of the week. The other members have similarly packed schedules.

All of their itinerant wanderings can be heard in the gorgeously elusive music they make. Not exactly modern classical, ambient electronic or chamber music, Victoire have decamped in a newly settled, sparsely populated inter-genre space, a space where shimmering electronics mingle with mournful violin and clarinet lines, where Philip Glass‘s icy repetitive figures find themselves melted by warm surges of keyboard. Theirs is a vivid, sometimes unsettlingly evocative sound world, one that feels as private and inscrutable as the unnamable emotions it recalls.

We sat down with them in bassist Eleonore’s apartment to talk about their enigmatic and fantastic new EP, Door Into the Dark, about what it means to be neither here nor there and about their brilliantly checkered musical pasts.

So, how did you guys get started?

Missy Mazzoli: Well, I’m a composer, but I’ve wanted to have a band forever. I really, really missed performing. More than that, I just missed being a part of this crazy New York scene — being able to play music in clubs and galleries and bars and whatever. I also didn’t like always having other people decide when my music was played. But I didn’t know what my band was going to look like, or how it would be special. You know, these days everyone has, like, a classical music/indie-rock hybrid…

Well, not everyone has one…

Missy: [laughs]

Eleonore Oppenheim: Everyone who is anyone!

Missy: It feels like everyone! There’s just this proliferation of these groups right now, so I was like, well, whatever I do has to be really different. And then I had this epiphany — I could clearly see the band and the instrumentation, and it was this vision of all girls. And it helps that all of my friends who are the best players happen to be girls.

Eleonore: We’re like the Heart of indie-classical! [Laughs]

How did you all originally meet?

Eileen Mack: Lorna, Missy and I met in 2002 at the very first Bang on a Can summer institute.

Yeah, you guys all spent time in that world, right?

Missy: Totally. All three of those composers [David Lang, Julie Wolfe and Michael Gordon, co-founders of Bang on a Can] are hugely influential to me. We’re not trying to be the next Bang on a Can or anything, because they’re very much of a different generation, of a time and place, and we’re doing something different. But I don’t know what my life would have been like without them! Because they really did pave the way, and I don’t know if we would even all have met if it weren’t for that summer institute and that scene for young people that they managed to create.

Eileen: I wouldn’t have come to this country without them! I moved to this country because I saw Bang on a Can on TV.

Missy: What!? I didn’t know that!

Eileen: I was at my parents ‘house in Australia, and my mom tells me there’s something cool on television, and they were airing some New York composers ‘documentary showing the Bang on a Can All-Stars rehearsing “Cheating, Lying, Stealing” in David Lang’s apartment. I just said, “Holy shit.” I got all their CDs and then learned about the summer institute from a friend, and that’s what decided it for me.

Eleonore: Those guys paved the way in so many ways for us. Personally, I never thought it was “okay” to be doing what I was doing. Like, I was doing so many different things, genre-wise — I came from a jazz background, and rock and roll had always been something I had been doing; I played upright, electric, I wrote songs — just whatever, you know? And I always thought I had to “select” something, because that’s what music school does to you: it tells you that you have to find a focus otherwise you’ll never “make it.” And what Bang on a Can does for young musicians and composers is to tell you that you don’t have to choose. You can make a career out of doing exactly what it is that you do, which is everything. You can play the saw, and washboard, and violin, and sing, or you can compose at night and play in a bad blues-rock fusion band by day if you want.

Do you ever think about where your music “fits”?

Missy: I think about it a lot. I always have the same thought pattern, and it’s like a circle. It starts when I’m trying to figure out where we’re going to play a gig, or trying to figure out who’s going to release our album. Even the next song, or piece, or whatever you want to call it, that I’m going to write, where to start from. I always have this question: “It would be a lot easier if we had this specific genre.” But then my next thought is: Wait, that would defeat the very purpose of writing music that exists in this crack, in this imagined world. It’s kind of like our very mission is to not be defined in one or two words. It’s fun being enigmatic. It’s fun not really being able to be pinned down.

There are so many bands like that, though! Whenever I get angsty about categories, I think about bands like Godspeed You Black Emperor! or the Dirty Projectors. It sounds like they just don’t give a shit, like they are totally free from having to stuff themselves in a genre.

Olivia De Prato: This is the first “band” I’d say I’ve been in. I’ve played contemporary music for years, but I’d never played in a group that didn’t have either a conductor, or wasn’t a more traditional chamber-music set up before this. If friends ask me to describe Victoire, I have a hard time knowing what to say. I just say, “OK, let me just play you something.”

Eileen: I have another group that combines pop music and classical music. And we were doing a gig last night and our cellist is like, “You know, I feel a little bit uncomfortable doing a gig because it’s like we’re not really a chamber ensemble and we’re not really a rock ensemble. It’s like we’re living in some space between.” I was like, “Yeah. That’s the point.” [Laughs.] “You obviously haven’t read our mission statement!”

So let’s talk about the EP! What really struck me when listening to it is that there’s something determinedly small-scale, something intimate, about the music, something that feels specific to intensely personal memories.

Missy: Yeah! It’s more about nostalgia than memories. Because I’m not specifically writing songs about things that happened to me, and the recordings that I use, like for example, “I am coming to get my things” uses that recording on an answering machine. It’s not like my aunt or something, it’s just something I found. But that it evoked such a strong emotion in me, hearing that recording, it’s so sad, and so creepy and so…alone. To hear this woman, and imagining what this woman had to — the position that she was in, to leave that desperate message on this answering machine. It just got me thinking, it’s really about creating false memories, creating this world that doesn’t really exist.

Olivia: Because Missy knows us all so well, she writes with us specifically in mind, as people. We discuss everything. And that ‘s part of what makes it sound so intimate. Because it is!

Missy: I want our music to be at once very familiar and personal, but also something that you’ve obviously never heard before. So that’s where we exist, on that line, between things that are comfortable and beats that you’ve heard a million times, but overlapped with a violin line that’s totally strange and from another planet.

Eleonore: And that’s kind of like the point of a good rock song. It should be something that seems vaguely familiar or nostalgic but without being something specific. You know what I mean?

It evokes nostalgia for something you can’t quite put your finger on, yeah. Speaking of “I am coming for my things” — did that piece start with the piece of sampled speech that you use there? Does the slightly disturbed instrumental interlude that follows elaborate on that?

Missy: Sure. I imagine this band kind of emerging from the static of the answering machine. The interesting thing about that piece is that in the middle is this total poppy, repetitive, even happy-sounding section. And then at the end it becomes a little more disturbed again and the harmonies kind of fall apart.

“Like A Miracle” feels very — and this is a term that basically I want to shoot myself in the face whenever I use — but it feels very IDM to me. The electronics have that same sort of incredibly precise, almost painterly attention to sonic detail and thought about what every little flicker of sound might do.

Missy: It’s so interesting to hear you say that, because for me, “Like a Miracle” comes out of my obsession with gamelan music, but for much of the same reasons you were talking about — the attention to detail, these weird forms, this repetition that repeats until it doesn’t repeat and there’s a cut-off phrase of seven bars or something, no one plays for a little bit and then everyone comes in with these weird times. That’s all from gamelan, but it’s also from Aphex Twin, you know? We were totally coming from a different place but ending up at the same place.

And with the same effects. But the sounds to me, that twittering little sound that pans back and forth to me is very…it just feels like that headphone space that you only get when you’re really locked into an electronic record. What kind of electronic music influences you?

Lorna: I’m really into Add N to X. I’m a huge Aphex Twin fan, too. But I also like seeing all these new bands that have the “normal” band set-up; they have the guitarist, the drummer, the bassist. But then, they also have the electronics dude. That’s new, and I think that’s a really great development I think all the bands that we’re all into have that element too. You know, you have High Places on eMusic. Like that sort of usage of electronics with bands is amazing. I like the combination of both the acoustic and the synthetic all in one.

Who are some of your other influences?

Missy: I love Meredith Monk and Philip Glass. They both taught me so much about timbre. Their bands and ensembles always sound so good, you know? The way they voice things and combine instruments.

Eleonore: I am — and Missy is, too — obsessed with Beach House. And we’re talking about electronics and how they fit in and also the element of nostalgia. For me the thing that’s usually lacking from electronic music is that nostalgic element. I mean I like Autechre, Aphex Twin, of course. But the thing that Beach House does amazingly well is that they take these weird, soundscapey things — when they’re onstage they basically have a drum machine, one keyboard maybe, a synthesizer and some sampling stuff that they just loop — and somehow with that they manage to have this completely nostalgic experience. The electronics are there, and they’re really cool, but there’s also this Serge Gainsbourg thing going on and it’s kind of like that perfect balance of nostalgia and innovation. If we could achieve that in our music, that’d be amazing.

That is actually one of the things I think your music does in spades — the way the electronic elements both mesh with and completely change your perception of the acoustic sounds. In “A Door in the Dark,” there’s a point where the violin goes a little flat and starts sawing, and it feels like everything is melting. It reminds me of slowing tape, and it made me feel like your music exists in this really fascinating liminal space between electronic and analogue. You’re talking about electronic music that can evoke the feelings of acoustic music, and so much of this feels somewhere in between what electronic music does and what acoustic music does.

Missy: Yeah, in “Like a Miracle”, the electronics are probably more present than in any other song. That electronic backing track is kind of like a disembodied lead singer. And then at the end, there is a very romantic moment, and then the electronics kind of eat the acoustic instruments and it’s purely electronic at the end. Then the MIDI piano comes in, and it starts feeding back and everything just really falls apart. There’s this idea of kind of mashing everything together. Like there’s the singer but he is subsumed into the electronics along with everything else. It’s about creating this weird world in between everything but still existing its own space.

From: New Orleans

When eMusic called Luke Winslow-King to talk with him about his music, he was sitting out in the street in his adopted home city of New Orleans, running through some jazz standards with fellow musicians. This is an everyday occurrence for King: roaming out into the warm sun, guitar on shoulder, to while away the afternoon. It’s part of the reason he loves the city and part of the reason he could never seriously consider leaving.

That deep-seated love of the city is all over Old/New Baby, King’s self-described “tribute to New Orleans” (its predecessor was full of light, lovely folk songs). Recorded at the legendary Preservation Hall, Baby is bursting with all the color and revelry of a Mardi Gras parade, And amidst the brass band oom-pahs, clacking washboards and swooping clarinets is King, quietly crooning his songs of love.

eMusic asked King about his love affair with New Orleans, and how a folk musician from Michigan comes to record in the legendary Preservation Hall.

On why first impressions can’t always be trusted:

I first came to New Orleans on a little trip with some friends playing music when I was 19 — I think it was 2001 — and my car got stolen. We had all of our equipment in the car and everything.

