The Sporting Life: An Interview With The Low Anthem
Two years after the release of their critically acclaimed sophomore release Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, The Low Anthem is back to touring like crazy. After taking a brief break in December, which doesn't really count as a break because they spent it recording a new album in a cavernous, abandoned Rhode Island pasta sauce factory, they're hitting the road again, playing Seattle's Crocodile Cafe tonight with Timber Timbre. Your Seattlest caught up with The Low Anthem's Jeff Prystowksy to talk about the new record, a new band mate, the coming baseball season and the games people invent to stay warm in Rhode Island winters.
Seattlest: You just wrapped up work on a new album--what sort of direction did that take for you?
Prystowsky: We rented an abandoned pasta sauce factory for a month. It looked like an airplane hangar... just this wide open space with wood floor and high ceiling, and I think the record really sound like the space. he natural reverb of the place found it's way onto just about every track on the record...We've been playing on the road as a band for two years straight now, and so we were able to get mostly live takes...pretty much the whole record sound like the whole band playing the songs together, it's not an overdubbed record...Lyrically, though it's a wordy record, there is osme more personal writing, as opposed to [the record by The Low Anthem, Oh My God,]Charlie Darwin, which had more writing on a larger scope. We also had a local beer sponsor, as well as a local pizza sponsor, so you can imagine us for a month in this abandoned pasta sauce factory, living on beer and pizza and recording pretty much all day and all night. The other thing was the building wasn't really up to code, and so anyone who came to visit us had to sign a death waiver. It kind of gave the album a dark edge there.
You added a new member, Mat Davidson, in the studio for this album - will he be joining you on the tour as well?
Oh, yes. He's a legitimate multi-instrumentalist, and played probably about ten different instruments on the record.
Since everybody in the band plays multiple instruments, how does that affect your songwriting process?
It creates a lot of different line ups, a lot of different kind of formations at the live show. The songwriting is mostly done by Ben, away from the arrangement process...and he'll bring it to a band rehearsal and we'll all play through a song on all our different instruments and play through the song. That's not to say I don't write songs...but my songwriting has taken a kind of interesting turn....and it didn't really make sense for the new Low Anthem record... Jocie is also a great classical composer in her own right, and Mat is a songwriter in his own solo project. So we all contribute, it just depends on whatever it is we're doing. For this albumostly it was Ben writing a song, bringing it in, and we have our instrument room with like a hundred instruments in there, and we just walk around and try different arrangements and see what works.
You're a serious baseball fan as well. I know it's just spring, but who do you like for the Series?
For the series, I like Cardinals/Yankees, and the Yankees probably take it. We're finally getting some time off after this tour ends in May and I'm thinking of doing one of those baseball stadium tours. We'll see if it happens, but it'd be a pretty cool week and a half - hopefully there are some other bands playing in between those days, and I could combine my two favorite things, baseball and music.
One more sports question - talk a little bit about Baffle Ball, if you would.
That's a game we created in the recording space. It got really cold in the pasta sauce factory, because there was no heat when we were recording because the heaters were so damned loud that we had to shut them off when we were recording, and we were recording in the dead of winter. So we brought some tennis rackets and tennis balls, and we'd hit ball against the wall just to stay warm between takes. And then we took one of the guitar baffles... and started using that as a net. Then we used gaffer's tape to make a court, and suddenly we're playing this game and making up all these rules. Before we knew it, anyone who came to the studio would be challenged to a game of Baffle Ball.
The Low Anthem plays the Crocodile Cafe tonight at 9 p.m. with Timber Timbre.
