GroupThink

Menomena Interview Transcription

(I totally nabbed this pic from Band Doppler. Yoink!)

*This interview transcription is completely unedited.

Menomena Transcription
February 8, 2004
7 p.m. @ the Olympic Pub, Centralia, Washington

Interviewed and transcribed by Janna Chan for the Seattle Weekly

To read the resulting article from this interview please click on this link: Six Feet High and Rising

I met the three incredibly tall gentleman of Menomena on a balmy Sunday night in a Centralia pub. The band hails from Portland, Oregon and I call Seattle home so we agreed to meet half way. The guys were a half an hour late but their sincere apologies and affable nature more than made up for their tardiness. It didn’t hurt that they bought my dinner too. (Imagine that: A band buying the journalist dinner. Now, I’ve seen it all!)

Me: Tell me a little bit about yourselves. Where did everyone grow up? Where did you guys meet? What’s your favorite color?

Brent: I introduced myself to Danny at a show that both Danny and Justin’s band were playing in. This was senior year in high school either 1996 or 1997.

Justin: That band went on to break up and Brent and Danny lived together for awhile and decided to start a band.

Brent: Wow, this all sounds kind of weird. I approached Danny anonymously at a show and we later ended up living together. We’re both straight, though. Does it sound bad if I have to point that out?

Danny: Yeah, that does sound kind of weird. But, getting back to the point, Menomena started in the fall of 2000.

Me: So, Danny and Justin went to the same school. What school?

Danny: West Lake Christian High School. It’s a tiny private school in Lake Auspiga. It’s in a wealthy suburb and super cookie cutter.

Brent: I went to a large public school on the other side of Portland in Gresham. San Barlo High School.

Me: [Directed at Danny] Okay, so when you approached Danny at that rock show, did you go to the show specifically to see their band?

Brent: I was supposed to see this other band but they canceled and the club owner “insisted” that I see Danny and Justin’s band. I really had no plan to stay, but I guess it’s a good thing that I did. These guys played the best Pearl Jam-esque music ever.

Danny: We were scheduled to play at this all ages club called The Push. In fact, the owner of that club went on to start the Tom Fest [an annual Christian Rock music festival].

Anyways, Brent introduced himself to me after our set and I thought he was hitting on me. He asked me to come out to his car because he a had a cassette tape he wanted me to listen to. Against my better judgment I went out there with him and he handed me this tape with piano music on it. Brent was a huge Smashing Pumpkins fan at the time and he made this tape of what he thought “Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness’s” music would sound like after just reading the lyrics.

Me: [Directed at Brent] Why did you decide to do that?

Brent: I wanted to test myself by comparing my music with the Pumpkins.

Me: [Directed at Justin and Danny] When did you two start playing music together?

J: We started playing in June 1995 but we’ve known each other for 10 years.

Danny: We won the talent show during our senior year and the school had to debate whether or not we were singing Christian lyrics.

Me: Sound like a nice holy time. Well, I listened to “Am The Fun Blame Monster” many times and there doesn’t seem to be any obvious traces of Christian rock. What happened between then and now?

Danny: After high school Brent went off to the East Coast for college and the band went on a long hiatus. We would email and he would come back for holidays and he finally met Justin during a break in 1997. Menomena officially came together in 2000 after Brent graduated.

Brent: In fact, a lot of what’s on the album was written during that first year. Most of what’s on the album was created the first six months of the bands birth. It all happened quickly because we were excited to work together.

Me: Did you guys have anything out before this full-length?

Brent: We had the Rose EP which had five songs on it. Those songs all ended up on the full-length.

Me: What is the song writing process like? Is there one person who writes most of the songs or is a group effort?

Brent: All of us will write our own part for the song and we tend to bring in our own solo pieces and work it out with the group.

Justin: Brent is good at presenting a main idea by using DLR to show us a rough cut of a song.

Me: Okay, before we get ahead of ourselves. What is DLR [pronounced: deeler]? And please try to explain it to me as if I was a simpleton.

Brent: DLR stands for Digital Looping Recorder and is a computer program that I created to help us record impromptu material. DLR gives us a bunch of raw material that we can mix together at a later date. We don’t have to decide which parts will make the cut when we’re writing it. It’s hard to be creative and editing at the same time.

It came about because in the beginning whenever I had a vision of what I wanted a song to sound like the other members resisted or didn’t agree. It was always hard to reach a consensus on instrumentation. Now, each of us can use DLR to contribute ideas to songs. We can decide on the tempo of songs, add drumbeats or loops. It’s kind of like a peace pipe where one person will record their idea and then passes it along to the next person so they can record their part.

Danny: Nearly 75 percent of our finished music is recorded on the fly with DLR. Without it we wouldn’t have been able to preserve a lot of these work sessions.

Justin: It’s a great way to start something out of nothing.

Me: Are there a lot of potential songs left on the DLR sessions?

Brent: We have a ton of unmixed DLR sessions.

J: We pick the parts that strike us first.

