STACK February 2017 Issue 148

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JAPANDROIDS
INTERVIEW
continued
FACTOID: Between the end of their Celebration Rock tour and their mid-2016 announcement of new shows, Japandroids' online presence was non-existent for three years, with many presuming they'd quietly broken up.
In choosing where to take themselves
to write their brand new record Near
To The Wild Heart Of Life, Japandroids’
Brian King and David Prowse decided
to follow the thread of experience from
their heart-bursting second record,
Celebration Rock . “We’d finished about
half the songs and we just got burnt
out, or hit the wall, and got stuck,”
explains vocalist/guitarist King of their
2012 album. “We thought it would
be good for us to go out of town for
a bit. We decided to rent a house far
away, [and] we ended up in Nashville. That
house became the Japandroids place for about
six weeks. It was really good for us, we had
a really good time, it really inspired us.” Not
surprising it was where the pair wrote perennial
banger The House That Heaven Built.
“This time we picked New Orleans, which
is another classic American music city. It’s a
city that we both love, but at the same time
we don’t know a lot of people so we’re on
our own. We’re very much living together 24/7,
working on songs and then going out for meals
together. It’s a bonding experience as much as
anything.”
The great shift in approach, this time around,
was the songwriting. Near To The Wild Heart Of
Life presents experiments in studio production,
with far more changes in tempo (such as the
wonderful, slow build in Midnight To
Morning), yet we still get that tangled
background chorus of voices, the parts
that encourage any old wet sock to
sing along. “In the beginning we really
didn’t have conversations about what
we wanted to do – it was more about
what we didn’t wait to do,” King says.
“We made the first two records by a
very similar process, with the mentality
of making a live record that’s very
simple, very raw, very direct. I think
with Celebration Rock we felt we had
achieved this thing we’d been trying to
achieve since we started the band, which was
to make a really great live-sounding rock and
roll record. If you feel like you’ve achieved it, all
you can really do is a) have a new goal or b) just
continue to do that same thing over and over.
This was the big conversation we had in the
beginning."
by Japandroids
is out now via
Inertia.
FOXYGEN
How well acquainted with orchestral
instruments were you guys before
liaising with Trey Pollard on
arrangements? Did you direct him
as to which instruments you wanted
highlighted on each track?
We were decently acquainted with
orchestral instruments going into the
process, but we had little knowledge of how
to stack the instruments and divide melodies
between the instruments. We gave Trey
and Matt a detailed moment-by-moment
breakdown of the record: how we wanted
each part to sound, like "This part sounds
like a big band jazz, this is Star Wars cantina
music."
Apparently no computers were
used in the making of Hang – why
is this important to you, or were you
challenging yourselves for fun?
We always use analogue tape. Computers
are not necessary to our type of music and
create more problems than they solve.
Indie rock duo Foxygen (Sam France and Jonathan Rado)
have just released their fifth album Hang, full of dynamic and
dramatic orchestral arrangements, cool keys, peachy horns
and cheeky Muppet harmonies. We posed some questions
about it all to the pair.
In the Follow The Leader
clip, where did the guy on
the horse come from? It
looks like he just happened
to be hanging out in the
park that day.
Yes, correct. It was just a
man and a horse, enjoying his
day at the park. We "roped"
him into being in the video.
America is one of the most dynamic
(style, tempo, vocal variety) tracks on
the album – is that why you chose it
for the first single?
Exactly. We felt it best summed up the
themes of the record and what we were
going for as a whole. Big tune.
Trauma seems a companion track
to America, to me, with Rise Up
being the kind of hopeful conclusion
to the trilogy. Am I making these
connections up?
You could think of it
that way. The second
side of the record definitely operates
as one piece. I actually originally
envisioned Rise Up as the opener to
the record, but it felt best as a closer.
The kind of clavichord sound
that jumps in amongst your more
regular piano, is it a real one?
There's a lot of different
keyboards on the record – it depends
on what song. On Mrs. Adams we
used an old RMI electric piano.
There's also lots of clavinet that pops
out. We made it a thing to not use
Hang by
Foxygen is out
now via Inertia.
any "synths" on this record (but there's
one hidden in there somewhere).
How did you get to know the
D’Addario boys [The Lemon Twigs]?
Did they contribute any ideas or
did they solely play in a session
capacity?
They were our hot session band. We
had demoed everything beforehand and
they learned the parts. A few parts were
developed in the studio; Brian played
the virtuosic jazz guitar solo coming
out of the first chorus of Avalon. But
the structure of the songs was already
laid out.
04 FEBRUARY 2017
visit MUSIC NEWS
Master of atmosphere Max Richter
is following his acclaimed 2015
album Sleep with Music FromWoolf
Works; these slowly sumptuous pieces
come from the scores Richter wrote to
accompany Wayne McGregor's Royal
Ballet, based on the works of Virginia
Woolf. Expect instrumental idiosyncrasy
and provocative genius from this three-
part release.
MAX
RICHTER
Three Worlds: Music From Woolf Works
by Max Richter is out now via Deutsche
Grammophon/Universal.
Read the full interview online at
© Yulia Mahr