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article by jennifer kelly | photos by justin carl.
Members of the Spinto Band have been recording music together since before they could drive, before they had to shave and before they likely had any direct experience of the girls they dedicated their power pop anthems to. In fact, their band started when some of them were still in middle school, when bassist Thomas Hughes and his brother Sam discovered that the audio equipment they'd been tripping over all their lives (their stepfather was a musician) could actually become the highlight of a really fun sleepover. Friends like Nick Krill, Jeff and Joe Hobson, Jon Eaton and Albert Birney arrived, sleeping bags, musical instruments and cool sounds in hand, and the band began making the first of its lo-fi pop recordings. Soon, The Spinto Band -- named after Krill's grandfather, whose own scribbled songs (some of them written on Cracker Jack wrappers) filled an entire cabinet -- were recording in earnest.
DIY apparently ran in the family -- several families, in fact -- in suburban Delaware, and The Spinto Band charged recklessly ahead, recording four albums, creating art work, posting songs on the Internet and gradually building a reputation as the coolest thing to come out of a basement since shag carpeting. Splendid began reviewing Spinto Band's output early on, and in fact, their Good Answer prompted our own Mike Baker to demand, "Who would have thought that it would take a seven piece indie-rock outfit from Delaware and a humble self-released disc to change my opinion about the prospects for the CDR boom that's presently plaguing the music world?"
This year, New Jersey-based indie-powerhouse Bar/None joined the bandwagon, releasing the Spinto Band's first professionally-recorded CD, Nice and Nicely Done, in June of 2005. A best-of compilation of sorts, the disc gathers old songs and new, and puts the sheen of Nashville studio equipment on them, but retains the sheer exuberant rambunctiousness that put the Spinto Band on the map. We're guessing that even today, if you visit a band member's house for dinner one night, you'll more than likely end the evening in the basement, laying down crazy sounds for another home-recorded album. Here's what bass player Thomas Hughes had to say about his band's origins, its approach to home recording and those embarrassing sixth-grade songs that are still floating around on the internet.
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Splendid: So... You guys have been together as a band for almost ten years, you've got four albums to your credit... Are you all old enough to drink yet?
Thomas Hughes: I think half of us -- maybe more than half of us are.
Splendid: You must have started really young.
Thomas Hughes: Yeah. When we were all about... I don't even know how old. I was about 15. All the band members vary, but there seemed to be a period where we all got instruments, the guitars, the keyboards, the drums. I don't think any of us had any real experience playing music. It's just something that sort of happened. We started playing together.
Splendid: You're all from the same school and the same neighborhood.
Thomas Hughes: Not really. We're all kind of scattered across this area where we live. It was more that our parents were friends with each other. That's how we met each other.
Splendid: And you and Sam Hughes are brothers?
Thomas Hughes: Yeah.
Splendid: I really like Nice and Nicely Done. It's the kind of thing that's hard to write about and hard to interview about, because it's just really good material of its type. There are no real gimmicks to it.
Thomas Hughes: Oh, well, thanks for saying that.
Splendid: It's much easier to do an interview if somebody's recording in a geodesic dome or something weird like that.
Thomas Hughes: We tried to, but...
Splendid: Tell me about your name. I understand it came from Nick's uncle, who sounds quite eccentric. Do you want to tell that story?
Thomas Hughes: Oh, yeah, it was actually his grandfather. Nick was looking for a Lenny Dykstra rookie card -- a baseball card -- and for some reason he was looking in his grandfather's house. This was after his grandfather died. He was going through this cabinet and he found all this sheet music for songs -- songs and ideas for songs. And this was sort of the same time when we were all getting into music and recording music on four-tracks. He decided to bring some of the music to us and he was like, "Hey, you know, we're going to play these songs." So we ended up playing it.
Splendid: What kind of music was it?
Thomas Hughes: It was all over the map. Some of it was the old type of folkloric style. He had been writing from the 1930s up until the late 1970s or early 1980s, so that's sort of represented there.
Splendid: And did he really write on Cracker Jack boxes?
Thomas Hughes: Oh, yeah. Some of them were. They were basically his scribblings on whatever he could find to write on.
Splendid: That's kind of cool. What do you play, what instrument?
