Brand New: If You’re Going To Do Something, Make It Significant
Harriet Jennings catches up with Brand New’s Vincent Accardi for a significantly long chat.
Posted 22nd September 2009, 3:13pm in Interviews, by Harriet Jennings
Apparently, if you’re going to do something, you might as well make it significant.Harriet Jennings catches up with Brand New’s guitarist Vincent Accardi for a significantly long chat (see what we did there? - Ed.) about their new album ‘Daisy’ (released this week), being hard to swallow and why British festivals are best.
So I've got to ask, I've been listening to the new album 'Daisy' today, and the opening track begins with a rather peculiar sample... what's that about?
Jesse actually found an auction online and he'd gotten these reels of a few sermons, I think it was from a Baptist church in Long beach, California. And towards the end of the record we were just going through the reels and old records and just trying to see if we could find samples or if we could put anything interesting through the record, sort of a thread. And we came across that song on one of the reels, 'On Life's Highway', and it just sorta hit us immediately. You're on a reel to reel machine so it's not like you're skipping tracks, and we were just letting the thing roll and roll and roll, and listening to the guy's sermon and whatever songs were in-between, and that one popped up and its just seemed to sort of pop out at us for whatever reason at the time. And listening to it lyrically, we all thought it was beautiful and it seemed interesting to perhaps have that in the record somehow, and I think at the time we had sort of realised we had made the decision to have 'Vices' as the first track on the record which was kind of a shocking thing to have after something so pretty. And that's really it. We just lucked out stumbling upon it, we hadn't owned that long enough to wrap the record up in it, it came about a month before we'd finished the record and mastering, and it became the opener and closer to the record, which I enjoy very much now.
The entire thing was recorded in a basement studio where you apparently ate and slept, is that really how it happened?
Yeah, for the most part. The studio is Long Island based; it's pretty central to where the four of us live. None of us have to travel more than half an hour, give or take, to get to the studio so most nights we were able to go home. It helped break it up a bit because, you know, we were in a basement. Mike's studio is a full basement at the bottom of his house but it gets a little cramped in there when you're constantly with five or six guys, trying to move kit around and mic things up; it's kinda hard not to be in each other's way. But yeah, we would start our sessions around noon and continue to record until whenever we saw fit, really. The first few months of that record, we weren't leaving until 2am, 3am every night, we were really excited and we had a lot of work to do. They were long days. We rarely slept there; we definitely could have but it was nice to go home and wake up in your own bed and feel some separation from where you work and where you live and where you play. When all those things become one, you really start to lose a sense of what's going on sometimes and it becomes a lot more frustrating and a bit more claustrophobic. We would take weekends, Fridays and Saturdays to be with friends and family and relax but for the most part we were just pushing 12-hour days, six days a week.
Sounds intense. Does anyone in the band have anybody in the band have any particularly annoying habits when you're together that long?
Erm... I think when you're together this long, you sort of grow past noticing those things. I don't think you'd be able to be together as long as we have if we were still harping on about small, little habits that everyone has. We've grown to accept all of our faults and I guess, what is that phrase? Your 'pet peeves'. We're very tolerant of each other, and luckily enough we're fairly like-minded and what bothers one of us probably bothers all of us.
Probably best! There seems to be a common structure running throughout the album with softer verses and heavier choruses, multiple shifts in texture and dynamic, was that on purpose?
You know, I think that's something kind of common in all our records, particularly the last two records, you know 'Deja' and 'The Devil and God'. We tried to sort of make a conscious effort to not make those the devices that we rely on but I think that at this point, it's kind of instilled in the way that we write music and it's just one of those things. We're becoming a bit gimmicky with it, you know, relying on the sort of dynamic of being shockingly loud after trying to be quiet so I think we tried to do the opposite but it's so hard not to when you're so used to writing that way in the first place. That's why for me, a song like 'Bed', the second track on the record, or even the first track on the record, 'Vices', they kinda stick out for me because they sort of start off with a certain energy level which is maintained throughout the song. 'Vices' never really gets louder or softer. It just sort of starts somewhere and we just had to figure out how to keep it so intense. 'Bed' being the exact opposite, there's not really that explosive moment, it just kind of keeps itself to itself. So with songs like that we managed to do it but a song like 'You Stole' say is very much written in a classic song style, where it is the most quiet and dainty little thing and something the exact opposite happens in a verse or chorus after it. To answer your question, I guess in this record, if anything, we were trying to do the opposite, and I guess it just didn't turn out 100%.
How do you go about writing new material?