We had met a great jazz singer named John Boutte in Michigan when he was on the road touring with Cubanisimo. He’s a bit of a local star in New Orleans, and he’d invited us to come down, and had volunteered to help us find a couple of shows. He was putting us up at the time — he actually said that the place we parked was a “safe spot,” which it turned out not to be. So we got kinda stranded here for a couple of weeks, which was just long enough to fall in love with the place.

We did get the car back a couple of weeks later, but with none of the stuff in it. Eventually, I went and auditioned for the music program at University of New Orleans and ended up going there, and I just kind of stayed here. John Boutte went on to become a great mentor to me — and he cooks a lot of great New Orleans cuisine.

On what it is that keeps him here:

The weather — indoors and outdoors feel the same. The streets can become your home, it’s so comfortable. I love how open people are about music, allowing other people to sit in and play with them, and just to inspire each other. I like that there’s gigs every night, and the music seems to be really free and open. There are so many guys to learn from. It’s more about the music than about business. It’s just a really fertile place.

Besides that, just the colors of the city — the sun-faded colors of the houses — the vegetation and stuff. It’s just so amazing. The people are so relaxed and cordial, too.

On his first exposure to the music of New Orleans:

I didn’t really know much about the music of New Orleans before I got here. I had studied bebop and jazz at school, but I grew up playing folk music — Woody Guthrie, old-time folk music like that. When I found this, it felt like a hybrid of the two. It’s people’s music — for dancing. It’s not too intellectual, you can just enjoy it. And you can really get slamming more than you can with a folk band.

It’s also cool in the city how the legends come about — you meet people and hear stories about places and things that happened. It’s been such a fertile ground for music for so long. With the blues, it has different homes all over the South. It’s cool that one city has its own music.

On his decision to shift away from folk and toward brass bands:

My girlfriend Ji Un Choi, who is also my writing partner, is a great poetess and film writer. We’d both been into Bob Dylan and stuff like that. We had been writing songs together, and there was always this group of tunes that felt inspired by the music down here — whether that was on purpose or not. So we had these tunes where we’d be like, “Oh, these don’t really fit on the other project.”

We gradually started adding a couple more to them, and then it just all fit together, and I started working on the horn arrangements. I didn’t really think of it as being a New Orleans-themed record until I was halfway through it.

I’m always pretty sensitive about [feeling like I'm "appropriating the music"]. But over time, it’s kind of been everyone’s music. It avoids the connotations that the blues has of being, say, “black people’s music.” There have been all kinds of people down here, playing this music for a long time. I don’t ever try to claim New Orleans as my own, I just give back. I’ve been inspired by some amazing music here, and blessed enough to be nurtured by some people who have really embodied the spirit of music from New Orleans. I’m always sensitive about it, but I feel like people down here are cool with this being “everybody’s music.” And the stuff on the album — it’s not like we’re playing trad jazz tunes. It’s definitely just “influenced” by it.

On collaborating with blues guitarist Roberto Louti:

I used to see Roberto playing on the street. I became friends with him and his wife over time. His wife is “Washboard Lisa,” who’s another real legend in New Orleans. I used to watch them every night at the Apple Barrel, which is this tiny blues bar. I was so inspired by his playing, I just watched him for hours and hours. He’s just an amazing presence — he sounds like he’s possessed when he plays. I kind of re-learned the way I play slide guitar after watching him. I’ve never taken a formal lesson with Roberto. He doesn’t want to do that. He wants to just jam. If you ask him for a lesson, he’ll just take out his guitar and play. The blues is so much call and response, so you can kind of just learn by doing. He’s really into “feeling it.” He doesn’t want to talk too intellectually about it. He doesn’t really know chord changes. He just wants to go.

He actually got deported about two weeks before we recorded the album, so I ended up going to his home town in Italy to overdub him. All of his tracks on the album are overdubs.

The rest of the record was recorded at Preservation Hall. My engineer, Earl Scioneaux, he and I studied music theory together at the University of New Orleans. He’s the sound engineer for Preservation Hall, he does all the recording there. We also know Ben Jaffe, the tuba player, who’s also the caretaker. We just called him up and asked if it would be OK, and he gave us some time on a couple of weekdays.

On “Never Tired”:

My girlfriend and I wrote that song in Italy. We were riding in the car when the first line came up — she’d come up with the line, “I’m so tired, I’m so tired,” and then I came up with “tired as a tire, tired as a retiree,” and it just kind of developed from there. We spent the rest of the day writing down volumes of ideas. We ended up cutting a lot of it and still having that many lyrics. For a while, it seemed like it was another song, and I was trying to figure out what song it was. That’s always a good sign, when it feels like an existing song already.

On “April is to May”:

That one I wrote that same week in Rome. I heard the first verse on a weird radio station, on a real small radio in a village where I was staying. It was a kind of reggae, rocksteady song. So I took the first verse and wrote the rest of the song after it. That song is really stark, really sharp shadows. That one came really easily, too — the ones that people like are usually the ones that were easiest to write.

On “The Sun Slamming the Highway”:

My girlfriend wrote all the lyrics to this one. It was inspired by this vision I had one time of being asleep, and there’s both a string quartet and a street band coming down the road — which is something you always get in New Orleans. You’re listening to one kind of music, and then a street band comes along, and it all kind of melds together.

On the other kinds of music he writes:

I have a really good friend and collaborator, a cartoonist named Cosmo Segurson, and I got into doing instrumental music with him. The first thing we did was the Henry James play The Turn of the Screw. We performed it in this abandoned building in the French Quarter. It was really cool — we did like a five-day run. The cast was just my girlfriend and one other actor who was playing five different roles. It ended up being this creepy ghost story with organ and electric guitar.

I also did a production of Wozzeck under the bridge in Strawberry Fields in Central Park with my friend Cesar Alvarez — he’s in a band called the Lisps in NY. I did a small film project called Wanted in Rome. I acted in it; it’s my girlfriend’s script. I wrote the music for that, too.

I’m really excited about the idea of just being able to compose instrumental music for other people to play. I love performing, but I like the idea of doing composition work, too.

On his insatiable urge to travel:

I did a study abroad program in Prague with the University of New Orleans. I was studying classical music at the time, so this was basically an intensive study of Czech classical music. I focused on string quartets a lot when I was there, and I got to hang out in the city a lot. There were these cool orchards there that I hung out in. I did some busking — that was actually kind of the beginning of me developing my love of playing in the street. It was cool, it was like woodshedding. It was nice to be able to have my education be specific to a place, to be learning about a whole culture.

Over the last few years I’ve been to the Czech Republic, to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France, Denmark, England, Spain, Belgium… I just go around and play on the street. I’ll go on the internet and book a few gigs ahead of time, and then I just kinda connect the dots, and play on the street when I have time. They’re always “working vacations.” I’m always trying to keep playing in the clubs, making contacts. It would be really cool to spend the summers in Europe, have a good network set up where I could go do tours over there and try to cultivate that over time.

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time in Rome. I have a bunch of friends there, and we’re working on a couple of projects. I’ve been there, like, four or five times in the last few years. I think I’m going back again this summer. It’s so beautiful — it’s definitely in contention with the beauty of New Orleans. The ancient times seem to live on there because of the architecture. They eat great food — they really know how to live life. My music is a bit of a novelty over there, too, which is cool. I play on the street a lot, I play in hotels. I’ve actually been tempted to move there, but New Orleans keeps calling me back.

From: Portland

Blue Giant may be a new band, but its members are no novices. For the last decade, principal songwriters Kevin and Anita Robinson have been the driving force behind Portland guitar-pop band Viva Voce. Drummer Evan Railton used to play with Portland’s Swords Project. Bassist Seth Lorinczi used to play with Circus Lupus and Golden Bears, and multi-instrumentalist Chris Funk is a longtime member of the Decemberists. What’s novel here is the approach: forsaking their respective indie-rock pasts, the members of Blue Giant instead turn out stark, moody, loping alt-country, writing songs that burrow down deep into the dark broken heart of man to dredge up the hate and the fear and the spite that bubbles near the bottom. The results are both gripping and devastating. eMusic talked to Blue Giant’s Kevin Robinson by phone from his home in Portland.

On meeting Anita and the mystery of songwriting:

Anita and I both played music in a small town in Alabama, so it was just a matter of time before we met. She was a guitar player in one band and I was the guitar player in another band, and we just kind of went from there. We were both songwriters on our own, but as soon as we broke out the 4-track, we were writing together. It’s remarkable — whenever you start to create things you have — not rules, necessarily — but a path set out in your mind. The reason it’s fun to collaborate with people is because, almost immediately, they derail those rules. Anita and I have completely different instincts, but the result of collaborating basically gets us to where we both want to be. I mean, in a way, it’s the dullest thing to talk about — there’s no real moment where a giant lightbulb goes off and we figure out how the chemistry works. It runs to both extremes: one of us could be sitting in the kitchen with a guitar and a song comes out, or we could be sitting in the studio for four hours beating our brains out and screaming at each other. There’s no real rhyme or reason to it.

On the transition from Viva Voce to Blue Giant:

Last year, Anita did some songs with the Shins on their last record, and so as a result we kind of got grafted into their touring cycle. As we toured, we got to see the dynamic of being in a band. There was a lightbulb that went off, where we felt like there was something missing with us just playing and working as two people. And, I mean, touring with bands like the Shins and Jimmy Eat World just challenged me personally as a songwriter. Those are some fucking great songwriters, you know? So we sought to correct that as best we could. Blue Giant is definitely its own thing. We’re gonna see it through to the bitter end, through the breakup and then through the reunion. This is anything but a side project, and we wanted to make that clear from the get-go.

On how a change in identity sparked a change in approach:

There was definitely a shift in songwriting — we started writing a certain kind of song. We were writing songs that didn’t necessarily sound like Viva Voce songs. We were kind of rediscovering classic country, and then infusing it with our own skewed, fucked-up rock & roll past. Anita and I both grew up in Alabama so, like it or not, this music is a part of our upbringing. This whole past year leading up to the election, it was kind of a bleak time to be an American. I think American music is the one thing that you can always point at and say, “This makes me proud to be where I’m from.” It’s something you can always hold as prestigious, no matter what’s going on in this country. So we just got back to that idea, almost in a defiant way. Like, “Yeah, things are really fucked up now, the music industry is fucked, it’s like Lord of the Flies; the whole country is going to hell in a handbasket. The best thing we can do is write the best possible songs we can in the best possible format.” That format ended up being this kinda countryish vibe.

It was pretty remarkable, when we got back and started to record it, how many people were on the exact same page. As soon as we started to write, a band just sort of formed around the songs. We got together a rhythm section of really close friends in a matter of weeks. It wasn’t anything we had to force into place. As soon as the songs were written, boom, there was a band. I met [drummer] Evan [Railton] years and years ago, and have always bumped into him. We were both on a hiatus, I guess, after touring so much — I mean, physically my hands were shot after touring so much — so I was like, “I’ve written some songs on guitars, do you want to come drum on them?” And Seth [Lorinczi] is basically the best bass player I’ve ever met in my life. Chris [Funk] and I have known each other peripherally for years. He got a copy of our demo and basically called me and said, “I have to join your band.” In a way I feel like we just took the best players in town and said, “Sorry guys, you’re stuck with us!”

