Well, this is the big surprise I have been talking about lately. Yep, Steve hooked lelelow.com up with another interview...
Well, it's a hot and humid day here in Florida. My mom finally left the house...so I felt like it was time to sneak in some songs on Guitar Hero while I waited for Steve to call. Well, in the middle of a song (I was doing rather good on, might I add) he rang. I then proceeded to drop my brother's controller on the ground, oops, then moseyed on over to my room to start the interview. Let's just say it was a "weird"filled interview, for lack of a better word (as you shall soon see).You have been hard at work on recording new music. What are you personally most excited about with the new tracks?Since we’ve been recording in our own studio, it’s been a lot easier for us to do everything our own way. So, sometimes we’ll write it and record it the same day. Other times we will write it as we go along and we’ll start with a demo and we’ll keep changing it until it becomes a real song. I don’t know, it’s weird. We have this new song, for example, we wrote last Sunday and recorded it, like the drums and the bass for it, in one day and we were able to put it away for, like, five days, and then last night I recorded the piano and the vocals after not listening to it all week. Normally you can’t really do that if you’re in a studio. It’s so expensive that you just…have to record it all at once kind of thing. And then we have one song that we’ve slowly been working on for two months so it’s really all over the place. Also, there’s nobody saying what we should or shouldn’t do. I mean, I’m basically producing it myself. So last night, for example, we spent maybe an hour and a half setting up the vocal mics. We wanted to have microphones down the hall because there’s a giant spiral staircase that we set up all these weird mics and stuff on. And I did one vocal take and it was so crazy and then Paul came and he hugged me and said, “That’s it.” Most producers would never let you keep your first take, but since we are doing it ourselves, we can do weird stuff like that.
Awesome. How do you think the sound of the music has changed from the band's previous albums?It’s pretty freaky. It’s a lot weirder and…um…it’s a lot more twisted, I think. It’s weird. There’s a lot of cool time signatures and slightly…I wouldn’t say they are typical arrangements necessarily. The sound is a lot dirtier. Just kind of like a fat, dirty sound. It’s maybe…I don’t even know what you would compare it to. It’s a lot more keyboard heavy mainly because Paul and I have been doing most of the writing so far. So, often a lot of the songs have been written with him on drums and me on keyboard. So it’s definitely a mixture between old-school Hot Hot Heat synth mixed with a lot of tac piano and really grindy, dirty bass and raspy vocals. There’s more kind of gang chants vocally and singing a lower range than I normally do, I think.
You now have your own studio. Do you think that's had a particularly drastic effect on the feel of the new stuff or does it only play a minor role?It’s totally different. It’s pretty much the best thing, I think, people in our position could do is to build our own studio because…I mean, it’s in downtown Vancouver. It’s on the corner of…it’s called Hastings Street and it’s right where east becomes west and it’s where downtown becomes the worst part of town. But there’s just really good energy and it’s a corner suite and we’re overlooking the city and the mountains and the ocean. The vibe is really good there. And also, I don’t know…something just about doing it yourself makes it so that you’re not really putting on a show for anybody except for whoever you invite into the studio. It’s just a lot freakier and it feels less reserved and it feels like the way I want to make every record.
I recently read an interview with Dan Boeckner of Wolf Parade where he said they were building their own studio to prepare for the collapse of the music industry and loosen the amount of ties to their record label. Is this one reason you made your studio or, for you, is it more of an internal influence?It’s totally partly why I built the studio. I mean, I’ve always had a big role in making each of our records but it’s gotten to the point where I’ve said I need to do this myself and not rely on having to pay big money to producers and big money to other studios because the problem with that is then you are always waiting to find out how much the record label is willing to invest on your record. There’s this screwed up association between money and music and it shouldn’t be that way. So basically I just invested most of my money into a space where I knew we could make records until we are in our nineties. So even though it’s a smaller studio than we’ve worked in in the past, everything that’s in it is the same kind of stuff we wanted to use in a normal studio so now we’re only limited by how well we know how to use the gear that’s in there. But a big part of it was I just don’t want to have to rely on any label to tell me how good my record’s gonna be. So we can make records for free now. I’d rather rely more on the quality of the music. If the music’s good, people like you will tell people about it and word-of-mouth goes farther now than it ever did before.
It was rumored for a while that the band would be picking either Outta Heart or My Best Fiend for a third Happiness Ltd. single. Will there be a third single or are y'all going to concentrate solely on the new music?Yeah, we were talking about it. To be honest, we just wanted to get rolling in the studio. I don’t even think of things as singles so much anymore. I mean, I guess you have to because it requires the label investing money, you know, all that kind of crap. I don’t know. I don’t really…I started noticing that the people coming to our shows…a lot of them weren’t people that found out about us through the radio. Even though I like having our songs on the radio, I don’t think it’s the majority of people at our shows because of it. I just kept thinking that it’s more important that we put out more music more often. Because I think the people that are coming to our shows are people that find out about us through their friends, the internet, word-of-mouth. It’s more important to nurture that and put out more music than I think it would be for us to spend another four to six months promoting a single song.
