Given certain Splendid writers' obsession with the Elephant 6 collective, it can hardly be a surprise that when Elf Power played Chicago's Schuba's at the tail end of their tour with the Minders and Fable Factory, Splendid's Chicago staff was there with interviewing muscles flexing. Laura Carter, Andrew Rieger and Aaron Wegelin were kind enough to cram inside their newly-acquired van with us and discuss REM fans, sitars, the connection between candy and ornithology, cover albums and Orange Twin. For this interview, Jason Jackowiak ran the show while George Zahora did his best to drive things off topic...
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JJ: Anything cool happening on the tour? Like bomb threats?
Andrew: Let's see...
Laura: This is a new van!
Andrew: Yeah.
Laura: We bought this on the road.
Bryan Helium battles static cling |
Andrew: Our first van died in Baton Rouge, and luckily my brother lives in Baton Rouge,
so we had a little headquarters (from which) to search around frantically before our show
in Baton Rouge that night. We happened to find this van for a really great price, and put it
on the ol' credit card...
JJ: Wow.
Andrew: Yeah, that was the first bit of excitement. What else fun did we do?
Laura: We had a show cancelled, so we took off for Tijuana.
Andrew: Yeah, we spent a day in Tijuana, which was interesting.
GZ: With the New Van?
Laura: No...
Andrew: We actually took the trolley from San Diego to Tijuana, which was kind of cool...and...
Laura: We went swimming in the ocean.
Andrew: Yeah, we went swimming in the ocean in San Diego, and --
Laura: Met up with the Minders in L.A., and then after Seattle we went to Yellowstone National Park -- us and the Minders and
Fable Factory.
GZ: So you guys have a good time on tour -- it's not just work. You try to actually enjoy yourselves.
Laura: Yeah.
Andrew and Bryan |
Andrew: We're on vacation and working at the same time.
GZ: Is playing more like vacation or more like working? Is it just the driving that's work?
Andrew: Yeah, it's just the drive that's working.
Aaron: There's a lot of work that builds up to our hour that we play each night.
Audio: "Icy Hands will Never Melt Away" (from When the Red King Comes)
JJ: How have crowds responded at your shows?
Andrew: Most of them have been really great. Don't you think?
Laura: Yeah.
Andrew: Yeah, it's been our most --
Laura: -- successful tour --
Andrew: The most enjoyable tour we've ever had.
GZ: Is it partly because you all (all three bands on the tour) get along so well?
Laura blows it |
Laura: Well, like the tours that we did "under the wing" of Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel were successful
purely because of their merits, and the times that we've gone out unheard-of have been gruelling, and just hard. This is the
first time that we've had big crowds --
GZ: People there to see just you?
Laura: Yeah. And the Minders. They've been in the same boat -- they've had tours where one person has shown up to see them,
and they've had no money...we've all been there. But this time it hasn't been like that -- we've all eaten well and gotten good nights'
sleep, and it's just made a big difference. We have the energy to run off and do really fun stuff.
GZ: Does your show change when you realize that you've got a big house of Elf Power fans, as opposed to just a generic audience?
Andrew: Well, we can play longer, obviously, since we're not the opening act --
Laura: We played thirty minute sets before.
JJ: I read on your website that you opened for REM at Chastain Park in Atlanta. How did that go?
Andrew: Fantastic. Really great.
Laura: It was seven thousand people or something like that, and our faces were blown up on huge television screens, and all of our
parents met each other for the first time and they were sitting together, and they were like "Oh my God, our little babies" and they had a great time. It was really cool, really different from anything we've ever done.
Andrew seems moved to tears... |
GZ: A lot of those older R.E.M. fans probably hadn't heard a "new" band in a long time.
Andrew: Yeah...It seemed like the crowd response was good. Some people were indifferent but a lot of people seemed to really enjoy it. Everybody clapped -- we didn't really get any boos or anything.
Laura: These old codgers -- the people who work at Chastain, these scruffy old guys were like "(The audience) really liked you! Usually they're brutal to the opening act."
JJ: A Dream In Sound is amazing. Did you have any particular goals or ideas in mind when you started writing it?
Laura: Get it done fast. Studio time is expensive!
Aaron: Hike up the drums.
Andrew: There were things with our earlier recordings that we weren't happy with and wanted to improve upon this time...
Laura: We were also really scared of sounding slick and unlike us, so there was a big fight in the studio, like "We can't use our 'four-track edge' -- you can't take it away from us."
Andrew: The engineer was great, and he didn't add any unnecessary slickness -- he just recorded everything as it was, and he'd have suggestions which were usually good. Sometimes we'd take them and sometimes we wouldn't, but he was really good to work with.
Laura: He also set us up at night. Overnight, he'd set us up on the digital system so we could record as much "experimental" stuff as we wanted, to add in the next day, which was great. There aren't many people who'd do that -- that's hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment that he's leaving unlocked and open and just saying "Okay, kids, I'll be back in the morning." Do you know what I mean? Like, "You can record away, and if you get anything you want to use we'll put it into the real mix tomorrow."
