Splendid: What does "Desaparecere" mean?

John Dieterich: It means, "I will disappear."

Splendid: I love that song. I noticed a lot more noises and machines on the new album. There's a drum machine on "Desaparecere", right?

John Dieterich: We are not at liberty to disclose. No, okay, there are drum machines on that, among other things.

Splendid: There are just a lot of little sounds on Milk Man, it seems. Maybe more so than on other albums. Would you agree?

John Dieterich: I wouldn't, but I can see why you think that. I'll probably totally disagree with this in 10 minutes, but what it seems to me is that on Milk Man, what's there is very much present and very obvious. It's very evident that it's there. I think on Apple O' and Reveille there's a lot of stuff that you don't necessarily notice or that isn't prominent. Part of it has to do with production. Reveille is just a bunch of different things piled on top of each other just trying to make it sound good. We were taking recordings that didn't sound very good and trying to make them into something that we liked. I think with Milk Man what you hear is a lot clearer and on the surface. There isn't this haze of layers that you have to go through in order to hear the drum machine. The drum machine's just there. Maybe it's true of Apple O' that there isn't too much of the machinery and little noises.

Splendid: So, when you were working on your masters, was it in something music related?

John Dieterich: Yeah, it was an electronic music program. But I hardly did any electronic music while I was there. I didn't really know what I was doing when I was there. I was just kind of floundering about. I met lots of people who have become really good friends and who I still play music with.

Splendid: So you grew up in Minneapolis and went to San Francisco for school?

John Dieterich: Well, Mills College is in Oakland. And I'm originally from Wisconsin. I lived in Minneapolis for five years but I grew up in central Wisconsin.

Splendid: Chris and John, is your other band the Natural Dreamers still active?

Chris Cohen: Yeah, we're working on another album right now. I also had a band called The Curtains and that band led to my joining Deerhoof, in a way. John went on a trip for two months and our other guitar player of The Curtains left, and I knew Greg and Satomi would be bored and they wouldn't have any band stuff to do, so I got them to join The Curtains. They were in The Curtains before I was in Deerhoof. Then Satomi left The Curtains and Greg kept doing it and I started playing with Deerhoof when John got back. I joined Deerhoof first as the keyboard player. A lot of what I did was kind of like Kelly. I learned some of her parts and stuff. A lot of times we used the keyboard to double Satomi's vocals.

Splendid: That was the very first aspect of Deerhoof's sound that struck me.

Chris Cohen: The vocal doubling?

Splendid: Yeah, it reminded me of The Shaggs and how they would often play the melody that they were singing note for note on the guitar in unison with the vocal.

Chris Cohen: Yeah. The weird thing with The Shaggs, though, is that their melodies seem to be in a different scale than the guitars. They don't exactly double them; they sort of follow them. They always sound like the vocals are in a completely different scale. We do it for completely different reasons; when they do it, I always think about how they're sisters and stuff and it's like their voices naturally just kind of lock together. With ours it's because Satomi sings really quietly and sometimes we use other instruments just to make the melody louder. It's also because we like the way that sounds.

Splendid: It's a cool sound.

Chris Cohen: You like that? Because some people say that it's kind of cheating or something.

Splendid: I don't hear it as much on the newer stuff.

Chris Cohen: Yeah, on Milk Man we used the keyboards more for stacking up realistic chords and stuff. We didn't play the tracks on Milk Man live together, so there wasn't as much of a need to bolster Satomi's vocal melodies because we could just record them as loud and perfect as we wanted to. For Apple O', we didn't record the vocals with all the instruments but it was arrangements we were using live, whereas in Milk Man we actually did the arrangements for the album and then when we do the songs live, they're different arrangements that we do specifically for the live shows.

Splendid: I missed you guys on tour this time. Do you have to compensate for Satomi's soft voice when you play the new songs live?

Chris Cohen: We just have to be really careful. Satomi can sing really loud, and she does on some songs, but there are certain songs where the idea is this impossible mixture of loud guitars and drums and quiet singing. There are a few songs that are like that, and they're really hard to do live, but we've managed to work it out. It's hard to keep instruments quiet, because there's this urge to play loud. We're always trying to play as soft as possible. Greg is a kind of a loud drummer. He can be extremely loud, but he can also be the quietest drummer. But sometimes when he gets really loud, the guitars get cranked up.

Splendid: So, how do you deal with the hard songs when you're touring?

Chris Cohen: The hardest ones to deal with are the ones that we don't do anymore. We do a few that are difficult. Sometimes the vocals are the most important part. The song "Milk Man" is kind of like that. We've figured out how to do it as well as we can.

Splendid: Do you tune your guitar strangely?

Chris Cohen: Me and John both tune regular. John sometimes used to do some funny things. Nothing really weird, he might just drop his lower E down to a D. We just try to come up with very particular chord voicings that will sound as good as possible in combination with each other. Sometimes we just play straight barre chords, too, but since we have two guitars it's fun to try to spread that out as much as possible and cover as many notes as we can. A lot of the Milk Man songs have chords that have a lot of notes in them and we try to cover as many of them as we can on guitars. Often we're playing really different things. People often say that John and I are like twins and we always play in unison. We do, sometimes, but it seems like people have this misconception of us being twins. We both have brown hair. Sometimes, especially in other countries, people will be looking at one of us and then that one will go away and the other one will come back and they'll think we're the same person. And it kind of frustrates me because Greg and Satomi look really different from each other and John and I look kind of similar and we're both playing guitar on opposite sides of the stage, and people seem to think we're twins because of that. I want to say for the record that we are not twins and we don't really play guitar like each other at all.

Splendid: Your guitars are very tightly intertwined, though. Do the two of you ever come up with stuff together and present it to the band?

Chris Cohen: There have been pieces of things. For a while we were doing this song where we had a jam part and John and I stuck in a section from a Natural Dreamers song. I think it's a really good idea that we've haven't really tried very much. Greg and Satomi kind of do that, but John and I do it less often. Satomi and I have maybe done that more than anyone else. I'll write something and then she'll not just write a melody over it but we'll sort of collaborate on it.

Splendid: Are any of the songs on Milk Man like that?

Chris Cohen: No, but a few on Apple O' are like that. "Panda" is kind of like that. And "Forbidden Fruit". John and I will have to try making stuff up together for the next album.

Splendid: You guys just sound really tight.

Chris Cohen: Hopefully the whole band sounds tight. Well, you know, Natural Dreamers is me and John really digging into songs together and those songs are maybe the most collaborative things I've ever done with anybody. I don't know how Deerhoof works. Songs have been written on the spot, like, somebody will just play something at practice and another person will be like "Oh, what was that?" And somebody will make something over that. Those things happen occasionally. We don't rule anything out that could result in a good song.

Splendid: You just got back from another tour, right?

Greg Saunier: We got back about a week ago. It was similar to that one, a US tour. We didn't come to Cincinnati, but we played at Oberlin.

Splendid: Did you see any old classmates?

Greg Saunier: I hope not, because that would mean they hadn't graduated in 15 years or something. I didn't see anyone that I knew. A professor of mine was going to come, but somehow schedule-wise it didn't work out. And of course the next day he said a bunch of his students went and were raving about it and he said he felt really bad he didn't go.

Splendid: What was he your professor of?

Greg Saunier: Of Music Composition. Which is what I studied while I was there and have since made a mockery of in subsequent years. (Laughs) Oh, that's not true; he taught me everything I know!

Splendid: Do you really feel like you refer to your music education consciously when you're writing songs?

Greg Saunier: No, not consciously, because it's not like my music education started when I went to music school and ended when I left music school. Everybody's music education continues any time they listen to music or think about music or hear sounds or do anything at all. I could go to the movies and feel like I'm getting a music education. Even if it's something visual, it might give you ideas or you might realize that they seem to have solved some problem that's been on your mind lately, even if it's not the same art form. Somebody like Satomi, she'd never had any quote un-quote music education, but a lot of times I feel like I've learned just as much from her as I ever did when I was in college studying music. She's gotten a lot of music education since being in the band, even though at no time was she ever going to school for it.

