After their show at THE EARL in ATLANTA, GA band members of VENICE IS SINKING joined me for an interview.
Before finally shutting down the club on that Sunday night, we were able to talk about the many things that interest Venice is Sinking. We set the record straight and credited the horn parts on their latest record to the correct person. We talked about the influence of Athens on their music, and they backed up my theory that every musician from Athens is, was, or will be in the band Dark Meat. In an eerie prelude to that summer’s tragic Georgia Theatre fire, we talked about the album they recorded there and the importance of “musical mistakes.” We also talked about the internet’s double-edge influence on bands, fans, and press and we found out that Lucas (the drummer) loves every cereal in the grocery aisle.
Special thanks to Matt Crisler for taking photographs of the show and for being my concert buddy.
Full Transcript (Audio):
Lucas Jensen: My name is Lucas Jensen!
Nichole Bennett: My name is Nichole. I’m in the Earl in Atlanta, GA, and I’m lucky enough to be surrounded by members of Venice is Sinking. Would you guys mind going around and introducing yourselves?
Daniel Lawson: Lucas already went.
Lucas Jensen: My name is Lucas Jensen! I play drums!
James Sewell: I’m James Sewell, and I play keyboards.
DL: And trumpet.
JS: And trumpet.
DL: I’m Daniel Lawson. I play guitar, and I also sing.
NB: If you were to tell the story of your band, would it be a comic book or a pop up book?
DL: We were just talking about pop up books.
LJ: I think we would have to go with pop up book. In person maybe we are goofier, but our music is more ornate or pretty. Some sort of glittery griffin with some fairies kind of pop up book.
DL: I think it captures our whimsical side and our artistic depth.
LJ: I’m just kidding. I don’t want any fairies at all near us. We’ll leave that for the Tori Amos set.
DL: We talked about doing this though…back when we thought we would have money for things.
JS: Before global warming, the economy….World War II.
LJ: Yeah that was back before 9/11.
DL: We were just fetuses.
LJ: That’s true. Before 9/11 we were at some point. Everything changed that day. It’s not good to joke about that still?
DL: I guess not.
NB: It’s almost acceptable.
LJ: We were going to say before that we are not commenting on 9/11. Pop up book it is.
NB: So your latest album has been gaining a lot of press, and I heard that it was a more democratic album than your first one. As in, the whole band was involved in the making of this one—is that true?
DL: Yeah. I think with the first record I had a lot of songs lying around before we were even a band, so we ended up using those. With this one, it was just a lot more collaborative. Like James came in with that bit that is the thematic…
JS: The Azar theme.
DL: …that main melody that is intertwined throughout the record—that’s all James. There’s that one day, Lucas, where you, me, and Karolyn…
LJ: It was two days, and we wrote three songs or something. We wrote “Sun Belt.” “Ryan’s Song” was just this instrumental we had, and we turned it into something one day. We did something else too…we finished “Iron Range.” It was like, wow those were a great two days, and then we took months off and didn’t do anything. I think Daniel had these songs, and it was more of his project…and that’s not saying it shouldn’t be..
DL: I brought stuff early in on this record, and we all fleshed it out.
JS: Yeah that was the fundamental difference. Even if you had the fundamental idea of what a song would be, it wasn’t all done. When I first joined in 2005—because I’m not the first keyboard player—I was told the parts to play basically, and they were within the limits and ranges not only of the old keyboard player but of the old keyboard, which was considerably smaller. It had like one sound you could switch on. So for the new record, it was a more collaborative songwriting effort but also for the individual parts like the keyboard part.
DL: Yeah, and you got to do the horn charts and stuff for “Okay.” That’s all you.
LJ: Which somehow managed to go uncredited on the records, but now we will set the record straight. The song “Okay” off Azar by Venice is Sinking: horn arrangements by James Harold Sewell.
DL: Junior.
LJ: Junior. So there we go. Maybe BMI can put that in there.
NB: I believe on your website you say that this album talk about a location’s ability to influence. You guys are out of Athens, which is well-known for it’s music and it’s billions and millions of musicians. How do you feel that being located in Athens has affected you guys.
DL: It’s certainly helped. There’s somewhat of a cache trying to book shows out of town if you are from Athens.
LJ: People are definitely interested in the scene—everything from B-52’s to Pylon to Widespread Panic. There are a lot of people out of Athens that people don’t even talk about. Matthew Sweat got his start there and The Glands…the whole E-6 thing with Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control. If you know indie rock, there’s a lot of great indie rock from there. It’s a wonderful music town. There’s so much influence too.
DL: It’s a great place to start out as a band. As a really young band you could play every week if you wanted to. There’s plenty of venues.
LS: And you can have a different audience as well. There are going to be different people at different venues.
DL: For somewhere like Clemson, I’d imagine it’s a little more limited.
NB: Limited.
LJ: Not to discredit Clemson at all.
NB: No, no no. There are definitely places that could be venues, but it’s the audience that is more keen on cover bands and jam bands.