Aaron: It was a really nice studio but it wasn't stifling. We each had our own room, and we could go in little sound rooms and work on sounds while other people finished their stuff.
Andrew: Yeah, we lived there. There were bedrooms -- it was a house.
Aaron watches in horror as George derails the interview |
Laura: Me and Jeff (Mangum) lived in the motor home.
Andrew: It was way down this dirt road, just out in the middle of nowhere -- it was kind of nice, no distractions really, except for the
Nintendo machine.
Aaron: Literally for the first two days, I didn't leave the house. I didn't even go out on the front porch.
GZ: So if you had the choice of a lifetime to work on an album on a four-track, or just a week to "nail it" in a perfect top of the line studio, which would you choose?
Andrew: I don't know...it's fun to do it both ways.
Laura: Lifetime on a four-track.
Aaron: Yeah, four-tracking's great.
Laura: If it was a choice, I'd have to go four-track. But for your whole life?
Aaron: When we say four-track, we mean like whatever we have at our houses, which might be eight-tracks now.
Laura: I still don't even have a two-track.
JJ: I asked about the concepts behind A Dream in Sound because (previous album) When the Red King Comes is almost a concept album. I don't know if it was meant to be that way, or if it just turned out that way because everything you were writing fit together that way, but even the packaging, the inclusion of Eno's song -- it all fits together. Did you set out to do anything like that with A Dream in Sound?
Andrew: For Red King it was kind of an intentional concept, but for the new album there wasn't anything like that. We just had a bunch of songs written, and we didn't feel the need to create some crazy story just because we'd done it before, especially since the songs were already written and it wouldn't be "real".
At this point, George derails the interview with a question relating Elf Power's Red King to Lewis Carroll's Red King in Alice in Wonderland. Andrew tries gamely to work through this, but the confusion it causes lasts for several minutes.
Everybody's on stage... |
JJ: You're members of the Elephant Six collective. How much do the collective's members' projects influence you?
Laura: It's more the fact that we're all a big group of friends, and everyone has different skills -- John Fernandez is a bad-ass clarinet player, and we'll call him over all the time and be like "Come record!" We'll have nights that we'll go and hang out over at Eric's house to record, and some of those recordings end up being Black Swan, or end up being whatever, but it's purely wanting to hang out together...I know we definitely influence each other; we have to. We're the same group. I listen to their albums more than anybody else's, because they'll have just finished something, and it'll be like "Listen to this -- I just covered this one." That always happens. It's not really an intentional thing, like "They recorded like this; now we're going to!" But at the same time, if we had the opportunity to record with Robert (Schneider), we probably would, and then our album would sound very similar to the Apples, to the Minders, in some ways to Jeff'a, although his is really different. Robert had to do a lot of different stuff to record Jeff just because of the nature of his music. But I bet that if we recorded with Robert, it would end up like the Minders. When the Minders did the album with him they got the whole "Oh, they're just trying to rip off the Apples" thing, which is stupid -- people don't realize that that's Robert's hand directly in it, saying "I've got a keyboard part!" and playing it on the Minders' song and then the song gets a Robert feel, but instead it's (perceived as) the Minders ripping off the Apples. Which is all just really unfortunate, I think.
It's confusing and hard to figure out how much is taken from each other, but it's just a big ball of fun.
GZ: Why doesn't Simon's ("The Bird with the Candy Bar Head", from the song of the same name on A Dream in Sound) head melt?
Andrew: Because it's constantly regenerating. The other birds are taking snacks off of it but it constantly regenerates.
GZ: So, like, even on a really hot day? We had a day this year that was like 105 degrees and everything was melting. Would he just stay inside on a day like that?
Andrew: He might just stay inside, yeah. It might melt a little bit but it would keep growing back.
Simon (artist's rendition) |
Laura: It'd get a little soft.
Aaron: It's hard candy.
GZ: So he's not like a Twix or anything.
Aaron: No, I always thought of him as a Zagnut.
Andrew: Yeah, with nuts and caramel in there, and a little nougat for the brain.
GZ: That would make it hard to fly.
Andrew: Yeah.
Laura: He had a hard life.
Audio: "Simon (the Bird with the Candy Bar Head)" (from A Dream in Sound)
JJ: So what's forthcoming from Elf Power? Anything due soon?
Andrew: Not really. We've been busy playing live for the past couple of months, and we're gonna take a break. We've got a bunch of new songs and we're gonna start recording, and that's our only big project, really.
JJ: I noticed that you're doing a single for Kindercore's singles club. Will that be a brand new song?
Andrew: I think we're actually going to use this cover of the Byrds' "Feel a Whole Lot Better." Do you know that song? (He sings a bit of it) It's an old song by the Byrds. I think that's what we're gonna use. We have an old version of it that we worked on a long time ago, and I think we're gonna finish that up. The other band we're doing the single with, which I think is the Great Lakes, wants to do a cover of a Zombies song, and we thought each of us doing a sixties cover would be a fun thing.
