Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of music… the thrill of lo-fi from Brazil! You know about the massive lo-fi scene in South America, right? If not, then let us introduce you to Pug Records, the little label that could. DIY is alive and well in the hearts of these great people who have brought us some bands that make us remember the early years of Guided By Voices. They release records in limited handcrafted cassettes and free mp3. Their self-professed goal is to have fun, promoting and celebrating bands and musicians they love. With great releases by Top Surprise and Coloração Desbotada they’ve piqued our interest and encouraged us to once again venture out of our U.S/British shell to find out more about the music being created in other parts of the world. Label owners Amanda, Andre and Eduardo talked to us about the scene in Brazil and their plans for global domination (we’ll help!).

Top Surprise – More Than Cool by pugrecs

TDOA: First, tell us about your label! How did you get started?

PR: Pug was born to support groups we love, people with similar thoughts to ours about music. It’s an idea we had for some time, and it finally started last April, only four months ago. We’re a baby label yet!

TDOA: You release everything via free mp3 or hand-crafted cassette, which we love. Who does the artwork and do you do it this way because of the cost?

PR: For the cover art, we pick artists which we admire and with which we identify. Usually the online release has a different cover art from the cassette. Pug’s logo was designed by the phenomenal Bruno Okada, from São Paulo. Coloração Desbotada cover was drawn by a talented friend of ours called Diogo Machado (also from São Paulo), and Top Surprise was made by Nikos, an amazing artist from Greece. The rest of the artwork is done by us. We choose the cassette as an alternative for the factory CD and the vinyl – it is cheaper than both, unusual, and matches our sound and aesthetics perfectly. It’s just one more interesting idea, after all.

TDOA: You’ve done a great job of getting involved in social media and promoting your label through the internet. Are social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook a big deal in Brazil?

PR: Yes, pretty much everyone we know is either on Twitter or Facebook – or both. People in Brazil really seem to love those sites. Pug’s a 100% blog-friendly label, we see music blogs as the present incarnation of the fanzines, they’re very important. Since we’ve been involved with music zines and blogs for some time, it’s natural for us to cooperate with this kind of vehicle, from smaller mp3 blogs to sites like The Dumbing Of America – it’s been great so far.

TDOA: Everything on your website is written in Spanish and English. What kind of response have you gotten from other countries? What countries have you gotten responses from?

PR: English is the primary language for Pug, that’s certainly the easiest way to communicate with all parts of the world. We had nice responses from many countries, from the U.S. and U.K. to Italy, Japan, Canada, Spain, Costa Rica and Eastern Europe. Portuguese is for the Brazilian audiences, even though most of our audience in Brazil is used to read in English on the internet.

TDOA: I think that there’s an arrogance amongst the U.S. and British audiences that all “alternative” music comes from their countries. We’ve discovered a lot of great bands throughout the world. We’re interested in how the music scenes in different countries evolved. Can you talk about the scene in Brazil? How long has it been there? How big is it? Are there clubs for bands to play?

PR: Ever since the early 80’s you could find post-punk groups and weird alternative stuff in here. In fact, since the 60’s there are people doing great alternative music in Brazil. By the late 80’s, a proper indie scene started to appear, in tune with the shoegazing and noise music in the U.S. and U.K. by then. There are venues dedicated to alternative music, especially in larger cities like São Paulo. If you’re not in a big city, you need to improvise. The big media prefers to focus on bad music, you know. Today there’s a great scene in Baixada Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro’s suburbs – one of the most unlikely places where you’d expect to find a bunch of genius lo-fi bands. It is due to Transfusão Noise Records, a DIY label with bands such as Coloração Desbotada, Tape Rec, Fujimo, Carpete Florido, Babe Florida. Transfusão co-released Top Surprise, we’re great friends.

Coloração Desbotada – Extenso Ambiente by pugrecs

TDOA: How did bands like Guided By Voices and Eric’s Trip influence bands in Brazil? I don’t think they played shows down there did they? I’m intrigued to understand how that music got there and how it became popular.

PR: Only bigger American indie bands — like Sonic Youth, Pavement, Guided by Voices — had their records released here. Neither GBV nor Eric’s Trip ever performed in Brazil, unfortunately. Years ago there used to be importing stores where you could find records by underground groups from other countries, and there were also a good number of fanzines writing about this stuff. Today, with the internet, we don’t see much difficulty in finding out about the music around the world. This semester Brazil will have shows by Pixies, Pavement, Of Montreal, Dinosaur Jr, Yo La Tengo and other newer bands, all of them in big festivals – there’s an audience for that.

TDOA: Your blog talks about bands from South America all the way to Michigan and Ohio. How do you find the great bands that you seem to uncover?

PR: We’re connected to nice people around the world, like Lost Sound Tapes – a great cassette label based in Seattle. We’re always looking for new bands and likeminded people, and they’re everywhere. In Myspace you’re able to discover tons of brilliant artists in a few minutes. Better yet: they’ll come to you! Michigan has great stuff, and we’re Ohio collectors – so many great basement recordings from that state!

TDOA: We first heard about you after hearing Top Surprise, who we love. Can you tell us a bit about the band?

PR: Top Surprise is three guys and a girl from our hometown, Juiz de Fora, a medium-sized college town in Brazil’s southeast. The band was born around the same time as Pug, and they encompass much of what we love in music — they’re one of the noisiest live bands in the world, and they have catchy pop tunes. It’s heartfelt music. We’ve just released their debut EP, which is available for free download and in cassette. It was recorded at home, produced by lo-fi genius Lê Almeida — whose project Coloração Desbotada was our first release.

TDOA: Do you think any of your bands will make music videos or do you think videos aren’t terribly important?

Sure! Videos are one of the best ways to complement a band’s music. Top Surprise is on pre-production for their first, and we plan to make more of it in near future!

TDOA: What’s next for your label?

PR: Our next tape is from Duplodeck, another Brazilian combo. We’re collecting nice groups from all over, for a compilation that will come out later this year/early 2011. And having our bands to play in the U.S. would be really cool.

For more information about the label and their great bands, visit www.pugrecords.com

The most requested item from our readers? A podcast. Well, we’ve posted a few audio interviews so if you really want to hear us talk, cruise over to the Peter Hook interview. What we think you’d find more valuable is a podcast of the twelve songs that melted our eardrums in August. We loved ‘em and now we’d like to share them with you. Download it and take a listen.

Here’s the bands featured on this months playlist:
1- Burnt Ones- Kaleidoscope Eyes
2- Secret Colours- Tomorrow Never Knows
3- Weed Hounds- Skating Away From The Cops
4- Best Coast- Crazy For You
5- Desmond & the Tutus- High Fives
6- Ghost Animal- Some Other Time
7- Japandroids- Younger Us
8- Shrag- When We Go Courting
9- Violent Soho- Jesus Stole My Girlfriend
10- Wise Blood- B.I.G. E.G.O.
11- Betty and the Werewolves- Should I Go To Glasgow
12- Freelance Whales- Location
13- TadaTátà- Susie

We’d love to hear some feedback from you on the bands and what we can give you on future podcasts. Leave a comment or shoot us an email!

George Lewis Jr. can’t help it. He just wants to make beautiful music. It’s not his fault that Pitchfork has placed the weight of a buzz band tag on him. He can’t be held responsible for the fact that his new album has been compared to the works of such heavyweights as Echo and the Bunnymen, The Police and Morrissey. You can’t criticize him when, upon questioning, he isn’t familiar with OMD or the New Romantic era of the 80′s. Dude just wants to make great music and his first album “Forget” is a downright masterpiece. This is not just another New York City buzz-band preparing to be devoured by the indie snob lions. TDOA writer Amy and editor Todd tried to get George Lewis Jr to buckle under the pressure, to reveal the inner workings of his evil genius. Instead we got a nice guy who’s made a good record that he wants to do the talking for him. We’re on board. Join us on the proverbial Enola Gay as we join George in dropping a bomb on the indie rock snobs will attempt to define him. We are so in love with him.

TDOA: What was it like working with Christopher Taylor? What do you think his influence brought to the record?

TS: Working with Chris was a deep experience, we worked very closely in a cold church and chiseled away at the great mess of a record I had made in my bedroom. He is patient and kind, and will take you to his home and make you the most unbelievable food you’ve every eaten in your life. Chris brought openness to my record. Before I brought him my finished demos they where very tuff!! sounding, very muscly and Chris really stretched them out and let them breath while also retaining the vibe of my bedroom recordings..

TDOA: Feel free to tell me that I’m wrong, but vocally I hear a Morrissey influence. Truth or fiction?

TS: Why not… I love the Smiths and one of the first CDs I ever bought with my own money was “Bona Drag”… But I have to say listing him as a vocal influence is not true, It comes out the way it just wants to come out, I have always wanted to sing more like the great nasally singers but I just don’t sound like that. When I was super into Fugazi I wanted to sound like Guy Picciotto and ended up sounding more like Ian Mackay… what can you do ooo.?

TDOA: I really like the idea of offering your album for super-cheap, just so new people can get interested. What motivated you to do that?

TS: It was a group desicion (manager, me, the guys at Terrible) We want people to get into the Music as soon as possible without a price tag dictating whether they will buy/steal it. We are nice guys too

TDOA: In the past year or so, there seems to have been a revival of the New Romantic style that bands like Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark perfected. Were you influenced by those bands?