Splendid: How about you, Chris -- where did you learn to play?

Chris Cohen: I've been playing pretty much all my life. Ever since I could. When I was eight my friend and I had a band in our minds that we talked about and drew pictures of and made the album covers for. We didn't actually play together -- my friend didn't even play an instrument -- but I guess I've always wanted to be in a band. I've always wanted to do music. And, at the base of it, everyone in the band is self-taught. The drums were my first instrument. I had a drum teacher one summer who taught me how to hold my sticks and taught me this lesson about how you should always warm up. He told me this horror story about Max Weinberg, you know, from the Conan O'Brien Show and the E Street band. One show he didn't warm up and he broke his hand. His veins popped out of his arm or something. Some horrible ligament just snapped. So I learned to always warm up. I had a few drum lessons here and there from different teachers, and the same goes for guitar. I really just started self-taught. And Satomi is the most self-taught of all of us. She just picked up bass and decided to play it. That's pretty much how most people do it these days.

Splendid: How about you, John?

John Dieterich: I started probably around 11 or 12. My brother wanted to start to play and on the same day my parents took us to a music store that rented and he rented a bass and I rented a guitar. And we're both now lifetime musicians. That was when I started and I never wanted to play in bands. I was too shy. It was more like playing at my house. I would just lie in bed and play guitar to help me go to sleep. And then my Grandpa gave me a guitar and one night when I went to bed I was playing it and I lay it on the ground and I rolled over and smashed it in the middle of the night and gashed my back open. That was my first acoustic guitar.

Splendid: I read on the timeline on your web site that Satomi joined the band a week after she got to San Francisco.

Greg Saunier: That's actually true.

Splendid: How did that happen?

Greg Saunier: Rob and I were playing as a duo. We played really loud, which I guess doesn't necessarily mean anything because on a guitar or a bass you just turn up knob a little more or you buy a new amplifier or something. But what I mean is we played with a lot of physical exertion. We just kind of tried to make our music as expressive as we could even though it was just bass and drums, which you don't normally think of as being very expressive instruments. We were just trying to make our instruments sing, in a way. It meant playing with really wide dynamics and a lot of speeding up and slowing down and just sort of adding a lot of ornamentation to the way we were playing with these sort of tumbling drum fills or feedback on the bass and stuff. Anyways, my point is, our singing at that time was sort of suffering because we were so busy freaking out on our instruments that we could hardly hold a tune. So we decided we needed to get a singer in the band, and we told a friend of ours who was in another SF band called Caroliner and it was only a week or two later that Satomi moved from Tokyo to SF. She was going to City College here to study film. She had become friends with Caroliner when they were on tour in Japan. She went to see their show and really loved it and talked with them and ended up going to a bunch of their other shows. After a while, she was meeting them outside of their shows and helping them make some of their props. They have a whole lot of props at their show and costumes and things which I guess they didn't bring it all to Japan for the tour so they ended up kind of making new stuff from scratch when they arrived there. And she just instantly hit if off with those guys and was helping them out and that basically changed her mind from moving to England to moving to SF because that's where they were located and she thought, "Well I'm going there, these guys are great." When she moved she was staying with one of the members of the band whom we had just told "Hey, we're looking for a singer," so he pulls out our first single. This was in '95 or something, we'd been going for about a year, and he played it for her asked if she liked it and she was like, "Yeah, it's okay," and he said, "Well they're looking for a singer, you wanna join?" So he calls us up a minute later and says, "I got somebody for you to sing," and we said, "okay, send her on over." And maybe the next day or something she came over for practice.

Rob and I lived together and we practiced in our kitchen. We weren't renting a rehearsal space at the time; it's just really expensive in SF, so we were doing this really weird super turned-down practice in our kitchen where I was playing the drums with chopsticks and he was playing through this tiny practice amp. It was an experiment. We were still busy trying to be as heavy as we could be, but without any actual volume. So, it was really bizarre. Satomi came over and we just probably seemed like total weirdos, completely freaking out on our instruments with hardly any sound coming out at all, and we're just like, "okay, sing something, follow along." And it was incredible. Within seconds it was just obvious that it was absolutely perfect. We got along with her really well and she wasn't taken aback by what we were doing at all she just instantly thought it was good and she kind of just fit in right away and it was better than we ever could've hoped for. While we were busy playing our instruments in this exaggerated style, the way she chose to sing along with it was the opposite. So, whereas a lot of times the vocals are the most expressive part in a group, she chose to sing in a way that was almost completely inexpressive. She sang in this really plain way. While we were playing in a very vocal way on our instruments, she was singing in an almost instrumental way. Not only did she join the band about a week after coming to America, but a week after that, Deerhoof went on their first tour and so she was on tour with us about a week after she joined. She hardly knew the songs at all. And we were on tour opening for Caroliner.

We did a West Coast tour so it was really great how the whole story worked out. I guess it just clicked really well and really fast. It wasn't until we were on that tour that we discovered that Satomi had never done any music at all in her entire life; she had never been in a band and never had any musical experience at all, so we thought that was really funny. Of course, since then she's learned to play guitar, bass, keyboards and drums. On this last tour she played bass on most of the songs but she plays drums on certain songs and then she does just vocals and dancing on a few of the songs, too. It's great. She wasn't the kind of person who had these big musical ambitions in her life when she joined the band, which was completely the opposite of me and Rob because our whole lives were music, or maybe art and music, and we were just obsessed with it and wanted to take it as far as it could go. And she just had this very different attitude about it which was, "Music? Sure, that sounds fun!" and it just made a really nice balance. And actually Chris and John are kind of, again, a little more like me, where they've had an obsession with music for many years and they're pretty hard-core about it. I just feel like Satomi's approach to it compliments the rest of us in a nice way. It just works out well for us and it makes it stay fun. We end up pushing her to try things in music that she never would have tried if she hadn't been in this band, and she causes us to hear what we're doing from a different point of view than we would have had if she hadn't joined the band.

Splendid: I've thought that very same thing about Satomi's vocals being instrumental or percussive and the drums being sort of melodic. And the guitars are quite percussive at times. It's as if the roles are reversed.

Greg Saunier: It's funny, because if you think about traditional rock music it feels like we've switched roles, but at the same times that's sort of naturally how we tend to play, We don't really feel like we're switching, it just comes out like that.

Splendid: I know who plays bass, guitars and drums in the band, but who plays all the keyboards and piano stuff on Milk Man?

Chris Cohen: I did a little bit. In December we went to Europe and we brought this keyboard with us, but we lost the power adapters and then we had to use batteries, and then the batteries kept falling out and, just in general, the switching instruments kind of slowed us down so we ditched the keyboards for the live show.

Greg Saunier: The show just gets too plodding if we have too many instrument changes.

Chris Cohen: On recordings, pretty much any of us will play anything at any given time. Greg played a lot of the keyboards on Milk Man. I played some keyboards on the EP we're working on right now. I still play keyboards and drums. And Satomi plays drums at the shows on a couple songs right now. Everybody does everything. The first time I saw Deerhoof, John played drums and Greg had his leg in a cast and he played guitar while on crutches.

Greg Saunier: Right, it's true. That was right around the time John joined, I had gotten hit by a car here in SF and it broke my right leg, which I play the bass drum with, so we were having a little bit of a hard time playing shows for a little while. I was having to play drums with my left leg, having to teach it to do things I usually do with my right leg, and then sometimes John took over on drums and gave me a break. I remember that, that's when I met Chris.

Splendid: So you're all multi-instrumentalists.

Chris Cohen: It always seems to me the best drummers are the people who used to play guitar or the best guitarists are the ones that used to be drummers. When I used to actually practice all those things, like I don't practice drums anymore at all, I used to switch back and forth. If I felt bored with guitar I would start to play drums, and then once I started playing drums again I would feel like I had all these new ideas for guitar. To achieve any type of musical effect on any instrument is really vague. A lot of people think of one instrument as having one function and they just get so burnt out. I just wonder how they could go on thinking of a guitar only as something you strum, you know? To me it seems like that's the wrong way to think about it.

