Les Savy Fav: We Have Completely Fucking Conquered These People

fakejazz:To start with, what's the history of the band together?

tim:The history of the band?

fakejazz:Yeah...

tim:We started playing together five years--maybe six years--ago, one winter. Syd and Seth and Gibb and Pat were playing together, and they needed a singer, so I joined them. And they had a bunch of song written, and I was going to be singing and vocals when I met up with them and started doing that. And then it was the five of us playing for about two years, or when we were all in college together, and we'd go on tour every once in awhile. And with that line up we wrote the album 3/5 which came out on the Self-Starter Foundation. then after that we were playing a little longer, and our drummer Pat got a little unsatisfied and left, and we got another guy who we know from college, Harrison Haynes, to join us. At some point along there we moved to New York--there's a drip in our ceiling, I just realized--so we moved to New York, and then we wrote The Cat and the Cobra, and then Gibb [Slife], our second guitarist, didn't want to tour, wanted to stay at home and do his painting and stuff, and so with him doing that we became the four piece that we are today. It's kind of a boring history but that's probably everything.

fakejazz:Ok... and, where did you come up with the name of the band?

tim:Well, I don't know. we spent a long time trying to figure out what to call the band, I think Syd and Seth probably made it up, and so, basically, though, the idea was we were thinking of all of these different names, all of these different ideas, and the only one that we could all agree upon was one that didn't have a meaning outside of itself.

fakejazz:So, the new EP, would you say that there's a theme present on it?

tim:A theme present on it? not that I've decoded yet (laughter). Why... do you see that?

fakejazz:Yeah, I kind of do...

tim:Let's hear it, man.

fakejazz:Um, like, sort of... empires falling... you know, it sort of starts with "I.C. Timer" and it ends with "ROME," and Rome fell... and that's sort of what I see that song to be about. and it sort of documents it, through "Asleeper's Union" and then "In These Woods" and "Hide me From Next February"... I don't know...

tim:Yeah, you could work that. It could be like... you know, Rome is all about--the title of the ep--is to write a name of a place--Rome Written Upside Down--to write a name upside down of a place where a person is, like an ancient hex against that person. Like if in imperial Rome you showed up at your house, and someone had written your name upside down on your doorway, you were like "Oh, shit, I've been hexed." And, so, the idea of it was with that song was the idea of hexing imperial Rome, and you know, sort of talk about political ideas within our music and one of the political ideas I probably have is, if you're going to complain about society complain about places where it started--places like Rome--rather than now, we're so far in it. And then "I.C. Timer," you have a song sort of about being a cyborg, and the meaning of "February..." is sort of a rant against science. But, if anything, it's about--if anything--go for the big targets, like all of science, all of society, ancient Rome (laughter). You know, maybe those things are pointless but at least they're more to the point in terms of where a lot of the things I want to overthrow come from (note: the recording got kind of shoddy at that last bit, so I'm not sure if that's exactly what Tim said or not.).

fakejazz:Alright, so... what kind of production did you utilize on the EP? Cause I noticed there were some cool things...

tim:Well, on the EP, with Gibb not playing with us anymore, all of a sudden there was all of this space open to us, for recording and for writing the songs. And I always wanted to play the keyboards, so, we got a keyboard. And so when we were recording we started playing along with the keyboard, and putting in new stuff, which was fun, in terms of getting some sounds we hadn't used before. And then in the studio we were doing a lot more stuff with dumping the songs onto the computer, and then breaking them apart and putting them back together. One of the things we always have a problem with in the studio is we feel like it gets really stale, fast. you know, like when you play live, it's really exciting and fun, there's people, there's all sorts of things to change and do, but when you're sitting in the studio sitting by yourself, being like, "How can we make this exciting and fresh?" So we were trying to surprise ourselves more on that recording than we had in the past, by taking songs that we thought we wrote a cutting them in half, putting the back on the front. Like in "February," we basically wrote, and then chopped up and put back together, and it was all pasted up. We cut all these parts out and added new parts afterwards. It was pretty fun.