TS: I wish I knew who they are (I’ll check them out), I don’t know if I am comfortable with the term “New Romantic” it seems too lazy… and romance for the most part is not a lazy endeavor. I am influenced by lots of music not just one type

TDOA: What made you choose Twin Shadow as a moniker? It’s very interesting, so I’m curious to learn the meaning.

TS: Motorcycles, Twins, Old Comic Books, Jaques Brel, Cassavetes, Brando and the list goes on…..I took the many things I love in this world and two words kept popping up….. TWIN SHADOW

TDOA: I’m very excited about you coming to Dallas –what do you hope touring will bring?

TS: Adventure and record sales.

You can purchase the debut album by Twin Shadow for $1 at http://twinshadow.net/post/1003349444/unforgettable-deal

Tour Dates:
Sep 11 Glasslands Gallery Brooklyn, NY
Sep 18 Le Poisson Rouge New York, NY
Sep 20 9:30 Club Washington, DC
Sep 21 Orange Peel Asheville, NC
Sep 22 The EARL Atlanta, GA Tickets
Sep 24 Antone’s Austin, TX Tickets
Sep 25 Granada Theater Dallas, TX
Sep 27 Rhythm Room Phoenix, AZ
Sep 28 Belly Up Solana Beach, CA
Sep 30 Echoplex Los Angeles, CA

Should our favorite bands remain stagnant? When you hear that first great album, do you expect them to repeat the formula endlessly throughout their career? The music highway is littered with bands who’ve refused to evolve beyond that first record and have been tossed to the side of the road by music critics and fans alike. Film School had mastered that wall of noise/My Bloody Valentine sound and developed a great following throughout the world. And then, Greg Bertens went to see the re-formed MBV as he prepared to make the new Film School record. The result is Fission, a record that’s stripped of the effects pedals, leaving behind what the band has always excelled at: making great melodies. This is the sound of a band whose confidence in their ability to write a great song pulses from the speakers, drawing you into their new vision of bliss. Greg talked to TDOA writer Amy about the new direction and the future.

Here’s the first single from the new album: Heart Full of Pentagons
Heart Full of Pentagons by Film School

TDOA: You’ve talked about how seeing My Bloody Valentine for the first time had a profound influence on the sound on Fission. Can you talk about that and why you think that “big sonic sound” has reached its end?

GB: I’m not sure it’s reached it’s end, I just found it wasn’t inspiring me in the way it used to. Maybe because we toured for over a year on a big sonic album (Hideout) or maybe because I’ve been a fan of that type of music for years and was just ready for a change. I’m not sure, but when I was standing in the audience I didn’t get the feeling of awe and inspiration that I had hoped for. There were plenty of people at that show who felt something powerful, but I couldn’t for whatever reason. I left the show knowing I was ready to explore new territory for the next Film School record. Ironically, some of the music that inspired the jangley / poppy element of this new direction were early MBV recordings like “Ecstasy” and “Strawberry Wine”.

TDOA: I read one review that called this new album “your most accessible album to date.” What about your old records was “inaccessible”?

GB: Yeah, I’ve been told Fission has more “pop sensibility”. Maybe it’s the upbeat tempos or lighter vibe on some songs or that Lorelei is singing more – maybe it’s all of those pieces. I do feel like it’s not as dark as Hideout, at least not musically. In the end it’s probably just the use of more major chords and traditional song structures. Clarity was a big theme for us on this record – clarity of sound and ideas.

TDOA: Sometimes people read to much into the name of a band (and I may be guilty of it here!), but do you think people automatically assume that you’ll make videos and do you enjoy that prospect?

GB: I don’t even think about what it literally means anymore. Like Radiohead. Do you really picture a guy with a radio for a head, or something to that effect? No, you probably picture Thom Yorke, or at least I do. I think I’ve seen or heard Film School in the context of our band so many times over the years that it could be any name. But yeah, I do think people who are new to the band probably see the name and think about film references. Many times promoters make posters for our shows and use a strip of film or a camera for imagery. It used to kinda bug me, but I’ve totally embraced it now and have a full collection of those types of posters, it’s pretty awesome. What I really want is one of our show promoters to make a poster of a guy with a radio for a head.

TDOA: Now that you’ve left Beggars, what advice would you give to bands who are contemplating signing with a big label?

GB: Beggars did a lot for us – they introduced our music to the world. Major labels can do a lot for a band if they use their influence in the right way, but you can also get lost in the shuffle. I’d say if you go that route make sure not to just hand over your record and assume it’s a done deal. Stay on top of things and stay connected with your fans through Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, your website and emails lists because those are the people that will be there with you in the end.

TDOA: The song “Go Down Together” was featured on 90210. How did that come about? Did you have any trepidation on how your fans perception of the song might change seeing it in the context of that show?

GB: Our sync rep pitched the song and the 90210 music supervisor liked it and put it in the episode.
Nah, plenty of bands license their songs nowadays to a variety of shows/commercials, it’s just the nature of trying to make a living doing music in a world where people don’t buy music like they used to. “Go Down Together” was written for our album first and foremost. The way I look at it if any song gets picked up for TV or film it’s just more people that get exposed to the music.

TDOA: You guys are touring – a LOT. What venues and cities are you looking forward to?

GB: New York is always fun, how can it not be? We’re playing Pop Montreal this time around, that should be fun. I’m actually looking forward to a lot of the dates because we have friends and fans we haven’t seen for a while since we haven’t been out in a couple years. I just wish we had more time to spend in each city.

TDOA: I really loved the Dear Me video – can you tell me about that creative process?

GB: That was done by James Sumner. He directed a Deerhunter video that I really liked so I wrote him and asked if he’d do one for us. He’s awesome – pure creativity and out there. He was sorta going for a low-fi tron vibe. He originally wanted to do it in front of a green screen in order to do effects in post production, but because we didn’t have much of a budget we had to settle for his warehouse in Portland with a black background. It was tough to block out all the sunlight – we used garbage bags over the windows and had a black curtain over the white wall behind us. In the hallway outside he had a couple of assistants sewing long reflective strips on to our clothing. Those poor girls were sewing all day long – it took a lot longer that we thought it would to get everything prepared. We finally shot the video at the end of the day and it went fairly quickly, but we didn’t see the video for a few months. The rendering of the effects actually melted down his computer, I think he had to start over at one point. It was a real effort to get that done, glad you liked it.

TDOA: One of the most interesting things about the band (and the component I’ve seen commented on most) is the interplay between you and Lorelei. What quality do you think that lends to your music?

GB: I think harmonies add a richness to songs you can’t get with one voice. How good are some of those Fleet Foxes harmonies? Or those on Yo La Tengo’s Moby Octopad? I wanted more of that richness and dynamic on Fission, but to be done in our own way. Hopefully that translates to the album.

TDOA: What do YOU think is the best track on Fission? Why?

GB: “Sunny Day” is probably my favorite. Lorelei brought it in as mainly just bass and vocals, and at a slower tempo. She was learning how to use a new recording program at the time so the original demo has all kinds of weird pops and cut off instruments, it’s pretty great. But I knew there was a great song in there and that an edgier production would be a nice balance to the sweetness of the song. It just makes me feel good every time I hear it/ play it. Maybe some day we’ll release the original.

TDOA: To what extent do you think social media is important in helping to promote the band being on an indie label?

GB: It’s pretty huge. Several years ago all you had were email lists and a wonky website. And most of the email addresses people would write down at shows were illegible. So, all you really had was a wonky website. The best thing about social media though is the ability to connect with fans regardless if you’re on a label or not.

Film School is giving their fans an opportunity to help design their merchandise! Visit http://www.animalsoffission.com. If you’re an artist, submit your designs. If not, take you get to vote on the designs you like the best. 10% of proceeds from any Animals of Fission merchandise product will be donated to Tony LaRussa’s organization, ARF. ARF saves dogs and cats who have run out of time at public shelters and brings people and animals together to enrich each others lives.

To purchase the music of Film School via iTunes

Pre-order FISSON at http://www.hispeedsoul.com now to get your copy signed by the band & a digital copy emailed to you immediately.

See the band live:
Sep 19 2010 The Casbah San Diego, CA
Sep 20 2010 Plush Tucson, AZ
Sep 22 2010 The Nighmare Dallas, TX
Sep 23 2010 The Parish Austin, TX
Sep 25 2010 The Masquerade Atlanta, GA
Sep 25 2010 Spanish Moon Baton Rouge, LA
Sep 27 2010 Local 506 Chapel Hill, NC
Sep 28 2010 DC9 Washington, DC
Sep 29 2010 Johnny Brenda’s Philadelphia, PA
Sep 30 2010 GLASSLAND Brooklyn, NY, NY
Oct 1 2010 Mercury Lounge New York City, NY
Oct 2 2010 TT the Bear’s Cambridge, MA
Oct 3 2010 Casa del Popolo Montréal, QC, CANADA
Oct 4 2010 El Mocambo Toronto, ON, CANADA
Oct 6 2010 Firebird St Louis, MO
Oct 7 2010 Southgate House Newport, KY
Oct 8 2010 Schubas Tavern Chicago, Illinois
Oct 9 2010 The Cactus Club Milwaukee, WI
Oct 10 2010 7th Street Entry Minneapolis, MN
Oct 11 2010 The Waiting Room Omaha, NE
Oct 12 2010 HI DIVE Denver, Colorado
Oct 13 2010 Urban Lounge Salt Lake City, UT
Oct 15 2010 Sunset Tavern Seattle, WA
Oct 16 2010 Mississippi Studios Portland, OR
Oct 19 2010 The Independent San Francisco, CA
Oct 20 2010 The Crepe Place Santa Cruz, CA
Oct 21 2010 The Echo Los Angeles, CA

Continuing our string of interviews with bands that will likely end up on our Top 10 albums of 2010, we bring you Tears Run Rings. While the comparisons to the great shoegaze bands of the past aren’t inaccurate, they do a disservice to the beauty and originality of this band. Like eating the grandest layer cake ever, their music melts away to reveal endless tracks of beauty and melody. The band broke it all down for TDOA writer @aemccarthy.