On the importance of Portland:

Several years ago, Anita and I moved from Alabama to Nashville. We didn’t have any expectations when we moved there, we just knew we didn’t want to live in Alabama. Well, basically, we got there and got all the problems of a small town and all the problems of a big town without the benefits of either one. I just really fucking hated that place — I called it “Satan’s asshole.” Looking back now, it was a dark time in my life; my father passed away — there was just a lot of dark shit going on. And unless you’re trying to become a gospel legend or Big & Rich and ride an inflatable horse, I just don’t think Nashville is a great musical culture to be in. It’s kind of poisonous. So we just ended up touring a lot.

Portland is to people our age what Florida is to old people. It’s a beautiful city; it supports local arts; it’s a culture where we immediately thrived. So we went back to Nashville and literally sold everything we had and moved here. We stayed with some friends for about six months until we got jobs, and that was it. The town actually makes a pointed effort to support local anything. People will protest a Starbucks because there’s a mom & pop shop that’s in the area. I mean, for us, it’s like a love story. So when we started this band, it was like, “OK, you’ve loved what we’ve done in the past — here’s some pseudo-country jams for you.” And the town was like, “OK, we love it, let’s go.”

On the themes of Target Heart:

All these songs are just stories. Some of them are personal, some of them are just storytelling. I think that was the shift, getting back to what I considered to be classic songwriting styles. There are several songs on the EP that are about abusive love — hanging on to something when there’s no reason to hang on, staying in something out of just stubbornness. It’s not necessarily something I had to experience, it was just something I had to have the perception to write about. I didn’t have to shoot a man to watch him die. It’s just brutal imagery — you’d just stay and get shot down over and over and over. I’ve seen it happen to people around me. Anytime you watch someone you love go through some horrible ordeal, you kind of live through that a little bit. This has been a strange year for people in our lives — we’ve seen a lot of heartbreak. I mean, a song like “Hell or High Water” continues that idea. Sometimes there can be situations where love and affection becomes a weapon. You can even tie some of these ideas back into the state of the country — regardless of how shitty this is, I’m not going to lose hope.

On the benefits of a good concept:

Portland has consistently lent us its ear. Whatever crazy idea we’ve had, the town has supported. Let me give you an example: there is a certain type of 3D Glasses that makes certain kinds of light appear 3D. Like, if you look at a blue light, it makes everything but the blue light 3D. So we did this one Viva Voce show where we gave everyone who came custom Viva Voce 3D glasses. We had all these crazy projections and lights. I have no idea if it actually worked, but it was kinda cool to look out and see 400 hipsters wearing yellow 3D glasses.

With Blue Giant, right out of the gate, we’re trying to connect with people in the same way. It may not be as silly as 3D glasses but, for our first show, we had programs like church bulletins that we gave away with the EP inside. The little tour of Portland that we did, we gave a single away to everyone who came. That helped to almost instantly create a sense of something special. There was a reason to be at the show. Also, any time we do a show in Portland, we try to get another artist involved. Our last show we had Corin Tucker from Sleater-Kinney and Sam from Quasi come and play with us. With Blue Giant, we want to make it so that anything we do is going to be bigger than just us individually.

From: Los Angeles

Diva Dompe is busy. Very busy.

The singer, songwriter, bassist (and currently sole full-time member) of L.A.’s Blackblack also majors in Biology at Cal State and co-runs a raw-food catering service. Somehow, she also found time to participate in the West Coast 88 Boadrum performance alongside her father Kevin, former drummer for proto-Goth legends Bauhaus, and to embark on two separate one-week tours of Japan.

A hectic schedule, sure, but Dompe clearly feeds off of the hustle n ‘bustle: the lo-fi guitar pop on Blackblack bursts and swells with a childlike enthusiasm. Even the track titles (“The Most! The Best! The Greatest!,” “The Energy Song,” “I Wish I Were a Scientist”) betray the songs ‘sugar-high rambunctiousness: ogres, bears, demons and emerald forests are just a small part of the fantastic Blackblack universe.

Taking some time out from her many activities — including auditioning new band members (her sister, and Blackblack’s drummer, Lola recently left to start college in San Francisco) — Dompe spoke to eMusic about being inspired by L.A., scary-story parties and black metal.

On getting into music:

When I was younger, it was being around my parents and hearing music they played. When I got into playing music with other people I was around 12. My dad took me to see The Filth and the Fury, the Sex Pistols movie and it just totally blew me away. I bought Never Mind the Bullocks that night and listened to it non-stop for a month. Then I got really into punk music, and I was friends with a lot of punk-rock kids in L.A. One of my first bands that played a live show — I was 13 — was called the Vulgarities [laughs]. It was funny — I played bass and sang in that band. It was all political, they were all about the World Trade Organization [laughs]. It’s funny to think back about it. I still love punk music, but it was also very constraining.

On being in a band with your sister:

When I started writing songs — some of the songs for Blackblack — I was 16, in high school. I played drums in a different band then, but was also writing songs on my own, on bass. My sister was 13 and I just told her to play drums in my band. She didn’t know how to play drums at all. She was into it. I kind of…told her to do it [laughs]. She wanted to, as well. I would always try to get my friends to learn instruments to be in a band with me, since I already got along with them. It doesn’t usually work out, but I guess it worked out in this case.

On having fun:

I don’t like going to bars; I find that kind of boring. I try to do different things. I really like going to the observatory with my friend — I like to go up there and draw, it’s just a really nice view of the city. It’s nice to be inspired by space.

A couple of weeks ago I had a scary-story party. We went up this canyon called Firemen Canyon at two in the morning and walked up this trail for half an hour until we couldn’t see the city anymore. It was the night that there were meteor showers, there were shooting stars everywhere. We went up really late and just told scary stories. We were scared that we were gonna get attacked by mountain lions [laughs]. Every time there was a rustling in the bushes, we’d shine our flashlights on it.

On being an artist in L.A.:

It might just be because I grew up here and I’m comfortable with it, but when I leave, I’m always happy to come back. There are so many different things going on. Whatever you’re into, you can find that. The weirdest things, you can find people who are into that and find avenues for going further with it. With local music, there are so many different things set up, all these different bands that are doing things that are creative and interesting and supporting each other. There are places like The Smell where you can play. There are some really good stores, like Family Bookstore and Ooga Booga which provide an outlet for people to sell things. Dean from No Age has a record label. Everyone can work together and help each other out.

On catering:

This year I started a catering company [Crops & Rawbers] with my friend Amanda, who’s in another band called Pocahaunted and also runs a label called Not Not Fun — and it’s all raw food. She actually asked me about it because she’s a raw foodist. I’m not — I’m vegan, but I’m trying to be more raw. I actually just bought a dehydrator. I’m getting more into it. At first we were just gonna do desserts, I guess that seemed easier. But very soon we expanded and started doing everything.

We’ve done pop-up restaurants at local galleries; we’ve served food at shows. I think it’s different, because a lot of the raw restaurants in Los Angeles, they’re on the west side and they’re very expensive — just a little unapproachable. So we’re trying to make it very accessible and fun and incorporate it into other events, since we’re both really into music as well. We’ve sold food at [popular all-ages venue] The Smell a few times. It’s fun.

On making a video:

We made all the sets and costumes for that. It was really hard work, but it was really fun. The setting of the video is that there’s this tribe in the forest, and they worship a butterfly. I was the tribe chief, and I had these big butterfly wings on, and we painted a big backdrop to make trees and used lots of fluorescent paint and blacklight stuff. There’s an evil butterfly catcher, and he captures the butterfly that we worship, so we all get sick. Lola is the tribe warrior, so she goes out and shoots poison darts at the catcher and frees the butterfly, then he starts hallucinating. So we all dressed up as mummies and did a choreographed dance. Then he gets fed to a giant spider. It was really fun! It was so low budget.

On recent listening:

One of my favorite bands is Os Mutantes. They’re a Brazilian band from the ’60s and their music is so interesting to me. It’s so experimental but very honest and heartfelt. I really want to get more into world music, which I think is such a funny term — “for all the music not made in the United States and England.” [Laughs] My teacher for molecular neurobiology is really interested in music too — he burned me some CDs of Indian drumming. It’s just, like, twenty minutes of Indian drumming and it blew my mind.

Also I’ve been listening to this band Marine Girls; they’re from England. I actually lived there for a month — I was gonna go to school there, but I didn’t like it so I came home. I’ve been listening to Young Marble Giants. Oh, and black metal. Like Emperor and Burzum.

For fans of: Sprengjuhöllin

Mad, mod and bursting with energy, Icelandic quintet Sprengjuhöllin outfit big melodies with blaring brass and bounding guitars, making songs that transcend language and geography. A distant, foreign cousin to ’60s groups like the Action and the Kinks, Sprengjuhöllin write the kind of pop songs that seem at once both novel and familiar.

But the music is just the half of it; Sprengjuhöllin’s songs are like novellas, with misbegotten characters stumbling dumbly around empty ideologies and taking long trips with no destination in mind. In order to appreciate all aspects of Sprengjuhöllin’s songwriting, eMusic spoke to dual frontmen Snorri Helgason and Bergur Ebbi Benediktsson and asked them to explain what each of their songs are about. Those explanations — along with a few perilous personal misadventures — are below.

On what, exactly, ‘Sprengjuhöllin ‘means:

Snorri Helgason (guitars): Sprengjuhöllin directly translates as “Palace of Explosions.” It’s not a real word in Icelandic or anything. To us, it means something that’s big and stable — like a palace — but is also really destructive and unstable — like a bomb. There’s a contrast in that word that we like. The thing with our band is that each member is from a really different musical background, so we have this chemistry going where everyone brings something from their world to the table. We find a middle ground, and that’s the final product.

On the dangers of playing Icelandic television:

Bergur Ebbi Benediktsson (vocals, guitars): We got contacted by the biggest television station in Iceland. They were going to broadcast us live, playing a new song, in front of the biggest swimming pool in all of Iceland. This was in the beginning of August, and it also happened to be the warmest day recorded in all of Reykjavik — it was 25.5 degrees Celsius (about 80 degrees Fahrenheit). All the girls were running around in bikinis, everything was just going so well, so we decided that we were going to be such winners that, when the song was over, we were going to jump in the pool with the girls with our clothes on, and that would be the end of the television show — it was a live broadcast.