fakejazz:Yeah, on that song did you--I noticed in the liner notes you credited "phone sex woman"--is that the song you used it on?

tim:Uh huh. yeah yeah--that's the one. and there was going to be all of this other stuff [...] for the recording, you know, the line: "When one world says 'wait', the next says 'step aside', when one planet says 'stop', the next says 'let it ride'" and each of those quotes was going to be from a different person who I tricked into saying it. So I called this phone sex person and talked to them for like twenty minutes trying to get them to say "step aside" (laughter), but I really couldn't. I was being like "oh, pretend that I'm standing in your way, but I'm all, like, naked or something, but you want me to move so you can get past me... what do you say?" And the lady would be like: "get outta my way" and things like that. It was really funny. We've done some stuff, like, one time we played a show and I called the phone sex person and tried to convince them to help me do a fantasy where I'm a famous rockstar and they snuck backstage... but it always comes out really funny and not very sexy. So there's this really long tape of me trying to [get her to] say these phrases--but not telling her explicitly, just trying to negotiate the conversation towards what I want her to say--that are really funny and failed and I was like "Oh, the CD!", and we were going to put them as an extra track on the cd, but none of us were going to do that. And the other ones are my mom and some friends of ours, so there's all these tapes of me on the phone trying to trick people into saying things. "Let it ride" was the hardest, probably. Syd's girlfriend said that. He kept saying "what do you do if you're in Las Vegas and"--we called at four in the morning while we were trying to finish the song--"you're in Las Vegas, and you're winning with the cards you have," and she was like "twenty-one?" I don't know how he convinced her to do it... but there might have been cheating involved there.

fakejazz:So... speaking on the production, again... how did you get the little blip at the beginning of "I.C. Timer?"

tim:Oh... I was like... with that song I really had this fantasy of... we have this old record lave that barely works, but I had this idea that we were going to record it and make a record of it, and then get a DJ to come and scratch it up or something. But it turns out that the motor is broken, and it would have sounded bad anyway. So we just brought it to the computer and tried to make a fake DJ-scratching. which I don't think sounds really like a DJ very much; it's not like the DJ mixing it up.

fakejazz:I think it sounds pretty cool though...

tim:Oh, I like the way it sounds...

fakejazz:It fits in with the sort of feeling of the song, I think...

tim:Yeah, I agree.

fakejazz:Where did you come up with the artwork for the EP?

tim:Well, we had this idea of doing... we were dealing with the idea of calling it Rome (Written Upside Down), based on finding out it was a hex, which comes from Harrison, our drummer, who was reading I, Claudius. and in I, Claudius there's... you know, it's this fictionalized story of Claudius, who had a really interesting life, and knew all of the major players and who sort of had a distant view on it. But at one point, Germanicus, one of the generals, one of the generals or powerful dudes--powerful people--in Rome gets a hex put on him and all of this weird stuff starts happening. like, Rome written upside down on his wall, his own name written upside down, and every day a letter is missing from it. It like happens in his bedroom, and he wakes up and his name is written upside down with one less letter than the day before. So, he locks all his doors and puts guards out front, and he has no idea how it's happening. Like, one day someone in the kitchen finds under the floorboards tons of babies' chopped off hands--it's like this sick, psychological warfare--either way, we obviously heard about that and got really excited by the prospect. But we were most taken with this idea of Rome, written upside down--like this hex against the entire world back then, the idea of hexing Rome. So, we have that idea in mind, and then we're thinking about our French oriented band name, and so then we got to thinking about the Dying Gaul, this sculpture--I don't know if you ever saw it?

fakejazz:No...

tim:Heard of it?

fakejazz:No...