LJ: No problem with jam bands and cover bands, though. They definitely serve their purpose, and there are even quite a few popular ones. It’s not our scene necessarily, but we certainly don’t begrudge that. [In Athens] there are so many musicians living together that everyone has their own thing, their own side projects along with collaborations.
NB: Dark Meat.
LJ: Yeah Dark Meat. Everybody’s in that band. Our old bassist actually was in it for a while.
NB: Raise your hand if you are in Dark Meat.
LJ: Our old bassist Steve [Miller] threw out sandwiches for them for a while. That was kind of his job. Obviously it influences us, but more than that—getting back to the locations thing—ther’s a song on our last album CSX about moving out of our old practice space. It has a very southern feel to it. People don’t actually hone in on this in our music, but it’s actually pretty southern. The third record is going to be even more so. We like plenty of British bands, but I feel like there is an Americana thing even if it isn’t twangy or country. A part of that is that in Athens you are surrounded by kudzu, train tracks, and porches. Moths and mosquitos.
Benjamin Weikel [from The Helio Sequence]: Big fucking bugs.
LJ: Yeah you guys don’t have bugs like that in Portland.
BW: Yeah there was one time before a show…I was out back, and I always stretch before I play. There was a black widow hanging from a water spout. I was like, wow, black widow. That’s a big spider. Then I went a little further down, and this wood spider comes out. It was as big as my hand. I was terrified.
LJ: Did you see the cockroaches? This probably doesn’t happen in Oregon, but in some of the old houses here, they are just there. The exterminator can come, but they are just part of your existence.
DL: My cat eats them.
NB: Speaking of the new album, I heard that you guys are doing a Cowboy Junkies Trinity thing. Is that true?
LJ: Yeah that record was recorded a year ago, actually. Which is kind of depressing that we haven’t put it out yet, but we had to put this one out in order.
DL: It always takes so much longer.
LJ: Yeah, we are going to put this one out on vinyl.
DL: It was recorded in Georgia Theatre. They shut it down for one week, and we recorded it with Dave Barbie using just two stereo microphones.
LJ: Unidirection, I think. I mean, we don’t know that much about this, but you can hear where everyone is placed on the stage, if that makes any sense. It’s like flattening 3-D a little bit. You can hear that placement. We used only two mics. We recorded directly to tape.
DL: It’s totally live, but it’s not a live record like you would think of.
LJ: There’s no clapping.
DL: Yeah no one was in there, it was just a big empty room, us rolling take after take.
LJ: Like The Trinity Sessions, we tried to pick the best one. We played a lot louder than The Trinity Sessions though. They used one mic, and we used two. We went direct to quarter-inch tape, so the mixing that was done was done live, pretty much just setting the levels. That brings about some interesting things. Some are good. Some are bad. If the vocals are a little quiet on one song, they are a little quiet. That’s it. On another song if it goes a little loud, it might peak out and get distorted.
DL: Yeah, it’s totally unusual, and you are constantly adjusting the volume, maybe. I mean, if you are just sitting down and listening to the record maybe. If you are in your car, you are constantly fiddling with the knob. Which is cool because you don’t normally hear records like that. Everything is so compressed now.
JS: Normalized.
LJ: Like the whole Metallica controversy with the new record. It was so loud and even, the mastering job. Our record is definitely old fashioned that way. We’re not luddites or anything. We love technology and hip-hop and all of these other things that use modern technology, but this record is just really pure in that regard. It’s cool to have musical mistakes on there. With a lot of modern music, it’s buffed to perfection. With indie rock too—don’t let indie rockers tell you they don’t autotune. They are autotuning everything. Everything is just spit-shine clean.
DL: That’s kind of what we did on Azar, so it was nice to have a record that was the complete opposite. Someone told us there was an opening.
LJ: Yeah, we were finished with Azar in eight months. In two months, we had to write songs and put it all together. So, there is an immediacy to the songs.
JS: Some of us, not any of us here, hate some of those songs and don’t want to play them. She’ll remain nameless, but she doesn’t want to play them.
LJ: But that’s Will’s favorite song on the record.
JS: One of my favorites too.
LJ: We put them together quickly, and that’s kind of scary to me. We had some meltdowns. We got drunk a lot…a lot of Scotch. It was a fun experience.
JS: It was pieced together a lot hastier than Azar. When we got in the studio, and Scott Solter asked us what color our album was, we didn’t know. And it turned out that was a valid question. With the Georgia Theatre stuff, we came up a lot different.
LJ: It’s a lot twangier. Well, not twangier but acoustic-ier. It’s the opposite.
NB: I would be interested to hear that.
LJ: So the next record, the fourth record: apocalyptic dance party record. This won’t happen, and this will be somewhere. And I’ll look like a total idiot.
NB: Headline of Pitchfork tomorrow!
LJ: Yeah I wish they would care that much about us.
NB: Remind me to tell you about Spoonfork.
LJ: I just want to embrace more rhythmic ideas. It’s pretty, but maybe it’s a little edgier. I want your guitars to sound like Boris on top for me to sound like Miami Bass. And then you’ve got piano…I don’t know. It might be awful, but you’ve only got one life, one go-around. You’ve got to take chances.