Well, as soon as the song ended, Georg, our bass player, just sort of panicked. We were supposed to hold hands and jump into the pool in a coordinated fashion, but he just ran out ahead of us, crashed into a bunch of children, and then hit his foot on this metal plate that said “No Diving.” When he hit the water, we just saw blood everywhere. He started yelling “Aaaagghhh! This is horrible! This is horrible!” His toe didn’t quite fall off, but they had to give him like 15 stitches. It looked like a slaughterhouse when he got out. Then, after all of that, the producer of the show came over to us and said, “Um, you know what, guys? Don’t kill me, but the broadcast was a total failure. We didn’t get anything.”

On why New York isn’t much safer:

Bergur: We were invited to play two music festivals in Canada, one in Winnipeg and one in Vancouver. We thought that it was a relatively long flight for just two gigs, so we used some contacts in New York to put ourselves on the bill with another Icelandic band, FM Belfast.

Snorri: It was my first time in New York City. It was great to see and to talk to New Yorkers. I loved talking to cab drivers with funny accents. Our first night in NYC, we were really jetlagged but really excited.

Bergur: There was suddenly just an air raid of eggs. Some guys throwing eggs from a five-story window. I guess this is just how people from New York welcome tourists?

Snorri: So me and Bergur started laughing really hard, but the other guys in the band didn’t find it that funny. Our drummer went out to the street to look up at the building to see if he could see lights, or some asshole laughing in the window or something like that, when a garbage truck came by and the driver screamed, “Get out of the street, you morons!”

Bergur: The thing is, we liked it — we were willing to pay for an experience like that.

The songs: What They Mean, Where They Came From

Bergur Ebbi Benediktsson

“Glùmur”

Glùmur is a Christian name. It pretty much means how it sounds — it’s someone who’s gloomy, someone who’s mysterious and dark. He’s the protagonist of the song, and he’s sort of like a bum. The person who’s singing meets Glùmur in a park — where, you know, bums hang out — just sitting on a bench. Glùmur starts talking about his life: he’s been everywhere, he’s had all kinds of jobs, he’s been involved in a lot of interesting stuff that happened in Icelandic history in the 20th century. He’s like a Forrest Gump type person, who’s squeezed himself into a lot of situations. Today, he’s a total loser, but he doesn’t have any regrets. He’s just a fun bum who’s done a lot of things and has a lot of children everywhere.

If you listen to “Glùmur,” you get the perspective that he’s misunderstanding everything. He thinks he’s still great. This bum thing, it shows up a lot in literature — how bums and tramps are always so optimistic. They don’t own anything, so they don’t have anything to lose. I had an uncle; he was either at the top of society or the bottom. As soon as he had anything — a good job, his family was stable, a great car — he started drinking again and lost it all in a few months. So then he’d start up again.

“Keyrum Yfir Ísland”

The title literally means “Driving Over Iceland.” We talk about places in Iceland that people know about, and people have the experience of doing a road trip around Iceland. Road trips in Iceland are kind of unique. We have very bad roads to begin with. We sometimes have really bad weather. In the summertime we have 24 hours of daylight and people just go mad — they don’t want to fall asleep at all. So this song is about a guy who goes on one of these road trips and goes completely mad. He ends up in the mountains in the wilderness and he doesn’t want to go home unless someone goes down and collects him. He’s just going to stay there. He’s going to become a mountaineer.

“Síðasta Bloggfærsla Ljóshærð Drengsins”

This song is basically a manifesto that goes wrong. It’s about a guy who claims, in the song, that he’s completely independent. He’s not dependent on anything, including religious concepts, like God. It’s a very typical thing for young people to read about all kinds of revolutions around the world, and to just get caught up in that. When people really dive into this kind of stuff, if you claim you’re independent from everything, you just lose your mind. There’s nothing to live for if you’re independent from everything. You have to be attached to things.

This guy has a little doubt. He admits sometimes that he misses God. What happens is that he out-thinks himself; he is so completely independent that he’s become dependent on his own ideology. This guy in the song, he’s always criticizing, but in the end, he’s nothing without this bullshit he’s stuffed his head up with. Eventually, he goes insane because he out-thinks himself. He starts to think that he’s independent of himself. And if he’s independent of himself, then he doesn’t really exist. In the next stanza, he floats into a mythological place — it’s this beach from Norse mythology — where the people go after they die. So he’s on the beach, and he’s physically OK, and he wants to talk about his experience, but he can’t — he doesn’t have a mouth. None of the people on the beach have mouths. They got it taken away because they wasted too many words on bullshit. The title of the song means “The Blond Boy’s Last Blog Entry.”

“Sumar í Múla”

“Sumar í Múla” means literally “Summer in a Promontory”. “Múla” is a common place name in Iceland — it could be just about anywhere. It is also the suffix of a few street names in the commercial sector of Reykjavík, which contains office buildings and, in general, very boring establishments.

That said, the song’s name and meaning is supposed to be a little bit of a riddle. The protagonist is stuck inside a promontory — meaning either he is stuck inside a projecting mountain or stuck inside an urban office building. It’s summertime, and he thinks he’s missing out on a lot of stuff. But he thinks too much, since he has the typical modern day “thinking-sickness.” The protagonist feels that he’s missing out on the summer because he’s locked inside an office all day long, but he what he thinks he is missing out on is some Jane-Austenish 19th-century drama sensation — couples kissing each other under trees in the meadow or floating down streams on rafts, listening to Rimbaud deliver poems. The song lyrics cite various influences from 20th century Icelandic poetry, and even directly some direct lines.

“Nú er tíminn”

“Nú er tíminn” means “Now is the time.” I have a typical “carpe diem” message. It’s a call for our generation to establish itself with a name and meaning and stop listening to what the old folks say about the importance in life. The guy in the song says he knows nothing about agriculture or wool and just wants to eat his sushi, be easily persuaded and have fun. It is sometimes fun just to go with the flow and let go of hard and difficult ideologies.

Snorri Helgason

“Worry ’til Spring”

I was thinking about Mississippi John Hurt — do you know him? He’s got this weird finger-picking style that a lot of times copies the melodies of his songs. So I was thinking about that, and about the song “Blackbird” by the Beatles, and that kind of inspired me to try that method out. I was trying to figure out Mississippi John Hurt‘s version of “Stagger Lee,” and I kind of stumbled upon this melody. I just worked my way along on that. I was working at a kindergarten at the time I wrote this, and during the lunch breaks when the kids just finished eating, we’d go into this little room and play children’s songs. One day I started playing songs that I’d been writing and I played that song to them and they really liked it. I used to do that a lot when I was working there.

“Þá Hlupu Hestar A Skeið″

This song was first written in English, it was called “All the Horses Are Gone.” This was one of the first songs that Bergur wrote and presented to us. It’s an expression in Icelandic folklore — these old tribes and families that lived here in Iceland in the old days, the song is a description of a battle between the two of them, and then it becomes a trip through Icelandic history.

“Frá Gleymdu Vori”

That’s really just a typical love song — a lost love. The singer is describing a romance that’s ended, and he’s comparing it to a rainy day in spring.

“Taktlaus”

This one is about this guy — and there are a lot of these guys around — that just do not want to dance at shows. They think they are too cool to dance. They just hang out at the bar and get drunk and then maybe sway around in a semi-violent manner and spill beer everywhere. It’s a really short song, and a short lyric about that. It’s about being afraid to dance and hiding it behind some kind of coolness. They kind of envy and hate the people that are dancing.

“Flogin Er Finka”

Actually, the direct translation of the title of this song is “This Bird Has Flown.” It’s about a girl that’s left, just like the girl in the Beatles song. It’s about being alone on a winter afternoon. You go out, your car door is frozen shut, you can’t turn the key. All in all, it’s just a gloomy winter’s day.

For fans of: Mingering Mike

Mingering Mike is late.

I probably should have expected it. Mike is an R&B superstar with nearly 40 years in the business. He’s racked up a string of No. 1 hits (among them the astonishing “But All I Can Do Is Cry”) and played venues in cities as far away as Paris. He has a bevy of celebrity admirers and a book that details his rise, fall and rise again. A little tardiness comes with the territory.

He’s asked that we meet at Marvin, a hip, bustling restaurant near the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, DC named after soul legend and local favorite son Marvin Gaye. There’s an enormous painting of Marvin on the rear wall, and a steady stream of ’60s classics — Curtis Mayfield, Donny Hathaway, Isaac Hayes — filters through the air.

They have a lot in common, Mike and Marvin. Both of them grew up on the hardscrabble streets of DC, two quiet kids born into atypical families and harrowing social upheaval. They both scored their first hits early in life — Mike at 18, Marvin at 23, and both of them first became famous for a series of duets — Marvin with Tami Terrell, Mike with the Big “D.” Both of them sold out DC’s legendary Howard Theater, running through their respective golden greats for an ecstatic and adoring public.

But it’s there that their careers diverge. Marvin recorded 24 studio albums during his lifetime, but Mike has released nearly twice that number. Marvin recorded mostly for Motown, but Mike put out records on countless regional imprints: Decision, Ming/War, Mother Goose and Nation’s Capitol, to name just a few. In 1972, Marvin Gaye released one LP. Mingering Mike released 15. In terms of productivity, dedication and sheer drive, Mike bests Marvin every time.

Oh, there’s one more key difference between Mike’s career and Marvin’s: Mike’s is completely imaginary.

There are so many entry points to the story of Mingering Mike it’s difficult to know which one to choose. You could start with Dori and Frank, the two crate diggers who fortuitously stumbled upon boxes of Mike’s homemade cardboard records at a flea market while in search of rare funk 45s. You could start with the internet — specifically, the SoulStrut message board — where Mike’s legend slowly grew to epic proportions. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, the best place to start is with Mike himself.

Mike — that’s as much of a name as he’ll give, and as much as I’m willing to push for — grew up in DC in the 1960s, raised by his sisters, first Cathy and then Ladosca, at the peak of the soul music explosion.

“It was fantastic,” he beams. “It just seemed like everything that was pouring out of the radio was great.”

We’re sitting at a table in the back of Marvin, directly across from the enormous, imposing portrait of The Man himself. Mike, when all was said and done, was only 30 minutes late, a delay due not to prima donna posturing, but the inability to find parking.

As is often the case during interviews and public appearances, Mike is accompanied by Dori Hadar, who is as warm and affable as Mike is shy and gentle. Mike’s current popularity is largely because of Hadar, and, in what could be read as a combination payback/apology, Hadar acts as a kind of publicist and agent. Call him the Mingering Manager. The two of them have a rare and natural chemistry. Any time Mike starts to talk about his life, Hadar leans in close. He’s surely heard Mike’s story countless times over the last four years, but his rapt attention and frequent questions make each telling seem like the first. It’s easy to understand his enthusiasm; hearing Mike speak is like heaving open a huge window across decades. Peering through offers a view of five-and-tens with plate glass windows, old green Fords coughing exhaust and blaring Motown, and legendary soul venues with lines around the block.