tim:The Dying Gaul is this famous sculpture, and it's supposed to be the last Gaul dying as Rome conquers what is olden day France. and this sculpture is famous because it's supposed to be like, you know, the idea of the Gaul's being totally vanquished, like this figure is sort of laying, sort of desperately--oh my god, my cat is about to attack me--this, you know, it's supposed to be about this French guy, dying, gasping his last breath. And the symbol is not of this last guy dying, but, "We have completely fucking conquered these people, we will then give them our entire culture." You know, like the original imperialist ideas. And so, we wanted to put the Dying Gaul on the front cover, and then we were like--I don't know--we couldn't get any really good pictures of it. So we started thinking, like, oh, well, what about doing the statue of liberty, because it's sort of like hexing imperialists in modern society. so we put that in there, and in terms of the artwork, just like... we're really into 80s new wave art. Ok?

fakejazz:well, we kind of talked about this earlier... your old guitarist leaving... how has that affected the band?

tim:oh, well... it's been really good. we wouldn't have thought it at the time, but I think in retrospect it's the best thing that could have happened to us. You know, [...] we were happy playing with him, and he was our pal, and we were enjoying the way we were sounding but I think without him, all of a sudden we realized all of these new possibilities. You know, it gave us an opportunity--without changing the dynamic of the band--in terms of personalities and the way things were working, we could have gone the same way, but with one less person, there are all of a sudden all these new opportunities. I think before, with five people, we were--you know, Seth is an amazing guitarist, Syd is a great bass player, Harrison's a good drummer--there was this sense of always having another good guitarist in there, having to fit everything in, and it was almost like packing your luggage in the trunk of a car every time you wanted to write a song. and all of a sudden we were "God! all we have is a handbag and a stretch limo."

fakejazz:So, when can people expect to see--like, are you recording anything now?

tim:Yeah, we're actually in band practice in between as we speak right now. and we're writing new stuff to record at the end of April, and we're going to release it in the fall, on Frenchkiss, Syd's label, our bass player's label. He runs it, we help run it.

fakejazz:What's the new stuff going to be like?

tim:You tell me, please! I wish I knew. we're literally writing the songs now and figuring stuff out. Nobody knows what it's going to be like. Nobody knows what it's going to be like until after it's done, and then sometimes we don't even know.

fakejazz:Ok...

tim:You know? Like, we rarely go into things with a game plan; we sort of just have some broad ideas of what we're going to do that we probably established a long time ago, and now we sort of just go, and see what happens... trust our instincts.

fakejazz:Ok, so do you kind of keep it spontaneous?

tim:Yeah, try to keep it spontaneous. One thing we want to do with this record coming up is make it the most spontaneous sounding record we've done so far, you know, try and really make it something that feels like, I don't know... feels like a recording of an event, almost like, you know... maybe, like, field photography. Somebody goes out into the African jungle and takes some really good pictures. It's like you caught a moment, you know? Trying to catch the moment of what's going on in the studio. People will hear it and be like "God, I can tell something was really going on in there, that was weird."

fakejazz:Nice. Do you mind if we talk about The Cat and the Cobra a little bit?

tim:Yeah, that's fine.

fakejazz:Ok, why did you include so many prominent female vocals on the first track?

tim:We like Toko's singing. Do you know who that is?

fakejazz:No...

tim:Toko, she plays in this band Enon. They're a really awesome band. There's this connection... she plays in Enon, and John Schmersal who is sort of the front guy played with us after we finished recording The Cat and the Cobra. He did a tour with us... we sort of did one more tour as a five-piece after Gibb left the band, and John played with us. And John also used to be in Brainiac. We had known Toko's vocals... she also played in this band the Lapse [as well as Blonde Redhead], and so we liked the way her voice sounded on that song. We wanted to do something that was going to be like... maybe... I don't know if we really wanted to do this... but it seemed like, afterwards, it kind of defied 3/5 a little bit, you know? It sort of starts it on a note that says, "This is a little different from our recording before" [...]

fakejazz:Ok. The song--do you mind me asking what a song is about? Is that ok?

tim:Maybe...

fakejazz:"Roadside Memorial?" It's my favourite song on the album... I was just curious what is it about.

tim:You might be the only one... Nobody else likes that song. That's good, though! What it's about?