TDOA: My understanding is that the band doesn’t write or record together in a single studio. Given that, can you talk about the genesis of a typical Tears Run Rings song? It there a typical formula, where you start with a bass or guitar track?

TRR: We’re not your typical band. We write most of our songs as a group, but we live in 3 different cities and we can only meet up 3 or 4 times a year–so we have to make the most of our time together. We wrote most of the songs on Distance over a 5 days period in November, 2008. Well… we wrote the first draft of those songs. The most important thing is to lock down the song structures up front so that Dwayne can record drums. The drum tracks are the only semi-constant in our songs because they’re the hardest to change– the rest evolves over time. Sometimes we’ll end up mashing 2 songs together or changing the chord structures entirely before we’re happy with a song. The biggest changing factor is when Laura and Matthew start recording vocals. When the vocals are in the songs really start to take direction.

TDOA: We’re always interested in the dynamic of married couples who play in bands together. Does the “finish each others sentences” concept every present itself while writing, where you intuitively know what direction the other person is going?

TRR: Ed and Laura were married this year and Dwayne and Matthew were groomsmen in the wedding. It was really cool when it happened because when TRR first started they weren’t even dating yet! We’ve all been friends for a long time and not much has changed since the old days. Yes, Ed and Laura are on the same wavelength musically, but the whole band tends to intuitively merge on a sound. That’s not to say we always agree on the direction to take songs — but we typically know where we’ll disagree, and some of our best parts are born out of those creative differences.

TDOA: I’m always curious about how bands choose their names, and you guys are no exception. How, what, when, why?

TRR: When we were choosing a band name Laura came across an old Mark Almond tape cassette in Dwayne’s garage. We’ve been Tears Run Rings ever since. It suits us… and we like that our album are filed next to Tears for Fears and The Teardrop Explodes. Both are great, moody, pop bands–which is what we consider ourselves to be.

TDOA: I really enjoy the video for Forgotten. Can you tell us who directed it and who came up with the idea of mixing animation with live footage?

TRR: Thank you sir! It’s all edited footage from obscure (some would say “forgotten”) films. And it’s another example of us getting creative with our long-distance band. If we lived closer to one another we might be tempted to shoot something original or maybe create a typical, band-playing-instruments music video. For “Forgotten” Matthew edited together pieces of old, public domain footage and set it to music. The majority of storyline was taken from a 1966 short called “Silent Snow, Secret Snow”. The boy in the film was only slightly less schizo before he starred in our music video. And the animation was taken from the beautiful 1939 Fleischer Studios production of Gulliver’s Travels. It seemed to work well in Forgotten as the boy’s nightmare. Crashing waves are a reoccurring theme on our album.

TDOA: So, Tim Morris plays guitar “sometimes.” On what occasions does he join the band?

TRR: Hah, whenever he shows up to band practice. Tim’s been a part of TRR since the beginning — since before the beginning, because we were in bands with him before Tears Run Rings. He sang and played guitar on our first EP. We see him less frequently nowadays… but even when he’s not around we take turns pretending to be him and playing Timmorris-esque guitar parts. So he’s “sometimes” in our Always, Sometimes, Seldom, Never.

TDOA: I noticed a pretty big gap in your record releases – “Always, Sometimes, Seldom, Never” was released in April of 2008, and your upcoming, “Distance” is set to be released at the end of next month. Why the gap and what can your fans expect from the new record?

TRR: Big gap? Two years is fast for what we did! We literally spent every moment we had together writing and working on music; and in the mean time we were teaching ourselves how to record and self-produce records (not to mention touring). The good news is now that we have 2 albums under our belt we’ve become better and faster at the process. We’ve already started on the next album–with any luck it won’t take quite as long for a 3rd.

TDOA: You’re very open about the bands that’ve influenced you. Although we disagree, some critics seem to feel that shoegaze should have died and not been re-born. Why do you think it seems to be ok for some genres to be endlessly repeated, but shoegaze gets slagged?

TRR: We love bands like Cocteau Twins, Moose, Pale Saints, and MBV so it’s easy to admit that we’re influenced by them. But it’s funny that these bands are lumped in the same category because they all have a completely different sound and a different approach to songwriting. The biggest thing they have in common, and the thing that we shoot for most in our music as well, is that they create songs that are deeply personal and moving. But that feeling wasn’t born with, and didn’t die with whatever shoegaze is–so it makes no matter to us how people want to define it or slag it off. We just hope is that our music moves others as much as it moves us.

TDOA: The cover art that the group has used is brilliant. Who does it?

TRR: We’re pretty DIY. Matthew does our art. The photograph of the ocean on the on the cover of Distance was taken by a photographer/artist from new york named Eric Slayton.

TDOA: We’re intrigued by the four “parts” of Happiness, spanning two records. What’s the story behind it?

TRR: On our first album we were toying around calling a song “The Happiness of Being with People” (which is a Kafka/J.D. Salinger reference, btw) but that title didn’t fit on any song. As the album came together we realized we had 2 songs that would make nice bookends–and we love albums where all the songs flow together and tell a story–so we shortened the title and called them both “Happiness”. In Distance we found ourselves building off of what we had done on our first album. It made sense to keep the tradition going.

TDOA: Your label, Clairecords, has some pretty solid acts. Which would you most like to tour with?

TRR: We toured with Secret Shine after our first album and it was amazing. We’re huge fans of theirs from back when they were on Sarah Records, so it was a big honor. We promised them we’d join forces again and tour the UK.

TDOA: I didn’t see a touring schedule – where are you guys headed to promote the new album?

TRR: Normal bands get to practice once or twice a week and will still spend months and years rehearsing and learning their parts. We get an afternoon (at most) for perfecting a guitar part before we record it on the album. And sometimes when we listen back to an album we can’t even remember who played a particular part, let alone how to play it again. We love playing out –and somehow we pulled it off for our last album–but the time when spend learning how to become a live band is time away from our next album. We’d love to tour again, but for now we’re focusing on album 3.

TDOA: QUICK! Your boat is sinking and you can only take 5 records with you. What do you choose? (Lame, I know, but I always love getting people’s top 5 lists. Maybe Nick Hornby should write a book about me.)

TRR: Wa!! Why is the boat sinking?! We’ll grab the 5 most buoyant albums we know:

“Float On” by The Floaters
“Flesh Ballon” by Pale Saints
“Swim” by Caribou
“Bridge Over Trouble Water” by Simon & Garfunkel
“Whirlpool” by Chapterhouse
“Last Splash” by The Breeders

For more information about the band, visit http://www.tearsrunrings.com

We’ve followed Dead Confederate for quite a while. Their rootsy approach to rock, coupled with their amazing live shows have always kept us on the edge of our seat. Thus we were thrilled to get an opportunity to interview the band and help spread the word. Hardy Morris talked to our newest writer Sania (aka @Dark_vanity) about their newest record, Sugar.

TDOA: How is the tour going? Your playing small clubs this leg, is that your preferred type of venue, or are festivals more enjoyable?

HM: I have always preferred smaller clubs. It’s ore fun for the band and the crowd. There isn’t that separation between band and audience. Small, dark, dirty = fun show.

TDOA: What is your song writing process? Are there constant acoustic sessions on the tour bus or does everyone just come to the studio and let the sound happen organically there?

HM: I almost always write on acoustic guitar. It’s just always around and easy to pick up if you have an idea. I have written in other ways, but the acoustic feels like home…even though I have NEVER played an acoustic onstage with the band! As for the songs coming together with the band, I just write and record the demos on acoustic and let the band hear them and they come up with all their parts. It’s a rewarding progression to hear these simple acoustic songs turn into a wall of sound.

TDOA: You’ve been called everything from alt-country-mellow to gloom rock. Ridiculous terms aside, what would you consider your sound to be?

HM: I think it is just rock-and-roll; our version anyway. It’s just the songs we write and the way we play…we didn’t have a specific genre in mind when we started the band, we had songs and dudes that played instruments…and I’m sure that’s the story behind almost all rock n roll bands.

TDOA: The new album Sugar has a few upbeat tracks and has a softer vibe straying a bit from the darker elements on Wrecking Ball, what was the inspiration for the name of the album and what’s behind this evolution in sound?

