« Follow Them Around | Main | If this is the party at the end of the world, then sign me up. »
August 04, 2006
Winterpills
Here's an interview I just did for http://www.junkmedia.org with Philip from the sublime Winterpills.
Sure it's the middle of a globally warm summer, but what better time to chill out with the Winterpills? The Northampton, Massachusetts group combines Elliot Smith-like melodic sensibility with Simon and Garfunkel-esque harmonies to create a lush world of lo-fi heartbreak. We caught up with frontman Philip Price by phone as he and bandmates Flora Reed, Dennis Crommett, Dave Hower, and Jose Ayerve navigated rural Pennsylvania in support of their self-titled debut on Signature Sounds.
Junkmedia: What are the best and worst things about touring?
Philip Price: The best things are pretty much what you'd imagine which is just getting out in the world, getting out of your little safety zone and making new fans. The worst things are pretty much what you'd imagine too. (Laughs.) Long drives, the stress of travel, being away from home. I'm really lucky in that Flora is here with me because she's in the band, but not everybody can bring their partners along with them.
It doesn't get stressful being in a band with your significant other?
It hasn't yet. It's been great actually. I suppose in theory it sounds like if you live together and work together and do everything together that eventually you're going to drive each other nuts, but when we're back on land, she has her day job and I've got what I do, and we're apart all day. It's not like we're in the same house together all the time.
What kinds of things are you listening to in the van?
Well, I think you better not put this in the article but… No I won't tell you what we just listened to.
Oh come on. Tell me.
Well we did just listen to a little Grateful Dead, but no one here is a deadhead.
(Laughs.)
None of us listen to the Dead except for one album but we just happened to put that album on. You busted us.
Everybody's got their guilty pleasures.
We have this problem right now where we're in a rental van that we can't play our iPods through so we're listening to a smattering of CD's. It's not really representative of what we'd be listening to with our million gigabytes of music on our iPods.
What else have you been listening to?
Let me look… The Books, Cat Power, the New Flaming Lips album, Jose Gonzalez. (Calls to rest of band) "Everyone yell out one thing you've been listening to lately." Dave says "Bob Marley." Flora says "Link Wray." Dave says the new LL Cool J sucks, but I guess he's been listening to it. Kings of Convenience. Jose says Sonic Youth Sonic Nurse. Magnetic Fields. Dennis has been listening to himself a lot.
That's always dangerous.
It's fun. I go through periods where all I listen to is my own music.
Really?
Well if I'm trying to figure something out about it. I'll listen to it for a day and go, "is this any good at all?" Then I go, "Well I guess it's all right" and I listen to something else.
I'm not a musician, but with my writing, once something's published I can't look at it.
I understand that too. Songs that like demos, I'll listen to endlessly as I'm working on them but once the finished product is out… like today because we hadn't had a chance to rehearse in a couple of weeks we played the Winterpills album so that Jose could click on his bass track and I was listening to it while sort of dozing and all I could think of was "God, this sucks." But you never know, sometimes I'll hear one of our songs on the radio and for some reason my brain hears the one in a different spot so I don't recognize it as a Winterpills song. It sounds like someone else completely and it always catches my ear and I'll go "That's really good and familiar. And then I go "oh my god, it's us!" I get a little temporary distance from the song. I get to hear it the way the rest of the world might hear it. At least the rest of the world if it were me but not having written any songs.
So does that make you think about how people listen to your music?
I hope other people have that reaction.
I was coming home from Mexico a couple of months ago and it was one of those days where you wake up after three hours of sleep and you have to travel for fourteen hours and you're on a plane forever. I was really wired, tired, and restless and I put on the Winterpills on my iPod and it was the perfect music at that moment. It completely chilled me out and took me out of my irritation.
So it has therapeutic qualities. Well, who knew? That makes me feel pretty good. Thanks for telling me that. Now we've got to think about the next one.
Are you writing?
There are songs that were already written when this album was made that we didn't record that are waiting for us. We've been playing them. We play about five or six songs that aren't on the album that will definitely go on the next album, so that's half an album right there. I have a lot of new stuff; we just have to decide whether we want to do Winterpills versions of them.
Was there one time in your life when you decided you were going to be a musician?
