We’ve always taken two approaches to a band. One is to do this little mini-symphonic movement within the recordings, and the other side has always been the sloppy-esque garage rock band, and we just play this way live. On our recordings we play this way, but there are so many other instruments and things like that. . . . Well, it’s like if you have an ink drawing and you paint it with watercolors or something like that. It’s like you get this wash that makes it look much more attractive in a sense and at the same time, there was something about the starkness of the ink drawing that in and of itself could have been seen as something perfect and like so basically. . . . Okay, back to the simple elements. The thing is the way I have always looked at production is that it’s a pop song; we’re not like a prog rock band or something and if we are going to try to do a counterpoint and if we are going to try to do a large arrangement of things, every individual element has to be very simple and sweet, just like the Beach Boys. Pet Sounds is really complex, but at the same time the individual parts were really simple. Bach is like that too, except there are a lot more notes per measure with Bach, but still the parts themselves sound like singsong lullaby-type things. So, within the context of doing pop songs, I try to make it sound more lush, well, it’s not lush because what we do is not exactly lush, but just try to make it sound more baroque.
You’ve said that you want the songs to be “wistful, and have a romantic quality to them.”
Yeah, exactly. People always kind of feel that our songs are very happy sounding, but really most of the songs I write are sad, kind of wistful songs that are. . . . They are the kind of songs that are seeking something, kind of like Pet Sounds. There’s this yearning feeling that I feel for the world, and a lot of people feel. It’s kind of like you are just looking out the window. . . . I don’t know, this yearning feeling. It’s like you are separate from things, or maybe you can’t hold on to them, or perhaps they go so fast and maybe they’re not coming. That was always something that was important for me to get across in music, and I feel that there is a gentle, re-assuring quality that I always try to put in the music, and at the same time there’s always been a little bit of a self-effacing quality or something like that. Basically, with the new record. . . .
Would you say it is more ambitious than your other records?
Well, I think it is. I don’t know. You may disagree. You listen to it on the surface and it’s like this fuzz rock. It’s a totally different genre than trying to make Pet Sounds, you know. At the same time, to me it’s easy to do big productions. I’ve produced a lot of records. It’s easy to do beautiful horn parts, and I love the stuff. It comes easily to me. I love it. I love beautiful things. I mean I love these movements and the harmonies, and I love putting on headphones and hearing all this different stuff dancing all over the place in the mix. I love different parts not stepping on each other’s toes. There’s a certain feeling, there’s this counterpoint that I am really into, and at the same time, with the new record I wanted to try to do something that wasn’t easy for me. I wanted to try to do this thing which I felt I hadn’t been successful with in the past. It’s not like we were. . . . What’s been hard for me is making records that actually sound like the Apples, like what we sound like as a band. On every record there are a handful of songs that are real rockers, and when I go back over them they never sound very rocking. Somehow they become more washed out sounding. Maybe it’s the horns or whatever, but they never come off sounding as ballistic as we actually perform. I mean we’re a sloppy, loud, frenzied band. We’re not like Belle and Sebastian, where we are going up and pulling off this pretty stuff live. We’ve always had two different ways of going about it. We record one way, and we play live the other way. And so, when the horns come in on the record, when it’s live you kick on the big muff and it’s just a blast. We always tried to be the loudest possible band we could, that anybody has ever heard. There’s a certain sense of . . . well, I think what I am trying to say is that, as a producer, the artifice, my love of beauty and my love of this interplay and sort of depth of sound or whatever, kind of covered up some of the aspects that are true to our band. Not that it’s not true. There’s something to be said for pursuing your vision. There’s something to be said for your bandmates and you trying together to make something beautiful and great and that is transcendent. That is what we have been trying to do. At the same time, there is something that transcends transcendence, it’s the uh, uh, I can think of the word in Latin, the vivaciousness, no, that’s not the word, it’s the . . .
Vivacity?
Yes, that’s the word. It’s like the moving alive sort of quality of the music that classical music often lacks and Pet Sounds lacks. Pet Sounds doesn’t rock, and no one is going to say that it does.
But when you were young growing up in Louisiana, you listened to stuff like Jethro Tull, XTC . . .
Well, I was totally into R.E.M. I was really into punk rock and psychedelia when I was kid. That was what I was into. I was into psychedelia. I love 1960s psychedelia, and I also really liked punk rock and garage rock type of stuff. When we started that band we wanted the band to sound like “Interstellar Overdrive,” that was it. That was the template for our band. So “Interstellar Overdrive” is so garage rock, and so incredibly trippy, it’s both extremes in one song, so to me that’s what we wanted to start our band with, and there’s a certain. . . . I’m not trying to knock our work. It’s hard for me to say this without sounding like, uh, I’m not happy with it. I am very happy with everything we’ve done. It was perfect for what it was, but at the same time it was dishonest in the sense that. . . . Well, as a producer I covered up the sort of blemished quality of our band, which is a large portion of it. And on this record, it occurred to me that there was something great to be had by us, that’s going to be had by uncovering us, by letting the songs stand out, by trying. . . . Well, I try not to double-track the vocals very much, stuff like that. Like keeping first takes. I don’t know exactly how to say it without sounding stupid.