Thomas Hughes: Live, I play bass guitar. And in the studio, I just play whatever...
Splendid: You guys switch around quite a bit?
Thomas Hughes: Yeah. In a live setting, there are members who go from guitar to keyboard. (pause) I was just in the middle of a game. I had to leave it.
Splendid: You're playing Atari?
Thomas Hughes: We're playing this game called... It's Sorry, but it's Team Sorry. We kept changing places, switching around. I got someone to take my place.
Splendid: I hate to mess you up, because you've got that song on the album about Atari. Was that on a previous album as well?
Thomas Hughes: It was on an EP called Good Answers. The actual title is "Japan Is an Island".
Splendid: Isn't that sort of a hidden track on Nice and Nicely Done?
Thomas Hughes: Yeah, it is. It's kind of strange on that album. That's the sort of thing that we sort of de-emphasized... like when we wrote it, we were still in high school, but we recorded it in Nashville and it's sort of followed us. Like a ghost or something. But, yeah, it's there.
AUDIO: Late
Splendid: Do you feel like now that you're not in high school -- I don't know how old you all are, but I would guess early 20s -- do you feel like you've outgrown some of the subject matter of your earlier songs?
Thomas Hughes: Yeah, that's really true. If you get any group of people who wrote songs when they were still in middle school, there are bound to be some things that they're embarrassed about. But the stuff sticks around forever. If we put a song up on the Internet back in high school, it's probably still around today. We've done ... you know the web site MP3.com?
Splendid: Yep.
Thomas Hughes: There was a site like that, and we just uploaded, for the hell of it really, some of the songs that we were working on at the time. Really boring music, you know, and it's still up there because we forgot the password. They were just some songs that we were recording in our basement. So that's kind of funny.
Splendid: But you've been doing that all along. I was looking at some of the Splendid reviews of your earlier stuff, like Good Answer and Mersey and Reno, and you've been recording your own stuff about as long as you've been writing and playing it, right?
Thomas Hughes: Yeah.
Splendid: So tell me how you learned to do that.
Thomas Hughes: Yeah, sure. Sam and I... our stepfather was a musician and he had all this old equipment lying around the house. We just sort of grew up with it, and we had all gotten instruments, and we had this stuff that enabled us to record music. That was exciting for us. It seemed that from the beginning we were always more into recording the music, rather than actually writing the music. Writing songs was recording music for us. It was just a means of recording music. Listening back to all the songs, we would start off with sounds and just record for the sake of recording because it was really interesting. And then, I guess, the more we did it, the more we became interested in the songs themselves and their structure. I think that's where we are now.
Splendid: So, when you started out and you were just recording stuff for the sake of recording it, what did you think would happen? What was the goal?
Thomas Hughes: I guess it was mainly for our personal entertainment. On the weekends, we just brought everyone over and part of the activity of the weekend -- which was like a sleepover -- would be recording songs. It would be like, "Hey, does anyone want to record a song?" and the kids would just go down there and maybe two hours later we would have something and we would put it on one of our natty little tapes. That was just something we did. We even made games out of it. One person would go down there and record the second track and another person would record the third track, until we've had eight tracks and that would be a song. We'd do stuff like that.
Splendid: So it was really just for fun?
Thomas Hughes: Yeah.
Splendid: At what point did it become more serious? Where you wanted to put a record out and try to be a band and play shows and all that? I don't know what your goals are now. Maybe it's still for fun, but at what point did it change for you, if it did.
Thomas Hughes: Well, we always... sort of... having fun was always the main interest. But we'd always sort of known that we were this band and we were really interested in doing art and making album art for a band and making up album titles. That's actually how we started releasing our earlier stuff. And there are lots of other recordings, too. We each have solo projects, too. Each of us would release an album of our solo work, whatever that was. And we'd also make up fake bands. This is on our Spintonic production. It was a way to release our music, a way of cutting CDs or burning CDs. We'd make up band names and just make records for them.
Splendid: Cool.
Thomas Hughes: Yeah.
Splendid: So all the bands on Spintonic are basically you guys in some permutation.
Thomas Hughes: Yeah.
Splendid: What about Bikini Carwash?
Thomas Hughes: It started as us, but just lately, we've wanted to get more people involved, because it seems like it would be more fun. The Bikini Carwash is one of those with other people.