“My brother used to work at the Howard Theater,” Mike recalls. His voice is rich and low, a slight drawl seeping into slow-to-come words. “I was about 15 at the time, and I saw James Brown there, I saw Junior Walker there. At every show, they’d have local acts open up for the stars.” When Mike wasn’t using his family connections to score an audience with the King of Soul, he was spending his spare quarters on 45s. “I was the 45 king back then!” he says. “Because of the way the economy was, it was better for me to buy the 45s instead of the LPs. There used to be a bargain store that sold 45s for 25-cents apiece, so pretty soon I had stacks and stacks of them.”

In what will come as no surprise to any avid record collector, as a teenager Mike was a bit of a loner. He often refers to himself as the “Silent Observer,” and even now, listening to him talk, it’s easy to hear the tentative tones of a quiet little kid, the kind who went to soul shows alone and who would soon begin to construct an elaborate career of his own. As Mike puts it, “Sometimes you reach a certain point in life where you think, ‘Well, I could do that.’”

For Mike, that point arrived at age 16.

“I had a small reel-to-reel player,” he explains, “and I would just record by myself. I wasn’t satisfied with the beat, I couldn’t do that too well, so I just concentrated on the lyrics and tunes. When I met up with the Big “D” and found out that he had the same interest, we started getting together and doing stuff. It seemed like that took it to a higher level.”

The Big “D” is Mike’s second cousin, and the two whiled away whole weekends pouring homemade soul songs onto reel-to-reel tapes, using their voices, an afro comb and a telephone book to create their own variations on the 45s Mike was so enthusiastically amassing.

“A couple of songs that we did, it was just me and him,” Mike says, “but it sounds like a group. Later on, other family members got interested, and they tagged along, too. They would just resemble the music. One of them would be a trumpet, some kind of horn. Big “D” would make the percussion with either his hands or an afro comb. We always recorded in the bathroom, because of the acoustics. We just threw a sign on the door that said: ‘Recording.’”

The products of these sessions are raucous and bursting with joy, stomping combinations of rhythm and blues, field hollers and gospel shouts. “Coffee Cake” is a delirious funk jam, Mike and “D” chanting the name of the titular treat over and over, creating a kind of jug-band thump. “Hey You” is a simple soul ballad, Mike coyly asking, “Hey you — how ’bout a date?” with an unaffected sweetness that would make Marvin himself proud. The tracks that comprise Super Gold Greatest Hits are the original artifacts — the songs Mike and “D” recorded in the bathroom in the late ’60s. And while they’re undeniably unpolished (most of them consist of little beyond some tape hiss, Mike’s soulful singing and “D” mimicking various instruments), they are also undeniably songs, songs with clear, hooky choruses, sturdy structures and passionate lyrics. To listen to “Sunny” once is to have its “guitar” line stuck in your head for weeks.

“I started out with the songs and tunes,” Mike says. “It wasn’t until two or three years later that I started developing the albums.”

Mike’s tunes are winning but primitive, but his albums are his masterpieces. For each batch of songs, Mike constructed covers out of cardboard, decorating them with magic marker illustrations that look alarmingly similar to the soul albums of the era. The cover of Do I Love You depicts Mike and D wooing a confused woman with flowers and a box of candy. His imagination didn’t end with the artwork: Mike slid some of the covers inside cellophane shrink wrap, affixing price tags and creating labels that boasted, “Free 45 in this one only,” and “Contains the Hit Single ‘Eat Myself Silly.’” On the flipsides, in addition to the tracklisting, Mike scrawled elaborate, often hilarious, liner notes. The back of Minger’s Gold: Supersonic Greatest Hits boasts, “Mingering Mike has shown you millions and millions of times of his capabilities as a successful songwriter, composer and, last but not least, singer. A true artist in every sense of the word.” When Mike noticed his empty covers wilting when he stood them upright, he cut out cardboard LPs, spraying them with a black lacquer paint to replicate the shiny look of vinyl. Each individual LP was properly labeled, the tracks perfectly timed to fit on one side of an actual vinyl record. Each cardboard LP has the passion and poetry of a love letter, the product of a person who cherished, studied, revered and often disappeared inside pop music. As Mike matter-of-factly puts it, “It was just something that had to come out. I used to go to the local drug store. I just bought color cardboard sheets. It’s an overwhelming thing, so sometimes I’d buy the material in advance, in case I thought of something later on.”

The covers, which can be viewed at the Mingering Mike website or, better still, in Hadar’s book Mingering Mike: The Imaginary Career of an Amazing Soul Superstar are spectacular, meticulously designed and expertly drawn. Mike issued “albums” on countless imprints — Decision Records, Fake Records, Mother Goose Records. Each record had its own catalog number, and each label boasted a roster of dozens, all of them based loosely on Mike’s friends and family. In addition to Mingering Mike & the Big “D,” there was Ramblin ‘Ralph, whose debut album In My Corner features such hits as “Think I’m Going to Have to Pawn My Set or Eat My Pet.” There was Joseph War, whose debut album proudly proclaims, “Joseph War stands for peas and hominy.” And there was On the Beach with the Sexorcist, the cover of which featured two teenagers cavorting behind a giant beach ball. Mike’s imaginary success wasn’t just a local phenomenon. The back of Can Minger Mike Stevens Really Sing? (which, collectors will want to know, was issued on Fake Records in 1969, catalog number 5-2158) contains a testimonial: “With a look of success, singing and dancing, boy he’s a mess.” The quote is signed, “James Brown.”

That the records are made of cardboard are almost beside the point; Mike’s covers are an artifact from a time when a record’s lineage and presentation was just as important — if not more so — as what was etched in the grooves. Ditto Mike’s stage name, which came to him when he saw a street sign that read “Merging Traffic” and fiddled with the first word a bit; it’s perfect, the kind of near-sense non-word that conveys heaps of implied meaning without an iota of the literal kind.

Viewing Mike’s records chronologically offers a kind of History of Soul in miniature. Early Mingering Mike platters, loaded with love songs like “There’s Nothing Wrong With You Baby,” slowly give way to records that are spiritually searching and socially-conscious. The cover of Mercy the World by the Outsiders shows Earth slowly being submerged in boiling water. The cover of Joseph War’s Ghetto Prince is ornamented with ominous needles and pills. A drawing of an enormous skull adorns the inner sleeve of The Drug Store; across its cranium, Mike scrawled a poem. It opens with the line, “More death’s in the neighborhood.” (When I ask him what inspired him to make so many records about drug abuse, Mike laughs and replies, “The 1970s!”)

“That work is instantly recognizable to any of us who have imagined ourselves as singers with a great band but haven’t quite got all the pieces in place yet,” David Byrne says when I ask him about it a few weeks later. “Mike instinctively knew that the cover art, the song titles and the narrative that is revealed as one record historically follows another are in some ways maybe not equal to, but at least parallel to, the actual songs.”

“If you go through them all one by one, you can see a person grow,” Hadar says. “It tells the story of the city I grew up in at a time I wish I’d grown up in.” The covers are so intricately detailed, it’s difficult to believe Mike ever spent time doing anything else.

“I never worked on them at work,” Mike explains, “because I needed to keep things separate. I didn’t really tell anyone about them till the ’80s.”

“What did they think?” Hadar asks.

“They liked ‘em,” Mike slowly responds. “They thought they were kinda strange, but they liked the artwork. But this mainly was something I just did for personal satisfaction.”

This seems as good a place as any for a brief clarification. When an artist produces this much singular work in such a short period of time for an audience of less-than-five, a temptation arises to label their work “outsider art.” This appellation, besides being condescending and cruel, generally implies some kind of deep emotional disturbance. In fact, to a man, almost every person I’ve told about Mingering Mike, almost immediately asks if he’s “like Daniel Johnston.” The short answer to that question is “no.” Mike is not mentally or emotionally handicapped. He doesn’t break out into fits, he doesn’t swear compulsively or drift off into some private, unreachable space. He is warm, soft-spoken and a little shy, preferring to display his enthusiasm — as he says again and again — “on the inside.” Hadar has described him as “one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met.” It takes all of three minutes to agree with his assessment.

Which makes the fact that, in 1968, Mike was drafted to fight in the Vietnam War that much more ironic. Even now, 40 years later, Mike still seems blindsided.

“I was super sad,” he recalls softly. “Super sad. In fact, I recorded the song ‘But All I Can Do Is Cry ‘on the very last day before I shipped out.”

The song is as primitive as it is affecting. Against a dry, shuffling rhythm track Mike — his voice cracked and wounded — sings, “Oh, it hurts so to say goodbye/ When you see the tears falling from my eyes/ I never like saying goodbye/ But the man told me to come on and to take a ride/ Kiss your family and friends goodbye/ …So all I can do is cry.” It’s haunting, a kind of R&B last will and testament, pure gospel soul poured out from the depths of a broken heart. “When I came back, Big “D” told me, ‘That song was really sad, but really nice. I really liked it,’” Mike recalls. “It turned out that I’d left the reels in the recorder, and he heard it after I shipped out.”

In Hadar’s book, there is a picture of Mike in the barracks during the early part of basic training. His face says it all: he looks dazed and distant, trying to smile but inside shriveled and throbbing with hurt. “There’s a line in the song that goes, ‘I might die. ‘That’s exactly what I was thinking: I might die. They have you in basic training, and there’s bullets flying over your head and you’re crawling on your belly — I just knew that wasn’t for me.”

So Mike did the only thing an imaginary soul superstar can do when they’re faced with a situation that threatens to damage both their art and personal well-being: he went AWOL. But returning home, too, turned out to be a nightmare. “Every night on the news the Army would announce who they were looking for,” he said. “And one of my family members told me they saw my name. My cousin Ralph, he used to come by the house and bang on the door real hard, and I’d jump out of my skin.”

Holed up in his house, unable to work outside of small, off-the-book gigs at a cousin’s gas station, Mike took comfort in his life’s one constant: his albums. The records he drew during those years are a combination of passionate protests and heartfelt pleas for peace. The cover of The Two Sides of Mingering Mike displays a pair of profiles. Facing left is Mike the soul singer, eyes wide, mouth open. Facing right is Mike the soldier, green hat pulled down low over his brow, eyes narrowed in anger. Similar is the soundtrack to Mike’s imaginary film You Only Know What They Tell You. The cover depicts an American soldier, strung up like a marionette, kicking a Vietnamese soldier in the chest. The image Mike drew on the flipside is even more chilling: that same puppet soldier, deflated and helpless, his pained face colored in a rainbow of red, yellow, black and white.

Mike created a new imprint to house these more political works: Decision Records. “If you look at the logo, there are two hands,” Mike explains. “One is reaching for a rifle, the other is reaching for a microphone. The caption beneath says, ‘Which would you choose?’” For Mike, the decision was obvious. “I wanted these records to have a message — like they were for the whole world. I was using them to communicate silently.”