When you are doing that for your band or other bands, do you ever get a flashback of being ten and going to Sun studios and learning about multitracking and how exactly to approach the process?
That did happen. That’s weird [pause]. Wait. At first, I thought you were just talking about it. I thought you were saying that hypothetically. I was like, wait a second, that exact thing happened. It’s really hard for me to keep interested in stuff unless it’s new. I don’t know what it is with me. I have this psychological block. As soon as something starts to become familiar to me, it’s not that I am bored with it, and it doesn’t go across to my relationships with people. It’s just that I am easily distracted, and I need to be easily distracted to be interested. Basically, have you heard all of our records?
Almost all of them.
Every record has essentially been a wholesale rejection of the previous record. Like with every record, I try really hard to do that which I was dissatisfied with on the last record, and in this case I felt that on the last record I really did well in a White Album sort of late 1960s, early 1970s rock ’n’ roll album kind of way, but the garage rock songs weren’t garage rock–sounding enough. I mean as a band we are incredibly loud and fuzzy and kind of raucous, and on the record it sounds like we comb our hair neatly and wear ties or something. I don’t know exactly, but on our last record I really wanted to get across how raw we are, and looking back on it, it’s a great record. I am not dissatisfied with it at all, but it does fail on being raw. In fact, it is very highly, very nicely produced, so I just realized on this record. Do you ever watch Seinfeld?
Yes.
There’s this episode where George does the opposite of everything he should do, and he ends up being really successful with it. Do you know what I am talking about?
Right.
He decides that every impulse he has is wrong, then he should do the opposite, and that would be right. So he goes and asks some girl out on a date, and he says he lives at home wi
th parents and is unemployed and he ends up getting a date. At the end, he ends up getting a job with the Yankees because he tells off the guy who is hiring him or whatever. So I was trying to do that with this record, where basically I felt dissatisfied, and I was like, “Where are we going to go with this?” At the same time, I wanted to do something great. I am not saying that this record is great, I’m just saying that I want to do something great, and if I am going to expect that I can do something great, it’s not going to be by starting off on my hero’s shoulders. There’s that whole thing about Isaac Newton and Galileo about standing on the shoulders of giants, but that is not the way you make art. That is the way that you make progress and other things, but that is not the way you make art. You don’t make art by standing on people’s shoulders: you make art by jumping off.
But you also make art from a certain restlessness because you have said before that you are not particularly rooted in what is happening now, and you’re not rooted in the past because you are not into retro per se, but the idea that there is a certain restlessness and rootless that makes you go forward.
Yeah, you are totally right, exactly. Without that you start to. . . . You either settle into what you do and it becomes boring, or you become so rootless, like U2, that you are not making art anyway. You have to be able to balance your vision with a sense of honesty with yourself of being able to let yourself. . . . It’s like what they say about painters or artists, you have to learn how to draw before you can forget how to draw. It’s the same thing with jazz musicians, you have to learn how to play saxophone before you cannot play the saxophone, before you can squeal and know what you are doing. Actually, I don’t know what I am trying to say with that.
But with The Discovery of a World Inside the Moone, you said you wanted that record “to be non-psychedelic, non-Elephant 6, non-1960s, non-conceptual.” Is the new record a wholesale rejection of that notion too?
You know what, I feel like I didn’t accomplish any of those. I don’t feel like I followed that program up accurately. In a sense, I am still trying to reject all those things and at the same time I feel like we really pulled it off on this record. What I learned from the last record—it isn’t very Elephant 6, it isn’t entirely 1960s, but it does have the intonation of 1960s stuff, it does have horns and flutes, and how can you do that without sounding 1960s? That was the main palette of instruments in the 1960s, so just by using the stuff I love you’re calling to mind this other time. A lot of music is very wistful sounding, even the rockin’ songs or whatever, and I wanted to call that to my mind. It was a production choice, like you put it in there and it’s easy to automatically bring a certain picture or feeling into the mind, but with this record I wanted to give up those things that were easy for me. If we were going to make sounds and create feeling, I wanted to do it in a way that is totally original to this record and that wasn’t using the palette that had been used by others. Sure, there are a lot of rock bands, there are a lot of punk bands, and there are a lot of garage bands, and there are a lot of fuzz guitars out there, but still this is the palette where, being somewhat a master of it too, that we could experiment in the way that we do live and also we did on our earlier records and take it further than other people have. I don’t know if we did that on this record. I’m not saying we have. I think our new record is really great, just for me liking it. . . . I am very happy with it. I am not dissatisfied with it in any way. You know, like you asked earlier, on this record we were trying to be more ambitious; I mean the program was if we are going to do something great it cannot be in any way by copying other people or referencing other records that we think are great. How can you do that? How can you . . .
