Deerhoof Interview

Many times in my life I have been part of a conversation about a band that I have never heard of.  Sometimes I pretend like I have, others times i don’t.  After minutes of careful thought, I’ve decided that I really like these conversations.  My hope is that this blog will be a starting point for many different types of musical discussions.  Some of it you may like, some of it you may hate.  Isn’t that’s what makes life fun?  

Ever hear of deerhoof? I spent a lot of my subway riding time this summer listening to them.  Turns out I liked what I heard.  It was a perfect end to a day of carrying heavy boxes and couches.  Check out their myspace page, and take a listen for yourself.  (www.myspace.com/deerhoof).

So what happens next?  

Greg Saunier, deerhoof drummer, was gracious enough to answer some of my questions about their music.  For this I am very grateful.  

Here she goes:  (blue/red is me, black is greg)

When you return to touring it looks like you are playing venues

ranging from small taverns, to large festivals? In which setting do

you feel more comfortable as a performer? Do you think your music

fits better in one venue over another?

-You never can tell! Our band has a few idiosyncrasies that make small venues kind of a challenge… Satomi sings very quietly, and although all four of us love the sound when she sings that way, it's a constant struggle to make the instruments quiet enough on stage. Her mic is cranked up so high that it's picking up everything on stage, and often the sound engineer will complain that they're getting more snare in the vocal mic than vocals. We've been playing for something like 15 years and still after almost every show Satomi will tell me I played too loud tonight! So in a way playing big and especially outdoor shows can feel like a breeze, I can bash away and there's no sound bouncing off a wall and into her mic. But when we can pull off a show on a small stage it's one of the greatest feelings in the world.

Would you call songwriting for the band a collective process, or

do you handle most of it yourself?

-Neither actually, we have four distinct songwriters in the band. Each person writes their own songs separately from the others. That person usually has a very good idea of how they want it to sound. But then when the group gets their hands on it, that composer is quickly unburdened of the idea that they can control how it will sound. So actually songs get changed around pretty drastically. We don't have a system - We never know what kind of song anybody is going to bring in and that person never has any idea how it will end up after everyone's made it their own. A lot of times though the person who writes the lyrics is not the same person who wrote the music.

Do you make attempts to explain your music to listeners before

their first listen? Or do you just sit back and let the music speak

for itself?

-Ha, I don't even make attempts to describe it after they listen, I don't like describing it. In fact I don't like describing any music very much, I never agree with the way stuff get categorized. To my ears a certain "jazz" recording might have much more in common with a particular "classical" piece than it does to the rest of the "jazz" genre. Another way to answer your question would be to say that yes, I do explain our music, I explain it through the music, the music is an explanation of itself. So we don't really sit back, we work pretty hard at trying to make the musical ideas as clear as we can.

When I listen to your music I'm very intrigued by your use of

melody, and rhythm. A strong melody is always present, but it seems

like the importance of the lyrics vary. Every time I listen to your

music I tend to walk away singing the groove and melody. Can you talk

about how you view lyrics in your music?

Hard to sum it up! Every song sort of has its own story. We have songs where the melody was written way before the words, we have others where it all appeared at once. Sometimes the lyrics are really difficult and take forever, sometimes they just flow right out. We all have written lyrics at different times. For my lyrics I tend to like extremely simple but also ambiguous, like you could map the words onto a variety of different possible topics. You don't know if they are about a personal relationship or a political situation. I get excited by a certain kind of irony, where the mood of the words seems at first glance to contradict the mood of the music. I'm also always trying to write lyrics that use very simplified English, partly because we have so many fans from countries where English is not the main language, and also we have some very young fans.

In the fall you are doing a lot of shows with brooklyn based xiu

xiu, and father murphy. What qualities do you look for in bands that

you share gigs with? Are the selections usually music based, or crowd

drawing based? Or both?

-Well we would never choose to have other music on the bill that we don't like. But whether or not we worry about their draw depends on the size of the venue. If we're playing smaller places then we often bring totally obscure acts. Also it's more than a question of simply whether we like the music, we also look for something that makes your ears excited and ready for more, because we're next! For our New York show coming up we are playing with Axiom Ensemble which plays contemporary classical music, and they and I have been involved together in deciding which pieces they might play, which is so exciting for me. We don't always play with "bands".  (I would love to see more shows that include music of different “genres”)

Currently it seems like your music has a concentrated set of

listeners. Is this something that you are happy with?  (not the best question, sorry about that)

-That's probably true but it never seems that way to me. We have always had more listeners than I thought we would! And our fans, bless them, are such a wide-ranging group in terms of age or what other music they like. We've always been so lucky in that way, we've never ended up in any clique or subgenera.

Do you have any questions for me? Any band, or person you would

like to see in future interviews?

-Jim Black! What a drummer…

Lets all give Greg a round of applause.  Please check out their music and tour schedule at http://deerhoof.killrockstars.com/.  

I look forward to your comments/questions/concerns.  

-leon