DL: It’s evolved from just my straight reggaeton.
LJ: No offense to reggaeton people, but god it’s so repetitive. Also we don’t know what we are doing. It’s all the same beat. We tried to listen to Pandora and come up with different beats, but it’s all the same beat!
NB: Before the show, we were all talking about the internet’s role in music. There’s a danger in a few ways. A band can get over-hyped, but at the same time it’s something for bands that never would have gotten any notice at all. So I was wondering what you guys thought about how the internet plays a role for Venice is Sinking? Has it helped you guys, hurt you guys?
JS: All of this stuff is available for download on the internet illegally.
LJ: If you search “Venice is Sinking Azar” on Google probably the fifth thing down is a rapidshare. It’s a pretty good bit rate too. It’s not even an up-convert.
DL: I think it’s kind of awesome because people have our music.
JS: Yeah it’s not necessarily a negative thing.
LJ: There’s really nothing we can do about it.
DL: It’s just been very different from our last record which came out in 2006. That stuff wasn’t quite as common.
LJ: Now it’s just everywhere. There’s good things too. You can hear it on Last.fm. We have it up on iLike. iLike’s cheesy or whatever. Lala—you can listen to the whole album without paying for it. You can check it out if you want to buy it. Blogs have been really good to us with interviews and things. Stereogum premiered our video, which was great. Pitchfork, fingers crossed, will hopefully review this one. They gave the last one a 7.0. That’s a pretty great rating. I think there’s a lot of opportunity. There’s a lot of press. There’s so much other noise too. I think that’s the dark side. We’ve had more opportunities to connect with fans than before through Myspace, Facebook, all these other things. At the same time, so does everybody else. I think there is a widening of the scope of what indie-dom is and the number of bands there are, but I don’t see a lot of heightening. In fact, you can look at sales figures, and you can see that from a sales perspective sales are tanking everywhere. But, certainly, there is a better communication between the fan and the band. And the fan and press, the band and press. It’s a wash. You might get in a couple of ‘zines before the blogs, but you wouldn’t get in Spin or Rolling Stone. You’re still not going to, but you have all of these other places you can get in. Maybe ultimately it’s a gain. I wish we were more successful, but I’m sure a lot of people do. You take advantage of these opportunities. Keeping track of it is a real pain—keeping track of all of the different webthings, Myspace events, Facebook events. You do a Facebook event, and 73 people confirm. You look out at the show, and 10 of them are there. What does that mean? There’s so much noise, and a lot of it doesn’t mean anything. At first I used our Twitter as totally promotional, but I just merged it with mine. So, I talk about my cat and stuff. It doesn’t matter. It’s just content out there.
NB: The internet has also helped you guys bring out some of your music videos, as we talked about earlier, with “Ryan’s Song” on Stereogum. You guys actually won an award for one off of the last album.
LJ: “Pulaski Heights.” We are lucky to know people who do video very inexpensively and are talented. All of the credit goes to them for that. We’re not actors.
JS: And living in an artist’s town has a lot to do with that.
LJ: There is a great visual arts community as well.
NB: And then before we had the Powerpoint.
LJ: Oh, I made that one myself. Nobody’s ever watched that. I laughed my way through it, but some people thought I was being sort of serious. Some people are like “that’s really terrible.” I know. We should give that one another promotional push. I’m gonna twitter-tweet that.
NB: They are kicking us out of the Earl because of Sunday midnight rules, so we will end on everyone’s favorite cereal.
LJ: I like a lot.
DL: I don’t know that I have one, but I was just in Sweden visiting our old keyboard player, and it was kind of astounding—their grocery stores—because everything in them was completely healthy. Like, the grocery store on the corner from my house—you couldn’t buy wheat bread there. It’s all just Sunbeam white. You go to a grocery store in Sweden, and it is all heavy and dark. There’s a whole aisle in this urban grocery store that is all muesli varieties. So, I guess I’m going to go with that.
JS: I’ve been big on Raisin Bran lately.
LJ: Classic.
JS: It’s got some sweetness to it. I’m moving up from the kids’ cereal.
LJ: I have a lot. I really like Cocoa Pebbles. I grew up not eating sweet cereal, so when I have them it’s really good. I like the healthier stuff. I gotta say Life cereal is pretty much the jam. Cinnamon Life is really good. Oh’s are good, but they cut my mouth open. I know that sounds really weird. Golden Grams are real good. Cinnamon Toast Crunch is good. I don’t think Apple Jacks is that good. It seems good at the time, and then half way through the box…
JS: Same with Fruit Loops.
LJ: The semi-healthy cereals are really good. Smart Start—I’m not gonna lie. I like Grape Nuts.
DL: Didn’t you put Grape Nuts in your percussion shaker thing?
LJ: Yeah I put Grape Nuts in my shaker, and my shaker blew open.
NB: I’m glad this is relating back to music.
LJ: It blew up. All the little beadies fell out, and I needed a replacement so I put Grape Nuts in it. It just sounds dead. It’s not a good shaker anymore.
