I don't do many band interviews, mostly because when I really like a CD, the music tends to stand on its own and I don't feel like I need to waste the artist's time with a bunch of boring questions they've answered 317 times before. Or maybe it's just that I'm a shy dork. Either way, I wasn't sure about doing an interview with Mojave 3, despite the fact that their most recent CD, Excuses for Travellers (which I reviewed for Splendid) is easily one of my favorite CDs of the year. However, I spent a good part of my teenage years wearing out Beggars Banquet records, and when our Beggars press contact told me that the interview would take place at their headquarters, I got a secret little teenage dork thrill at the prospect.

The interview took place on a beautiful September day in downtown Manhattan. The band was hanging out up on the roof of the building, and I felt a bit guilty about making Rachel Goswell, Mojave 3's bassist, co-singer and occasional songwriter, come down to the office for the interview. I was further unsettled when she sat down and said, "So who's this for then, a fanzine of some sort?" Now, I'm not even entirely sure what a fanzine is, but I'm pretty sure they've got something to do with nerdy teenagers obsessively doing photocopied paste-ups of blurry band photos and receipts stolen from Morrissey's garbage. I quickly assured her that Splendid is not a fanzine, to which she replied "Huh."

Anyway, Ms. Goswell was very sweet, and we had a nice time sitting on the Beggars couches eating their Danish and talking about nothing in particular. It was more like meeting someone on the subway and discovering that they're in a band than it was doing an official band interview. Plus she dropped some nice gossip about Belle and Sebastian, so I'm not complaining!

Splendid: How long have you been in New York?

Rachel Goswell: One day.

Splendid: Were you doing stuff yesterday here too?

Rachel Goswell: Neil (Halstead) flew in Tuesday and spent the day doing interviews and various things.

Splendid: So it's your turn today?

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, we're kind of splitting it today. We felt a bit sorry for him. We actually arrived in New York about seven last night and went to Other Music and did an in-store there.

Splendid: How did that go?

Rachel Goswell: It was good actually. It was kind of weird because it was about one o'clock in the morning for me. It was good, they had to close the doors, people couldn't get in.

Splendid: They do some pretty cool stuff there. It's a neat place. They have all sorts of good people showing up. And so you have the show tonight. Is this the start of the tour here?

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, we're just doing four dates, we're going to Toronto tomorrow, then we're flying out San Francisco and LA and that's it really.

Splendid: Then back to England?

Rachel Goswell: Yeah. It's just kind of a manic week of four gigs, loads of acoustic things here and there. It's just kind of a taster because the new album's just come out.

Splendid: Is there going to be a full-on tour at some point?

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, hopefully. We were thinking of coming back in November. I think it's been pushed back until January; it's a bit more extensive. I think we just wanted to get out and see what kind of vibe was over here. It seems to be pretty good -- it's quite encouraging.

Splendid: Yeah, that'd be kind of scary, flying all the way over here and people are just sort of like, "ho hum, a CD, that's really interesting..." Well, I'm glad. I didn't know, I thought that this was like a big tour that was starting.

Rachel Goswell: Just a wee taster.

Splendid: Well, you've done dates in the US many times before.

Rachel Goswell: Yeah.

Splendid: So it's not like the first time, all scary...

Rachel Goswell: Oh no.

Splendid: Do you like Manhattan?

Rachel Goswell: Oh yeah.

Splendid: You have places you come back to.

Rachel Goswell: Um, not usually. The last time I was here, about a year ago, I did quite a lot of shopping down Canal Street -- I discovered Canal Street, and I'd quite like to go back there today, given the chance. I don't know whether I'll have the chance. Greenwich Village of course is cool as well.

Splendid: Do you have many friends in New York?

Rachel Goswell: Don't actually have any.

Splendid: Really?

Rachel Goswell: We had. It's kind of weird because we've got friends everywhere else we're going, we've got loads of friends. But New York nobody. Over the years we've known people that have lived here but just aren't here anymore. It's kind of a bit odd actually in that way.