In 1977, Mike received a pardon from President Jimmy Carter, but those years still loom large. Later in the afternoon, during a photo shoot in front of the White House, Mike refused to get too close to the building. “They’re going to see me,” he protests. “I know some of those Secret Service guys, and they’re going to recognize me.” At first, it seems paranoid, the kind of overreaction that can fuel those “outsider artist” speculations. After a bit of thought, though, I realize it’s actually a perfectly natural reaction from a man whose government once tried to kill him.

Dori Hadar is a criminal investigator. He works for a firm of defense attorneys, a career he says he “fell into” after moving back to DC from Seattle. More importantly, though, he’s a record enthusiast, a hobby that found him at flea markets and thrift stores at odd hours, flipping through endless towers of vinyl in search of the odd rare treasure.

“I had to go to the jail really early one morning to talk to a witness,” Hadar recalls. “I got out at like 4 am. There’s a flea market about two blocks away, so I thought, ‘Well, I could go home and sleep for a couple of hours, or I could go down to the flea market.’”

The flea market was a regular haunt for Hadar, and his timing turned out to be fortuitous. A delivery truck packed with crates from local auctions had just arrived and, as the driver told Hadar, “I got records.”

Hadar set about rifling through the stacks, astonished by what he was finding. “It was a fantastic collection,” he says. “It was all stuff I’d been looking for, and all of it in great condition. I was just happily like, ‘Oh my God!’”

It was near the end of his search, when the sun was creeping up outside and other diggers had begun to filter into the stacks, that Hadar made his most valuable discovery.

“The last box I looked in — and it just happened to be the last box I looked in — contained all these albums.” Tucked in at the end of a long row of record crates sat the full Mingering Mike discography.

How Mike’s records ended up in a flea market at four in the morning is itself a tiny tragedy. After he moved out of his sister Ladosca’s house Mike had been keeping his records in a storage locker in downtown DC. He’d made friends with the owners of the facility, and they never minded if he was a few days late in making his payments. Over the years, though, the facility changed hands, and the new owners did not take as kindly to Mike’s periodic payment lapses.

“I went to go make a payment one day, and they were closed for the Christmas holiday,” Mike says. “I called them when they re-opened, and they told me they’d had an auction and sold it all. I was so upset. Every time somebody brought it up I’d just fly off about it. I would have looked for them myself, but I had no idea where to go.”

The rediscovery of the records is so fortuitous it’s almost unbelievable; they could have turned up in some podunk thrift store or been trashed as valueless by a cynical store clerk. Instead, they ended up in the hands of a record enthusiast who just happened to be a private investigator.

“I was completely puzzled over what these things were,” Hadar explains. “Mingering Mike? What’s a Mingering Mike? Why have I never heard of Mingering Mike? Why are these records made out of cardboard?” Hadar asked the other crate diggers in the store, but none of them seemed to share his fascination. Flummoxed, he posted pictures of the albums on the record enthusiast website SoulStrut — and that’s when the legend of Mingering Mike took root. The thread quickly became the message board’s most-viewed, racking up thousands of pageviews and generating both rabid enthusiasm and curiosity.

“Someone made the suggestion, ‘go back to the flea market and just buy the whole lot. ‘So I went back and I bought the reels and some paperwork — bills, stuff like that — and using the addresses I found there along with some resources at work, I was able to find Mike.”

Hadar and Frank Beylotte, another digger who had also discovered some of Mike’s cardboard records, turned up on Mike’s doorstep, tentative and apprehensive.

“He was very calm and collected,” Hadar remembers, “and very hard to read.” Mike offers an explanation:

“When they knocked on my door, the first thing I thought was, ‘Uh-oh! More bill collectors!’”

Their first meeting was pleasant but stilted, but a few weeks later Hadar and Beylotte sat down with Mike and his cousin, Joseph War, and explained the situation.

“What I wanted to convey was, ‘People really, really love this,’” Hadar says. “‘People are moved by this. They’ve never met you, but they look at these albums and they love you.’”

What followed was a rocket ride to regional stardom. Stories appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker and the Washington Post. A small record label called the Vanguard Squad, owned and operated by Soul Strutters, contacted Hadar, interested in issuing a limited edition Mingering Mike 45. And DC’s Hemphill Fine Arts Gallery organized a show for Mike, putting a decade of painstaking work before the public at last.

“The albums were displayed chronologically,” Hadar says, “and so people would just stop and read them. Just watching these people who’d never seen these before — or who didn’t know what they were — just the expressions on their faces. They were totally drawn in.”

“There was another exhibit downstairs, but all the people were coming upstairs to look at my work,” Mike beams.

“And every single person had a smile on their face,” Hadar finishes.

“I never thought too much about it when I did it. It was just something that had to come out,” Mike said. “But seeing they’ve been out for a little bit and seeing that people love them — that’s just overwhelming.”

“They’re records you really wish were real,” Hadar added. “You look at the song titles and the liner notes, and you just want to hear those songs.”

“I was nervous at first because they were so personal,” Mike admits. “But people were coming up to me and saying, ‘It reminds me of my childhood! ‘That really made me feel good. So I said to myself, ‘Man, I’m bringing joy to people — out of my misery, out of my loneliness. Well, that’s OK.’”

“Loew’s Palace used to be right there, where that bank is.”

Dori and Mike and I are in central DC, taking a slow drive through the quiet Sunday city as Mike points out his childhood hangouts. “York’s Haberdashers was over there, and further up was Lynn’s Music.” I’m starting to get used to the past tense. Earlier in the afternoon we’d driven by the Howard Theater, where Mike spent so many teenage nights. In its heyday it was proud and glorious, but now it’s sadly crumbling. The marquee had rusted over, the windows were either blown out or boarded over and the walls have faded to a sickly shade of orange. I’d wanted to photograph Mike standing in front of the building, but the large barbed-wire fence and the building’s embarrassing disrepair immediately make it clear that this is a terrible idea. It becomes a kind of afternoon trend: the drug store where Mike bought his supplies, even the flea market where Hadar first found Mike’s cardboard chart-toppers, are all lost but to memory.

“When was the last time you were in Loew’s Palace?” I ask as we roll slowly past.

“That would have been to see James Brown.”

“Did your brothers go with you?”

“No, I mostly went by myself. They were older than me, so they liked different music.”

“How much did that show cost you?” I ask.

“It was expensive!” Mike exclaimed — he cranes his neck around and smiles. “Five dollars and fifty cents.”

“There’s a toy manufacturer that had expressed some interest in doing a Mingering Mike doll,” Hadar says.

“How would you feel,” I ask, “having a doll of yourself?” Mike was typically reserved. “It’s alright,” he allows.

“Has it been hard, balancing your personality as Mingering Mike with your day-to-day life?”

“I seem to be balancing the two pretty well,” Mike says. “Only the people I’ve told know, and they’re keeping it rather secret.” He chuckled. “It’s funny. I used to sit back and observe — but now I’m the observed!”

“That’s the price of being a soul superstar,” I say.

“It was bound to happen!” Mike laughs. “I should have known!”

Some 40 years after his first cardboard release, Mike’s made-up catalog numbers now correspond to a bona fide album. Songs that, until now, were just thin wisps of cellophane and etchings on an invented album cover are now actual, playable, hearable songs, the first tentative steps in transforming an imaginary soul star into a real one. “Who knew that he actually made recordings of the songs that were to fill the vinyl in that universe?” Byrne wondered during our correspondence. “Alright, there still ain’t no band, but we’ve all done this at some point, yes? I myself used to walk home from school humming guitar solos that I imagined would put Clapton to shame. Mike did one better, and actually wrote lyrics and melodies to flesh out his young fantasies. It turns out Planet Mike is more complete than one would have thought.”

But as thrilled as I am to be working with Mike, it seems like a bitter irony that his first record is being released in a format that can’t be held in the hands, whose artwork can’t be pored over, whose liner notes can’t be studied and learned and recited. I feel strangely complicit, for the first time, in a kind of bait-and-switch — like a guy who sells 3×5 postcards of Starry Night. As we drive away from downtown DC, a city Mike remembers as tiny record stores and packed soul venues but which I see now only as steel and concrete and Coldstone Creameries and H&R Blocks, I’m struck by an exchange Mike and I had at Marvin a few hours earlier.

“Are you going to make any more records?” I asked him. Mike nodded.

“Well, right now I’ve got the foundation for The Return of the Magnificent Mingering,” he said, “but I only have it as a blueprint, so I can finish it when I have the time.”

“So will you still make the covers look like vinyl LPs, or will you switch to CD?”

“I’ll do both,” he said. My brow furrowed. He continued. “The reason I’ll do both is so you can see how it used to look — a big, full-sized record — and you see how it is now with a CD.”

Then he leaned a little bit closer, brown eyes twinkling, smile creeping across his face. “Now,” he said, “you tell me: Which one would you want?”

Personae: Randolph Chabot

No offense to eMusic’s previous Selects artists, but I get the sense that the only one of the bunch that could become a genuine pop star is one Randolph Chabot. Under the name Deastro, Chabot writes the sort of pop songs that make you swoon – and then wraps them in a hyper-colored gloss of synthesizer sturm und drang. M83 is a reference point for Keeper’s, his eMusic Selects release, but it’s not quite accurate: Deastro is M83 plus Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. And giraffes. And a tiny bit of Nick Drake as well.

When you meet Chabot in person, however, there’s not even a hint of Nick Drake about him. He’s a chatterbox, eager to talk about art, books, music, social work and the one time as a youngster that someone scaled a giant inflatable Clifford at a community pool. (“He was a God to us. We sacrificed other kids in his honor,” he tells me, finishing up the answer to a question that had been offered minutes before.) He’s charming in the way that people who are really into stuff — and want to tell you all about it — can be.

Now 22, Chabot made his first album when he was only 12. It’s one he still listens today. “I hadn’t heard a lot of music then, so it’s nice to listen to something that was unfiltered by other influences.” But after years of working in the studio alone, he’s finally getting a band together. For now, they live down the block. “It’s cool to walk a couple houses down and get together and work on stuff.” Soon, they’ll be living together, though, as part of an effort called ARC (Artists Revitalizing Communities). The organization seeks to “end intellectual attrition” in Southern Michigan by encouraging like-minded individuals to move to Pontiac and create a scene there. In a world that now seems to be far more interested in globalization, it’s a conscious throwback to indie rock’s beginnings, where art flourished in the unlikeliest of places — and made those communities more attractive to live. An amazing musician and a social conscience? Yep. This guy’s got pop star written all over him.

On his musical beginnings:

I got my first guitar when I was five. My uncle bought me this really nice one, although I don’t remember what brand it was. I remember this one time, he put me in front of this Marshall half stack and then he went into his room and played this huge Drop D chord directly into his amp and it was so loud, but I was like, “Oh, wow, that’s so awesome.” He taught me some songs, chord structure.

