Ahead of their gig supporting Spear of Destiny in Glasgow at Oran Mor on September 5th I spoke to Chisolm from Feather Trade over the phone. We talked each member coming from different areas, working with producers and running into Skrillex amongst much more!
We began the interview by speaking about Athens where the group were formed...
CHISOLM: Each of us are from different places, we all live in Athens and I'm kind of living over here (UK) a lot more now. The band formed in Athens but our drummer is from Canada, our bassist is from Atlanta and I kinda moved around my whole life up until College years.
Do you feel you all coming from different areas has an impact upon the sound at all?
Yeah, I would say it does. I lived in Athens as a kid and loved it. In the nineties REM was huge and they were the main creative force in Athens. When my family and I moved away I kept listening to that music a lot as a way to stay connected with the town I really enjoyed living in. That kind of influenced a lot of the stuff I listened to in record stores; going through bargain bins or whenever I'd look for bands that I'd heard they had played with or offshoots like when people say "Oh if you like this band you should check out this band." That helped develop my musical taste which is widely different to say our bassist. She grew up in Atlanta where there is a big rock radio station so she grew up listening to your standard rock 'n roll. She really loves Motley Crue and bands like that. But Alex our drummer, being from Canada, his taste in the underground is gonna be different to mine or than Natalie's. Every place has a different culture and a different sense of sensibilities in what is underground and what is mainstream. One of the things he and I have in common is that I've always had a sweet tooth for certain kinds of dance and pop music and he came from a jazz/funk background. He was really into Jamiroquai and I love listening to Jamiroquai. I respect the musicianship and necessarily see them as artists, I see them as musicians because they're very technical and it's just fun to listen to. He's more technical than I am.
Anyway, I would think being from different places and having different experiences greatly effects your taste in music and your influences. I think most people who get into music are using music to make their life make sense at that point. So the music they're exposed to and they gravitate towards as shaped their life in some way.
And do you ever notice what you're listening to having a direct impact upon the development your sound?
No, I wish it did. I've always really liked Seventies soul music and Motown music and I always come back to that stuff. I would love to be able to write the way those songwriters wrote but I can't haha! I think life and emotion kind of dictates the sound. I do the primary share of the songwriting and I've always felt certain sounds have certain emotions folded into them. Most people will hear metal and think that sounds very angry. I will try and express the emotion I have based upon thoughts or a subject in sound. It's kind of like expressionist painting, you can see a lot of the intent or emotion in brushstroke. I try to never view guitar as guitar. I look at it as a noise making device, otherwise I think you just start following conventions.
And when you head into the studio with a producer, such as Matt Yelton (Pixies) who you're working with on the upcoming album, how does that relationship work and what does he bring to the table?
I think when you have a producer that you can have a good working relationship with they get to know what it is you like and what you're going for and they can extrapolate that and help summarise it musically or artistically. They are able to understand the context of what you're doing and where it's coming from but then they're able to help it make sense together. If your songwriting is the culmination of everything you've heard that's had an impact upon you, that's a lot of stuff to throw up against the wall and rearrange into something that makes sense.We will practice while we're writing but we don't really have a context of what it sounds like to other people, other than us. Someone like Matt is like an audience member that can say "Here's what you're doing and here's what you think you're doing, let's try and bridge that gap". Sometimes its good to have someone tell you that the way you sung that part isn't working and try singing it this way, and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't but it's nice to have an impartial set of ears to hear what we're doing outside of us.
We don't spend a lot of time demo-ing ourselves. I've often felt like it's better not to record your ideas as you're working on them because I prefer to forget the stuff I'm not in love with. The stuff you really love you won't forget, it'll keep coming back every day. Until something won't go away we won't record it. It's great but you can get yourself into a situation where you've become very locked into certain parts of how you've written. By the time someone records what you're doing it can be useful for them to go "This is what you're doing, is this what you think you were doing?" and sometimes it's not quite how we thought we sounded and we can have a good conversational dialogue and tweak things and mix things.
I never really understood the role of a producer, I always confused them with an engineer. I thought they record you and do a little bit of mixing and that's that. I think working with Matt is probably the first time we've worked with someone who does real production and helps you fully understand what you're going for and how to accurately perform that, not only in a live sense but how to archive that in something like a record.
And when you head into the studio with him, would you say you're very much a studio band or one who prefers being out on the stage?
I think we prefer live. Working with Matt, I've gotten a lot more comfortable in the studio and listening to my own voice and listening to the vocabulary of recording. If I could I would just play live all the time and not have to worry about recording but unfortunately that's not the way it works. We do our job in the studio but live is a lot more fun, you're interacting with people and performing and expressing something to people instead of being in a room trying to capture it. Both are abstract in their own way. I find the studio to be kinda stressful, going in and worrying am I gonna get the right takes today, can I sing this right today. There's this pressure because that's how it's gonna be forever. Having to learn getting through that has helped me enjoy working in the studio more.
And looking to live, I wanted to ask about supporting Florence and the Machine?
Haha it was our first show and they were playing a festival in Atlanta and they were on tour with a band called The Maccabees and we were just supposed to be support for them at a different show. Then in the middle of their set Flo shows up, pulls up to the venue in like a limo and walks through the crowd and gets on stage and she starts performing. It's like a Florence and the Machine thing happening in the middle of this set, the crowd is going nuts. Then she crowd surfs to the back of the room, gets to our merch table and starts throwing all of our merch into the crowd. This is our first show. They're loving it but there went all our money we'd put into the merch. It was both amazing and heartbreaking to watch. I think she's sober now but that night she was definitely partying. Then at the end of the show she just disappeared, back in the limo and gone. It was surreal.
It's weird throughout history we've been oddly connected to various bands. I remember when I was a teenager there was this band playing at a skate park, this hardcore band and the singer and I didn't get along at all. And his name was Sonny and years later he winds up being Skrillex! It was funny 'cause people kept talking about Skrillex and I was like "Man, that's just hardcore music somebody made with a synth and a drum machine" . Then I found out it was Sonny, who my band had played shows with, and I was like this totally makes sense! Just odd stuff like that. It's like a weird Forrest Gump story with our band!