fakejazz:Yeah...

tim:God... I dunno what it's about, really. Maybe that's (long pause)... I don't know what it's about. It's kind of about--if anything--the most important part of that song would probably be the line "You've got it to my heart, it should have broken long ago but the goddamn thing won't fall apart." You know, sort of ideas like... I don't know. I don't know what the idea is. but that's the root of that song. All the other stuff is lyrically, I don't know... revolving around that.

fakejazz:Alright...

tim:Sorry that wasn't clear enough...

fakejazz:Oh, that's fine. Why did you include the bonus track on the album?

tim:Oh, because we like that song... and really, that song was on the seven inch [a studio version as opposed to the live version on the album], but a lot of people don't have that seven inch, you know, Our Costal Hymn. It's a seven inch on DeSoto records. That has that song on it, and we really like the song, but we like to keep the seven inches somewhat pure. So, it's the kind of thing where a lot of people don't buy them. So it's this idea, like "well, if you want to hear that song for real, you'll have to get a seven inch." And for a lot of people, that probably means you have to get a record player. So the reason we wanted to put it on there, just cause it's cool to have a bonus track, I really like the live recording of that...and it's a song we really like but didn't want to release the same version.

fakejazz:Speaking of your live show... I've heard tons of things about it... just crazy energy, and stuff... do you want to talk about it, at all?

tim:Yeah [...] the live show we play is usually pretty energetic on our part... not always on the audiences part, usually more from us than from them. I guess that's the way it always [is]... or, lately. yeah, I don't know. Live we're always trying to do new things and make it live, you know? Every show should feel like an event, a one of a kind event, and really acknowledge the audience, acknowledge the space, trying to bring this whole thing into everyone's mind while we're playing it. A lot of bands are kind of just... executing. This idea that what we like is just playing live, being able to play around with the whole song, play around with the whole deal.

fakejazz:Right, ok... You were on tour in Europe recently?

tim:Yeah, we just got back...

fakejazz:How was that?

tim:It was really fun. We had a good time. In fact, it's a lot of fun to play in Europe. It's been something that we as a band have wanted to do for a really long time and just started doing last summer. And it's been really good. There's a lot of people there who have a lot of attention to the band. We release our records over there on Southern Records; like, we do it ourselves in the US and then license it to them for Europe. And, because of that, there's a lot of good attention in the UK, and in Germany we have a good friend--Armand--who runs this label, Xmas Records, which we just did a seven inch [for]. He's a supercool guy, and he's done so much to make--I mean, before we even got to Germany, we were being asked by a lot of people to come tour, and stuff, and it's basically because of this one guy single handedly telling his friends about us. It was really cool, going last June, when we had never been and just sort of showing up at some places and having a hundred people or fifty people... and being like, "What? I've never been here in my entire life, and there are people who have heard the music and want to come see us."

fakejazz:Neat! So, what's the weirdest thing you've had happen while you were on tour?

tim:In Europe or ever?

fakejazz:Um... either one... it's up to you...

tim:I can never think of the weirdest things that happened on tour, when people ask me... and then I start talking about it, and I can come up with a bunch of stuff. [...] I know there's a million weird things that have happened on tour. we played in a double-wide trailer one time, that was pretty fun, but I dunno... actually, a lot of bands have played at this place. It was down in Pensacola, Florida, I think... Oh yeah! one time we were in Pensacola, Florida, and we met a guy who could tie his penis in a knot. That was pretty weird. And he also made a pipe bomb. Same guy. That may have been one of our weirdest tour nights... going to this suburban house, I guess kind of just pool hopping, or maybe it was somebody's pool they were allowed to be in it, and their parents were away--this was years ago--and we all went in the middle, skinny dipping. and this one kid had a really, sort of prodigious member, and tied it in a knot. And then he made a pipe bomb. And we all went on a late night run to go blow it up in some neighbor's house, which was pretty funny. In the parents' car, which was a convertible Cadillac. That was the weird thing that happened on tour once.

fakejazz:Ah...