I only had it for a couple of months, though, because I had this friend who is simultaneously the greatest person and the craziest person. You love him and you hate him. But love definitely more than hate. But anyway, he was playing Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in our basement and jumped off a chair and roundhouse kicked my guitar. I didn’t get another one until I was 12. I got a classical guitar, which is something I’ve been into ever since.

On his family.

My dad was really into drugs and music before he became a Christian. So he’s seen both sides of the story. My dad is kind of like this fusion between conservative and crazy at the same time. He’s an amazing guy, though. When my mom was pregnant with my baby brother, he taught us how to do 360′s in the parking lot of the hospital. I think more than anybody, my dad taught me how to take risks.

I remember one time we got had just gotten home from school and he pulled up in his car (which was weird, because he worked and it was early on in the day) and he was like, “Get in the car! We gotta go! Pack a little bag, we’re leaving.” We were so confused, but we ended up in Kentucky and saw Mammoth Cave, totally on a whim. I have an awesome family. I was home-schooled and my mom was really weird in her own way, but really, really cool. She’s the best cook ever. I think if my music really starts to suck, I’m just going to use my mother as a lure to invite bands to play with me.

On getting into electronic music:

I made my first electronic album when I was 12. My friend got me copy of [computer programs] Techno DJ and Acid and I just went crazy. There was this matrix where you could type in the notes and a Roland key piano. You’d have to ask my mom how long it was, but I just spent months trying stuff out. I still listen to those things that I made all the time for ideas and I still really dig it.

What did you call yourself?

I was DJ Shield, because that’s what my name means in German. Or it means Wolf Protector. I also had another electronic project called Veleciraptor. I seem to have a knack for picking out names that are also taken by German metal bands.

On what he’s been listening to lately:

I love Christopher Willits. He’s my hero pretty much. I’m also really into Steve Reich’s new album, The Daniel Variations. I’ve also been listening to Luigi Nono, who is this Italian minimalist composer. The new Why? album is amazing. So is the new Dosh album. Yeasayer, HEALTH, Beach House. I’m into so much stuff.

On the last dream he had:

I had a dream the other night where it was a friend of mine’s birthday party and she said she was making cheesecake. She said that I could have a slice of it before the birthday party, but that I just had to make sure that I brought it back. But then I went to the birthday party and left it on the dashboard of my car and it melted. And then I woke up.

On working:

I worked at Taco Bell when I was 15, which is probably against labor laws, but there was this random thing. There was this lady there who was from Russia, but was still a Communist, so she would always be trying to convert us. It was the most amazing job I’ve ever had. You met the weirdest people there. This guy came in one night and asked for no onions on his bean burrito, and my manager put the onions on the burrito on purpose, because the guy was kind of being a jerk. And the guy came back and was really mad. “Who put onions on my BEAN BURRITO?!” Everyone was freaking out and then my manager pointed at me and said, “It was him.” It was probably the scariest moment in my life.

Also, I went to hair school for a while in Minnesota. The hardest thing to do was to cut flattops. Cutting straight edges with a curved instrument is kinda tough. After a while, though, I was getting carpal tunnel and had to choose between cutting hair for the rest of my life but not being able to play the guitar, so I gave that up.

On getting a band together:

This guy, Mark, lives in my neighborhood and we’ve kind of slightly known each other for years and about a month-and-a-half ago he e-mailed me and I’d been looking to do full band stuff. Just make it a little bit bigger sounding, a bit more flamboyant. Hm, not flamboyant. Maybe just a bit more neon? Anyway, so Mark and some other guys all live in my neighborhood and I’d been talking to his friend Jeff for a while. I’d stop by and see their tour van and be like, “Oh…you guys are in a band? That’s cool…” [laughs]

On getting involved with ARC:

I was friends with this kid who runs a loft space in Pontiac and he lives across the hall from the guy who runs it. The idea is that a bunch of young people get apartments, lofts, whatever, in a certain area – wherever we’re needed most – and then live there for three years to try to help rebuild the creative economy around there. While we’re living there we put on shows, work in the community and try to just be a positive influence. I went to college for a while and was studying to become a social worker, so it’s pretty close to my heart. I’m going to be moving there pretty soon with my three bandmates and we’re planning on building a studio in the basement.

On how he ended up with ended up with a track on the Ghostly Swim compilation:

I think I sent the Ghostly people stuff a long time ago. Like I hand-drew this crazy Magic Castle and then sent them my 37 song demo. But I never really heard back from them.

You sent them a 37 song demo?

You know who Margo Guryan is? She had this album called 25 Demos or something like that and I bought it for, like, nine dollars and so I wrote that album because I want to, someday, give away 37 songs for, like, five dollars. I just want to have someone feel like I did, where you get more than ten songs for ten dollars. It’s like, “This is a good day. This band loves me.”

But, yeah, there’s been a really good response from the song on the compilation. That girl that I had the dream about the melting cheesecake, she played it for her niece and nephew and said, “This is a song that Randy did.” And the kids listened to it and they were silent and then at the end, they told her, “Oh, we want to hear another song that Randy did.” When she told me that, I knew I was on the right track. I played this art fair last summer and I did this Beach Boys/electro thing and there were like 120 little kids and they all rushed the stage. I mean, I guess that’s what I’m looking for: the five-and-under audience. [laughs]

From: Brooklyn

Personae: JB Townsend (guitar), Brad Hargett (vocals), Andy Adler (bass)

After moving to New York from south Florida, JB Townsend (guitar) and Brad Hargett (vocals) formed Crystal Stilts with friend, bassist and fellow record store clerk Andy Adler. Recently adding Frankie Rose on drums, the Stilts have solidified their sparklingly moody guitar pop. Until now, the band has only released a limited-run 7-inch and vinyl-only EP; Crystal Stilts culls tracks from those releases as well as unreleased new songs and demos. The foursome met with eMusic’s Yancey Strickler and Alex Naidus at a Brooklyn bar to talk about the road that brought them here.

Can we talk about the van? What happened — all the equipment was in the van…

Brad Hargett: Yeah. We were practicing at [Brooklyn practice studio] Flood, but it was a really small space. We were in between spaces, really — [the other band] said “You guys can practice here, but we don’t want your stuff here.” It was one of those things, we were being lazy. We should have gotten another space, put our gear in it, you know. But it was free most of the time, we’d go in, maybe pay $20. But we were getting increasingly paranoid about all our stuff being in the van. We kinda knew this was a really bad idea.

So anyway, I woke up some morning…

Andy Adler: I think the precursor is that it got side-swiped.

BH: Yeah, I was walking outside on the way to practice in Bed-Stuy and someone had side-swiped not just my car but two cars in a row. They were just crushed. The rearview mirror was hanging off and from front to back there was a huge swipe across it. So I ended up getting tickets for having no sideview mirror — which, I even got a ticket while it was parked. I swear, they gave me a ticket while it was parked. Also, I had a few parking tickets…whatever. [Everyone laughs]

JB Townsend: He had like six or seven parking tickets.

BH: That was my first hope, though, that it had been towed. I had outstanding parking tickets. I get to work, freaking out a little — this is ten days before South by Southwest. All our shit was in it. But I figured, it probably got towed.

So I call the police station. They were like, “Lemme check. You’re car has not been towed, call 911.” Fuck. So I call 911, report it stolen — even checked on the New York City government website where you can see if it’s towed. I actually have a printout from a month later saying, “Your car has not been towed” from the New York City Police Department, the City Marshall. So anyway, we figured it was stolen. I had given it up. I thought I had gone through all the options. The Police Department didn’t tell me that maybe, you know, they have no communication. [Laughs] So anyway, we were supposed to leave on a Monday morning for SXSW. The car has a Florida license plate, so my mom gets a letter and calls me, [in mom voice] “I got a letter, it says your car’s been impounded!” This is 6pm on Friday and they’re closed all weekend.

For one, I was furious. They told me it had not been towed. They could have at least said, “Maybe it’s been towed, we have no idea,” but they told me it had definitely not been towed.

AA: And that it was gonna be auctioned off the next Friday.

With everything that was in it?

BH: That was the question! Would they advertise that? “Start a band!”

JBT: Vox Jaguar organ.

AA: Bob Dylan bootlegs. A pair of pants.

BH: We needed to try and get it out. We couldn’t — it would’ve been smarter to rent a car, drive down there, play the shows and figure it out when we got back — but the car would’ve been gone by then. So we had to get the car back. I tried to get up early and go over there, but it was such a runaround. You had to go to three different places; I sat around for eight hours while they got around to bringing it out. When the guy finally pulled the car out of the lot, he pulled out with the tow truck and just dropped it without slowing down. The car bounced back about five feet, then he just gave me one of these. [Points fingers]

Like, “See ya.”

BH: Yeah. So we still, at that point, had a chance to start out for Texas right then. But considering the step-daughter treatment it received, I got in there and it was like Click-click-click. Nothin’.

How many days was it that you thought everything had been stolen?

BH: It was three weeks!

Three weeks?

BH: Yeah. I thought it was gone.

Before your mom got the letter.

BH: Yeah.

So what were you doing for those three weeks?

BH: Crying. [Everyone laughs]

Were you like, “We can’t even be a band anymore?”

BH: Well yeah, there was that thought initially. But honestly, we don’t have that much equipment. Maybe fifteen hundred, two thousand dollars worth of equipment. It wasn’t like we had twenty grand worth of shit.

The thing was, everyone was really cool with borrowing equipment, everyone was super helpful. I almost felt bad when we got the stuff back. Especially because I feel like it looks really stupid. It sort-of looks like, “You didn’t even call to see if it had gotten towed?” I feel like people that don’t know the story — which, I would think the same thing. You know… idiots.

Have your parents heard the band?

JBT: My dad has.

What was the reaction?

JBT: My dad said it sounds like “the best new Beatles.” [Everyone laughs.]

AA: In a French accent, nonetheless.

JBT: [In French accent] “That sounds like the best new Bettles.” [Everyone laughs]

BH: My dad said, “What the hell is that? Are those actual words or are you just mumbling?” [Laughs]

What’d you say to that?

BH: I said, “They’re words, dad!” [Laughs] To my dad, me being in music is a huge joke. My dad’s also old — he’s almost 80. He had us when he was well into his 40s — me and my sister. He was in his mid-thirties when the Beatles hit, so for him, people that play music are like jazz [musicians]. You have some sort of musical education and talent. I don’t even play an instrument, so it’s a joke to him.

What would it take for him to view what you do as being legitimate? Was there a path he wanted to send you on?

BH: I think he would view it as legitimate if I ever made money from doing it.

AA: Or opening for Tony Bennett.

What was the reception at the very first show?