Splendid: John, do you find that knowing several instruments is helpful?

John Dieterich: I love it. It's very difficult, since I've playing guitar for so long, to find new ways of approaching it. I've gone through lots of periods where I'm sort of dealing with all my influences and trying to figure out who I am in the midst of all of it. I feel like when you switch to a different instrument, one that you're not necessarily comfortable with, it allows you to write from a different perspective, and in a way that isn't tied to all this baggage. I played piano for a couple years when I was very young, but I only remember one song from that entire time. So for me to try to write on the keyboard is really fun because I just think about things differently. I'm not used to my hands being on the instrument so everything feels just as strange as everything else. Whereas on the guitar, certain things just feel comfortable. When people sit down with their instruments, there are certain things that they do, even subconsciously, that are the first things that they do every time they sit down with that instrument. I don't really have that habit with keyboard or anything else besides guitar.

Splendid: I understand. I feel the same way about piano, since it's much newer to me than guitar. What kinds of precedent has been set for the sort of "instrumental role-reversal" that Deerhoof employs?

Chris Cohen: I heard this album once by this gentleman Milford Graves and he is really into tuning his drums and he had basically tuned his entire drum set to very pitched sounds. I had never heard a solo drum record that I could just listen to straight through like that. It had so much melody. He did sing, though, too. I always thought that was a great achievement. I feel like I see a lot of things like that. I saw this guy Ches Smith who has a band called Good for Cows and he plays in a lot of session-type things. He played with Tom Waits and Mr. Bungle. I saw him do this solo percussion show where he played a classical percussion piece, then he did some original pieces that he wrote and it was total music; it didn't leave me wanting anything. It was totally satisfying music because he was thinking that he could do melody on the drums and each thing had to act like multiple purposes. It was really inspiring. And he has this other band that's a duet with his bass player and both of them treat their instruments like that. They have this variety of roles that they could play at any given time and either that or they accomplish a lot more than you would think with just drums and bass; everything you would expect from music and it's just two guys with drums and bass. It's really neat. So I imagine the more people you add together who are doing something like that, it could be incredible if everybody had that kind of attitude.

Splendid: You'd have Deerhoof.

Chris Cohen: (Laughs) Well, I don't know. Maybe. I don't want to say this like a prediction or a generalization, but I do think that those bands that are the real hard-core collaborations are also the most work and the most volatile at times. I'm not an authority, but I've sometimes wondered why everything that we do together takes four times as long, but then, it seems to be four times as good, too. It's hard to do that all the time. And sometimes people want to do things alone, and it adds a lot to not rule that out because that way you have a nice variety between from song to song. I feel like we have this way of working together that I really know the ins and outs of. I understand what we all want and how we play together. But when I go see other bands, I wonder, how do these people react to each other? Recently I've found myself in a couple of situations by mistake, talking to other people about their bands and making assumptions that other bands work the way I do. If I saw a band and one person was totally inaudible at their show, and, obviously, that happens to us, too. But sometimes there are bands that make me think, "How do they talk to each other?" And I realize that there are some bands where people are afraid to tell people what they think. In fact I've been in bands like that when I was younger. There are some bands that are afraid to tell each other what they think about each other. I've maybe rudely assumed that every band was like ours where people tell each other everything that they think. I've sort of insulted people and they say "We don't tell each other what to do." And in Deerhoof everybody tells each other not what to do, we don't boss each other around, but everybody tells each other what they think. Like if one person thinks, "This would sound better if you did it this way," we will tell each other that. And sometimes there's tension because of it, but not very often. Most often it's totally pleasant. Everybody in the band feels that that's important. I don't know if that's really common.

A lot of bands are like that, I assume. But, when I was younger, I did play in bands where people didn't want to communicate with each other and I always felt I didn't know what we were doing. If I don't know what the other person in the band's idea of how this music is supposed to sound is, then all I have to go on is my own idea, and we might, by mistake, have totally conflicting, separate ideas. And it's like, "How do we even know if I'm supposed to be in a band with this person?" I feel like I was in so many bands when I was younger where I'm not even sure we belonged in a band together, and ultimately we didn't. We parted ways. But with Deerhoof I feel like I belong in a band with these people because there's just a willingness. I'm willing to try whatever their version is because I believe in all three other members' ideas at least enough to try them. With a lot of other bands I've been in, I don't think we were sure of what the other members' ideas were and it turned out in the end we had totally different ideas. So, no wonder we stopped each other from achieving the greatest thing we could have achieved. I'm glad I'm in a band with people who are at least telling me what their vision of this music is. We're all more than happy to accommodate or reach some kind of consensus.

Splendid: I read that Deerhoof as a collective is very interested in the music of Anthony Braxton.

Chris Cohen: I know John really likes Anthony Braxton. I wonder what Greg and Satomi think. I don't think I've ever really talked about him with them. I know they went to a show of his, so they probably like him. Anthony Braxton...do you know who he is?

Splendid: No, but I want to.

Chris Cohen: He was a guy who did free jazz stuff in the '60s. He's this incredibly ambitious composer, he got into classical music and he has a really great way of talking about music, too, he's very enthusiastic. Actually, I think probably a couple of us have read this great book of interviews with him and he's just a total over-achiever; extremely ambitious, amazing person. But there are other people out there like that, too. I feel just as inspired by everybody I know. Especially the people in Deerhoof, I feel just as inspired by them as I do by Anthony Braxton. Probably more, actually. I don't actually listen to Anthony Braxton any more and every day I'm learning things from the guys in my band. I would say that John, Greg and Satomi are bigger influences on me than Anthony Braxton.

Splendid: Deerhoof's sound is so unusual and eclectic. It's amazing to me that four people are able to come together and all operate on the same wavelength. I guess what I'm saying is, I think it would be rare to find one person who had Deerhoof-type music swelling up inside of them, and the fact that all four of you do astounds me.

Greg Saunier: Everybody in the band kind of has a different point of view. Everybody has different musical taste and history, just like any band, really. We kind of end up getting a lot out of that because everybody has their own take on things and their own strengths. We disagree on music a lot. It ends up sort of helping in the end. One person will do one thing; have an idea, but it ends up taking a lot of effort before all four of us are satisfied with something so we end up having to revise stuff a lot. Everybody has to approve everything we do, so it can make it really slow, but it's also really nice just using consensus on everything. It's not like one person's deciding for everyone else whether something's good or not or whether it's finished or what songs we should play tonight or whatever. Everybody has to be in on it, I guess.

Splendid: So, you all have very different tastes in music?

Greg Saunier: It's not like there's nothing we agree on, but sometimes it can feel that way when we're traveling in the car and can't find something to listen to. A lot of times we'll be working on a recording and three people will listen to it and just be so sure that it's perfect and we just know that it's hot stuff and we've nailed it, and then the fourth person will come in and hear it and say, "What's this? This doesn't sound good at all," or, "I like it except for this one part," and that part was the part we were most proud of. So we end up pushing ourselves a little harder in order to be able to all agree on things. But one thing that's nice is it's not like we have four musical tastes meaning Satomi only likes Middle Eastern music and John only likes heavy metal and Chris only likes Jazz. Everybody has really wide taste. All four of us listen to what seems like all kinds of music. It's not a question of style; it's more a question of the four of us seeming to get different things out of music. Where one person might really notice where the playing is really good, the guitar parts, another person might notice whether it makes good background music. Another might notice whether the song is memorable or if it's difficult or easy to dance to or whether it gets boring. That's one of the neat things about music; there are so many uses for it, so many ways it can be appreciated. We always want to at least try to make music that could be used in a bunch of those different ways successfully.

Splendid: Where do Deerhoof songs come from? Improv?