There's never really any rhyme or reason to it. I will say that a bulk of our material gets done in the studio. We've never really been the kind of band to get into a rehearsal room or a studio with each other and just hash out parts in front of each other and try to figure out how a song should go while the four of us are standing in a room together; that rarely works, it's never really been a tool for us in the writing process. Usually it's more somebody will bring a very simple structure, a very simple idea to the recording studio, loosely in our pre-production period, I guess you would call it. Everybody starts to just record right away and that's just how we go into the process now. We're kind of lost trying to write in front of each other, figuring things out in front of each other. We'll get the bare structure of a song down on tape and then everyone can sort of sit with it and figure out what it needs and what it doesn't need and what your role in the song is and everybody just sort of plays off that. It's never really become something constructive. Otherwise we just sit around staring at each other, waiting for someone to come up with the next part and that gets frustrating and then you start to question whether or not you even like the song so we'd rather hear it immediately, even if we don't know how to play it yet or what the song's supposed to be. Whatever we might have gets tracked immediately and we build upon it from there.
What made you choose 'At The Bottom' as the first single?
I'm not really sure, I think collectively everybody thought that would maybe be the easiest song for people to hear, compared to the rest of the record. I'm not even sure about 'At The Bottom' as a single in the traditional sense. I guess it falls under three minutes and thirty seconds and has more of a structure than maybe some of the other songs on the record. It just wound up being that one and I'm sure if we were to push a song like 'Vices' it would just be too frightening and maybe too difficult for people to absorb. And then who the hell wants to hear anybody screaming for 3 minutes straight while they're driving their car to and from work, you know. So I guess just by default that kind of became the song. I'm not really sure if there would have been any better to sort of push at the time.
You've played all sorts of festivals over the years, which would you say was your favourite?
We got to play Reading and Leeds for the second time this past August. I really enjoy that festival but we've only been able to play it twice. We always find that outside of America the overall attitude that show-goers have towards festivals and what they're about is a far leap from festivalgoers in the US. There just seems to be so much more of a community vibe. Reading and Leeds is an example of that. We were able to do Big Day Out in Australia, I guess it was two winters ago, and that was massive, I mean, not only were the shows wonderful and you were in Australia with beautiful views and whatnot, we were on tour with Bjork and Rage Against The Machine so it was pretty overwhelming to be able to watch them every night. A few summers ago we did Pukkelpop and we really enjoyed that because of the countries that that went through, it was great to be able to play on stage and your backdrop was the Alps, they're pretty wild things. And that again, Dinosaur Jr was on that, Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails. We've been fortunate to have some really great festivals under our belt and most of them are by you guys in the UK or in England. I just wish that... it's just Reading and Leeds is just so short, it's just two days and it goes by so fast, that was one of the reasons that I enjoyed Pukkelpop or Big Day Out because it felt more like a tour, you were able to settle in a bit.
Kings of Leon complained about the crowd at Reading this year, did you agree with them?
Did they? [Laughs] Were they being booed? Were they being ill received? I find that kind of a strange thing for a band of their size to say or act like. I didn't hear anything about that. No, we didn't have any problems at either Reading or Leeds, they were both great crowds and we enjoyed our shows. I know we all felt a little bad that we were so unrehearsed for it but we enjoyed our shows greatly and we had no such problem so sorry to hear that for Kings of Leon, I guess.
You're playing at Wembley in January; excited?
Yeah, it's quite a different room for us to be headlining. We have very little experience playing in crowds that size and having to deliver a headlining show. We'll be playing a similarly sized room at the end of our US tour at Long Island, New York, and that will pretty much be our only warm up to that and that's a pretty big show for us, that's a hometown show for us. And for myself and several other members of the band it's where we saw some of our first shows, our biggest concerts of our younger years so it's a pretty big deal and we realise how prestigious Wembley is and it's a bit nerve-wracking, it's exciting and it's going to be something different for us for sure so we're hoping we can get ourselves together by then. We'll be out on the road for two months so hopefully we'll be able to play these new songs and we'll be in good shape for that show and everything will go well but it's a pretty unbelievable thought that we're able to do something like that, especially in another country where it's difficult to get to and we might not get over to as much as we'd like. The thought of that many people being at a show for us is pretty overwhelming.
We were talking earlier about some of the bands you've played with, who's been your favourite to tour with, who was the most fun?