HM: We had written some new songs that strayed from the bleak, sad-bastard sound of Wrecking Ball, and at first that was a little scary, but we all genuinely liked the new songs, so we said, “these are still our songs and it’s our band, so we can do whatever we want.” I don’t feel it’s that far off though. There are still plenty of dark moments on the album, we just explored more melodically and texturally…no crime in that. It was fun. As for the name of the album, it is actually a direct reference to the snowfall that we were in while recording the album in New Jersey. It was white everywhere and it just seemed to fit with this batch of songs and music…I don’t know, we just kept coming back to that word and it fit.

TDOA: What are you listening to right now? Any albums that absolutely blew you away so far this year?

HM: I really liked Cloud Nothings album Turning On. We leave for tour tomorrow with fellow Athens, GA pals Futurebirds, and their new record Hamptons Lullaby is also great.

TDOA: One of the new album tracks “Giving It All Away” has a collaboration with J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., how did that come about?

HM: We did a couple of tours with Dinosaur Jr. last year, so we got to know J. from that of course, but it was really our producer, John Angello’s, idea. He has recorded Dino since like 1992 so he and J. are very close. We were recording “Giving it All Away” and John said, “we gotta get J. to play on this song.” So of course we were down and John sent J. the song and he liked it, so he played and sang on it. Pretty much John just called his friend to ask him to play on our song and his friend just happened to be J. Mascis.

TDOA: In the beginning, what made you want to pick up an instrument and want to start creating your own music?

HM: My mother is a musician, so there was always a lot of music going on in the house. She encouraged the arts in us from a young age. I think she has a cassette of me singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” at like age 2. There was always a guitar around that my Dad played a little bit, so eventually I picked it up. I learned a few songs that my folks taught me, but I quickly started what I thought were possibly songs (?). I still don’t knw how to play many cover songs.

TDOA: You’ve toured with so many great bands, which tour mates did you walk away from learning the most?

HM: I learn a lot on every tour, but I’d have to say that touring with the Meat Puppets last year was quite the experience. In fact it’s an entirely different interview….you learn more about rock n roll in one night touring with the Pups than you do in ten tours on your own.

TDOA: A dollar for every copy sold of the live EP Dirty Ammo is donated to help rebuild the burned down Georgia Theatre. Is that a place of personal significance to the band?

HM: It is significant to us and the entire town of Athens, GA. There have been countless great shows there and it was simply a legendary venue for our little town. The guys that own it had put in so much work over the past few years, and to see it (literally) go up in smoke was very sad. If we can do even a little bit to help out then we will.

Catch the band on tour:

Aug 25 2010 One Eyed Jacks w/ Futurebirds New Orleans, LA
Aug 26 2010 Chelsea’s w/ Futurebird Baton Rouge, LA
Aug 27 2010 Mango’s w/ Futurebird Houston, TX
Aug 28 2010 KUT’s Red River on the Rocks Festival @ The Mohawk w/ Futurebirds Austin, TX
Aug 29 2010 The Loft w/ Futurebirds Dallas, TX
Aug 31 2010 Old Town Pub w/ Futurebirds Steamboat Springs, CO
Sep 1 2010 Belly Up w/ Futurebirds Aspen, CO
Sep 2 2010 Urban Lounge w/ Futurebirds Salt Lake City, UT
Sep 3 2010 Neurolux w/ Futurebirds Boise, ID
Sep 5 2010 Official Bumbershoot After Party @ Hard Rock w/ Surfer Blood and Futurebirds Seattle, WA
Sep 6 2010 Doug Fir w/ Alberta Cross Portland, OR
Sep 8 2010 Great American Music Hall w/ Alberta Cross San Francisco, CA
Sep 9 2010 SoHo w/ Alberta Cross Santa Barbara, CA
Sep 10 2010 Detroit Bar Costa Mesa, CA
Sep 11 2010 Troubadour w/ Alberta Cross Los Angeles, CA
Sep 12 2010 Belly Up w/ Alberta Cross Solana Beach, CA
Sep 14 2010 Plush w/ Alberta Cross Tucson, AZ
Sep 15 2010 Rhythm Room w/ Alberta Cross Phoenix, AZ
Sep 17 2010 Telluride Blues & Brews Festival Telluride, CO
Sep 18 2010 Larimer Lounge w/ Alberta Cross Denver, CO
Sep 19 2010 Fox Theater w/ Alberta Cross Boulder, CO
Sep 21 2010 The Firebird w/ Alberta Cross St. Louis, MO
Sep 22 2010 Double Door w/ Alberta Cross Chicago, IL
Sep 23 2010 Musica w/ Alberta Cross and Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band Akron, OH
Sep 24 2010 Rex Theater w/ Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band Pittsburgh, PA
Sep 25 2010 The Note w/ Alberta Cross West Chester, PA
Sep 26 2010 Middle East w/ Alberta Cross Boston, MA
Sep 28 2010 Music Hall of Williamburg Brooklyn, NY
Sep 29 2010 Rock and Roll Hotel w/ Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band Washington, DC
Sep 30 2010 Cat’s Cradle Carrboro, NC
Oct 1 2010 Snug Harbor Charlotte, NC
Oct 2 2010 Patriot’s Point w/ Widespread Panic Charelston, SC

Read more: http://www.myspace.com/deadconfederate

If the prospect of an indie-rock opera doesn’t immediately grab you, consider that Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Greg Brown, Ben Knox Miller (The Low Anthem), Ani DiFranco, and Petra, Rachel, and Tanya Haden have all joined to create the new record by Anais Mitchell, Hadestown. Mixing elements of country gospel, ragtime, blues and early jazz, to approximations of rock, swing, and avant-garde all crafted into an incredible story, this is truly the Dark Side of the Moon for our generation. One of the things we enjoy about our site, is that we are under constrictions. If a great artist decides to answer every questions with a single word, we’ll print it and hope you draw your own conclusion about the band. In this case, Anais went into incredible depth about her music, the Hadestown project and working with Justin Vernon. Some publications would have to edit it down to meet the constraints of their publisher. Here, we present you with the entire, unedited version of our interview with one of the great musical minds of our time, Anais Mitchell. Written by the marvelous @aemccarthy.

TDOA: Can you talk about the creative process of bringing Hadestown from its 2006 roots to the release of the album in 2010 and how it differed from writing your previous records?

AM: I can say that it was easier, and harder, than writing my other records… it made me very high and low and different times… still, I want to write another opera.

When I first started writing the songs for Hadestown I had a few friends in mind to sing the parts, mostly singers from different bands around Vermont, and they ended up being the original cast. We rehearsed in a frenzy in the evenings during what I think was a two-week period. Our rehearsal space, and the first place we mounted the show, was the old labor hall in Barre, Vt., a beautiful old historical building where a lot of union organizing went on in the thirties. There was so much about those first shows that was flawed (at least writing-wise, on my end, in my own opinion) but they were some of the most magical moments of my creative life so far. Ben Matchstick created a whole world, a whole visual vocabulary for the show, in just a couple weeks. He’s a real magician, an eleventh-hour genius; he has the ability to make something out of nothing—no budget, no time, a rabbit from a hat. Then, of course, the collaboration with Michael Chorney, who wrote some of the most haunting and beautiful arrangements I’ve ever heard on any songs. One crazy thing about Michael is he doesn’t use any composing software, and he doesn’t play the arrangements on a keyboard as he writes them; he really just hears them in his head and writes them down with a pencil on staff paper—so a lot of the music he hadn’t actually heard out loud until the band got together a few days before the show! The band was Michael’s project at the time, Magic City; they had started out as a Sun Ra tribute band but were quickly evolving into something bigger. There was really a sense from the beginning of the collaboration that the Hadestown show had three voices in it: my songwriting voice, Ben’s visual/theatrical voice, and Michael’s orchestral voice. It was a sum-greater-than-the-parts kind of thing.

The feedback we got from those shows was pretty overwhelming. It felt like we had struck some kind of nerve. Still, there was so much missing from the story; people were saying things like, “Hey, I was so moved by that … What was going on?” So when we decided to mount a second draft of the show Ben and I really made an effort to flesh out the story with the lyrics and staging—not just the metaphoric emotional stuff, but the characters, the plot, the arc. I’d say writing-wise the show took many steps forward, but a couple steps back, during that second edition. I spent months writing very expositional lyrics that eventually got cut. There was constant tension in my mind between getting the story across and preserving the poetry of the songs: not just the purdy language, but the metaphors. It really dawned on me during this process that Hadestown was never gonna be a Broadway-style show. I was watching all kinds of Broadway stuff on video, classic musicals, trying to get a feel for story arc and so on. Everything is so clear and crude in those shows. The protagonist comes out onstage and the first number is him going “This is who I am, and this is what I want, and this is what is standing in my way, la la la…” But as much as I love a clear-cut story, this show just didn’t want to go there, at least not all the way.

To me, from a writing standpoint, the second draft of the show was kind of stuck in a netherworld; it was surely more focused than the first draft, but there was also a bit of expositional overstretch … which did not in fact make the story more understandable. For example, we really went deep into the post-apocalyptic stuff in the second draft. The idea was that Hades had broken his contract with Persephone—instead of letting her go above ground for half the year, he traps her in Hadestown, so the seasons are out of whack, and the above-ground world is nearly uninhabitable. There was this one song—“Epic,” it was called—which took forever to write, and attempted to tell that backstory. It was very dense and poetic and it was the battleground where I played out the exposition-vs.-poetry conflict for months as I edited it and re-edited it. It’s where I learned firsthand this lesson I heard in an address Sondheim gave where he said, “You have to understand that an audience hears a song in real time. It doesn’t matter how clever or beautiful your lyrics are, if they pass by too quickly for the audience to comprehend, it’s not working.” After the second run I’d ask people, “So didja get the thing about Persephone being trapped in the underworld, blah blah?” and they’d be like “Nope, didn’t catch that. So anyway…” It really blew my mind. I’d gotten into a place where I was concerned with trees and not forests. I was changing lyrics right up till opening night—which I see now was unnecessary, not to mention stressful.