BH: There’s a good story behind that, actually. It was at Free 103 and the Mad Scene played. Hamish Kilgour [of New Zealand band the Clean] was there and he said, “You guys were fantastic, the most interesting of the night — it reminded me of when I went to England in ’83 and bought the first Jesus & Mary Chain single.” Which was the best. I was like, “We’re quitting.”

AA: Yeah, all downhill from here.

JBT: At that show, Brad was sitting down behind the stage.

BH: I was sitting behind everybody. I sat in a chair behind the drummer. The first two shows, I sat.

Had you decided beforehand that’s what you were gonna do?

BH: Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you had seen shows before. You were aware how people acted.

BH: I wasn’t really comfortable with what I would do with myself. I had a pedal for the vocals and I sort of used that as an excuse — “Yeah, I really gotta fiddle with this thing.” Which — I wasn’t ever really changing it.

The first several shows I was very nervous. I remember the show we played with Psychic Ills at Tonic. It was our third or forth show and I thought their bass player was really cute. Just the combination of that, thinking they were good and playing at Tonic — which was a pretty good place to play — I was so nervous.

So the first time you stood up…

BH: The third show, I stood up.

What was the impetus to stand up? There had to be a moment.

BH: I mean, I realized I can’t really get away with this for long.

AA: You can only look like a douchebag for so long.

For fans of: Hands on Heads, The Dirty Projectors, Prefab Sprout, Xiu Xiu, Henry Flynt, Wipers, Soft Cell, Swell Maps, XBXRX

From: London

“Hands on heads!” That’s what the teacher at my primary school would yell when our class got out of hand. The rallying cry was supposed to make us focus in on a single activity, to stop us from fooling around and hitting each other and, hopefully, shut us up for a second. It worked. Kind of. Thirty pairs of small hands would clasp to 30 overexcited heads and we’d hold in our giggles until it almost hurt.

London four-piece Hands On Heads evoke those memories of suppressed hysteria in the 10 brief, chaotic blasts of angular noise-pop on their debut. Queasy carnival organs fight it out with skronky guitars and tumbling drums; vocals jump from urgent call-and-response missives to breathless and heartfelt monologues. Crucially, the lo-fi energy is balanced by a busy head for tunes — a lightning dash through Hands On Heads’collective musical brain turns up ersatz Eastern European jigs, showtunes, girl-group romance, nursery rhymes and those bittersweet melody lines of bands like Young Marble Giants and Josef K.

Hands On Heads double up as key members of the Upset! The Rhythm collective, whose shows are pretty much the first port of call for any noise or DIY artist passing through London. Their schedule is as frantic as any HoH song, with bands playing most nights in various London venues — and as I catch up with the band, it turns out that, “Right this second we are packing to go to SXSW for our Upset! The Rhythm showcase with foggy heads of excess from last night’s Casiotone for the Painfully Alone party…” As befits a collective enterprise — and a gang of close friends — the band responded en masse to my questions via e-mail, in true DIY style.

On the band members and HoH’s formation:

Luke Nava plays bass and sings, and writes half the songs. He’s quiet and intense, some say brooding. Christopher Tipton plays guitar and sings; he is very enthusiastic and often overthinks things. Chris writes the other half of the songs. Claire Titley plays organ and samples. She is the aesthetic intellect of the group, and she’s also very funny. Andrew Hickson plays the drums and percussion. His approach to life is raw and primal — much like his drumming. He’s also very superstitious. A few years ago Chris went to Peterborough to record Andrew’s other band, the Youth Of America. During the downtime, Chris and Andrew started to work on a combustion of ADD guitar riffs and explosive drumming, then on returning to London Chris enlisted Luke and Claire, whom he’d met at college, to jump into the new outfit.

On reference points:

You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever by Orange Juice, Architecture & Morality by OMD, The Getty Address by Dirty Projectors, Steve McQueen by Prefab Sprout, Fabulous Muscles by Xiu Xiu, Speaking in Tongues by Talking Heads. We’re all also big fans of Japan, Henry Flynt, the Wipers, Soft Cell — we’re really inspired by music that’s melodic and experimental. We all have a shared passion for the articulate and succinct nature of groups like XBXRX, Swell Maps and the Yummy Fur.

On their chaotic live shows [keyboardist Claire typically roughs up her keyboard]:

I’d probably say we’re passionate rather than angry — this often bubbles up as obsession, violence, extreme positivity and frustration. I think our live shows are very much an outpouring — which goes some way to explaining Claire’s rather physical technique! I’d say a lot of our songs are born from the idea of being alienated from dreams, lives not lived, lost potential, heartbroken promises, obligation, recklessness and taking chances.

On people’s reactions:

The Wire said we had a repulsive contempt for our music through making the songs shift in an “unrelenting and arguably impenetrable manner.” [On the other extreme is] our friend Tanith, who came to our first show and ended up marrying our drummer!

On where they’re headed:

We’ve also moved into the next phase of our songwriting plan: moving away from the abrupt shock-and-awe tactics of our first record, we want to reinvent the everyday surprise and power of pop music, in an attempt to express ourselves universally and make more of a connection with our audience. I think pop music has always had the most revolutionary potential. We want to be able to communicate our ideas to everyone in a way that is familiar, spontaneous and as a result alarming and surprising at the same time.

For fans of: Susu

From: Brooklyn

Personae: Andrea Havis (guitars/vocals), Mike Gabry (bass/vocals), Oliver Riviera-Drew (drums)

In many ways, the art-punk group Susu embodies the spirit of old New York. Their songs wallop like billy clubs to the back of the head. They play nude modeling shows and have a love/hate relationship with their home city. Their lyrics hew closely to what Mark E. Smith called the “three r’s”: repetition, repetition, repetition. But instead of being off-putting, all that hammering and hollering becomes engrossing; there’s an urgency to the band’s songs that makes every lyric sound like a last desperate plea before the bombs go off.

It’s no surprise that their songwriting process is laborious: songs are worked, re-worked, twisted and re-configured endlessly. The final product feels like it comes as much from exasperation as inspiration: one last angry, aggressive run-through in an attempt to make the whole thing cohere. The miracle is that they do cohere — and spectacularly. Each clobbering drum pattern and swipe of serrated guitar is harrowing and bracing. It’s like being shoved into the person standing next to you again and again and again.

eMusic took the band’s three members — Andrea Havis (guitars/vocals), Mike Gabry (bass/vocals) and Oliver Riviera-Drew (drums) — to brunch to find out what makes them tick.

On their formative years:

Oliver: I took piano lessons in the basement of a church when I was younger, then I took clarinet lessons after that. Eventually I had to give the clarinet back, since it was rented, and so I started playing in the school drum corps. This was when I was about 12 years old. So as a result, my dad bought me a Ludwig drum set, black oyster, looked just like the one Ringo Starr played. So at that point I figured he was just encouraging me. After he got me the drum kit I formed a band with the kid down the street. We were called the Fire-Breathing Bunny Rabbits. The bass player that we recruited used to play slap bass — like Flea in the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I just contacted him a few months ago through MySpace, and it turns out that now he plays bass for the band Aden.

Andrea: I started playing violin when I was like 9. My aunt had an acoustic guitar, and I just fell in love with it. I learned how to play “Dueling Banjos.” Violin I’d played really seriously, I was heavily-schooled classically. I didn’t really start focusing on guitar until high school — you know: smoking pot, Nirvana, it all goes together. I moved to New York and started playing with a few bands. Eventually I ended up in a band called Surgery Sunday, which Mike was in with me along with a drummer named Justin and two other people. We slowly started moving in a different direction and the other members felt it was too heavy and they didn’t want to do it. So they quit, and we shortened the name of the band.

Mike: I guess I came to music pretty late. All my friends in high school were in hardcore bands, and they always needed someone to play bass. My friends in high school would always practice in my parents ‘basement, so I was always around. I kinda started playing bass just to hang out.

On their strange touring luck:

Andrea: We don’t get to play much outside of New York. We want to. We’re just not really able to yet. We haven’t actively booked a show on purpose in two years — people just write us and ask us to be on a bill. So we end up playing some pretty strange locations. We played a nude modeling show once.

eMusic: What?

Andrea: Yeah. It was an art bar in DUMBO. [Ed: DUMBO is a neighborhood in Brooklyn. The acronym is short for "Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass"] The place was completely not set up for a band. There were some bourgeois after-work party going on, totally not a crowd that we would normally play to. And there was this nude modeling show going on upstairs — which was the show that we were supposed to accompany. We ended up not going on until 2:30 in the morning — there were only about five or six random people left by that point. People had brought sketchpads, and there was a couch where this transgender man was posing. Then there was another room you could go in and pay extra money for “erotic poses.” We seem to get asked to do things like this all the time. We just got asked to play at some Jell-O Wrestling event on the Lower East Side. I don’t think we’re going to do it.

On their painful songwriting process:

Andrea: The songwriting process is hell. It took us eight to ten months just to finish “Hands Up.”

Mike: Yeah, we just keep experimenting. We throw thing together that we know in our mind won’t work, but we somehow make it work.

Oliver: For every one Susu song, there are thirty or forty that we discard.

eMusic: Do you ever rescue any portions of the failed ones?

Andrea: Not as of yet. I can’t tell you how much stuff we’ve probably lost in the past year. We haven’t been recording, so anything we have is just all memory.

Mike: It’s impossible.

Andrea: We’re writing a song now, and we’ve probably been writing it for about three months.

On their blunt-force lyrics:

Mike: I think [Andrea and I] both use words like instruments. We don’t tell stories. The songs have meanings — I can’t speak for Andrea, but I probably pick my words more for how they sound than what they mean.

Andrea: I think we just bounce off a single idea. “Hands Up” is about a race, so we just toss around a lot of words that are associated with being in a race.

eMusic: The Fall does that a lot.

Mike: Oh, I fully admit to being a huge Fall fan.

Andrea: You don’t feel like it’s a specific description of what’s happening, but you understand what’s going on. It’s like what we do with our music — we try to pick the strongest moments of a song and string them all together. Like “Anarchitect,” that’s pretty straightforward, too. There’s an overall feeling to that one idea. It’s about failure: “built a house/ neck too short/ it came down.”

On the perils of being a band in New York:

Mike: At times I definitely dislike it. You kind of feel like there’s so many people out there trying to capitalize on the same audience. I don’t like feeling like I’m in a competition.

Oliver: I do feel angry and depressed at times. People come up to me and say, “Hey, that was a great show,” and I do feel almost a kind of resentment, because people are just kind of waiting to be impressed. Like their time is so valuable.

eMusic: You feel they’re being insincere?

Oliver: Yeah. Everybody’s got their distance. If you play a smaller town or city, people are much more personable. Playing here, crowds can be incredibly judgmental.

Andrea: Yeah, I don’t read blogs. My boyfriend does — he’s obsessed. I just can’t handle it. Music that I like has always found its way to me.