Yeah, it was 1992. I'd been doing music for a while but I decided I wanted to try and make a commercial go of it. It was after I had had a period of deciding whether I wanted to be a screenwriter or a musician. Then I somehow ended up becoming a journalist for two years which killed all my desire to write. I was a terrible journalist. I got fired from my job. I was a good writer but completely undisciplined as a journalist. They had me covering all kinds of things. If I didn't want to cover something I just wouldn't go. (Laughs) They'd be like, "You didn't cover that thing?" and I'd say, "Nope." "Ok, you're fired." It was sad because I really liked writing and my dad was a writer, but I just couldn't write after that. It made me also vow that I would never get a job in the music business doing music related work like engineering. Maybe a little production would be ok because that's more creative, but I wouldn't become a music industry drone and still have ambitions to become a musician on the side. I had to completely be a musician and be poor and work in some other unrelated job. Some people want to stay close to the business but frankly the business makes me crazy. I don't like it.
I don't even like hanging out with a lot of musicians. (Laughs.) I want to hang out with people who don’t just talk about music. That's one thing I love about the band – everyone's into different stuff. We're all in the music business but everyone has other interests and reads and likes movies and good wine and food and we all talk about that kind of stuff. It's not just constant shop talk. One of my primary outside interests has been my kids.
It's hard to be self centered when you've got kids.
It can be managed (laughs) but it's much harder. It's interesting because my youngest daughter applied for this summer arts program and she had to write an essay for part of the application. I got to read it and part of it was about, "I've watched both my parents struggle with trying to find a way to be successful in their art over the years and the sacrifices they've made" and she was incredibly perceptive. It's not something we'd ever talked about very much but I had a sense of her perception of me and her mom. Her mom's an artist too. And I thought maybe we don’t look like such selfish assholes to her. The arts are very selfish.
But it's selfish in the name of creating something to share.
That's true too and I realize that. There's a real dichotomy in that I have to have enough ego to think that I have something worthwhile to share so I'll do that, but there's this dance between ego and generosity. How do you be a good guy in such a cutthroat business? It's a constant struggle and something I think about a lot.
I always have a hard time watching people who seem to have the most success and are not necessarily the most talented, but are the ones who are best at self-promoting.
Yeah, they're better business people. The better business people will make it far and away above the less business oriented, likely less talented.
For a lot of people music is a big social thing, and certainly when you play it it is but it isn't really when you write it. Not for me. I don't write in the company of other people and I always feel weird bringing what I write to other people. I'm afraid it's going to get damaged or changed. Often it ends up getting changed for the better. But there is a trepidation there.
I think most people listen to music by themselves, especially now with all of the mp3 players. Everybody's got headphones and they're all in their own little worlds. It's all about how you relate to the music and what it says to you. It's weird because in one way it's really direct communication – you write a song, it's deeply personal, it's intensely felt. But then you put it out and people who you don't know, who you'll never meet listen to it, but they listen to it and it becomes personal for them.
Totally.
So it's one way communication but it's not.
I have a lot of respect for that. I get angry at some musicians who don't seem to understand that the songs they made really belong to other people now. I had this issue with Iron and Wine when I went to see them early last year. I really love the records, at least some of them anyway. A lot of his stuff is this incredibly intimate, it's very personal the way the albums were recorded and the arrangements were made. And he's up there onstage and he plays a couple of songs and they sound right. And then it's obvious he's become bored with playing the songs live and decided he wants to alter the arrangements dramatically. To me only Bob Dylan is allowed to do that because you just can't stop him. Most of [Dylan's] songs were caught in that particular form and were totally different before and were never played the same after but not everybody's like that. [Sam Beam] mutilated all the arrangements to his songs because he was obviously bored with them. And I thought, "You're betraying your fans." There were people there who were just like "Ugh, what is he doing?" Not to mention they were horrible changes he made. As a performer I want to be professional. I want to give people not something that's sterile, but I think they need to hear that familiarity of what they've grown to love. The arrangements can't help but evolve somewhat live, but I like to crack the whip and keep them pretty much close to what we have.
Have you heard any of Elvis Costello's newest CD? He just made all these jazzed up versions...
I heard about it, yeah. Jazzed up versions of his own songs?
Yeah.
I haven't heard it. Do you like it?
No. I've only heard "Watching the Detectives," but I don't like it. And I often don't mind when musicians rearrange their songs. I like it because I listen to music so obsessively that I can get tired of a song the way it is. I'm all for changing it around and doing something different, but it's too big band-y the way he did it.
It's almost like he's kind of a show off. He's been that way his whole career so it doesn't surprise me, but he is enormously talented so you don't mind as much.
It's just not right, especially that song. Those first two albums of his were such breakthroughs in terms of where punk rock went after the Sex Pistols, that's kind of sacred ground to me. Watching the Detectives is like, why mess with that?
Don't mess with perfection. It's like, "Here's another version of the Mona Lisa. It's a cubist version now." But you get too close to your art you don’t know what you're doing. You've got to get away from your material.
Posted by Laura at August 4, 2006 02:01 AM