Chris Cohen: I wouldn't say never ever, but that's almost the least likely way we get our songs written. They come from walking around and just making up songs in your head or music in dreams. A lot of times Greg dreams up music and he writes it down when he wakes up. Satomi makes up her songs in her head just walking around. John, I think, makes up a lot of his songs on guitar. He writes constantly, all day long. He has a lot of little scraps and stuff. He works a little differently than Greg. He has a lot of ideas that are more specific to guitar. But he plays keyboards, too. He has this broken organ in his living room that, if you press more than one key at once, makes this weird (he makes a noise). And he makes up what sound to me like jingles or something like that. Personally, I have a window in the house I like to look out of and that helps me write songs.

Splendid: If you all come up with songs individually, how do you share them?

Chris Cohen: When we're at practice, Greg will pick up a guitar. He usually has to figure it out on an instrument because he just has the tune in his head. Sometimes we just throw all our ideas into a big pot. We arrange them together. A lot of it is really trial and error. We play a song a million times in practice and we come up with a structure that sounds like it's going to work, that we all like. We play it at some shows and then we realize it's not working at all. We cut sections out. We shorten things and change them. I mean, there are songs that we've been playing for years and they're still being written and revised, even though they've already come out on albums. They're being revised at shows more than practice just because we've been playing so much. Satomi will come up with a melody and sometimes a guitar riff and she'll sing it and Greg will write it down and flesh it out with chords. Sometimes one of us will come up with all the parts and show them to people and that'll be it. Or they'll get changed later. Sometimes a person only has the idea for his or her specific part in mind. Basically, every song is completely different. Our sound is not any one person's sound. It's a combination of all four of us. I think each of us does have an individual sound, but I'd be hard pressed to say what each person's individual sound is. I guess the idea of us four playing together is that it wouldn't be the same. Hopefully we're more than the sum of our parts or we're doing something that none of us would individually have thought of or have been able to do. That's why we're a band. All of us do music on our own as well, and not that we don't think it's not as good or something like that, but the music we do on our own just is not Deerhoof music. Some Deerhoof songs, even on albums, are basically the work of one person originally and then the four of us nit-pick it, but a lot of things are the work of one person. I guess Deerhoof can be the sum of the four of us, or any combination of the four of us, or any one of us alone. I guess there are no rules, basically. So, just scratch everything I said before. It can be a complete collaboration. To me, that's the most fun part. I think that's probably what our next album is going to be more like -- every song will be more of a collaboration. But it can run the gamut from total collaboration to when you see us live, what you're seeing is more of a melding of us. But we've used lots of things that were just one person's thing, too.

Splendid: So, John, you use your instrument to make up songs rather than having them come to you and figuring them out later?

John Dieterich: Yeah, coming up with basic ideas, I usually do it on an instrument. For example, if I come up with a song on guitar and I'm working over it in my mind I might record it on my cassette Walkman and listen to it when I go to bed at night; that's when I try to think about what the melody would be on top of these chords. It's hard for me to think about things integrated from the very beginning, imagining every instrument at the same time. It doesn't come to me like that usually. It sometimes does, but it's very rare. It's just this process of starting from something and then building on it and imagining what it needs still, like maybe it needs another chord or maybe it doesn't need that chord.

Splendid: What's your way of sharing what you've made up with the band?

John Dieterich: Nervously. At that exact moment, no matter how long I've played music, it's still a very scary moment, sharing that with people. It's funny. Today's my birthday and my roommate had come up with this song they wanted to play for my birthday. That moment of sharing your music with someone for the first time is scary and shows how vulnerable you are. It's always a bit of a challenge, but I'm probably getting incrementally better. Maybe by the time I'm 80 I'll be somewhat comfortable with it.

Splendid: How does it work logistically when you share? You just play what you have for the others?

John Dieterich: It really is different for every song. Sometimes I might have a melody idea and a few sections and not really know how it should be put together, and present it as it is currently structured and ask what the other guys can imagine on top of it, or can they think of a bassline for it, or can they think of a melody?

Splendid: Greg, what's your take on communication between band members and how songs are born?

Greg Saunier: Communicating ideas to each other is always kind of a pain to experience, at least for everybody but Satomi. It doesn't always happen this way, but nine times out of ten Satomi's the one who's going to be singing the song, so if we have an idea for a song, the rest of us have to sit there and sing it and maybe we don't consider ourselves to be as good of singers as we think Satomi is. So it's always a little embarrassing to be like "Well, here's my song: wah wah wah" (makes high pitched noises and laughs), singing in this high voice or whatever. But everybody in the band writes songs, all four of us. That's one of the things I really enjoy about the band, and it makes it so that you never know what's coming. Everybody has ideas and everybody is trying new things on their own or going off in their own direction. I would say at least so far, that's the way songs tend to get born -- starting with an idea from one of the four of us, as opposed to, say, getting together and just playing around until we come up with something we all like.

It seems like that part of it seems to happen at home individually. But even that is not a rule. That's more just because sometimes we feel like we don't have enough time to practice. I'm sure if we had more practice time we might make up more songs in that way. And actually, that's something we're hoping to do the next time that we record or come up with a new batch of songs -- we'll probably think about trying to do it more that way, like try to make up some of the music together. Beyond that, every song seems to have been born in a totally different way. Sometimes it's not so much that making up a song is hard, it's that noticing that you did make up a song is hard. It's hard to notice. Examples would be like, I'm sitting around with Satomi and she just starts humming something or she points to something she sees and sings a funny little song. On one hand, I'm momentarily amused or we think it's funny or it's in the middle of another conversation we're having. Sometimes the hard part for me is noticing. It's hard to say, "Wait a second! We could actually use that. That's a good song you just made up," and to bother to write it down or find a way to remember it so that we can use it later. Another example would be, sometimes I have music dreams and I might dream that I'm playing in the Rolling Stones. That's sort of a recurring one for me, since they're old heroes or whatever (laughs). So, it's the kind of thing where, in the story of the dream you're playing a Rolling Stones song. But then at some point if you start to wake up a little bit some part of me realizes wait, this isn't a Rolling Stones song; in the dream it is, but in reality it's something that I'm making up right now without even realizing it. Sometimes that's the hardest thing -- just noticing. It's not being creative, it's just respecting the creativity enough to use it or just realizing it's happening, you know, becoming conscious of what might be happening unconsciously.

Splendid: I totally understand.

Greg Saunier: I'm glad you do.

Splendid: I dream songs, too! I dreamt I saw the Rolling Stones and they were playing songs that weren't really Rolling Stones songs. I've even dreamt entire musicals and woken up to remember just one scrap of one number.

Greg Saunier: I have to say that quite a few Deerhoof songs have been written in exactly that way. And it's funny to even use the word written when it's something like that. When you think about like that, "I dreamed this song," or "I dreamed this musical", can you really say you wrote it? It's not like you sat down and said, "Okay, I'm gonna write a song now, and I expect to get paid this much royalties later and I want credit." No, it just came out of nowhere and you couldn't predict that you were gonna write it. I think that's really neat. I'm intrigued to hear you've had that experience too. It's not like I've never made up songs when I was awake, too, purposely trying, but I just think it's interesting those two different ways of getting a song. Those two ways can result in songs turning out really different from each other. You might come up with something in a dream that would be very different from what you would purposely come up with when you were actually trying to write a song when you were awake. I think that's neat. I guess we're always trying to go for a range -- to get as many kinds of ideas as we can, rather than trying to focus on one kind of style or one kind of sound. Of course, another way to write songs is to sit down with an instrument. That's a very common way to write songs that I haven't even mentioned. I might do that, too. But if you're writing a song at the guitar or at the piano chances are it's gonna be really different from something you might hear in a dream. Because when you're sitting down with an instrument your fingers have a lot to do with what ends up coming out, and when it's in a dream it's purely mental and the fingers aren't falling anywhere that might be influencing where the song is going.

Splendid: I know what you mean. Satomi studied film, right? I studied film, too, and sometimes I'll get a musical idea from a bit of editing or sound effects or something and it's so different from picking a song out on guitar. The results are so different.