Splendid: So they're not you.
Thomas Hughes: No. This is... I'm talking more recently now, I guess.
Splendid: You did all the earlier stuff on Spintonic and now you're on Bar/None.
Thomas Hughes: Yeah.
Splendid: How did that happen and how does it change your lives and the way you do things?
Thomas Hughes: Well, one of the members of the band is John Eaton and his uncle, Robin Eaton, was listening to one of the recordings we made in our basement, and for some reason, he asked us to come down to Nashville, because he had a studio there. And offered to record us, so we had to record stuff we'd already written. It wasn't about us writing songs in the studio. It was about us trying to recreate the stuff that we had recorded in our home studio. So they're a little better quality. We had time to actually think about the songs, as opposed to just randomly brainstorming them and putting on lyrics and so forth.
Splendid: So I was reading about this Mersey and Reno, the two-hour, double-disc album? It sounds like the record that I have, Nice and Nicely Done, is a greatest hits compilation of the best from that. Or is that not true? Is there new stuff on Nice and Nicely Done?
Thomas Hughes: There's new stuff on that. The stuff that we were recording in Nashville is sort of a greatest hits because, like, with a basement studio, you have all the time that you want, but in Nashville, we had to go in and decide... We had a limited amount of time, so we had to decide on our favorite songs that we wanted to do and how we wanted to do them. So we approached that as a process of sort of narrowing it down. The stuff on the album, some of the newer songs that are on the album... Actually, Nice and Nicely Done was recorded in a period of about four years, so some of that stuff is older. There are also some songs that we only recorded in that studio, that we had written before.
AUDIO: Oh Mandy
Splendid: Which are the oldest ones and which are the newest ones on Nice and Nicely Done?
Thomas Hughes: "Late" and "Trust vs. Mistrust" and "Did I Tell You?" are the older recordings and the remaining seven songs were written just about a year ago, just in one month.
Splendid: So, how'd you feel about that, going from this very unstructured, just-for-fun kind of recording process to something a little more professional?
Thomas Hughes: It was sort of a new layer of fun. With a basement studio, you're sort of limited to a certain level of audio fidelity and number of tracks, so it was fun to actually have a professional reworking of these older songs. There were also a lot more instruments. There was a real piano and real bells and lots of keyboards that we could play with.
Splendid: Would you do it that way again if you had the chance?
Thomas Hughes: Yeah. It was really fun.
Splendid: So tell me about the people in the band and what kinds of backgrounds they all have. Are you in art school, or some of you are in art school?
Thomas Hughes: Yeah, some of us are. I still have one more semester to go.
Splendid: What are you studying?
Thomas Hughes: I'm studying photography and video.
Splendid: And you did the video for "Oh Mandy". Tell me about that.
Thomas Hughes: It's a video mosaic and I just did that because I was really attracted to the idea of needlepoint and I found this image in a thrift store. It's of a little blonde girl with an umbrella. I've become just obsessed with that image. I wanted to do something with it, and my friend Nick wrote the song "Oh Mandy", so I brought the two ideas of a video mosaic with needlepoint and "Oh Mandy" together and made a loose narrative out of that. It's sort of a puzzle, but also a music video.
Splendid: Have you guys ever done a video before?
Thomas Hughes: Yeah, we've done videos. We've actually made a lot of our own movies. But we kind of did stuff on the kind of production... Our friend Albert Birney, who used to be in the Spinto Band, he's primarily a film-maker. He works with animation. That's what he's doing right now. He does a lot of work for us.
Splendid: How did this thing with Bar/None come about?
Thomas Hughes: We were just sending this thing that we recorded in Nashville to other labels. I guess they liked it, so we met up with them and we decided to release the album.
Splendid: Are you getting more attention with this record than you have in the past?
Thomas Hughes: Oh, yes, certainly. It's maybe because of the Bar/None backing. It's not just us burning things in our living room, printing out the art work on our computers. I don't really know how it works, but there's a lot more press and a lot more people writing things about us on the internet.
Splendid: You know, I was looking and there's really not that much about you guys on the internet yet.
Thomas Hughes: It's more for us. We're not really used to reading anything.
Splendid: So, how big would you like to get? It's a very poppy sound. I could see it being pretty significant.