How can you not do that?
That’s true too. That’s the difficulty—how can you not do that? It’s really, really hard to avoid and at the same time it wasn’t a conscious thing, it was just that at times I would think, let’s put some tambourine in that sounds like this Zombies song, but the Zombies part of it discounted the whole idea. You know, like every time it came up that I wanted to do something. . . . At the same time when we started the album I made this sort of dictate that there would be no acoustic instruments on this record. This record was going to be all electronic and electric instruments except for the drums and tambourines and stuff.
Why choose to pull out acoustic guitars?
Because I felt like the acoustic instruments, and this is not to diss acoustic instruments, just so you understand, it’s just that you have to go by a certain notion.
Do you think you would be where you are today if it wasn’t for the Elephant 6 collective?
Um, I guess I would have to say yes. Our first album came out before we really got Elephant 6, well, we started Elephant 6 to put out the first Apples single, so basically Elephant 6 simultaneously started with Apples, but it didn’t really grow into a large movement until by the time our second album came out, and our first album was the one, up to now anyway. . . . Well, all of our records have sold better than the last one, but our first album did not sell significantly worse than our last album. So I feel like Elephant. . . . Well my friend Steve Keen, who is a painter, he painted most of our album art, he said once while talking about art and painting in general, he said that at least in the twentieth century it’s really hard for individual artists to make waves or anything, so most of the time a painter will make waves as part of a movement. He said he liked that about Elephant 6 because it was a movement. There aren’t that many movements in rock music. It’s like a fairly different thing.
It’s not like there haven’t been movements, there are plenty, like Flying Nun and K Records, Andy Warhol’s warehouse, I mean his Factory and stuff, that we have based Elephant 6 on, partially, but like he said, he felt that was noble about Elephant 6 and he liked that. I liked that explanation and thought it was nice. At the same time, though, a lot of times Elephant 6, I mean Elephant 6 as far as I understand right now is pretty much. . . . I mean I withdrew myself from it about two years ago or so, and it’s not that there’s any “fuck you” or anything, it just wasn’t. . . . I don’t really want to go into this, okay? I happened to touch on it, and I feel like I needed to, but basically, I think Elephant 6 did help us. In a way, Elephant 6 helped all the bands, because for a few years there was some Elephant 6 band coming out every month, if not a few, so there was a ton of press around, and every review would reference every band, or at least a handful of other bands, so there were all these names getting out there, each piggybacking on each other’s release. That was really good. It was good publicity. It was easy for the label to put out the various releases, because instead of having to create a buzz for your label you already have something rolling.
Especially in terms of publicity, is it easier to sell people something that they are already familiar with, rather than sell them something that is different?
You know, you are totally right about that. It is. In a way, I think the downfall of Elephant 6 is that people start to think that they know what it is about. They don’t need to listen to every record or every band. I think that in the end, to me, Elephant 6 did help a lot of bands, but I can’t say it helped our band get any bigger than it would have because we were one of the bigger-selling bands. So, I’m not saying that to brag. I am just saying realistically, I don’t know if it helped us a lot, and it could have hurt us, but it definitely helped us creatively. The amazing thing about Elephant 6 was that there was this competition for a while where everybody wanted to out-freak-out the next band.
The end product was a lot of this noodle-some sort of psychedelia, but there were also some great songs in there. There’s nothing bad about Elephant 6. It’s a wonderful thing as a movement, but I think it worked against bands in a way because if somebody else puts out a bad record, that’s going to count against your record too in the next review. If somebody else puts out a record better than yours about the same time, then their record is going to just end up as a footnote to their review. By alway
s piling all these bands together, it didn’t give the bands a chance to show what they’re all about on their own. What’s the difference between Olivia Tremor Control and Apples in Stereo? I’m hip to Elephant 6. The bands are all really different bands. If they weren’t Elephant 6 bands, they possibly would have nothing in common besides some members, so I think in a way it took away from the individuality of a lot of bands, and I know for a fact that in the end that probably made everybody upset; if not upset, then something of a bittersweet thing for everybody because yes, there is all this press out about Elephant 6, but at the same time, we are different. I’m sure every writer in every single band felt like that. We’re different from the next band.
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