Greg Saunier: That's really funny. It seems like you definitely understand what I'm getting at. I was just flipping around channels last night and I came upon Butch Cassidy or something, and there was this part where there was a chase happening on horses and they had a really ironic music choice going along with this chase scene. It sounded like a light, sort of like the Swingle Singers, jazzy vocals sort of scatting or something. Almost like easy listening, but up-tempo. Very light and funny and amusing and really incongruous with the visual that was going on and I just thought that added so much. And then, in addition to the shot to shot editing, they did some things with the music; they actually started editing the music. Like, the song stopped at one point and then there were these gunshots and then the song started again and then so they started riding again the other direction, away from the gunshots. And so, they made a kind of a new song out of the song between the original song and the sound effects of the movie. That's just one example I thought was cool.

Splendid: That is cool. Music is everywhere if you just tune into it.

Greg Saunier: Yeah, exactly. I couldn't put it better, that sums up exactly how we work, if you're asking about the birth of a song. There's no shortage of music ideas being born, it's just a question of finding them or noticing them or giving them the time of day enough to say, "okay, you qualify as a music idea that I want to try."

Splendid: That makes me think of something I learned in a music class, about John Cage and his piece called "4'33"".

Greg Saunier: "Four minutes 33 seconds." Absolute silence. That's a real notorious, kind of scandalous thing. In a way it does say a lot. That's an example, too. In his case I don't know that he was thinking of four minutes and 33 seconds as being an opportunity to listen to sounds in your mind or in your imagination, but rather to notice the fact that sounds are actually already happening all the time, just in your environment. There's another story where he was like, "Okay, I'm gonna put myself in a situation where there doesn't happen. I'm going to go into anechoic chambers where no sounds get inside; completely sealed off." Lo and behold, he still heard a couple sounds. One was this sort of high, whining sound and the other one was this low, rumbling sound. He went and asked the person who worked there what those sounds were, and she said "The high sound was your nervous system and the low sound was your blood circulating." So there's no such thing as silence. In any situation, there's always gonna be sound. I've noticed a lot that in dreams, if sounds are happening outside or in the room, a lot of times those sounds will affect what's happening in the dream -- you can actually hear the sounds in the dream, but in the dream you turn it into something. I think that happens a lot. I think that even non-musical sounds that are happening in your environment can influence the birth of a song.

Splendid: The other night I fell asleep list to Milk Man and had a weird nightmare.

Greg Saunier: That's so crazy. I've never talked about this. It's really strange how many different people over the years, since we first started the band, have told me that Deerhoof's music has given them nightmares. That's happened so many times. And of course with Milk Man that's sort of what the record is about. It's about when you go to sleep and certain dreams might come to you and some of them might have a nightmarish quality but then at the same time they might have this tantalizing quality. Who is it that visits you when you're dreaming? That's actually what it's about. We felt like dreams were such a big element of how we'd been coming up with our music for so long, we felt it would be neat to make an album where dreams were the topic. That's kind of what Milk Man is about so it's really funny to hear that you're falling asleep to it and it might be having some influence, that's really cool.

Splendid: Yeah, listening to Milk Man I had this crazy dream about clear gummy fish sucking my blood and multiplying rapidly, but they all eventually turned into iguanas, and, once they were iguanas, they were harmless.

Greg Saunier: But when they were gummy fish they were dangerous? That's amazing. Well, you should put this up in the story.

Splendid: Maybe I'll write a song about it.

Greg Saunier: It's so crazy because you never really know what you're going to dream, you can't predict it, but at the same time it seems like you can sort of influence it, even though you can't exactly control it. Everybody knows that if you do one thing all day, especially if it's something new, like if you go skiing or hiking for the first time, then a lot of times when you go to sleep that night you'll be imagining yourself doing that. Or if you play cards for three hours before you go to sleep, then when you lay down and close your eyes, then you're going to see nothing but cards. Sometimes it definitely seems like the same can happen with music. I especially find that when I listen to music that I've never heard before, music that's really new to me, and then close my eyes or drift off, I'll hear almost that same music in my head, but it's never right because I'm not familiar enough with it. I don't really have any of the music memorized yet. It doesn't work as well for some reason with music that I know very well. But when I don't know exactly how a song goes but have something like it swimming around in my mind, I'll start getting ideas for things. On the one hand I'm hearing a bunch of music that's similar to the music that I just heard, but if I stop and think for a second, I realize that while in my mind this does sound like the music that I heard, it's not actually the same music. My mind is actually making up this melody that's happening right now. It was not on that record I just listened to, even though it might kind of sound like it. And once we try to do that melody in our band, it's totally different; it doesn't connect at all and nobody would ever know what it was inspired by.

Splendid: Sure, it mutates.

Greg Saunier: Yeah, it mutates and it combines with whatever is in your mind.

Splendid: The music that I cannot remember correctly the first time I hear it always ends up becoming my favorite music.

Greg Saunier: For me, somebody who's wanting to write music a lot, I find that to be so useful, just hearing unfamiliar music. Because I can't remember it quite right, it causes me to be creative. I start getting ideas. I've used that trick many times.

Splendid: I was thinking about how your music often tells a story and frequently incorporates fantastical and horrific elements, and I thought I was brilliant for making this sort of obscure connection between Deerhoof and prog rock. Then, of course, I read a bunch of articles on the Internet that all made that same comparison. In one interview I read, Chris said he's not into prog at all. I was wondering if anyone in the band was.

Greg Saunier: I don't know that anybody in the band actually is. Not specifically. As far as prog rock goes, I only know the real biggies like Yes, and whatever hits were on the radio. Personally, I like it fine. I don't consider myself a proggy person, but I liked "Roundabout" and "Owner of a Lonely Heart" and all those songs. But I think what might be going on is that those guys in Yes listened to a lot of classical music. One of the reasons that that type of music ended up getting called prog was that it had a classical influence to it or it took some ideas from the way classical music is put together, or the instrumentation of a classical piece. I think maybe in Deerhoof we might listen to some of the same classical music that Yes listened to. That's just a guess because I don't know what they listened to, but it just sort of seems that way. I think it's less a question of us actually listening to prog rock that it's an issue of us listening to what prog rockers listened to.

Splendid: I definitely hear classical and jazz and all kinds of influences in Deerhoof.

Greg Saunier: And it just goes back to what I was saying. If you do listen to classical or jazz music, it's inevitable that your ideas might connect to it somehow.

Splendid: John, were you ever interested in prog?

John Dieterich: It depends on your definition of prog rock. What were you thinking of specifically?

Splendid: The whole story behind Milk Man and the fantastical characters. And some of the keyboard riffs made me think of that Genesis album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

John Dieterich: I've actually never heard that album. I kind of know the mood that you're talking about. I can definitely understand how you could feel that. But we weren't going for a prog feel. What we're doing feels more personal.

Splendid: More personal in what way?

John Dieterich: I don't know that Genesis album, like I said, but I feel like certain "fantasy" imagery has become associated with certain sub-genres of progressive rock, that to me isn't that interesting because you can immediately see the cover and have an idea of what it's about. I mean, really it doesn't bother me that you would think of progressive rock. I certainly grew up listening to King Crimson.

Splendid: When I was 14 my brother told me to listen to Lamb Lies Down every day twice a day, but I'm not a prog rocker, per se, either. I just feel like there's one tiny element of prog in there.

John Dieterich: Well, I'm sure that's true to a certain degree. It's not like we've been hiding away listening to that Genesis album.

Splendid: Yeah, I just wondered if anyone in the band was really into that as a kid.

John Dieterich: I don't know exactly what those guys used to listened to. I went through a period where I listened to a lot of King Crimson. I went through a proto-metal period. I mean, is King Crimson proto-metal? I don't even know what that means.

Greg Saunier: I've got a good friend in a band called Fat Worm of Error, an incredible band. His name is Chris Cooper and he used to be in Deerhoof. Anyway, every time I see him he tells me, "Okay, you have to listen to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway; early Genesis is where it's at." And his band sounds nothing even remotely like early Genesis. But every time I see him he says, "What you guys really sound like is..." or "What you should listen to is..." or, "Hey, have you heard..."