tim:And this past tour in Europe--it wasn't really weird--but we played a bunch with the 90 Day Men from Chicago, who are really good, and the Oxes from Baltimore. and we toured in Europe. And it's funny, those might have been the best bands we played with, and it's funny since we went all the way to Europe to play with bands we really like from the States. But it was really fun. When we were over there it was like all of a sudden we see another band from America, and they've been on tour also, and you have an overlap. It was really super-exciting, because all of a sudden you're like, "Yeah! All right! We can speak as fast as we want to each other, our English is perfect!" When we played with the Oxes... I dunno if you know who those guys are or not--but we'd never played with them before, and we became really good friend. Those guys have a really great live show: they use wireless guitars and run around like crazy. They sound sort of like Don Caballero and Shellac combined. Like, there's no vocals and weird time changes. Anyway, we immediately hit it off so much that after they'd play and we'd play we'd have a huge jam session for a really long time that's really loud and out of control, and the audience would get bored. But it was fun, you know. It was good to play with another band--they were one of the most live bands we've played with, there in Europe or in the US. And since we're crazy when we're live, it's always fun to find someone else who's a kindred spirit.

fakejazz:Yeah. [...] it must be weird for audiences after having sort of a boring, normal live show, then you guys sort of change like that.

tim:Yeah. Someone's not going to know how to deal with it. Like, again, talking about Europe, the first time last June that we went over some of the places in Germany where people were showing up unexpectedly I think had a really different idea of what--all they'd ever heard were our records--I think they had a really different idea of what we were all about. You know, a lot of the flyers would say "American emocore" and we'd show up. And you hear our music and, you know, it's pretty emo, or whatever it is, and we'd start playing, and I'd start running around being ridiculous and knocking stuff down and going all over the place, but not in a testosterone-y type of way, you know? I tried not to make it like that. Sort of like, there are a lot of crazy bands who are sort of like, I feel like some kind of weird... I don't know... just like cock-rock. I mean, they may be punkers, and they may be so hard; it's like they're being so hard and so bad ass that they're going crazy. And I think people heard we had this crazy live show, and we started crazy, and we were so absurd and so dada almost. And people would see it, and half of the audience would start smiling really big, cause they were glad we weren't another band like that, and the other half would start frowning and being like "These people, they're so not emocore." They say emocore (they pronounce it eh-moh-core), it's funny. When you're trying to write this interview you're going to have a hard time, trying to write about eh-moh-core. you'll have to make sure you put the little symbol for soft "e" (note: the symbol for a soft "e" is actually just a plain old ordinary "e").

fakejazz:What symbol is that?

tim:You know, for a hard "e" it's a line over it, and for a soft "e" you put a little letter "u" hovering above it, right?

fakejazz:Oh... right, ok.

tim:Eh-moh-core. That's what they say in Germany. (laughter) Anyway. That's whatever we were just talking about... that's some stuff.

fakejazz:Uhm... what kind of songwriting process do you go through to come up with your lyrics?

tim:For the lyrics... usually I think the lyrics come last in the song. I think when we're writing a song the way it usually works is, we're in the practice space, working on different things, and I'm playing some keyboard parts, and writing some lyrics down and occasionally singing some stuff. But mostly I'm sort of helping arrange while the guys are all playing, and I'll be listening to them, saying sort of "try this, try that," and they say "try this, try that" to each other, and I have a little notebook and I'm writing down lyrics. And then, as the song gets more close to being done, I start going through my lyrics, putting in things I've written while we were working on the songs, or I keep a book--like a sketchbook--and there's tons of little lyrics and quotes and stuff in there. so then I'll start collaging and pasting things together that make sense, or I'll make a bunch of pages, and each page is a different theme. You know, if you're just making stuff up you find you keep working on the same subject. or I do, anyway.

fakejazz:No, I know what you mean.