D: There’s a separation between the DLR sessions and the actual recording of our album. Most of our songs start out as DLR sessions. We record the demo versions with DLR but play the songs live and get a different feel and end up rerecording them without DLR. There’s only one song in the album that uses the original DLR track.

Brent: Oahu is 95 percent written and rerecorded in a half an hour and was never re-performed.

Me: Wait, so what’s on the album is done without a computer or electronic music devices?

Danny: Most everything on the album is purely organic. No looping or samples.

Me: So, you don’t use DLR when you play live? How do you guys manage to play all of the different instruments that are heard on the originals?

Brent: We consider DLR more of a tool than an actual instrument. That’s the difference between us and hip-hop music.

Me: I’m glad you brought that up. I was wondering of there was any hip hop influence on the band because of your use of sampling.

Danny: Since a lot of our music is loop based people make that association. At least 80 percent of the drums were influenced by that kind of style. I never really understood playing the drums before. Growing up and listening to Public Enemy I never understood the whole drum machine and drum loops thing. I didn't know that there wasn't an actual person playing those beats. I really wanted to play that way and try hard to imitate that bass-heavy and rhythmic drive that's in the music

Justin: I think that people’s hip hop association would most likely come from the drumbeats more than anything else.

Danny: Chuck D said that all of the Public Enemy drumbeats are based after Led Zeppelin drumbeats so it’s interesting that he’s comparing their music to a rock band so I started listening to more Zeppelin.

Me: What are you guys listing to?

Danny: Led Zeppelin, Talking Heads, Blonde Redhead, Flaming Lips.

Me: How about the lyrics? Who’s responsible for that department?

Danny’s written the most lyrics because he’s mixed down the most DLR sessions.

Danny: On the album, we share responsibility for lyrics. It depends on who mixes. It’s at that point that lyrics are generated.

Me: Who wrote “Strongest Man in the World?” How would you describe that song?

Danny: I wrote that one. I always like to shy away from analyzing my own lyrics. I don’t want to sound like the deep pretentious artist, but I hate reading interviews when artists start describing lyrics because sometimes it’s completely a different explanation of what I’m thinking. I like to leave them open ended. We kind of made a conscience decision not to put lyrics or even performance credits in the CD. I feel kind of awkward taking credit for writing lyrics to a song. I love hearing other people’s interpretations.

Me: Was there a certain tone you guys strived for when putting the album together? It seems fairly dark and moody.

Justin: I don’t think anything we’ve done has been purposeful. We agree that anything we write or mix down is just what sounds good to us. We’re not trying to write any particular kind of song.

Danny: We practice at my dad’s place in Cornelius. It’s a little wood shed that we converted into a practice space. That may have something to do with the mood of the album but I doubt it. We have our little software there and our instruments.

Me: Would this music have happened without DLR?

Danny: The band would exist but would sound different. We’re still the same people. I would imagine it would sound similar, but not as loop based.

Justin: DLR would be nothing without the people operating it. Say we had DLR but we were the worst musicians ever—the music would suck. I hate to put emphasis on DLR that this is what makes our music good or what are band is about because it’s just another tool.

Danny: We’re called nerds all the time.

Brent: People reading about DLR might think that we’re some sort of electronica or midi band. It doesn’t write music for us. It just stores it. It doesn’t auto tune or synthesize anything for us.

Me: Are you considering getting a patent for it?

Brent: It’s something we want to use for us. But if someone wants to use it too then that’s great. After I made DLR I found out that there was this software called ableton live and it was very similar. I invented this program and someone else beat me to it.

Me: How long did it take you to create this program?

Brent: Not that long. The midi version took me a month to create in spring 2000. The digital audio version I wrote in two months in the fall of 2000. Since then I’ve been working on an even better version. Hopefully it will let us bridge to using it live. But we will never be electronica or Kid A [Radiohead album]. It’s just another tool. We’re just three people playing all of these instruments and it presents a challenge live trying to do the song justice. Some songs require playing five instruments, but live we have to pick and choose what parts to emphasize, what instruments to play, and with DLR it might help us get around that. But I don’t know if the other guys are as on board with the DLR live thing.

Me: I have a personal affinity with the song “Oahu” because that’s where I was born and raised. You guys managed to capture the essence of what island life is like in a nutshell.

Danny: Wow, thank you so much. That’s a huge complement. I lived in Oahu for seven years. Hawaii is very dear to my heart. We started writing this whole album with a concept. For all the lyrics and songs I wrote, they were based on a singular concept, a story with characters and series of events. The concept fell apart because we decided not to pursue it. Someone saw us live and had comments on the lyrics because he thought we were singing from a first person point of view and he thought that we were talking about ourselves. It’s not necessarily about us exactly. It’s from other people’s point of view.

Brent: Not for me. I know that you guys are writing it as someone else but the songs are still really personal for you right?

Justin: Well, yeah. The song’s not necessarily about me. Not literal. It’s just story telling.