Splendid: Well I don't think you guys really sound like that, but like I said, it's the fantastical story and the fact that you've sort of created a concept album around that.

Greg Saunier: I think a lot of the fantasy stuff, most of that comes from Satomi, and I think of the four people who are not particularly into prog rock, she's probably the very least into it. She actually has a strong dislike for a lot of the prog rock that she's heard. She's not into it at all. I think where she gets her fantasy stuff is more from TV or movies or things that she grew up with in Japan. Animation and things. Something she really likes is this movie My Neighbor Totoro, an animated film by Miyazaki. Spirited Away was his most recent one in America. That's just an example of something that she's super into. And I look at the ideas and stories and lyrics that Satomi came up with for Milk Man and it doesn't make me think of early Genesis, it makes me think of Totoro. I think she got her ideas from that more than anything. Because Totoro is this character who is imaginary but he does end up infiltrating the dreams of these children in the story. I really love that movie.

Splendid: I haven't seen it, but I loved Spirited Away.

Greg Saunier: I haven't even seen that one yet. Totoro's a really great one because it's the kind of thing where, on the one hand, it's a movie for little kids to watch where they see it and they're like, "Totoro's so cute, I love Totoro, he's this great monster." And they identify with the kids in the story. But then also you look at it deeper and the story ends up being about the magic of the forest or the woods and it's subtly making a statement in Japan at a certain time when a lot of the forests are disappearing there. Satomi was telling me this story one time about how in some of the mail that appeared after that movie came out there were young kids writing letters to the government saying "Don't destroy Totoro's forest. Don't hurt Totoro." And that to me, and to Satomi, was totally mind-blowing. I would just say that that kind of idea is definitely something that we aspire to. Whether we achieve anything close to that, I don't know. There's one level you can take it at, maybe there's a child level of what the lyrics mean and what the artwork means, but then there's also some adult level to it as well, or a political meaning to it.

Splendid: Deerhoof definitely does have a childlike side. And then there's this unsettling undercurrent.

John Dieterich: There are more younger people coming to our shows now, I noticed when we toured this time. It's really exciting to us to play a show in LA and have the first people who come in the door be 12 years old.

Splendid: That young?!

John Dieterich: Yeah, it's just really neat that there are some people who are dragging their parents to come see us. I felt really happy that they were able to connect with the music. It's kind of always been a dream of ours. We occasionally get e-mail from this guy in Portland whose son, Max, is around seven and he's a huge Deerhoof fan. Max plays drums and all kinds of instruments and his dad will send us pictures of him playing drums along with Reveille wearing his Deerhoof shirt and it's just a neat feeling. Just knowing how I felt about certain music growing up and imagining that certain kids are feeling that way about our music is something else. It's something you could never imagine happening.

Splendid: That's amazing. Going back to the idea of having a child level and an adult level of meaning to the artwork and lyrics, I just got out The Man the King the Girl and was looking over the drawings.

Greg Saunier: (laughing) Got it out of what, out of the trash can?

Splendid: No! Out of my CD rack! I was looking at the booklet the other day and noticed all the drawings and the things the animals are saying and it seems there's an underlying message of environmentalism or animal rights.

Greg Saunier: A lot of that was Rob's doing, and he's yet another non-prog rocker. He was the original one and he was creating a visual sense and just a mood for the whole band. It was his band, he started it and, although he's not in it any more, I think that a lot of what he created for the several years that he was in it is kind of what set the tone for this fantasy thing. And again, for him it has nothing to do with prog rock, though Chris Cooper was also constantly pestering Rob to check out early Genesis. Rob was primarily a visual artist first and was kind of obsessed with nature images and the woods and deer and he was always painting these certain things over and over again in slight variations. He really liked to use these nature characters as symbolic of various forces in the human world. He's still going strong on it. His current band is called 7-Year Rabbit Cycle. He and Kelly have been living in Alaska for a few years but just this week they moved back to the Bay Area and 7-Year Rabbit Cycle has their first show since they moved here day after tomorrow. We're really excited. Satomi and I are going to go see them. They're a completely incredible band. The political element in 7-Year Rabbit Cycle is less ambiguous than it is in Deerhoof. In Deerhoof, at least so far, we haven't tried to name any specific names or make any lyrics be very obviously about one situation. We've tried to leave stuff open for interpretation, so things could possibly be taken in a certain way and related to various situations that are happening in the real world right now. We'd rather make things a little vague because we fantasize about making music that will age well and that, in a later time period if, say, the war in Iraq is over, will still be good even if there was no more need to fight against that particular event.

Splendid: That makes a lot of sense.

Greg Saunier: I'm glad it makes sense to you. You're a very sympathetic interviewer.

Splendid: So, Rob did the artwork on The Man the King the Girl?

Greg Saunier: Yes, and for Holdypaws and an album we did called Halfbird. He did the artwork on Apple O', which was after he wasn't in the band any more, but we still collaborate on things with him. We remain good friends. And he put out the LP version of Milk Man. He now has a label. He put out the LP version of the latest Xiu Xiu record and his own band and a ton of different stuff, and more is on the way. It's fun for us to be able to continue this relationship, even though he's not officially in the band any more. We're still very connected.

Splendid: Kind of like how Chris wasn't in the band when the songs on Reveille were written, but he participated in the post-production decisions?

Greg Saunier: That's right, we were still coming up with artwork and we had working titles for some of the songs but we were trying to finalize those. We were on tour with Chris, he had joined, and we were in the car driving around and we'd play our shows at night but all day during the drive we'd be trying to figure out the right song order and trying to figure out song titles and exactly how the artwork should be and which lyrics to include and which to not put in. Everything goes really slow in the band.

Splendid: You guys seem to work pretty fast. The last two albums came out in such rapid succession that I lost track.

Greg Saunier: The last four, actually, came out in rapid succession.

Splendid: Yeah? Well, I didn't even know about Halfbird until this week. You guys don't ever quit.

Greg Saunier: Why should we?

Splendid: You shouldn't! There's too much music everywhere. It needs to be harnessed!

Greg Saunier: Well, on one hand, as a person who likes going to the record store and likes to follow bands and likes to get new records from time to time, I know my budget is pretty severely limited. Even one album a year is kind of pushing it for a band that I like. That's kind of a lot of money to lay out. And especially if they go on tour and I want to go see their show, there's another seven or nine dollars. So, I feel like already we're sort of at the limit of what an average-income consumer might be able to deal with.

Chris Cohen: Every Tuesday there are a few new CDs coming out by bands that you might like to hear, and to expect that you're gonna buy them every time is a lot to expect. I remember I was really following some bands for a while when I was in college and I had a little extra money. So, I would go buy the new album and then I'd go the record store a month later and they'd have another new one and it kind of soured me in a way. It was just too much. And then if each one isn't totally amazing...and how can every album be totally different from the last one and totally better? Even if it is better than the last one it's kind of a let down because it came out too soon. We're waiting longer this time before we put out our new album. We are working on an EP that's going to come out in the fall, but it'll be short.

Greg Saunier: Yeah. But at the same time, me personally wanting to write songs, I also feel like one album a year feels like too little. I wish I could get more out. Sometimes I might have too many songs and part of me wished I could just get them all out but it doesn't really work out that way because everybody else in the band has their songs, too. We might, in theory, like the idea of making a really long album, but it just doesn't seem to work. It gets too long and the feeling doesn't carry all the way through, so we end up shortening them a lot and cutting songs. I think that actually 2005 we will not have a new album. We are releasing an EP in Japan this fall. Actually I'm working on it right now and it's getting pretty close to done. I'm really excited about it. It's totally different from Milk Man. Another different thing about it is it's going to be all in Japanese. Satomi gets, from people who like it or dislike it, people saying she writes nonsense lyrics or lyrics in broken English. Personally, I've never ever found Deerhoof lyrics to be nonsense, but sometimes what people think might be nonsense syllables is actually Satomi singing in Japanese, and people don't realize she's singing actual words in a language. But this time it's gonna be all that way and it'll be fun. She'll have a chance to write songs in her native language as opposed to her second language and it might give a different feeling for her, or a different kind of confidence. Actually, it's not like she's ever lacked any confidence writing things in English. It just might be different. We're all excited to be doing that and in Japan it's gonna be a split release with a Japanese band called 5471 that we were on a lot of our tour with. They were doing their first US tour. We'll see, but there's a chance that we might be able to get this Japanese EP out in America next year. But we won't have a real full-length album next year, but probably in 2006.

