Interview with BEL AUBURN

«“…miliardi di piccole note schizzano via dal fondo del manico di una chitarra elettrica e si dilatano nello spazio allungandosi fino a diventare strisce bianche”….lunghissime”….lontanissime”…. ». “L’autocitazionismo” mi ha sempre fatto schifo forse addirittura più della marmellata alla fragola però questa volta era quasi d’obbligo per riagganciarsi un secondo al discorso musicale ipnotico, magnetico e fortemente convincente dei Bel Auburn. Band proveniente dall’Ohio, conosciuta per caso ed entrata di diritto nella più continua delle heavy rotation personali targate 2006. Pop, post rock, elettronica e un sacco di ninne-nanne suonate in LA e in DO. Il loro è un disco stupendo, che ha inghiottito nel suo vortice lento gran parte dello staff di Indieforbunnies. I Bel Auburn non sono una band comune. I Bel Auburn scrivono sul retro del loro disco che potete tranquillamente “Sentirvi liberi di copiare e regalare una o più parti del disco a chi volete”. Anzi, fanno di più: mettono l’intera produzione disponibile da scaricare sul loro sito, tanto l’industria discografica è bella che fottuta e se a una persona piace un disco poi se lo compera lo stesso originale quindi non prendiamoci in giro. Gran bella scoperta i Bel Auburn”…ecco l’intervista alla band”…buona lettura.

Are you working on some new material for a new record this period?
Yeah, we are. We have four or five songs in the hopper right now, although we don’t know what the next album will sound like, yet. Our past two albums were written and–for the most part–arranged before we recorded them, but we decided that we needed to take a much different approach this time around. The last two albums were very conceptual, in that we had a point to make. Since then, we’ve decided that we aren’t going to have a point, per se, embedded in the next album. We’re not winging it, exactly, but we’re holding on to things a lot more loosely these days. We managed to paint ourselves into a corner on the last two discs. This time, we’re trying to figure out how to letting things flow a little more.

How and when did your musical project start?
That’s a loaded question. We’ve been playing together as Bel Auburn for four years. Before that, we played together in various other projects, but with no real end in mind. We played in churches for services, jammed in the basement when three of us lived together in college, and managed to stay friends through the whole thing. Mark, Jared, and Scott have been in Bel Auburn since the start. Justin and Abrams came in later, but were–respectively–a big fan-slash-relative and the engineer recording us from the start. At the beginning, we just wanted to write some songs. Shortly thereafter, things got a little more serious and we wanted to write some really GOOD songs. Three albums later and we’re still trying to figure out both parts.

Your last album was one of my 2006 favourites for sure. It is a sort of post rock full of honey, melody and blur. Did it take you long time for writing it?
We have a theory about bands. Some bands can just crank out good stuff. Those bands are often third or fourth tries for band members: most of the members in those bands have been in bands before and then finally found that essential mix of members and inspiration and put out a great combination of 10-12 songs. Other bands just get it right the first time: They learn their instruments just enough to go into the studio and churn out a great album the first time. Then there’s the road-tested band that spends years and years honing their sound amidst long road trips and smoky no-name bars on three coasts and a foreign border. We’re none of these three. We’re just friends who want to play music and take that desire very seriously. Given that we live in a very rural and very unhip part of the America, though, our options have been pretty limited to being put into one of the aforementioned three categories.

It took us a long time to get this album out. Almost two years, in fact. And the main reason for that is because we didn’t know what we were doing. Or, maybe, we knew just enough to know that we didn’t know enough to put out a great record. We had the idea, had the basic structure for the songs, and even had most of the album done. But we had already put out a really, really mediocre album, and didn’t really know how to avoid doing that again. We were sort of paralyzed for a long time. So, we sat on it for a while. Periodically, we would go back into the studio and try different things out, but there didn’t seem to be very much there in the way of direction. We knew we had some good stuff down, but we didn’t know how to finish it. To be honest, we’re not sure if the album ever did get finished. Putting this album out really just amounted to us giving up and sending it off to the CD replication plant. We had been satisfied with the songs for a while, but we weren’t really satisfied with just being satisfied and it therefore took almost a year and a half for us to just give up and decide to put it out. At the end–at the point of our putting it out, that is–the decision just really amounted to a collective desire to get the thing out of the studio and into a package so we could quit worrying about it.

It’s not that we don’t like the album, of course. It’s more that we just had to finish the thing and get it over with.

What are your main musical influences?
We like Radiohead. That’s surely apparent. We also like The Appleseed Cast, Pink Floyd, The Cure. We were pretty impressionable during the early days of Coldplay and Jimmy Eat World, and I’m sure those two influences still shine through. Sufjan Stevens keeps us up at night.

