ZapTown

Seattle’s five piece wonder is easily impressionable. Their music is brassy, charismatic, pop-licious and most importantly, talented. With a mixture of great compositions and amazing harmonies, the band’s latest album What A Lovely Surprise To Wake Up Here (Spark & Shine) brings out the best elements in the band.

The band takes some time to answer questions about the new album and what they are doing with it.

I want to start off talking about one of my favorite songs on your album “What A Lovely Surprise To Wake Up Here.” “Small Change” is not just a fantastic song, but also a little different than the rest of the album. Can you dissect the reasoning behind creating “Small Change,” and how it does fit into the context of the album?

Peter Fedofsky- First and foremost, thank you! Small Change is a track that really bridges the gap between our first album and this one. I wrote the song originally on acoustic guitar, and it had a much more psychedelic feel to it. The demo had lots of nonsense vocals in the backgorund, and echo-laden guitars and such. When we started rehearsing it, the feel was dropped entirely in favor of this kind of burlesque-show feel that we have
now. We did record another studio version at one point, which was heavily influenced by The Seeger Sessions from Springsteen. We did this huge drum sound with a pile of room mics, and I played a bit on a newer upright
piano. Something just wasn’t clicking, and those sessions were swept under the carpet. It always packed a punch live, so we lumped it in with the recording of What a Lovely Surprise. Boy, I’m glad we did.

One the surface “What A Lovely Surprise” is such an upbeat album to listen to, while in context it’s very realistic, the ideal construct to pop music. How did this develop when creating an album like this and what did it mean to you to take this approach?

Fedofsky – Matt and I always seem to write these catchy tunes about the end of the world, disasters, relationships turned sour, and such. There’s something sly about writing gritty and real lyrics to something that ends
up being a toe-tapper. I guess living in the gray and dreary Pacific Northwest lends itself to writing in this mode. It always cracks me up when people think of the band as super poppy and upbeat, as all we sing about is death and despair and the like…

Matt Gervais:  I was on a family road-trip and I think my sister pointed out a line from Crocodile Rock that was full of this hidden sadness.  It was, “never knew me a better time and I guess I never will.”  It’s full of apprehension and doubt, but is sung in this loveable and carefree voice. I liked the idea of being able to express a very real, melancholic
sentiment and to still be able to have fun doing it.  I suppose it’s in our mission statement.

Even in the Seattle scene, Curtains For You is a different kind of band than we come to expect from the Northwest. How did the band come about and how did the sound develop into what we know of now?

Gervais:  Well, when we started out, we sort of took an inventory of each other’s past catalogue and found that there were a lot of places where our styles overlapped.  Among other styles was this common affinity for ragtime and 60′s pop and we just went with it.  Our first performances were frequently compared to jug-bands as we had no drummer and we were playing this almost un-intentionally old-timey stuff.  We were George Formby without having heard much George Formby.  We’ve changed a lot since then, but have tried to keep the same spirit and reconcile it with the modern world.

Not just the musicianship, but your vocals and harmonies are outstanding and refreshing to hear such a well-blended vocal sound on an indie album. What is the background behind that? How important was it for you as the band developed and would you say you are lucky to have such rich vocal talent within the band?

Fedofsky – Thanks again. I think that we all have gravitated toward vocal harmony groups in our own record collections, and that helps. Anything from the Four Freshmen to the Beach Boys to Nilsson is fair game for us. Speaking for myself, I simply cannot demo anything without about 20 of me singing at once to cover my vocal failures, so somewhere along the way, I learned how to write harmonies to flesh out any musical situation. Matt’s writing is similar, so I know that it was important for us to be working with a band that was not afraid to hit the mic and ooh and ah as much as possible. As far as being lucky, I would say hell yes! It is refreshing to work with a band that not only tries to pull off what I hear when I write/demo a song, but they exceed my ideas and improve it dramatically.

Gervais -  Thanks a lot!  The harmony thing is kind of like crack.  Once you’ve immersed yourself in it, it is damn near impossible to escape.  You just keep learning more about how it works and wanting to one-up yourself with
new arrangements.  Pete is onto something when he says it’s also good for covering up vocal failures.  There is a comfort in having your own voice supported by three other singers.  The pressure is off all-of-a sudden and
you end up singing better than if you were all alone.  As the primary singer, it is priceless to have three other guys to go to when the going gets tough.

The album was recorded live. How did the production elements go and what obstacles did you have to face in order to accomplish this. What aspects to the recording do you think really pushed this album?

Gervais -  Going into it we unanimously agreed that it had to be done live. Especially coming off a debut album that was done in a very piecemeal fashion, we needed to capture the vibrancy of our live shows.  It’s a
time-tested formula.  I’d say instead of presenting obstacles this approach actually removed obstacles.  It becomes much more natural and less of a head-game.  Recordings can very easily be over-thunk.