Splendid: Does the fact that Satomi is writing lyrics in Japanese change the nature of the melodies at all?

Greg Saunier: Actually, it usually doesn't, because most Deerhoof songs' melodies are written first and lyrics are added afterwards. So it actually has no effect on the melodies because they're already written. Occasionally that's not true. It's kind of the least true in Satomi's case because she's the one person who seems to come up with her lyrics and her melodies at the same time. I might come up with a melody idea and then later try and think of what words could go with it, but in her case a lot of times the lyrics and the melody appear all at once, sort of in a flash. So sometimes if it's in Japanese, it might be a little different. It's hard to say. I've never really thought about it. One thing that I'd really love to do at some point is write songs where the lyrics come first. Where somebody's written lyrics for a song and it's like, "Okay, now we're going to write a song based on these, set it to music." That's something that we've never done that I think would be so cool. I bet we'd come up with something really different.

Splendid: With Milk Man you guys had the drawings first, right?

Greg Saunier: Oh, yeah. The artwork was the very first thing. That's just another example of something that was new and fun to try. Other times the artwork was really the very last element of the whole finished thing. We'd look at all the songs that we'd written and look at the lyrics and look at what was done and say now we can say what this is all about and how does it fit together and what would be a good image to go with it. A lot of times it was the very last thing. That was fun, too, using the artwork as this thing that was somehow gonna tie it all together. But in this case Satomi's old friend Ken had been doing some poster designs for us and tee shirts and stuff and suddenly it dawned on us one day, of course we should have Ken do the next album cover and we thought it'd be even better if we used this Milk Man character that he'd been drawing for a couple years, he'd been drawing it all the time.

Splendid: Is that what he called it?

Greg Saunier: Yeah, it's all totally his thing. Apparently the Milk Man is a self-portrait, that's what he secretly revealed at some point.

Splendid: That's pretty scary.

Greg Saunier: (Laughs). It's funny because he's not a scary person at all. He's always been so nice. My mom didn't like the poster version of it. We had the album cover but then there was the poster that came out when the album came out that just had a slightly different image on it...a little bit extra.

Splendid: What was it?

Greg Saunier: I think you can see it online somewhere. It was the same Milk Man, it's just that the banana was protruding from a different point on Milk Man's body. Anyways, it's sort of funny. Different people had different reactions to it.

Splendid: And your mom didn't like it?

Greg Saunier: (Laughs). She didn't. She really liked the music but she wasn't into the poster. She ordered it from the label and she said when she opened the box it had come with the poster and she was just horrified.

Splendid: Greg, are you originally from Ohio or from California?

Greg Saunier: Neither, I'm from Maryland. I just ended up going to school in Ohio and then after that I just sort of moved to California on a whim with my friends and then stayed here because I couldn't think of any reason to leave.

Splendid: You like the Bay Area, then?

Greg Saunier: We've traveled a lot, so although we really don't get to spend much time in any one place I can say that I've been to what feels to me like a lot of different places and they all have different things about them that make them unique. But San Francisco is nice. It's like a big city in that there's a lot going on all the time and no matter what you're interested in there'll be other people who live here who are interested in the same things. But at the same time it's not really a huge city. You could probably walk across the whole city in one day without too much trouble. And it's got somewhat of a laid-back atmosphere compared to New York, for sure. I could say there are a lot of great bands here and I would be telling the truth, but I think you could probably say that about almost anywhere you go. At least that's my impression. We've been all over on tour Canada, Japan, Europe, the UK, and everywhere we go there's always somebody doing something really interesting. I mean, whoever happens to end up on the same bill with us is usually interesting. We'll hear this local band that's playing on the show and it's like, "Woah!" It's not as though SF has the monopoly on cool music, that's all I'm trying to say. In a smaller city or a small town sometimes there's a different mood that people have; a kind of hospitality that you wouldn't get in a big city. Not that it's necessarily better, but it can be really fun to visit the smaller places. We did that a few times on this trip and it was really nice.

Splendid: I'm so glad you guys come to Ohio because a lot of people don't.

Greg Saunier: Where do they play between the East Coast and Detroit?

Splendid: They just skip Ohio. (Pause) I saw the name Andrew Maxwell online in association with Deerhoof.

Greg Saunier: Yeah, I just saw him last night. Andrew plays drums in The Curtains, which is me and Chris and Andrew. Or it was, but I think the band is probably not going to continue now because both Chris and Andrew live in Los Angeles and it's just to hard for me to participate in this band because I'm just too far away and I'm too busy with Deerhoof. Andrew has never been in Deerhoof but he's contributed a lot both by being in a band with me and Chris and by coming up with the titles for most of the songs on Reveille. Andrew is a master of coming up with song titles. I don't know how he does it, but he's a master. He always seems able to nail the mood of a song or find some image that fits it exactly. The Curtains have a new album coming out this summer and the very first song on the album is a song that I wrote and that I sing on but when I made it up, I had all the music but no ideas for lyrics. I wasn't even sure it would be a vocal song, I just thought it would be instrumental or something, and then one day he comes in and he's written lyrics that fit perfectly over the melody of the song. I took a look at these lyrics and it was just the most mind-boggling thing -- to feel like someone understood my song better than I did. As soon as he put those lyrics on it, I couldn't imagine the song being about anything else other than the image that he found for it. It's kind of a mind-blowing ability, one that I don't have, and I really kind of admire it.

Splendid: I notice now he's credited with "Literary Merit" on Reveille.

Greg Saunier: Exactly. "This American Eyebright Bugler", that was his suggestion for the album title. "Punchbuggy Valves", he made that up. He made up "The Trumpeter's Swan" as a title and we added the "Last". He was the one who put together the fact that these songs all seem like different variations on trumpet sounds. Swans or different birds that make these peeping or heralding sounds or the idea of certain flowers that are shaped like trumpets. There's the biblical idea of the last trumpet and the reawakening of people. Traffic horns. A lot of that thematic thing actually came from him, he was more able to put that together than we were able to for ourselves, so we ended up working around that. I can't remember the exact order, but it's possible that that had some influence on the artwork.

Splendid: That's very cool.

Greg Saunier: Andrew's a really talented person. He's also an incredible drummer.

Splendid: Is there also a unifying theme behind Holdypaws?

Greg Saunier: I think so. It's kind of weird because probably between the four of us, we've never sat around and talked about it. Maybe it was just too embarrassing or silly or something. For me, all of our records have their own thing. It's not like if you don't think there's a concept or theme, then that means you just don't get it or that somehow that's wrong, but I'm just the type of person who likes thinking about themes and what might the deeper meaning of an album be, whether or not it's even necessarily intended by the band. It's just that, as the audience, I like to be able to collaborate in a way. I like to have a part in it, too. So sometimes I try to add to what I think the album means by trying to create my own meaning for it. I've wanted to make albums leave themselves open to being interpreted as having some deeper layer of what they might be about, or what these songs symbolize, or something that ties them all together. I mean, to me, all of them do. Right around the time that we were doing Holdypaws, Rob and Kelly got married, as did Satomi and I. It was the timing there. A lot of the songs are love songs, but they are kind of dark. Maybe dark isn't the word. They are musings on the idea that, while you feel like you've found somebody to stick with, you also have the challenge of getting married, which is serious commitment and a kind of limitation on you. It doesn't apply strictly to marriage -- it applies to any serious commitment-type situation, like living with somebody. It's just that suddenly the level of the relationship becomes more intense and what you need to be able to do so that both people can be happy requires a lot more effort and it might require different people to...how do you explain it? I'm trying to be vague (laughs). It's kind of like the idea of freedom vs. limitations. On one hand you're kind of putting yourself in this trap. Or maybe the other person put you in this trap just by causing you to become attracted to them. You're so wowed by this person, so under their spell, that you're willing to lock yourself into this rule, this regulation that says, "This is my one relationship for the rest of my life." I think pretty much all the songs have something to do with that. They don't all make the exact same point, but they all have to do with being trapped in some situation and whether that's positive or negative or whether you might want to escape or don't want to escape.