tim:So [...] a lot of the times, I'll write something--you know, we'll be working on a song. and I'll be sitting on the subway, and all of a sudden I'll come up with a bunch of lyrics, and I'll write them down. And then we get back to the practice space, and I'm like, "Oh, well... I'll try them on this song." And you realize you just wrote it the exact length of the song, and the exact time of the song, without even knowing you're going to do that, because you work on these songs, and they become so engrained in your mind that you can't help but write things that are going to work with it. But a lot of the songs have these really elaborate, over the top explanations, and these crazy theories about what they mean. One of our seven inches that we have trapped--that we can't actually get to be released--is supposed to come out on Pacifico... we gave it to them eight months ago and they still haven't released it--but, what it is, is that song "Reformat" from The Cat and the Cobra.

fakejazz:Yeah?

tim:Yeah. We did a live version of "Reformat," and then the B-side is a seven minute long radio play, which is about the narrative which I imagine that song is. And it's the story of a submarine captain who drives the oldest submarine in the fleet, and it's the last diesel gas powered sub left--the rest are nuclear--and he's really old, and he's kind of got a chip on his shoulder... the old chip, you know... that he's good enough, and that he's good enough still. And so the captain pushes the ship beyond its limits, ends up killing everyone on the crew except himself, and then gets tried for committing mutiny against his own crew... and it's just weird. They have a law that's never been enacted before, a rare thing... and he ends up being executed on television because of it. And there's this very sad Brooklyn couple who's young son got on the sub. So we did like an old, Orson Welles style radio play. And it's really funny. And it would definitely give--if it ever comes out--a good example of my thought process. Like, "I.C. Timer" is all about becoming a cyborg. Like talking all about "the doctor" and all of his little things, and how excited he is about his new body and how in the end... and all of that kind of stuff. "Titan" is all about Frankenstein and Ferdnan the Bull, big giant people--I'm kind of a big person myself--big people who are lovers, not fighters.

fakejazz:Um... ok! What records have sort of... inspired you to make music? I don't know, if you want to answer that...

tim:Oh... I don't know. I just made a mixtape! I'll read you some of the stuff. I'm kind of trying to get inspiration for lyrics, you know, lyrics for this new album, that kind of stuff, so I just made a big mixtape of all the bands I like. I can read it to you if you like...

fakejazz:Sure!

tim:It'll be a really long list. Let's see... I really like U2, Smog, Superchunk, Chisel, Dave Clark Five, Choke, Tony Basil, Lungfish, Sebadoh, Sha-Na-Na, the Wu Tang Clan, Silver Jews, Momus, Dead Kennedies, Mr. Puller, Archers of Load, Evergreen, Dexy's Midnight Runners, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Love as Laughter, Modest Mouse, Simon and Garfunkel, Circus Lupus, Mudhoney, Bruce Springsteen, Blonde Redhead, Tweez, and Cat Power. Are all on my mixtape. That's the mixtape of all of the people who I think have really good lyrics. So... yeah. But the music we listen to is all over the place. All of us sort of have this big collection. Harrison loves a lot of Johnny Cash type deal. Syd loves a lot of older pop bands... new wave, that kind of thing, and up to Pixies-type stuff. And Seth is really obsessed with Wire and Joy Division and these kind of severe bands. We're definitely not a band who are like "Oh yeah! we're really into this band and that band." Normally you wouldn't get an answer to that question because the list is so long. Even now I'm skipping things I listen to all of the time.

fakejazz:Ok, so is there anything else you'd like to add?

tim:No... oh, yeah. Check out on Frenchkiss, coming up soon, The Apes. That's our next release. You know, Frenchkiss, our label, doesn't release just us. It has this band Lifter Puller, and this band The Apes from DC are coming up. Our new record will be out soon, too. So, look for all of that stuff. Is it ok to do advertisements and that kind of stuff?

fakejazz:Oh yeah! If there's anything else you want to advertise, that's cool.

tim:Yeah, man. Chicken, forty-eight cents a pound at SeaTown, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It's a good deal if you eat chicken. That's it.

fakejazz:Ok, well, thanks very much for taking the time out to do this interview [...]