As for the staging, the second time round we had more money and more time (though not by much!). The cast was expanded; Ben had pulled together some crazy awesome stuff with lights and this “utility chorus” that moved sets around on stage and populated the world he’d created. He really wrote some crazy beautiful staging sequences for that second draft of the show. As for Michael’s arrangements, he added an instrument (viola) to the band during that second year, and made all kinds of changes and improvements and additions to the score. There were a handful of new songs, intros, bridges. His was a hard position to be in vis-a-vis the collaboration because as the story was changing and Ben and I were rethinking plot points, lyrics, etc., there was plenty of perfectly gorgeous score that had to be modified or even scrapped to accommodate the changes. It’s hard to edit lyrics and staging, but probably even harder to edit a score for six instruments!

That year we had a more ambitious tour schedule put together in conjunction with Alex Crothers of Higher Ground Music: kind of a Vermont legend, he runs the one rock room in Vermont where nationally touring bands play. We actually did “tour” around Vermont and then down to Boston. We were driving this old schoolbus painted silver that used to belong to a local circus company. We were loading the entire set, the sound and light equipment, onto this bus and setting it up on different stages. We were crazy to try and tour a theater show like that. It was full-on winter and there were white-out blizzards a couple of nights. I lost a bunch of money on that tour, because of a few very dead towns, but a lot of the shows were really fantastic.

After the second run, there were again a lot of changes I wanted to make. I wanted to go a step further toward fully-realized characters, and a step backward toward the simplicity of the story in the very first show we did. I wanted to let go of some stuff that had never really sat right with me as a lyricist. We talked briefly about trying to mount another run the following year but the consensus seemed to be that to finish the songs, the song-cycle, should be the priority before staging again, and what better motivation to do that than booking studio time to commit the stuff to tape forever and ever? I worked real hard in advance of the recording but it was not as easy as I’d thought it might be to get things to a finished place. It felt a little like doing a crossword puzzle where there’s just a few squares missing, and it can only be one very specific thing. That is, we’d created a world, and now I had to be consistent within it, lyric-wise, music-wise. “Wedding Song,” “Flowers (Eurydice’s Song),” “Nothing Changes,” and “I Raise my Cup” were all new additions. “Wait,” “If It’s True,” and the two “Epics” also underwent major changes. I cut a song that had had a gorgeous score, and one that people were sorry to see let go. It was pretty tough!

But there was a crazy motivating factor, and that was, one by one these guest singers were getting on board. Ani DiFranco was the first, and I owe much of the momentum of the recording to her faith and belief in the project. I don’t think she’d even heard the Persephone songs when she said she’d sing them. That’s brave! Then there was Greg Brown: I’d imagined him singing the Hades part for a long time but still whenever I hear his voice coming in on “Hey, Little Songbird” I laugh for joy. His voice is subterranean, it has strange overtones, I feel it in my belly almost before my ears. He and Ani were both early songwriting heroes of mine. … Then there’s Justin Vernon: That was kind of a cosmic casting situation. Justin and his manager reached out of the blue and asked if I wanted to open the Bon Iver tour of Europe. They’d never met me; they had just heard my record once and liked it, and they thought, Let’s have her open the tour! It’s unthinkable, really. The very first night of the tour, when I heard Justin sing “Stacks” in Newcastle in the UK, my heart exploded; I thought, “He HAS to be Orpheus.” I wrote my manager Slim [Moon] and Todd [Sickafoose] the producer: “He is the Orpheus of the century!” I loved the idea that Orpheus, as a supernatural figure, could sing with many voices at the same time. But I had to have a stern little talk with myself that night; I was like, “This guy doesn’t even know you, and he’s already doing you a huge favor having you on the tour; you can’t ask him right away, you might weird him out, wait till the end of the tour and then see if it’s the right thing to ask him…” But the second night of the tour we were on a ferryboat from Scotland to Norway and I’d had a couple glasses of wine and I couldn’t bear it any longer—I just blurted it all out in a rush: the opera, the record, will you please please please be Orpheus? and Justin just said, “yes.”

The first thing we recorded was Michael’s orchestral arrangements, and it was a powerful thing to hear them in the clarity of the studio rather than the rush of the stage. They positively soared. We recorded them with some incredible musicians mostly from Todd’s Brooklyn scene: Jim Black on drums, Michael of course on guitar and Todd on bass, Josh Roseman on trombone, Marika Hughes on cello, Tanya Kolmanovitch on viola, and at some point Rob Burger popped in and laid down some mind-boggling accordion and piano. We were in a beautiful and expensive studio so we had to act fast to record all twenty tracks or whatever it was. Todd is a great producer, able to hear everything at once, able to know if a take was “there” or not, able to encourage everyone to feel the same things, breathe together, breathe magic into things, even in studio world. He was marvelous in that stressful situation. Then he laid down all sorts of other instruments, sometimes following the notes of Michael’s score but in another “voice” or register, sometimes supporting the score from beneath with a lushness and weirdness. He recorded some very weird stuff: a glass orchestra, a trumpet player who mostly played percussively, and at one point he said something about how he was hunting for “vintage futurism” sounds. “Vintage futurism” is how I had once described the Hadestown story. Together we sorted through the vocals—from New Orleans, Iowa City, Eau Claire, Los Angeles, Vermont—at Todd’s home studio in Carroll Gardens. Todd is patient, totally discerning, and totally open at the same time.

TDOA: Can you explain your choice of subject and setting in Hadestown? I find the conjunction of the mythology with the Americana to be fascinating

Ah yah. Well I think it started because I had this vision of the speakeasy scene that Persephone presides over in the opera. I saw the scene, with this wall, with a crack in it and a binocular machine pointed at it, so the underworld people could see the night sky. I am not a real theatrical gal. Many of the visual and staging ideas that ended up in the opera sprang out of the mind of our director, Ben Matchstick, but the speakeasy scene was like this early vision, and the initial version of the Persephone song came out of that. It had different lyrics. It went “Come and see the stars! They’re fixin to fall. Slidin and a slippin in their gravity shoes. Old man Mars takin Venus to the ball. Big dipper dippin to the blue sky blues. How selfless! The silent moon. Holding a mirror for an ungrateful sun. Hey Orpheus, are you leavin so soon? Every night around here is a fateful one…”
Anyway, once we were in a speakeasy we were kind of in the depression era, which led to the company town. I guess basically I’m saying, at first, there was no grand scheme, but the songs pointed the way and we went there.

TDOA: Slim Moon described the story of Hadestown as, “the story of Orpheus and Eurydice set in post-apocalyptic Depression-era America.” Did you think it also applies to our current socio-political situation as well?

AM: Well it’s funny, you know I started writing the Hadestown songs as early as 2004-5. Way, way before the economy went south. So everything became kind of freakily relevant the last couple years. I guess I’d like to think of Hadestown as a real archetypal story. It doesn’t HAVE to be America, even. Everywhere in the world, everywhere in history, there are lovers, walls, there’s wealth and poverty, there’s doubt, there’s music.

TDOA: I can’t imagine what it must be like to be on Righteous Babe. Can you talk about the first time you met Ani DiFranco and how she’s influenced you life and music?

AM: I met Ani in a bar in Buffalo. I had been brought to town by this wonderful promoter Michael Meldrum, who was Ani’s childhood guitar teacher and she happened to be in town, so he invited her to the show. It was pretty surreal for me, I came of age listening to Ani Difranco records. Her songs were some of the first I learned on the guitar and she was the kind of artist who occupied a mythical spot in my life. She would walk through my dreams sometimes, like Bob Dylan. It’s been a tremendous honor getting to know her and work with her.

TDOA: Just one more Ani question, I promise. What do you think is the best advice she’s given you as a young musician?

AM: Well, during my time with RBR, Ani’s always been really supportive of whatever I happened to be into. I mean, she’s not like doling out advice, but as an example, I’ve always admired her bravery with politics and emotional nakedness. The way she sings, which is SO expressive, sometimes almost uncomfortably so, in a good way, her power as a live performer, her old-school outspoken feminism, which we need in this generation of quiet hipster feminism, her prolificness and her sweetness despite being such a terrifying badass.

TDOA: The guest singers on your record sound like an all-star indie/folk lineup. What was it like working with Greg Brown, Justin Vernon, and the other musicians?

AM: I used to play Greg Brown on my college radio show, mostly tracks from his early live album One Night, and most especially this one song, ‘Canned Goods’. For me Greg Brown goes in a category with Dan Rather and Garrison Keillor as excellent American men who make you feel that there is order and meaning left in the world. In his songs he comes across as a family man and an unbridled poetic sex machine at the same time. Once in college a friend and I went to see him play at a concert series at the Knights of Columbus legion hall in Middlebury, VT. We got there late and there was an unforgiving woman at the door saying the show was sold out. We were sitting on the steps of the hall feeling sorry for ourselves when a man in a big jacket appeared with a guitar. “Are you Greg Brown?” we cried and he said, “Well, yes I am” in his deep voice. We explained our situation and he nodded an went indoors. A minute later the door lady came back and grudgingly let us in; we were now on Greg’s personal guest list. I never forgot that kindness from him.