Splendid: Wow. That's heavy.

Greg Saunier: (laughs). Well, we're a heavy band.

Splendid: I took all these film classes and we dissected the semiotics and meanings of things, and I was looking at the back cover of Milk Man and noticed how the words "Milk" and "Man" are written in black on either side of the word Deerhoof, which is in red. So, I'm juxtaposing female (milk) and male (man), then I'm looking at the banana coming out of the strawberry, and again it's this melding of male and female. Plus the picture of the Milk Man himself is very sexually ambiguous.

Greg Saunier: That's great. Nobody's picking up on this stuff. That's one of the things I really love about Andrew Maxwell. He really loves to think that way. He loves to try and dig a little deeper. I'm not trying to say that Deerhoof's the most profound thing. I like the idea that you could bother to go to the next level with anything, be it your rock band's CD, a movie that you saw, some TV show, or somebody's outfit -- anything you choose to think about in a more inquisitive way, and not take it at face value. I mean, the ability or the desire to do that may seem kind of quirky or funny, you know, "Isn't it cute that she wants to sit here and dink around playing around with the capital 'A' Artistic meanings of Deerhoof's album cover." On one hand it might seem a bit silly, but part of me wishes that were more common because it's like all you ever do is just swallow what's given to you. In another medium, like TV, suppose there's a toothpaste commercial on TV and basically they're telling you that this toothpaste is better than the other toothpaste or this toothpaste will get you the girls because it makes your teeth whiter. Well, a teenager growing up watching that who's only ever learned to take stuff at face value, maybe they'll just believe it. It sounds ridiculous to just say it that way, but the fact is stuff like that happens all the time, obviously, or people wouldn't be spending these zillions of dollars on their advertising budgets. Those ads do work. And then, to get a little bit more serious than toothpaste, imagine you're the president of the most powerful country on planet earth and you decide, "I want to invade this country," so you and your speech writers get together, or probably the speech writers by themselves get together, and find a way to make the case for such a preposterous idea and convince people it's the right thing to do. The ability to actually think deeper about something than what's handed to you, to think that there might be an ulterior motive, is an important skill. There might be a reason that Milk Man is in one color and Deerhoof is in another color. Or there might be some other reason that they want to do this war other than the one they're saying. Just the idea that some more elaborate or complicated thought might be warranted and the ability to do that is something that I really respect in people and I feel like it's an undervalued skill. And in the case of art, in can be really fun. It's not just like it's all about preventing wars. It's also fun to not just skip along the surface of things. Anyways, I appreciate the fact that you notice that stuff.

Splendid: I know what you mean.

Greg Saunier: So people who are into thinking of things that way, at least we always try to have some material there that would make you feel like it's worth doing in Deerhoof's case. Like there might be a few clues or something to tempt you a little bit or make you feel like, if you are starting to think there's a deeper meaning to it, you might be right because you found these little signs or reinforcements.

Splendid: You guys seem so mysterious because of that. The artwork and the whole aura of Deerhoof is shrouded in mystery.

Greg Saunier: To me, anybody's rock band is mysterious. It's a mystery -- where did these songs come from and why did they even bother to put these notes together, or why these two notes to make a chord instead of these other two notes? It's mysterious why anyone would want to be in a band in the first place. For the most part it's not going to make you a lot of money, unless you're quite lucky and that's something you're trying to make it do for you. And it doesn't appear to solve the world's problems. So I find it mysterious, anybody doing anything artistic. Where does that drive come from? It's amazing how it seems to be a drive that's common to people everywhere all through time. Maybe society teaches you how you're supposed to express that, or it gives you a language, but it seems like that drive to make art or music or anything beautiful, seems to be there in everybody somehow, and I find that very mysterious. That's kind of a big part of it for me. That's something I feel about a lot of other bands, too. They're mysterious.

Splendid: I know you guys are big Xiu Xiu fans. What was Jamie Stewart's role on Reveille?

Greg Saunier: There are just a few bits of music that he recorded at his house. He had a friend that was making some low budget movie that we never ended up seeing but he asked Jamie to ask us to do the soundtrack, so we went over to Jamie's house, this was when he lived in San Jose. He lives in Seattle now, soon to relocate to LA But he said, "Okay, you guys should come over and record the soundtrack for this movie that none of us has seen," and he just sort of vaguely explained the scenario to us. It was called Dance of the Squealing Mutilators. So, we sat down and just started coming up with some stuff. Jamie was playing keyboard and the rest of us on our normal instruments. We recorded some stuff for the soundtrack. Then later when we were recording Reveille we were trying little bits with this song fitting with little bits of this other song, so a lot of it's kind of edited like a movie in a way. The way the songs appear on the finished thing isn't necessarily the way they were played. Seconds might be out of order, we might have eliminated things, and in some cases we took a song and changed it around, like "Hark the Umpire", for instance. The way that it is on the record is really out of order from the way we actually played it. You hear these different sections of the songs, but actually when we played the songs, we played them in a completely different order and then realized that the structure wasn't good -- the arrangement wasn't good and we wanted to fiddle with it. And then there are a bunch of sounds in there, Satomi making these bizarre vocal sounds, that's actually pasted in from the Dance of the Squealing Mutilators soundtrack.

It's funny you should mention Jamie. I was just listening to Xiu Xiu's first album when you called. One of those songs that I played drums on I was just noticing I like the way Jamie recorded my drums on that song. It was me and Ches Smith playing drums. He is now the drummer of 7-Year Rabbit Cycle. Another funny thing is that guy in Fat Worm of Error, his name is Chris Cooper. He plays on the song "Cooper" on Reveille. He played this guitar improvisation over the song that we had already recorded and thought needed something. Satomi had already written the song and the lyrics, just singing Cooper over and over again. It was an homage to this friend of hers, Chris Cooper. Then, by pure coincidence, we were in the middle of recording Reveille, and suddenly he's here visiting SF and we said, "Chris we've just written a song called 'Cooper' and you have to come play on it." So he did.

Splendid: I noticed that on your web site you linked to the Splendid Essential Albums review of Reveille (Readers, you'll find a link to this article at the end of the interview.)

Greg Saunier: Yeah, I just loved the way that writer had written about it. It's just another example of somebody putting some time in it and giving it some thought beyond "I like it or I don't like it." It's like a dream come true to be given that much attention and to feel like your music actually is connecting to people or having some impact on culture or playing some weird role in the world. I mean, how could it not? But I really don't take something like that for granted. Just to be able to read in words the fact that somebody's world or thoughts or feelings were a little it different after hearing our record is kind of mind-blowing. I really appreciate Splendid because they have reviewed our albums starting with Holdypaws, and that was way back when nobody was reviewing our records. I value George's opinion because he has been listening to Deerhoof for that many years. Whereas, in England, Milk Man is the first Deerhoof album to be licensed for a UK release, and English websites and magazines are reviewing Deerhoof for the first time and they never had any reason to hear it before that because it was just some incredibly obscure import. So, it's interesting to contrast what they say versus what Splendid says.

Splendid: Well, Splendid appreciates you. Thank you all very much. I do have one final question, though. How do you do the "Giga Dance"?

Chris Cohen: Satomi makes up a new one every day. I think she dances more in the show nowadays. We try to play more songs where she doesn't have to play bass so she can move more. She says she doesn't think about her dances beforehand, she just makes them up on stage, which just blows me away. I think she takes a lot of her moves from action figures.

Splendid: Ah. So now I know.