Splendid: You know the Beggars (Banquet) people, though?

Rachel Goswell: Just met them today. Last night, it's kind of weird because they didn't put out the last albums you know.

Splendid: I thought...well you were on 4AD for the last ones, right?

Rachel Goswell: No, we've always been on 4AD, but in America Out of Tune was released through Sire. And the first Mojave album was released through Warners, because 4AD had a distribution deal with them. So this is the first time it's actually come out on Beggars.

Splendid: So is it working out with Beggars?

Rachel Goswell: A lot better, I have to say -- a lot more organized, and a lot more enthusiasm.

Splendid: That's great, it's pretty cool, you know you expect Peter Murphy to be trying to figure out how to work the photocopier or something in the corner....(laughter) Now let's see what sort of dopey questions I have for you. First of all, I love the new album. I see the Delgados poster up there, and that's another one recently that's really struck me and is just sort of looping in the CD player. So congratulations on making a very lovely album.

Rachel Goswell: Hee.

Splendid: It strikes me as being...it's definitely not a happy CD, but it's not sad really. It's not hopeless, you know it's sort of good for hanging out alone in your apartment feeling a little mopey. Especially as you go through the CD it starts to build up and have this hopefulness to it... What was the sense when you were making it? You seem to be moving towards brighter, maybe happier ground. Is that a fair thing to say?

Rachel Goswell: I don't know, really. I mean, obviously a lot of the songs on the album are written by Neil.

Splendid: So it's hard for you to say what was in his...

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, some of them he's had knocking around for a while, some of them are a couple years old or whatever. I wrote one, Ian's got two on the album. I don't really know. Some of them are personal to him, some of them are observations...

Splendid: Does the band talk about the direction you're going or how...

Rachel Goswell: No, it just happens. Generally the way it works is we'll do demos of our own songs and we'll go into a rehearsal room and just play around with them.

Splendid: So each person just sort of writes their own songs by themselves and then brings them to the band.

Rachel Goswell: Well, yeah, you kinda of write the basic chord structure and the lyrics and then everyone else writes their own instrumental parts. It just evolves like that, that's how we work.

Splendid: Was there a general vibe? Over how long a period of time was the recording for this CD stretched out?

Rachel Goswell: It wasn't that long actually, it was done pretty quickly. I think it was about two months from start to finish.

Splendid: Was there a good feeling while recording it?

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, yeah. It was quite quick for us, the recording process on this record, compared to others. With Out of Tune the demoing went on for about eight months or something. And the recording, we were kind of all over the place -- we went up to Scotland, came back down to London. And this was just quite quick. But it was a good atmosphere.

Splendid: It's got to be a lot less grueling too, you can just go in and you know, for two months, this is what I'm doing.

Rachel Goswell: Yeah.

Splendid: I guess I'm sort of on that because it seems like it hangs together really well and as you go through the CD it sort of keeps brightening up, even if the songs aren't exactly bright...(laughter)

Rachel Goswell: That's true...

Splendid: Maybe that's just something I'm reading into it. You mentioned everyone writing their own parts. I think one of the things I like best about this one is that it seems extremely detailed to me; the music's pretty complicated, but it's very subtle. You know there'll be a little trumpet part here and there, or the banjo will suddenly appear, something like that. Is that all spontaneous, just working in the studio?

Rachel Goswell: Yeah. You kind of come up with ideas, you know, the banjo thing, does it sound good...you try different things out.

Splendid: So it's really just experimenting, there's no master plan...

Rachel Goswell: No, no.

Splendid: You know, now we're going to make complex little arrangements...

Rachel Goswell: No, I think actually that everyone within the band has become much better at playing their instruments. And I think -- well, I hope -- that kind of shows through on the new one. You know, it's always a learning process anyway. We're kind of a lot more together. And obviously things get suggested like the trumpets or whatever.

Splendid: So do you think it's a confidence thing that people are willing to just say, "this would be cool..."