You told me some months ago that you had more Happiness Ltd. demos you wanted to put out. Any chance these B-sides will be released?Yeah I definitely want them to come out. There’s definitely another four songs. One called Kill What You Love, one called Life Alone, one called Cadence, and there’s another one which I am forgetting what we were calling it. There’s definitely at least four more. I always thought Life Alone was really cool. Mainly Life Alone and Kill What You Love was really cool, too. Actually, when we did strings for Outta Heart and Good Day To Die, we got them to do strings for Kill What You Love, so it made it up right until the last second then we changed our mind. I think we are going to wait until we release a few new songs and then maybe we’ll put out these other ones after. But I think that I want the next thing we do to be more of a big splash just because the new music is so crazy and different and I kinda want that to be a big deal when we put it out. Other than distracting people with B-sides right now.
I know that it has been long expected that you guys will be touring Mexico and South America. Do you see that happening any time in the foreseeable future or is it just wishful thinking?It’s definitely gonna happen. We had one offer to do Mexico and then it fell through. I can’t remember…something to do with the promoter. But yeah, we’re definitely working on it. I know that the response that we get from South America and stuff is way crazier than we expected it. I don’t know why, I think just really works there. I’d love to do a ton of touring there cuz we also having not only people who dig the band there but we also just like that part of the world. Everybody’s just welcoming and there’s so many good people in Brazil and Mexico. I definitely, definitely want to tour more there.
If you personally could handpick any current band that you have not toured with yet to do a tour with Hot Hot Heat, which band would you pick and why?I’d love to do an opening slot for Nick Cave. We’ve been listening to one of his albums, Murder Ballads, and some of Grinderman. But as far as opening for us, I like the Yeasayer album…we’ve been listening to a ton of new music lately. Although it’s not really stuff we could tour with. Frank Zappa, although we can’t really tour with him unfortunately. There’s some good local bands that we’ve been checking out lately. There’s, like, three good bands from Vancouver right now. The band Bison, which are really good, a band called The Clips…and a band called Bend Sinister—they’re really good. I definitely think we’re going to bring them on tour at some point.
If you could recommend some up and coming bands to the fans, which bands would you recommend?I don’t know if they’ve done any recent recordings, but that band
Bend Sinister are really good. And
The Clips and
Bison are really good local bands I really like. And that
Nick Cave album called Murder Ballads. That’s a pretty awesome record.
For the final question, there is something I have been meaning to ask you for a long time. Are we ever going to see the full Le Le Low music video?Ooh man…yeah…I don’t know. (laughs)
I mean, like, nobody would probably see it but really hardcore fans, you know what I mean? And I’m not gonna lie, everyone really wants to see it.Yeah, but that’s the problem when you put something online once. Ya know, it’s like herpes. It’s permanent! (laughs)
It hasn’t had that many views. It’s just mostly people that visit the website.Maybe I’ll upload it. I did one for 5 Times Out Of 100 and Le Le Low. Back then we were doing things completely independently and I edited that thing in our apartment. I remember we were doing weird things like shooting…we took a beetle or some sort of bug and filmed it walking around our bath tub and keyed out the white background and made this bug walking over the whole video. It’s kinda cool. Back then I remember we made our own website and we recorded those songs ourselves and…you know…I just like the idea of having a home base where we do everything ourselves. And then we signed to SubPop and we signed to Sire and all of a sudden there were these people helping us with it. But now I’m trying to get back to doing everything ourselves again. We’re doing it with our friends. We’re producing ourselves but we eventually want to find somebody that can do the website that can work with us at the studio and we want to do the videos ourselves and edit them ourselves. It’s just kinda every stage of being in a band is so fun. Like I want to be involved in all of the…not like in a Trent Reznor way but more just…I think I hate hiring anybody to do anything creative. It’s like giving away the funnest part of being a band. To me, that’s like a payment being able to do all that stuff. But yeah, that was the way it as back then. That’s kind of what we are coming back to now. Having said that, that Le Le Low video was my first attempt at making a music video. Yeah, I’m a little bit embarrassed about it now.
I totally feel ya. I haven’t done anything like you, but I used to be in TV Production at my school and definitely when you look back at your earlier stuff, it’s really like, “What the fuck was I thinking?” You know?I kind of feel that way about a lot of stuff, though, and then I change my mind and then I like it and then I hate it…pretty much every song we’ve ever done, every video we’ve ever done, it’s like there’s definitely a “what was I thinking” factor that’s eventually gonna come back to haunt you. Sometimes if it’s far enough in the past, it’s almost endearing when something’s really lame. But yeah, I don’t know. Maybe eventually I’ll dig it up. I know I have it on a CD somewhere here. Eventually I’d like to have a website that has every single thing we’ve ever done kind of…what do you call it…
Archives?Yeah, archive is the word. Where it’s just like every video, even the ones I made when I was in film class or whatever and even like all the previous bands we were in before this one. I was actually in one band where I was the singer and I played guitar and Matt Marnik was the drummer. And we played, I think it was like, an 8/6 song or an 8 song demo cassette. It was called New York City Rhythm and it was pretty cool. It was the first time I actually, like, sang. It was more like screaming, though, so it’s not like Hot Hot Heat where it was the first time I sang. Yeah it was interesting. Matt Marnik wasn’t a very good drummer. It was his first time drumming, I think, too.
So, this interview ended up being more than I expected. We got to learn a lot about the past, present, and future of Hot Hot Heat. After chatting for a while about some website business (keep your eyes peeled, guys), we parted ways. Thanks again to Steve for being awesome enough for this great opportunity!Also, on keep your eyes out for the
Talk To Me podcast. One
exclusive recorded question will be revealed on an upcoming episode so don't miss it!