Me: Does it make it easier to pretend to be other people because the songs are so personal?

Brent: Some of the lyrics do stem from personal experiences. Foe example, “Rose,” and “Monkey’s Back.”

Justin: The song is different from the majority of the other songs. It was the only outside song that we adapted. And it was very different before we adapted it. Less angry.

Brent: I had already written the song before Menomena. It’s an example of what sounded right at the time. I try to be true to what I’m feeling at the moment. We’re not trying to appeal to the tween market.

Me: Let’s talk about your seemingly instant success. You guys have been all over the Internet and in various music mags with stellar reviews. What happened?

Brent: We didn’t come out of nowhere. We’re living in Cornelius and Aloha. We made the album completely on our own. We did everything but mastering.

Danny: It’s weird that people think that we’re famous now or something. In our own lives nothing has changed. We still make every CD to order by hand and I still make copies for a living

[The album came out in Late May 2003. Within 6 months the album was a hit. It made Pitchfork’s Top 50, Number 32.]

Me: How did you guys promote yourself? Did you just send out CDs?

Danny: The Pitchfork thing was great. We owe a lot to them. We hadn’t even heard of the Website before. They were recommended to us. They overlooked the fact that we didn’t have distribution, a manager, a lawyer or a publicist, record label and they still picked up our album and listened to it. They’re not a tool of the industry. Their readers picked up on the album and we started selling CDs from our Website. We even sold a CD to someone in Israel. We’ve done reasonably well in Portland, before Pitchfork.

Justin: We’ve been playing as a band for two and a half years so it’s funny to hear that we came out of nowhere. We’ve paid our dues and are still paying them.

Brent: We seem to have a very grassroots success. There’s a handful of people out there that seek out new music and go to the trouble of ordering from our Website. We still make every CD to order by hand.

Me: Are you guys being courted by labels?

Justin: We have a lot of options right now and we have been contacted by some people, but we certainly haven’t been courted.

Me: Do you guys hope to have your next album distributed by a label?

Justin: We’re still trying to figure all that out. We don’t even know if we want to go that route. We’re not opposed to anything. We’re not counting our chickens before they hatch. It seems that we’ve done pretty well on our own. Danny has spent countless hours making the CDs. If we were to expand any further we would choose to have our album licensed by a label because we’ve already recorded and produced it and have sold enough copies to make us happy for the time being. It would be nicer to reach a broader audience.

Danny: We want to tour and reach a larger audience, but there seems to be a traditional path that bands take in order to do this. We don’t really want to follow that path.

Justin: One thing that is responsible for where we are right now, musically, is discernment. We think really hard on what’s the next step we’ll take. We’ve had a couple offers made to us by smaller nice labels but we’re waiting for something that feels right. We can afford to wait. We’re having a lot of fun right now doing what we’re doing.

Danny: I love the fact that right now all the CDs we sell are put together by us. We have complete control over that. We essentially touch every CD that goes into a person’s hand. There’s dog hair in just about every CD we sell from my pug Getty Lee.

Me: How many CD’s have you guys sold?

Danny: More than 2,000, I think. I’m very embarrassed to reveal the number.

Justin: Yeah we moved over 2000 units in the past quarter.

Me: So what are you working on now?

Justin: At this point we’re just trying to get along. This is a serious relationship. Relationships end all the time for weird reasons and this band is no exception.

Brent: We are working with the Monster Squad Dance Troupe and Mary Schnapp. We’re helping out with the music for this dance performance. It’s all original music with one installment called, “Under An Hour.”

Justin: We’re putting rarities on the Website for people to download free. Live tracks and songs that didn’t make the album. Once a month. No plans to put out another release yet.

Me: So why did you guys decide to make your CD case a booklet?

Justin: Brent’s into animation. The cool aesthetic in general goes to Danny the graphic design grad.

Me: [Directed at Danny] Where did you go to school?

Danny: I went to the Art Institute of Portland. I’m not in graphic design industry yet. I work at a copy place where I have to wear a navy blue apron.

Me: I suppose that answers the flip book question. It’s all paid for. How about you Brent, what school did you go to?

B: I went to Dartmouth. There’s a stigma. I studied Theatre modified with Music. I wrote a musical for my final project.

Me: How did you get into computer programming?

Brent: It was always a hobby. I always thought that I should have been an engineer. I thinks like an engineer. I always wanted to be an adventurer or an inventor. I used to program in high school for fun.

Me: What do you guys do for fun?

Danny: Dance Dance Revolution.

Me: You’re not serious?

Danny: I got a Play Station for Christmas and there’s this game called DDR. I have two of the floor pads. We’ve been known to go head to head to “Day’s Go By” by Dirty Vegas. I usually win for some reason. Well, I own it.

Justin: We’re thinking of getting Brent to program one of our songs into the game and that way we could go into the arcade and know all the moves instinctively.

###

For more information about Menomena check out www.menomena.com

Posted by MissPicklez at February 1, 2005 05:27 PM