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, definitely.

Splendid: The music, it's not...you know it's a much different thing than just say, writing rock songs or writing something where you know how it's supposed to sound, it's really going in interesting directions, it's got the sort of twanginess to it...

Rachel Goswell: We all get in a room together and it's just kind of a natural thing.

Splendid: Particularly this album. The sound has gotten much more distinctive, much more identifiable, it's, "hey that's this band, it's not all those other bands..."

Rachel Goswell: Well that's nice!

Splendid: So has it been a pretty stable core of the band for a while now?

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, me, Neil and Ian (McCutcheon) started five years ago. Simon (Rowe), who does the electric guitar, actually did some guitar pieces on the first album for us, and we asked him to join a few months later. He wasn't sure because he'd been in Chapterhouse before and he was kind of, "I don't know whether I want to do this." But thankfully he did. And Al (Forrester), our piano and Hammond man, our keys man, actually came in about a year or so later. We had various people live playing with us. We had a female, Poppy and for personal reasons she had to leave, she has a daughter. And Al was a friend of a friend of Ian's, so we got him and he was just kind of like the final piece that slotted into place. You know, we're all really good mates. We've actually got a pedal steel player called Melvin (Duffy), who unfortunately couldn't come with us this time, so we're using people in each city. So that's going to be interesting. It'll be nice meeting different steel players, because we admire them so much. But it is a really solid unit.

Splendid: So that's got to contribute to forging a sound that really hangs together.

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, we know each other inside out, you know what I mean, it's kind of like that.

Splendid: Is this pretty much full time for everyone? Is this what you all do?

Rachel Goswell: Well we all do various things, really.

Splendid: Is anybody working at...

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, yeah, we all work! (laughter)

Splendid: What do you do?

Rachel Goswell: I actually work in a children's nursery part time. That's a lot of fun, I like that. I'm also a keen gardener, I've been doing horticulture courses and things like that.

Splendid: Do you have your own garden?

Rachel Goswell: I do, yes, I do. It was a weed patch two years ago. It's not fantastic now, I've got a pond in there and a lawn. There wasn't a lawn in there. We all have our fingers in different pies, we all do different things really. But it makes it more interesting because there can be gaps where you're not doing anything for months and months and months. It's been busy since May this year because the album came out in England then, and we've done a lot of festivals over the summer, which have been really good. So it's been a really kind of positive year in that way, because everyone kind of breaks off and does whatever they want to do.

Splendid: And you're all flexible enough to be able to come back together when you have to.

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, and I think it makes actually for a happier band because we're not...before it was we were all skint, no one was working, we were just kind of getting by. It was a bit depressing to be honest.

Splendid: That's your whole life.

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, and it's nice to realize there is life outside music and there are other things that we enjoy doing. So it's a much more positive vibe.

Splendid: I've sort of got a garden, but it's hard in Manhattan. I've got a container garden in my apartment.

Rachel Goswell: Containers are cool!

Splendid: Containers are good. It's hard to grow good tomatoes or peppers in them, but I've got lots of nice little flowers... Have you seen the film Almost Famous?

Rachel Goswell: No.

Splendid: It's pretty good. Do you know what it's about? It's Cameron Crowe...

Rachel Goswell: Is that the one with Mark Kozelek in it?

Splendid: Yeah.

Rachel Goswell: See, he's a friend of mine. I saw him in LA last year when he was recording it, and it was really funny -- he said he plays a bass player in it. And he said, "Yeah, you know for years I've been playing with the Red House Painters, and I finally realize what's it's like to be a bass player and to not be in front of the pictures and nobody wants to talk to you..."

Splendid: Because he's always up front.

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, so he was saying it was quite a weird experience to be on the other side of it. I haven't seen the film, I'd like to see it.

Splendid: It's fun, there's one great scene where they get this new manager and he convinces them that they should be traveling in an airplane instead of a bus, and so they're all on the plane and they get into an electrical storm, and it's the most awful thing and it seems like the plane is going to go down. So they all start, there's all this tension, and they all start sort of saying the things they've always wanted to say to each other but had never said...(laughter) It sounds like you all having different things probably diffuses an awful lot...