GZ: Each of you, what's the last album you bought? Or shoplifted?
Aaron: (something the mic didn't pick up)
Laura: I bought the Kinks, and then after that I bought -- (to Andrew) What's the title?
Andrew: Electric Psychedelic Sitar Head-Swirlers.
Laura: Yeah.
Andrew: It's this bootleg series where there's twelve volumes that some fanatic is putting out, of all sixties and early seventies bands that used sitars -- the criteria is that there has to be a sitar in the song. It's all just really obscure stuff, and we got two volumes of it and it's really cool. A lot of it's really great; some of it's kind of cheesy. There's bands that you've never heard of, and then in the liner notes it says "This Swedish hippie commune band..." and you're like "What?" But then they have, like, Strawberry Alarm Clock on there, and Ted Nugent's band -- what was Ted Nugent's band called?
Laura, photographed without warning. |
JJ: The Amboy Dukes.
Laura: That was on your (Andrew's) volume.
Andrew: The Amboy Dukes, yeah. There are a couple of known bands on there, but mostly it's really totally obscure stuff.
Laura: The one I got, there's nobody I've ever heard of on the whole thing.
JJ: But is it cool?
Laura: Yeah, it's awesome.
Andrew: Yeah, they're great.
GZ: So those must be really hard to find...
Andrew: Yeah. We found 'em in this record store in San Diego, and then when we were in Minneapolis we asked and they were like "No, we had one volume a year ago". I think they're really hard to find. We should've bought 'em all while we had the chance.
Laura: They only had those two.
Andrew: No, they had three.
Laura: Oh, yeah, they had a blue one.
Aaron: All female.
Laura: Yeah.
Andrew: Oh well.
JJ: I was reading recently that there's going to be an Elephant 6 tribute album. Is anyone covering any Elf Power songs for it?
Andrew: I think there are two or three Elf Power covers on there.
Laura: Really!?
Andrew: Yeah. From what I've heard.
Laura: I didn't know.
JJ: The thing I read didn't list any of the songs. It listed bands who were participating, but not whose songs they were covering.
Laura: Who's participating?
JJ: I didn't know most of the bands. It's being distributed by Parasol.
Andrew: I talked to the guy who was doing it.
GZ: Oh, so we'll get Very Secretary doing "Simon".
Andrew vs. the Blanket of Doom |
JJ: Bands from Champaign (IL), yeah, downstate stuff.
GZ: It'll all sound like Hum.
Andrew: They told me a list of the bands but I don't think I'd heard of many of them. But it'll be kind of cool to see how that turns out.
JJ: Speaking of covers, how did you choose the songs for the Come On EP?
Andrew: Well, we do lots of cover songs, and it's just a fun thing that we like to do, and a lot of those were songs we recorded years ago, or songs we only play live. We bashed out a couple --
Laura: Some we had recorded, like, during A Dream in Sound we recorded a few covers and then didn't use them.
Andrew: Yeah, so they were just from various places and we realized we had a bunch of them and thought it would be fun to put 'em all together and do an EP just to sell while we're on tour, which was something special I think.
Jason Broccardo: That's funny, because I got mine in a record store in Detroit.
Andrew: Really? In a record store?
JJ: I got mine in a record store. We all did.
GZ: Yeah, I got mine in a store in Colorado. Weren't there supposed to be only 600 of those or something?
Laura: We don't need to go into that, because it's supposed to be tour only and we're kind of getting shafted because they're being sold on the side and we can't seem to stop it.
Andrew: Yeah, let's not talk about that. (pause) Did you buy it recently?
JB: End of June or July, in Detroit.
Laura: Let's move on.
Andrew: Yeah, let's move on.
Laura, photographed with advance warning |
JJ: One last Come On question -- the guy from Kincaid remixed "Separating Fault". How did that come about?
Andrew: He did it on his own.
Aaron: He played it for us at a dance party and we were like, "That's going on our cover record. Congratulations."
Andrew: Yeah, I think he just took a Stone Roses drumbeat and looped it and put it on there. It's kind of fun. I'm sure if we'd done it we'd have done it differently, but we thought we'd put it on there.
GZ: What's the best cover you do that's not on Come On?
Andrew: We do a pretty rippin' version of the Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog" sometimes.
GZ: Aw, do it tonight, please!
Aaron: We might dust it off.
Audio: "Encore" (live)
JJ: Can I persuade you to play "Historical Ant Wars?"
Andrew: We haven't played it in so many years...we haven't practiced it, so I don't think that's gonna happen.
JJ: I asked Bryan (Helium, Elf Power bassist) and he said "I don't think that's gonna fly."
Laura: Bryan's up for it. I'm up for it, but it'd be a fun, sloppy mess. (to Andrew) You'll have to do the Royal Trux eight minute guitar solo.
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