When we started thinking about who to ask to sing the roles of the different characters in the folk opera Hadestown, right away Greg Brown came to mind as Hades. There’s something subterranean about his voice, it has strange overtones, you feel it in your body almost before you hear it, so for the Lord of the Underworld it seemed cosmically great. I’m lucky that Ani Difranco is a friend of his and asked him if he’d do it. I don’t know how much he understood about the project before I got to Iowa City, but the whole thing was fairly kamikaze, we had a little window of studio time, the deal was that Greg’s longtime musical comrade Bo Ramsey was just finishing a record at the same studio and we were gonna get in as soon as they were done, at an undetermined late hour of the evening. It was cold and wintry, but we ate ice cream at Greg and Iris’ and listened thru the Hades songs while little kids ran around the house till we got the call to come in. When we got there at ten or eleven, the band was all leaning back on the raggedy couch in the control room smoking cigarettes (you can still smoke indoors at this studio), with an air of satisfied completion. It was funny to be just starting our own thing at that hour.

When I wrote the Hades songs, and my friend Michael Chorney scored them, we pitched them for the guy who was playing Hades in the live stage show in Vermont, who is a tenor. I sent the demos to Greg before we laid down the basic tracks with producer Todd Sickafoose, to make sure he’d be able to sing them in their original keys. But he never really got back and when I pressed him he said, ‘Oh, I can sing in just about any key…’ But I was pretty nervous going into the recording that the songs would be impossible for him to sing. In fact, he sang them all an octave below where they had been written. When his voice first comes in on ‘Hey, Little Songbird’, it still makes me laugh for joy.

We were desperately seeking an Orpheus for the studio album of the Hadestown opera when I got asked to open one of Bon Iver’s tours in Europe. It was a complete surprise and shows how pure-hearted those guys are cos they could have asked someone way cooler and more high profile to do it. The very first night of the tour, when I heard Justin sing ‘Stacks’ in this beautiful hall in Newcastle, my heart exploded, I thought, “he HAS to be Orpheus”. I wrote Todd Sickafoose (the producer) and Michael Chorney (who wrote the score): ‘He is the Orpheus of the Century!’ But I had to have a stern little talk with myself that night, I was like, this guy doesn’t even know you, he’s already doing you a huge favor having you on the tour, you can’t ask him now, you might weird him out, wait till the end of the tour and THEN ask. But the second night of the tour we were on a ferryboat from Scotland to Norway and I had a couple glasses of wine and I couldn’t bear it any longer, I’d been thinking about it all day, I just blurted it all out in a rush, ‘the opera, the record, will you please, please, please be Orpheus?’ And Justin just said, ‘Yes’.

We recorded the Orpheus songs at Justin’s house in Eau Claire in darkest winter. I’d teach him the melodies, then go out of the room and cook or read or whatever so as not to weird him out by hangin around. I’d hear him from the kitchen, but just one part at a time, one line at a time, so I was pretty clueless until he’d say ‘OK!’ and I’d run back in the room to hear the symphony of harmonies and countermelodies he’d created. He’s such an intuitive guy, he hears everything in his head, I think I saw him go to the piano ONCE to work something out. There was this one song where he sang some syllables, not words exactly, just sounds, they definitely weren’t part of the lyrics, and I was like, ‘hey man umm… what are you saying there?’ and he said, ‘I dunno! It just felt right” and I was like, ‘ok we’ll keep it!’

I love the idea that Orpheus, the son of a muse, able to make stones cry and milk flow from virgins’ breasts with his singing, is able to sing with many voices at the same time. When Todd and I went through Justin’s vocal files back in Brooklyn we came up with little names and numbers for his different voices, cos they’re so different, his low ones are so manly and sensual, and his high ones so ethereal and emotional, and the combination, to me, is a very Orphic thing, emotional manhood, I love it.

TDOA: This was such a massive and lengthy project. I read an interview where you said you’d almost written enough songs for another record. Can you talk about the themes of this record and is it daunting to think about following up this one?

AM: Ha! Yes. Well, actually as I write this I’m in John Raham’s studio in Vancouver BC working on a record of traditional British and Scottish ballads with my friend Jefferson Hamer. We’ve done a fair bit of rearranging and rewriting of lyrics, but it’s been a great project because it leans so heavily on the source, and it’s something completely different for me. I’m really crazy about the ballads. There are fairies and elves in them and everyone gets pregnant and dies. And yah, later this year I hope to record a new solo record. I guess it is kind of thematic as seems to always be the case, but i’m trying to be a bit loose with it too, make songs for the sake of songs and not some grand scheme. Sure it’s daunting, but all any of us can do is write what passes through our hearts.

TDOA: What are your suggestions for young women in your industry? How the hell do they compete with the blondes and the ass-shakers?

AM: Ah, that’s funny, cos I have been blonde on and off in my life and I just went back to blonde! No one can stop me now! No, you’re right, there’s much that’s unfair when it comes to women, conventional beauty and the music industry. I like how if you watch old VH1 music videos from the eighties, everyone looks like a freak: women, men, and they dance freaky. The role of the musician was to challenge conventions, not adhere to them. Leave that to the J Crew models. Hot, rockstar androgyny is inspiring. That still exists. I guess I feel like as a singer-songwriter the double standards are really apparent in the “singer” part of the job, but in the “songwriter” field I feel a lot of equality, mutual respect and camaraderie with men and women songwriters. That’s comforting too: songs transcend gender. When I get depressed about career things I just think how far a good song goes. I mean, we’re recording these ballads. They’re hundreds of years old. Who knows who wrote them, a nursemaid maybe. No one cares if it was a man or a woman.

TDOA: Socially, what impact do you hope Hadestown has?

AM: I only hope that people feel it emotionally, that they feel the political story in an emotional way and that is raises questions.

TDOA: The record has generated a lot of buzz in England thanks to its inclusion in NME’s “best albums of 2010, thusfar” article. How does it feel to know that your record appears to be crossing genre lines (folk, alternative, etc.) and getting some great critical praise?

AM: Totally awesome. I must give mad props to Michael Chorney, who wrote the orchestral arrangements and Todd Sickafoose, who did an amazing job producing the album in a way that celebrated it’s weirdness, but also made it accessible for listeners. I wouldn’t have dreamed that this weird stuff would strike a nerve.

To purchase the album in the U.S. via iTunes

In the UK

See Anais Mitchell live:

Aug 21 2010 Bridge School Benefit Middlebury, Vermont
Aug 28 2010 Great Waters Music Festival Wolfeboro, New Hampshire
Sep 2 2010 Ginkgo Coffeehouse St. Paul, Minnesota
Sep 3 2010 New York Mills Regional Cultural Center New York Mills, Minnesota
Sep 4 2010 Storyhill Festival Midwest Brainerd, Maine
Sep 7 2010 Bob’s Underground Cafe, Grinnell College Grinnell, IA
Sep 8 2010 Cafe Paradiso Fairfield, Iowa
Sep 9 2010 The Billiken Club (SLU) St Louis, MO
Sep 10 2010 Evanston SPACE Evanston, Illinois
Sep 11 2010 WFMT Folkstage Chicago, Illinois
Sep 18 2010 Madison Square Park Studio Series New York, New York
Sep 19 2010 FTC on Stage One Fairfield, CT, us Find Tickets
Sep 25 2010 Colonial Theatre Bethlehem, New Hampshire
Oct 16 2010 The Band Room North Yorkshire, UNITED KINGDOM
Oct 18 2010 St. Bonaventures Parish Social Club Bristol, UNITED KINGDOM
Oct 19 2010 Hare and Hounds Kings Heath, Birmingham, Birmingham, UNITED KINGDOM
Oct 20 2010 Latest Music Bar Brighton, -, UNITED KINGDOM
Oct 23 2010 LA SUONERIA Settimo T.se (To), -, ITALY
Oct 25 2010 La Salumeria della Musica MI, Milano, ITALY
Oct 27 2010 Bang Bang Club Berlin-Mitte, GERMANY
Oct 28 2010 The MAZE At The FOREST TAVERN Nottingham, UNITED KINGDOM
Oct 29 2010 Cluny 2 Theatre Newcastle, UNITED KINGDOM
Oct 31 2010 The Pleasance Theatre Edinburgh, SCOTLAND, -, UNITED KINGDOM
Nov 1 2010 The Green Hotel Kinross, Perthshire, UNITED KINGDOM

It’s really been a great year for music. We’ve waxed poetic about great bands like The Prids, so when we heard about a band that was hotly tipped by them, we scrambled to our 8-track players and turned the volume up to 11. New York City continues to churn out a zillion bandsthatpitchforkloves every day. So when we tell you that Me You Us Them is our favorite new band from the NYC, we recognize the magnitude of the compliment. Kevin Shields could only dream of creating a masterpiece like this, which blends his MBV sense of vertigo with a charmingly modern sense of melody. Album of the year? Pfft, we’re placing bets on where it will place on our albums of the decade list in 2020.
Hey, look who’s back? It’s Ravin doing the honors with a band we truly love.