Rachel Goswell: It does.

Splendid: So there's not this built up, like "God if he does that one more time..."

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, it's a lot more healthy. And we're all getting older.

Splendid: Don't need the drama anymore.

Rachel Goswell: They're like, they're my brothers and I'm their sister. You know, we do have arguments occasionally, but it's just natural.

Splendid: Things are pretty mellow.

Rachel Goswell: We're a mellow bunch.

Splendid: I notice, I was reading stuff online last night, we're all pretty much the same age, born in 70, 71, something like that.

Rachel Goswell: That's correct.

Splendid: I was thinking about the first music you remember thinking of as sort of your own -- you know, something you liked on your own. For me, I grew up with brothers and sisters, so the music I heard was always what they were listening to.

Rachel Goswell: Yeah.

Splendid: But I remember the moment when I first realized I could like something...

Rachel Goswell: Choose something for yourself.

Splendid: Do you remember that?

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, I mean, I've only got one brother. And he liked lots of dodgy stuff actually...It's kind of, there were a few things he liked. I mean, he got me into The Cure and Siouxsie & the Banshees at a young age. The first band... I used to have a real thing about Grace Jones when I was about thirteen, fourteen. I was quite obsessive about her. But The Smiths were my first kind of breakthrough band, it was one that I found.

Splendid: How old were you then?

Rachel Goswell: Fourteen.

Splendid: So they were still happening then.

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, yeah. Hatful of Hollow was the first thing I got. I never saw them live because I was too young really to go to gigs.

Splendid: Where were you living at the time?

Rachel Goswell: A little village outside of Reading. But I was always, always into music; my father used to play banjo actually, although he didn't play on the record! (laughter) Him and my mum used to go folk clubs and they used to take me along. And my dad taught me guitar when I was about seven. I remember singing with him.

Splendid: So you'd play around the house and stuff.

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, it was very much a staple of my growing up. And my dad encouraged me wholeheartedly. I had classical guitar lessons for a number of years, which was actually where I met Neil, because we grew up in the same area. My best friend's mother taught both of us classical guitar. It's kind of weird.

Splendid: When you were kids. So you knew each other way back when.

Rachel Goswell: We used to pass each other. We went to the same schools and stuff.

Splendid: And so The Smiths...because over here, I guess some people were into them, but most people I know didn't discover them until it was sort of too late. You know, they were gone already.

Rachel Goswell: They were massive in England. They used to get in the charts. I remember a program called South Bank Show, a fine arts documentary program -- they did a documentary on The Smiths. All these complete Morrissey freak fans that would sit in their bedrooms and look like Morrissey. I was never like that. (laughter) Have all the pictures and just be really, really obsessed. They were pretty big to get to that stage to have an hour thing done on them.

Splendid: It's funny the way someone can be so big in one place and somewhere else nobody knows what's going on until later. Now there are plenty of obsessed Smiths fans here. Have you followed Morrissey since then?

Rachel Goswell: No, I actually find I lost interest in them when they did Strangeways, which is when I kind of got out of The Smiths.

Splendid: Where did you go from there?

Rachel Goswell: Good question, where did I go from there, trying to remember...House of Love, My Bloody Valentine, Jesus and Mary Chain. That kind of stuff.

Splendid: Thicker sounds, grungier, harder.

Rachel Goswell: Yeah.

Splendid: I noticed that Tony Doogan engineered on the last album, and he's obviously associated with Belle and Sebastian. Do you know those people at all?

Rachel Goswell: Met them once. We recorded most of the music for Out of Tune up in Glasgow at his studio. And I think we decided we wanted to work with him... Well, Neil is a huge Belle and Sebastian fan. I'm not personally so keen on them, not really my kind of thing. And it was because of what he'd done with them and he'd worked with Teenage Fanclub and stuff. So we'll give it a try, something different. And we went up there and it kind of worked and it kind of didn't because we came back down to London and we mixed the album with somebody else, Mark Van Hoen.