Each of you contributes multiple instruments to the album. How does this convert live and still maintain the momentum?

Fedofsky – Sheesh, I always yell rotate in the middle of the set at one point or another. We are pretty quick at transitions, and would rather have ten seconds of shuffling around to have that euphonium and sax out instead of
leaving it out.

When listening to your music, I have a gut feeling that you guys had a lot of fun creating it and playing the music. The music just contains that underlying feeling? What was it really like making an album like this?

Fedofsky – We did and continue to have fun playing and recording together, and it shows for sure in our music and live shows. Recording this record was a fantastic experience. Our engineer at London Bridge, Geoff Ott, was
amazing! He literally became the 6th member of the band, and was as goofy and ridiculous as the rest of us. That set the tone, and made for some great sessions. We’re a fun-loving bunch, but we work really really hard. When the light is on, we give it everything we have, and then some. I’ve been in a lot of bands that involved drinking and smoking punctuated with some music now and again, if you know what I mean. We’re suprememly focused when we’re playing. Bringing that into the studio AND being wildly insane at the same time is a skill that we ended up with somehow.

Gervais: It’s really true.  If fun wasn’t the number one priority I don’t think we’d have even gotten this far.  The primary tracking was just insanely fun, but I suppose there is inevitably a lot of detail work that could be
construed as tedious.  I think we all get a charge out of getting into the details and fleshing things out.  The surgical stuff is sometimes the most gratifying.  Plus there is inevitably excitement and sheer joy in the act
of collaborating and creating something with your some of your best friends.  It’s impossible to not have fun.

Between solo work and members of the band doing other projects, is that a complication at all or does that benefit what you guys do together?

Fedofsky – It’s a benefit. How could it not be? Anything that we write is fair game, and having a pile of songs to craft a record from helps greatly. We never have to worry about lacking material for the band, which is a great
side effect of our “solo” careers. Because of this, Matt and I are competitive to the end, but in the friendliest possible way. We trade demos and sit at the piano showcasing our stuff to each other regularly. We don’t write together, but  learn from each other a lot. Right from the start, we were huge fans of each other’s work, and that continues to this
day. To be honest, we both write like dynamos, and it’s a bit hard to fit all of our output into Curtains records. Between Matt and I, I think we wrote at least 4-5 albums worth of material in 2009, and that is
impossible to bring to the band all at once. Aside from Matt and I, both Nick and Mikey are phenomenal songwriters to boot. Dave writes songs, but refuses to let us hear them. Something tells me that he’s the best writer
in the band, but we may never know!

Gervais:  Solo work right now is really a personal thing but is always in the context of, hmmmmmmmmmm, how would this sound if the band was playing it? Inevitably there will be songs that don’t fit for one reason or another,
but it does not interfere at all with the band’s productivity.  Like Pete said, it actually helps quite a bit.  With all of the excess material, the pressure is off, and you can just go to town with what you’ve chosen for
the band.

Talking so much on this album, I want to put things into perspective and ask what it is that you feel you did differently than on “Heaven’s Waiting” and what the latest release contains that you feel made the band
progress?

Fedofsky – Heaven’s Waiting was a great record for what it was, but Surprise really felt like our true debut record. We threw out click tracks and technical hoohah for this record, and just played it as we really sound in the studio. We wanted to strip it down to our live setup, and then overdub a bit of extra stuff as long as we needed it. I love the last record dearly, but it is not very representative of what we do live, so it sounds a bit strange to my ears. As far as progress, we really came together and captured what it sounds like to play in this band. The album sounds like
what we are going for every time that we step up on stage… minus the goofy vocal mixes, feedback, and normal three Stooges mayhem that comes with live shows.

Gervais – I think the songs on What A Lovely Surprise stand by themselves a lot better than the tunes on Heaven’s Waiting. In fact, that was one of the goals this time around.  We were caught up in creating this sonically rich
and diverse album with Heaven’s Waiting, but songwriting wise I think we upped the ante with the new album.  It’s seems like a natural progression. We learned that a few of our beliefs about album-making had to be
unlearned in order to find a new path for ourselves.  That is a trajectory that we’ll hopefully continue to follow.  I hope we surprise ourselves at every juncture.

And speaking of progression, what is in store for the band and what are you doing to keep the momentum alive?

Gervais:  We just got back from a West Coast Tour and are conceptualizing the next one.  We’re psyched to be opening for The Posies coming up in April as they have been big inspirations for us, and we’ll also be doing a lot
of festivals over the Summer months in the Seattle area.  Uhhhmm.  Oh yeah and impatient as we are, we’ve begun work on a follow-up to What a Lovely Surprise to Wake Up Here. Hoping for the best!