Any Time by Me You Us Them

TDOA: So for those who haven’t heard your awesomeness, who are you guys? How did the band come about and how’s the journey been so far?

Ian: An account of Me You Us Them so far…
Ryan and I began playing together in a band started by him and his wife at the time. I was our drummer, Ryan played guitar. That band broke up for terribly cliche and predictable reasons. The 3 of us that were not Ryan’s then wife regrouped, naming ourselves after a song in our repertoire that we had been striving to get right since the old band. So our lofty goal in the beginning was to finish one song (incidently, that line-up never actually played “Me You Us Them”). During the first year of MYUT, I remained on drums, and Ryan added singing to his duties. We wrote nearly an entire record, then our bassist disappeared. He didn’t quit, we didn’t ask him to leave, we just never saw or heard from him again. Minor setback. So I grabbed the bass, and we decided on an entirely different creative approach.
Ryan and I continued as a duo, becoming more of a democratic writing team, and sharing and trading responsibilities across the board. We ignored the fact that there were only two of us and started writing/recording whatever we felt like hearing in our songs, with no real regard for how in the hell the two of us would ever perform it. When we began playing shows again, we used a laptop with programmed and pre-recorded drum tracks and synths. Our first EP was released during this stage of the “band”.
In the months following the completion of the EP, we found a home on Brooklyn label Triple Down Records, courted our first drummer Jimi into the band, and began working on our full-length. We spent nearly a year playing a ton of shows and writing the record, then almost another year finishing the record, during which time we lost Jimi to the West Coast, brah.
After Jimi’s departure, we asked our good friend (and “Post-Data” drum tech) Zach to fill in temporarily. He’s still around, and we couldn’t be more excited about the current state of the band.

TDOA: Post-Data is pretty much the perfect amalgamation of every alt-indie, sub-genre I grew up loving, from grunge to brit-pop to shoegaze to post-punk, post-rock and math-rock, with a little ambient and IDM thrown in the mix. I’m curious to know how you would describe the band’s musical etymology…

Ian: Well thanks, man. I guess I didn’t realize we’d covered that much territory. A lot of those influences are there, and we try not to deny any one of them when writing a song. We also don’t actively seek to adhere to or destroy any musical boundaries, which are usually possessed inherently and/or accidentally, anyway. If anything, we always try to really own and fully occupy our boundaries in terms of songwriting, embrace who we are, and not be dishonest.
Tongue in cheek, we refer to ourselves as a “post-data rock band”, a term after which we obviously named our record. It isn’t so much descriptive of our sound, but of our process, and the timing of the release. A good friend of ours has baptized us “indie-ustrial”. Not to be confused with “Indi-ustrial”, a reference to India’s industrial sector.

TDOA: You guys are from Brooklyn, which has produced some of the most dreadful, overhyped, underwhelming bands I have heard in recent memory. [WARNING: The
opinions of this interviewer do not necessarily reflect those of TDOA Online Music Group, Inc. ] I’m curious to hear your perception of the scene there…
Or alternatively, since I know you might not want to shit where you eat, perhaps you could suggest a few local bands that you think deserve more attention than
they’re receiving?

Ian: The NYC spectrum is extremely crowded, and it’s very tough for us to determine where we fit into it, or even if we’re part of it. I think a lot of our friends in bands here feel that way. We’re fortunate enough to be part of a very supportive, eclectic label, which at times functions more like a collective. A lot of the bands/artists under the Triple Down umbrella are friends, play shows together, share ideas, help each other, hang out. None of us sound alike, but we’re all coming from the same place, have respect for what the other is doing, and have a sense of humor and humility about everything. But that’s just our little corner in a vast sea of activity.
Appomattox are one of our favorite Brooklyn bands, and are practically family. Oceanographer, a band that Zach also plays in, will make sweet love to your ears (they also did a gorgeous acoustic cover of our song “Drugs” which you can download for free here:http://www.oceanographermusic.com/storage/audio-files/Drugs.mp3). Aaron Nevezie, who mixed our record, is also a part of the JDT (Jason Domnarski Trio). They just pooped out an incredible little EP a couple months back. The new Tayisha Busay EP is hilarious, brilliant. Monuments just released their beautiful debut full-length. The last Zambri EP was on repeat for months. Same with the last Monogold EP, which slays. Adam’s Castle are about to drop a pretty huge new record. All very different, incredible bands, and really swell people. I’m all out of adjectives.

TDOA: What I really love about Post-Data is that, not only does it elegantly weave a vast array of genres into something much more than the sum of its parts, but at the end of the day, it’s all anchored down to hooks and melodies that stick long after the sonic experimentation becomes familiar. Was this a conscious decision on your part? Do you value the discipline and boundaries of pop song craft?

Ryan: Well, we know when something feels wrong to us. Every aspect of writing a song is conscious, but we try not to push things where they aren’t going naturally. So far every song that we’ve written has come together a bit differently, so we never really know what to expect from ourselves. We definitely have a lot of respect for the craft of songwriting, and we spend a lot of energy on the details.

Ian: Our palettes are pretty diverse, and sometimes one particular inclination might be what sparks an idea, or just might be in the foreground of a concept. But in the end, it takes us somehow employing most of our combined influences to get what we want out of a song. The right balance of everything we want to hear. You usually don’t find melody and structure without some degree of grit, density, or atmosphere in one of our songs. I am a total sucker for a good pop song, but I am able to exorcise most of those demons in The Wet Look, my Hall and Oates cover band.

TDOA: Post-Data feels like it was recorded in a live environment, as opposed to a direct-into-pro-tools set up. Is this an accurate assumption, and if so, why was it important to record the album in this manner?

Ian: “Post-Data” was actually recorded over the course of almost an entire year in several different locations. The project began in June of ’09 at the same Brooklyn studio in which we recorded our first EP with engineer Ryan Steele. We did the drums, bass, guitars, and synths there throughout the summer, and into the fall. A few months after our last session tracking the instruments, Ryan (Reesey) and I decided to return to our home town of Annapolis, MD to record the vocals. It was a decision that somehow just made sense. Go home to finish what you left in search of. We spent a couple days in Jan of ’10 at our good friend Alex Lakis’s studio, and boom-we had a finished record. We mixed and mastered at The Bunker in Brooklyn with Aaron Nevezie in February, and the record was released at the end of April. It was a long and exhausting limbo, and at times there was no end in sight, but we pretty much got the record we wanted.

Ryan: In preparation for our record, Ryan (Steele) actually knocked down walls in his studio to be able to get a more spacious, live sound, which is probably a lot of what you’re picking up on. You can really hear it on “Loving Like Lawyers” (Zach was actually part of the drum line with Ian and Jimi).

TDOA: Okay Ryan, how do you make all those cool twisty, warpy, pitch-shifty guitar sounds? (Don’t worry, your secrets are safe with us…)

Ryan: Are they, Ravin?

TDOA: Another thing I like about the record is that it makes tasteful use of atmosphere. It functions like an instrument all its own, surging, lingering and
vanishing to serve the emotion of the songs. What’s your perspective on atmosphere? Do you prefer recordings to be “wetter” rather than dry?

Ian: That’s a very cool observation. I think our obsession with atmosphere is pretty well documented. We’re usually striving to get more size out of our songs, both live and recorded. Maybe that comes from living in tiny NY shitholes. Maybe it comes from when we started the band wanting to make music that was bigger than the two of us. I’d say we generally gravitate toward a fairly saturated sound, but without the sort of long tails and endless resonance that instantly transforms you into an 80s goth band. I’ve always loved the way sound bounces around in bathrooms. Everything sounds cool in the bathroom. We should do our next record in one. It also would be very convenient.

TDOA: If I had to pick one song that I think best documents the Me You Us Them sound at this moment in time, it would be your sprawling epic, “Big Time”. It
goes from Faraquet to Mission Of Burma to Godspeed! and Sebadoh and Boards of Canada without skipping a beat. And how it does this without feeling bloated in
any way is beyond me. Anyway, I’m curious to know how this song came about. Was it a series of jams that you carefully linked together?

Ryan: As I recall, Ian and I were working on some other idea, and I just started playing what became the verse riff out of the blue. It stole Ian’s attention away from what we were in the middle of doing, so we just ran with it. From there, the ball got tossed back and forth until we had a song. The whole process probably took half a year or so, including recovery time after we’d crash it into a wall. I remember the vocals being the trickiest part to figure out, actually. But after the song finally evolved into place, they wound up being very simple, direct, and natural. By the way, Boards of Canada? Nice!

TDOA: I think what I love most about you guys is that, underneath everything, there’s a sense of ambition for the music and a pure joy for what you’re
creating. So many groups coming up seem to have a “too cool” attitude or pretense that’s more about being scene than actually trying affect someone
emotionally. In your minds, what is it you hope the listener takes away from the music, either in recorded form or live?

Ian: Well, awesome. Thanks for saying that. We made the best record we knew how to make, and are super thankful that it has found it’s way into people’s libraries. Finishing it was such a huge goal for so long that we still sometimes forget it’s out there. Every time someone new discovers the record and reaches out to us, it’s a welcome surprise. Are glow-in-the-dark fanny packs pretentious?