Thomas Hughes: As big as they'll let us, I guess. That'd be fun.
Splendid: So I guess people compare you to lots of different bands -- The Eels and Ween and Pavement and Yo La Tengo and all kinds of things that are not very similar. What kind of music do you listen to and admire and take inspiration from?
Thomas Hughes: At the beginning when we were all in high school, I think we all listened to the same styles of music. I really liked Pavement and Ween and the Flaming Lips, and of course The Beatles. Now we've all sort of drifted away from listening to the same things. Right now, I'm listening to Harper's Bizarre, Curt Boettcher, The Ballroom, Margo Guryan, stuff like that.
Splendid: Is it hard to get all the people in the band together and agree on what you're going to do?
Thomas Hughes: I think that's partly what makes it work. What happens is that either Nick or I will come up with an idea for a song and we'll bring it to the group and everyone will contribute something. I think it works out nicely.
Splendid: Is it possible to say, for instance, that this person in the band is going for this kind of music and we have this other guy who's really into something else? Is there are push and pull?
Thomas Hughes: Not really. We just play the songs until everyone comes to an agreement. There aren't really many arguments, musically. We're all able to say, "Hey, that doesn't work at all," but other than that, I don't know.
Splendid: So you're doing a small tour on the East Coast now.
Thomas Hughes: Yeah, we just started it. We played in Boston and Providence, Rhode Island. That was pretty fun. And we're going to Philadelphia tomorrow, which is sort of our stomping grounds, but not really. We're not really from there, but we play there a lot. So that should be fun.
Splendid: Your music basically evolved out of the studio, so how do you have to change it to play live?
Thomas Hughes: A lot of the time... when we first started to play live, we would have to relearn songs we did because we didn't remember what we'd recorded and how we'd recorded them. We would always have to relearn the songs or teach other members of the band how to play them. With six people in the band, it's not as easy as you'd think, because on the recordings there are always a lot of parts. There's always something; someone will have to play one line and then switch to another line, right in the middle of a song, to make sure it all sounds good from a live standpoint.
Splendid: When you play live, do you have four guitars?
Thomas Hughes: We used to have four guitars. We worked it down to three.
Splendid: That's still a lot of guitars.
Thomas Hughes: Yeah, it can get messy sometimes. We all have tuning pedals now.
Splendid: Well, that's good. Are they all playing different stuff at the same time?
Thomas Hughes: Yeah, there's usually a rhythm thing and a more melodic thing and there's a wild part, sort of guitar that plays exclamations.
Splendid: And then you have a drummer and a bass player. What else?
Thomas Hughes: Keyboards.
Splendid: Who sings?
Thomas Hughes: Nick and I do the lead vocals. Everyone else sings the backup vocals.
Splendid: Which songs do you like the best?
Thomas Hughes: I'm a big fan of "Spy Vs. Spy" because it's one of the new ones and I'm still not used to hearing it recorded yet. It's still fun to listen to.
AUDIO: Brown Boxes
Splendid: I really like "Brown Boxes" -- are you guys playing kazoos at the end?
Thomas Hughes: Yeah, there are kazoos.
Splendid: So is the song inspired by having to move from somewhere?
Thomas Hughes: It was inspired by just the title, "Brown Boxes". It was written from that title.
Splendid: So it was nothing to do with anybody's life?
Thomas Hughes: No.
Splendid: Is that usually how it goes, that you're just playing with sounds and words and stuff and it's not really biographical?
Thomas Hughes: Yeah, it's not really biographical at all. I can't speak for all the songs, but that one isn't.
Splendid: Who writes the most songs?
Thomas Hughes: I have three and a half songs on the album, and Nick has the remaining ones. My friend Billy Martin, who's on the Spintonic Productions label, co-wrote "Trust Vs. Mistrust". That started out as a concept album about Erik Erickson's Eight Ages of Man, but we never got around to finishing the rest of the songs.
Splendid: So it's just that one?
Thomas Hughes: "Trust Vs. Mistrust", yeah -- that's the first stage.
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Jennifer Kelly's grandfather had a cabinet full of interviews with big band musicians.
[ graphics credits :: header/pulls - george zahora | photos - justin carl :: credits graphics ]
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