Who's the most fun? Kevin Devine's a pretty funny guy, he's always good to have around, he's a very entertaining person. We've been fortunate enough to, over the last few years, be in the position to headline shows and take out whomever we please, and because of that we've been able to take out bands that not only do we appreciate their music but have been or have become great friends of ours. Kevin Devine, Manchester Orchestra, mewithoutYou, Thrice, you know we're about to go on tour with these people again and I hope that our fans aren't too upset about how similar the shows are but it's pretty hard to get away from that when you've gone out with people who are your friends for two or three months out of the year and you start to settle into tour as if it's another home, and you get used to having these people that you enjoy around everyday and I think it's hard not to do that. All those people are just wonderful to have around. There's always good conversation, there's always good fun. We're looking forward to seeing them all and spending time with them all again soon.
A lot of fans name 'Deja Entendu' as their favourite album, and you have received some negative comments on Myspace about new material. Does this concern you and how do you cope with the criticism?
I try not to deal with the criticism at all, to be honest. [Laughs] Whether or not it's good or bad it has an undesirable effect on me because if people don't like it it's hard to grow skin thick enough to not be bothered by it. Especially when you've been working on something so closely for a year and a half and you don't have time to absorb what you've done but people are already telling you what you should and shouldn't have done. That's difficult. And if people say it's good, they're always comparing it to something else and you never know why these comparisons are being made, it's so frustrating. I just try to avoid it all together. One thing about all the records we've put out over the years, the fans are going to listen to them or not, I guess. We're very, very aware of how each of our records has a different sound and because of that everybody is going to have a different favourite record and probably for as many people that come to a show and are excited about it, we realise that there's probably the same amount of people that are probably disappointed about it. Well, actually, we know because we've had a lot of emails about it. Especially now as we're going to be touring with four records under our belt, our song catalogue is growing and it gets more and more difficult to play what people want to hear and unfortunately, it's not always the new material. I'm sure there are kids out there that would want to see us for a night and only play 'Deja' or only play 'Your Favourite Weapon' but that's not here we're at right now. If those songs fit into whatever set that we create then they'll be there but it's too difficult to dictate what you should sound like based off your fans. If you're going to make a decision like that, well, that's just not something that we've really ever done before because we don't feel like that's being true to anything that we're trying to do. We're pretty selfish as far as song writing goes. We very rarely are projecting what people might think, we realise when we might be going over the top with things. We're very conscious of the more questionable songs on a record or the more questionable parts that we're writing perhaps or the fact that certain things might be difficult for people to swallow. But we're the ones that have to go out and play the songs about 300 nights out of the year, and if we're not happy with ourselves and if we're not happy with the songs, you're not going to get a good show either way so we all make point to try to please ourselves, and especially with this record, before anybody else. We were just talking about how, especially with the fourth record coming out, we're just very surprised that again it sounds so different from us. Our fans are not only loyal to us but they become very loyal to a certain record and it's really interesting to see a crowd of people that might be divided up in themselves because of what they're waiting to hear. If we were in a studio trying to recreate the songs that people like more, I think that that would be stale and very uninspiring, and I apologise to all the people that don't like what we do, there's no way around it though.
And finally, you don't do many interviews, is there a reason for this?
I think after 'Your Favourite Weapon' and 'Deja' and the few years we were touring between those two records, things sort of changed very quickly and very dramatically for us and we were going from being four guys who were in a band touring around the US by whatever means they had to do it, to all of a sudden being on buses and doing press and making videos and putting out singles and all of the steps that I guess every other band or group takes to further their career. We were just doing it blindly and saying "yes" to everything and taking the advice of our management and A&R guy and record guy and doing what you thought you were supposed to do, and by the end of us touring for 'Deja' we'd accumulated a decent string of interviews and press and what not and we were sort of looking back on it and reflecting on us and what we were saying and the fact that we were in the public's eye. We were very uncomfortable. I don't think any of us knew how we wanted to present ourselves because we were confused about what we were doing and why people were interested in what we had to say. It was all very overwhelming. After all of that, there was a very conscious effort to limit things and to not be so out in the open. Not because we wanted to hide from fans or have any less communication with our crowd. We weren't trying to project a certain image in anyway by not speaking to anyone, which wound up happening anyway but I think we were just trying to protect ourselves and our own personalities. Before you open up your mouth, you've got to think about what you're about to say, and that doesn't happen over night. Unfortunately, that bothered a lot of people and we've been called a variety of different names because of that. Really, we were just trying to not show people anything that wasn't worth showing. If you're going to do it, you might as well make it something significant.
Brand New's new album 'Daisy' is out now. Pick it up here. Tickets for their forthcoming Wembley Arena show are also on sale now.
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