Splendid: Was it just, he had a different sound in mind?

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, it was kind of a weird one. I mean, we recorded all the music up there, and a couple of people -- well, Belle and Sebastian, both of them came into the studio one day, didn't introduce themselves, they just kind of sat down on the sofa for about half an hour. You know, shy. We said, "who are they?" and then they left. And then Tony said, "Oh, that's Belle and Sebastian, they wanted to come and take you out on the town but I guess they lost their nerve." It was really weird. (laughter)

Splendid: That's odd.

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, people that odd...I'm kind of like, "Please!" It was a bit weird really. But we just did the music up there and it was quite a stressful time -- we were all broke, financial difficulties that plagued us really ever since we started. It was quite a tough time recording, got most of the music done and just decided to come home and finish up.

Splendid: So this one really was a lot different then the last one. Good feelings...

Rachel Goswell: A lot less pressure.

Splendid: How did you decide who to work with on this one?

Rachel Goswell: We just chose Mark. It was just Mark again because he's a mate. He kind of turned Out of Tune around for us, we kind of think he saved it really. And it was just kind of like...

Splendid: You felt good about him.

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, he's a good friend, and he's not, he's a good enough friend to say what he thinks. Like if Neil's wanting to do something that's just crap...

Splendid: He'll say, "that's crap."

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, whereas Tony wouldn't. And he was kind of like a bit more agreeable, you know what I mean, he wasn't kind of honest enough in that way, and I think you need that. It's good sometimes to have an outside person.

Splendid: Does he contribute his own ideas often?

Rachel Goswell: No, he's just kind of there. I mean, we did try a few things out, I suppose.

Splendid: But he's not like the fifth Beatle...

Rachel Goswell: Nooo! (laughter)

Splendid: Who else right now is in England that I haven't heard of that you're excited about? To put you on the spot.

Rachel Goswell: Well, I'm so out of touch with the music scene, to be honest. I quite like Coldplay, they're alright. They're in their early 20s. It's kind of guitar music. Lyrically, I really like what the guy does. Their album has three or four really good songs on it. It'll be interesting to see what the next album is like. I can't think of anything else.

Splendid: So at this point you're not really heavily engaged in the local scene.

Rachel Goswell: No, I haven't been for years, to be honest. I kind of listen to things that have been recommended by friends. I don't read the music press in England, I haven't done that for years. Just sick of the writing generally.

Splendid: Do you play around much? I mean, do you ever do small gigs just ramping up to new songs...

Rachel Goswell: No, we don't actually. Neil lives down in Cornwall, which is a good five, six hour drive, and the rest of us are based in London. We tend really just to play when we've got something to promote. Which is kind of the way it works. We all do different things. We come together, it sounds bad, when we have to -- it sounds bad, but that's the way we do it. It's kind of weird, I guess; within London we do really well when we play, and people know who we are there, but outside London, around the rest of England, people aren't that aware of us. We toured with (Suede's) Bernard Butler a couple of years ago when Out of Tune came out, and that was all over the place. And that's really the only time we've done that. And it's kind of at a point now where we just don't want to go out and play in shit venues just to sell records. We'll do gigs if they're worth doing. That sounds bad as well... It's just that there are a lot of crap venues, and we're kind of old enough that we don't want to be really hugely famous or anything. We're playing because we enjoy it.

Splendid: You can only do the college-band-playing-in-bars thing for so long.

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, it's, you know, boring.

Splendid: It sounds like music is just one of the things in your life now...

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, it's not the be all and end all. I mean, I really love it, you know. There's always good vibes when we come together. It's great to come out here and do gigs. And we've had a brilliant summer, for the first time really; we've played festivals in Norway, Spain, Portugal, Reading and Leeds, and we've just had a really, really good time and there's a really positive feeling within the band that things are actually going quite well at the moment.