Ryan: It’s intimidation vs. invitation. There are those bands that try to trick you into wanting to be a part of their exclusive scene rather then just hold the door open for you. Fine, you’re awesome, but you’re also rude. We’ve never been impressed by that, and that isn’t where we’re coming from at all. Everyone’s invited to our party, even the smelly kid that sits in the back of the class. That kid rules at parties. All we want is to be a part of and continue the human tradition of self expression, and we really hope people are able to grab on to that sincerity in our music.

TDOA: Any plans to tour in the future? What’s in store for Me You Us Them in the future?

Ian: We are in the process of setting up several small East Coast quickies, some of which will be with our friends The Prids. If you want us to play your city, holler. We also just filmed a video for our song iQuit, and we’re releasing a split 7 inch record in the fall with Bloody Knives from Austin, TX. One new song from each band. In their song they used some samples from one of our songs. Of course, we liked it immediately.

Re-entry by Me You Us Them

You can pick up the album via Bandcamp.

UPCOMING SHOWS
August 16th w/ The Forms, Former Constellations @ The Knitting Factory, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
September 9th w/ The Foreign Resort @ Cameo, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
October 8th w/ The Prids, Lookbook @ Spike Hill, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
October 9th w/ The Prids, Lookbook @ The Delancey, LES, Manhattan

Read more: http://www.myspace.com/myutnyc

GAYNGS Announce US Fall Tour, Glasser To Support

TDOA faves have announced plans for a U.S. tour this fall. Read the TDOA interview here.

Click Here To Download & Share “The Gaudy Side Of Town” Live MP3

Click Here To Download & Share Live Video Of “The Gaudy Side Of Town”

Click Here To Download & Share “Faded High” Single

“Olson layers vocalist upon vocalist in a hazy mix of sheets-blowing sax solos, draggy drum machines, and bad vibes” – AV Club

“…a druggy and dreamlike but genuinely affectionate tribute to the heyday of quiet storm and Lite FM radio.” – Paste

“Antique keyboards pulse, fretless basses thrum and a variety of voices echo in and out, underlying the trippy feel and making this pretty much the most scintillating and daring record of the year” – NME

“This is lush, involving music that takes stated influences and sculpts them into something genuinely there” – BBC

“This whole collection seems built for the bedroom, especially when it reaches its tripped-out plateau, a cover of Godley and Creme’s “Cry”" – Q Magazine

Ten of the twenty-plus contributors on the Relayted album will be there, including Justin Vernon and Mike Noyce of Bon Iver, ringleader Ryan Olson, Zak Coulter and Adam Hurlburt of Solid Gold. Jake Luck of Leisure Birds, Ivan Rosebud of The Rosebuds, Brad Cook and Joe Westerlund of Megafaun, and Mike Lewis of Andrew Bird and Happy Apple will all be there too!

Click Here To Read GAYNGS Contributor Justin Vernon’s Recent Interview With Pitchfork

U.S. Dates:

09/29/10 Milwaukee, WI – Turner Hall
09/30/10 Chicago, IL – Metro
10/02/10 Boston, MA – Paradise
10/03/10 New York, NY – Webster Hall
10/04/10 Brooklyn, NY – Music Hall of Williamsburg
10/05/10 Washington, DC – Black Cat
10/07/10 Nashville, TN – Mercy Lounge
10/10/10 Austin, TX – Austin City Limits Festival

Whether she’s playing with Tender Trap or charming us with Allo Darlin’, Elizabeth Morris Elizabeth creates music that makes our ears sparkle. Cheery indie-pop that reminds us that music can be upbeat without being vapid. Elizabeth and Bill are from Australia, Mike and Paul are from Kent. Their debut album Allo Darlin’ was released in June 2010, and another single Dreaming was preceded this in March. The album was recorded at Soup with producer Simon Trought, underneath the Duke of Uke shop in Brick Lane. TDOA writer Amy McCarthy helps to explain why they make our toes do a happy dance.

TDOA: Your songs are so wonderfully constructed. Do they generally start with a single guitar or vocal melody or are they the result of something that comes from the group writing together?

EM: Thanks! The way it normally works is that I will take a complete song written on uke to the boys, and then we will work on the arrangement together. Everybody writes their own parts, although sometimes I’ve taken the song to Paul first so he can work out his often quite complicated guitar parts. They don’t really become proper songs until we’ve played them together as a group. That’s when they start to feel like Allo Darlin’ songs.

TDOA: We recently interviewed Amelia Fletcher regarding Tender Trap. Elizabeth, can you talk about working with Amelia and how it has influenced your writing with Allo Darlin’?

EM: Well, I wouldn’t say playing with Amelia has influenced my songwriting as much as she personally has. I think we have quite different styles of songwriting, although people often put us together because we play together. I think since I’ve started playing in Tender Trap I’ve learned how to sing out more, mainly so I can hear myself over the guitar! Amelia is a very inspiring person and I love being around her.

TDOA: Great reviews in Pitchfork, the BBC and seemingly everywhere. Do you put much stock in reviews and could it ever impact your writing? Because you’re having some success, do you dare venture from the musical path you’ve begun?

EM: We’ve had plenty of bad reviews too! I stopped reading them after Darren Hayman told me to either read all of them or read none of them. I guess there’s some good things to take from reviews but I try not to pay attention – I’m too sensitive! We’re really looking forward to making the second album though and to making it as good as we possibly can.

TDOA: Do you know if Henry Rollins have ever reacted to the song, “Henry Rollins Don’t Dance”?

EM: No I don’t know! I very much doubt it though. I’m terrified at the thought he might ever hear it.

TDOA: The cover of “I Wanna Be Sedated” is one of the most unique I’ve ever heard – where did the idea for that come from?

EM: Thanks. Well I recorded that at my parents house on the Queensland coast, just into the computer. I’d been asked to do a cover for this indie pop Ramones Tribute compilcation. I’d just found this cool instrument called a Mandobird in the old music shop in my little hometown. I found it quite an inspiring little instrument and Marianthi (who runs the label that was releasing the compilation) wanted it quite quickly, so I just did it the only way I could really. I think it’s kind of sad song, when you know about Joey’s OCD and all that. I think it’s nice to hear new meanings in songs when they’re played differently from the original. That compilation has just been released, by the way.

TDOA: I listened to “Heartbeat Chilli.” I noticed that Johnny Cash’s “I keep a close watch on this heart of mine…” is repeated throughout. What made you choose that line?

EM: Well I wrote that song two years ago, so writing the song is a little hazy to me. I remember writing it in an afternoon. I’m a big Johnny Cash fan and I think that line always shone brightly to me. It’s funny, when I write songs I’m almost in a dream, and I can’t really remember the process very well.

TDOA: The single released in March, Dreaming, – who’s singing on the track with Elizabeth?

EM: That’s Monster Bobby. He’s a friend of ours and an amazing songwriter – he has his own project called Monster Bobby. He also plays guitar in the Pipettes, if you know them.

TDOA: In interviews you’ve referenced being influenced by The Maytals and reggae. Can you talk about how that is reflected in your music?

EM: It’s funny, I used to listen to indie pop all the time but now I like to listen to a lot of old reggae and surf and blues music. I guess because it’s so different from what we do and I just like the way it sounds. I think you can hear it in some songs – like If Loneliness Was Art. We call that song The Reggae Song to ourselves…

TDOA: How did you like playing at South By Southwest, this year? Do you think there continues to be value for bands to come over to the U.S. to play festivals like SXSW and CMJ or has the internet made it easier to be “noticed”.

EM: It was pretty cool but also kind of overwhelming. We’re really not into the whole “music biz” thing, actually we find it kind of disgusting, and SXSW is full of people who are into “networking”. We had most fun when we played things outside of the festival, like our friend Michael’s Waterloo Cycles shop and the Red House Pizzeria. Playing for pizza is gold!
I think there’s value for certain types of bands to play these kind of things, but really I don’t think music PR people are ever going to be into bands like us, we’re too difficult to characterise and we’re basically not interested in being cool. We like to play for real people, without press badges on, who are there for the music! People like us! Music dorks!

TDOA: Any plans to come back to the U.S. in 2010?

EM: Yes! In October – the album is being released in the States then and we’re plotting a East/West tour – we can’t wait! Look out New Jersey house parties – we’re coming back!

See them live!
Aug 21 2010 The Portland Arms Cambridge, Cambridge, UNITED KINGDOM
Aug 22 2010 Acoustic solo show at The Hangover Lounge at the Lexington Kings Cross, London, UNITED KINGDOM
Aug 25 2010 Proud Camden Town, London, UNITED KINGDOM
Sep 5 2010 Wasserturm Berlin, GERMANY
Sep 9 2010 End of the Road Festival Dorset, UNITED KINGDOM
Sep 10 2010 End of the Road Festival North Dorset, Dorset, UNITED KINGDOM
Sep 17 2010 The Red House Sheffield, UNITED KINGDOM
Sep 18 2010 The Deaf Institute Manchester, Manchester, UNITED KINGDOM
Sep 25 2010 Bunker’s Hill Nottingham, Nottingham, UNITED KINGDOM
Oct 1 2010 Magic Kids/Allo Darlin at Barfly Camden London, UNITED KINGDOM

Order the single in the U.S.

Order the album in the UK