Splendid: There's not all this pressure.

Rachel Goswell: No, we've had a great summer, we've been to some really hot sunny places, played some brilliant gigs...

Splendid: What more could you ask for?

Rachel Goswell: It's nice, it's good you know, we love it.

Splendid: I thought it was interesting, on some web listing thing, they listed artists similar to you. They had Bob Dylan, Slowdive, Carnation and Mazzy Star...

Rachel Goswell: Oh please! That's just such crap, man. That's lazy journalism -- that's what we call that. That's why I don't read things anymore.

Splendid: Your genres were dream-pop, alt-country and country-folk. It must get frustrating; people just take everything you've ever done and lump it together...

Rachel Goswell: Yeah...

Splendid: Excuses for travellers, certainly, you put it on and there's nothing that has anything to do with dream pop or fuzz or anything like that...

Rachel Goswell: It's frightening really, isn't it?

Splendid: Well, I hope you'll have some time to go shopping today. Are you excited about the gig tonight?

Rachel Goswell: I'm always excited about gigs. Well, most of the time. It should be good. We need to rehearse, we're going in a bit earlier than we were going to go in.

Splendid: Because of the steel player?

Rachel Goswell: Partly because of that. Although the thing is with steel players, they're really, really good musicians.

Splendid: Does this person know the tunes?

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, actually I don't know who it is we've got here. He was recommended by somebody. We've got this guy called Raymond Richards, he's going to do the west coast gigs. He's in a band called the Sam Hillman Quartet -- Chris Hillman's son, don't know what they're like. Supposed to be very good. He actually e-mailed me, asking if we needed a pedal steel player, and that he knew all the songs on the record, and we were like, "Yes, please!" It's a real shame that we don't have Melvin with us, because he's Mojave number six, he's a sort of member. He had other stuff to do, he does all sorts of things, he's a really, really good guy. He was really gutted that he couldn't come. We've got the guy from Wilco playing with us in Toronto. It's interesting with steel players, because they are such brilliant musicians. Simon actually bought a pedal steel, don't think he mastered it yet...

Splendid: So is it mostly going to be stuff from this CD that you're going to play?

Rachel Goswell: Know what, I think actually a lot of stuff from Out of Tune, a couple from the first one...there's about one...actually, "In Love with a View," "My Life in Art," "Return to Sender," "Drifting," "Breaking So Softly." Five.

Splendid: You'll play "My Life in Art?" I think that's my favorite...

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, we generally open with that one, it's a good kind of vibe.

Splendid: Do they all go well live, can you pull them off live?

Rachel Goswell: Yeah, occasionally there are the odd mistakes, which is why we're having an extended sound check today. We haven't played together for just over a week. You know, we all make clangers now and then, which is quite entertaining. But generally it's kind of one of those things -- you know the song, you've been playing it forever. But Neil is forever forgetting his lyrics, which drives me mad! Just kind of sideways glancing...(laughter)

Splendid: Mouthing them to him...

Rachel Goswell: Especially when we're singing together and I'm singing one thing and he's just off on a completely different verse. It can be kind of upsetting.

Splendid: He needs a teleprompter.

Rachel Goswell: He was doing that quite a lot last night actually, at the in-store. I kept stopping the song going, "you just can't remember, can you?"

Splendid: Well, that's just off a jet...

Rachel Goswell: It's total memory loss!

For some reason I turned off the recorder at this point, although we continued chatting for a little while longer. Rachel said that she got really sick of doing interviews a couple years ago, since people were always asking her the same three questions. I don't remember what she said the three questions were (I think one was, "How does it feel singing Neil's lyrics?"), but I'm pretty sure I didn't ask any of them! She also told me that Mojave 3 is great live, which I can verify, as they played a terrific set for a very crowded and enthusiastic audience at the Knitting Factory that evening. The pedal steel player was fine, Neil remembered his lyrics and they played my favorite song. Hot dog!