To be honest, we listen to a lot of music these days. Any one of us has a new favorite band at any given time. The wonderful thing about the Internet is that it doesn’t let you rest for very long. You find something you like, ingest it, try to replicate the parts of it that you can’t get out of your head, and then, before you’re even done, something else online has captured your attention.

We’re discerning to the extent that we can tell when a band has a voice, a matured and seasoned view of things. That sort of interest crosses all sorts of genres and fads, and one of the best things about trying to make music is attempting to take everything you hear and find your own collective uses for it. That’s all a really stupid way of saying that we like a ton of stuff and can’t nail down enough of them to site them as proper influences. It would be a lot easier to just say that we like bands from England and Iceland and sometimes Oregon.

And what are the best bands around the planet, in your opinion, right now?
Radiohead is great, like we said. It might not get any better than that. Being that innovative and still popular–that takes a gigantic amount of intellect and intuitiveness. We’re definitely sensitive to the business side of things, and to be able to make money with your own unique vision of things is remarkable.

Sigur Ros, as mentioned before, is also great. How in the world do you make pop music in a language that you–for the most part–made up? That’s ground-breaking. Gorgeous and genius.

Arctic Monkeys may not exactly be the best band around, and their popularity doesn’t do much for their critical stature, but there wasn’t a more honest album this year. That whole dancefloor song was okay, but the rest of the album: Holy Cow. Listen to that and you know what it means to be them. There’s something inherently important in being able to translate your own life and experience into 2 minute 30 second songs. That’s an accomplishment.

Gnarls Barkely are crazy good, although they don’t take themselves seriously enough. TV on the Radio are geniuses, although we haven’t quite figured out what they’re trying to accomplish (except for proving that they’re good, of course). Band of Horses: Their album this year blew us away, but we were disappointed that one of the two main guys left back in the summer to do his own stuff (How could you be a Horse and decide that there are greener pastures elsewhere?). The Shins: always awesome. Coldplay: Wish they’d stay together for a little while longer. Les Savy Fav: Please put out another album.

What are according to you the best album of this year?
Band of Horses definitely stake a good claim [non a caso QUALCUNO del sito gli diede cinque stelle al volo mentre qualcun’altro provò pure a mettere in discussione la validità  dell’album!!! n.d.r.]. Arctic Monkeys as well. Wish the whole Thom Yorke solo thing had worked out a little better [non a caso QUALCUNO disse infatti che”…. n.d.r. part 2 ;D]. Wish Illinois was an option again. Don’t get the Knife. Ys was way too big and strange a project to digest. Didn’t touch the Liars’ project. Silversun Pickups’ album was pretty good. Cold War kids, maybe? Beck is always a good choice, but probably not the best pick this year. Liked Sunset Rubdown pretty well. The Hold Steady: that’s up there too.

All that to say: Not sure. You know how we praised the internet a few minutes ago for having so much good stuff to offer? Well, that has a downside as well. Too much good stuff in the form of two or three songs and the albums sort of drift by the wayside. I think that was our problem, critically speaking, this year. Too much good stuff and not enough time to evaluate very many albums as a whole. The Hold Steady, though, that’s a solid pick. Not ours, necessarily, but we wouldn’t fault anyone for walking out on that limb.

And the best book you’ve read?
100 Years of Solitude.

Let’s talk for a moment of one of the most beautiful songs on the album: Burn Unit. Do you remember how it was born and what were you thinking while you wrote the lyrics?
The song itself is about a chess match. The whole idea of the album is that God has sort of gotten too good of a name in our society. The modern protestant movement has sort of picked up on God being “Nice” and “Caring” and run with it to the point that so much about Him is lost. To be honest, we’re not entirely sure that God isn’t a pretty harsh deity. Read any chapters from the old testament: there’s not a whole lot that’s nice about Him in there. The song, then, centers around an imaginary scenario wherein God sits outside a hospital and basically plays chess–the white and black pieces being the anemic and the burn unit unit, respectively. We took some criticism in several blogs for the line “someday I hope you find the time to pick up all the pieces”. They thought that line was too juvenile or cliche. But the whole point of that line is that it is juvenile and cliche, but terribly appropriate when talking about our typical response to the question of bad things happening to good people within the context of a God orchestrating the whole thing. If God is a God that plays chess with the wounded simply for the sake of the game itself–and, we should add, sometimes it truly feels like that’s the case–then we should get some answers at some point. The problem of pain and evil and the apparent senselessness of parts of our lives is probably the biggest question that modern religion has to account for, and we hope that there’s an answer waiting for each one of us at some point.

What are the most influential things in your life (the ones that drive your hand while you compose a song..)?
We just want to write good songs. There’s something about that goal that serves as pretty good motivation for everything that goes into accomplishing it. Mental, physical, social, cultural, spiritual: try to write good songs and not take all of those circles into account. Our bet: it doesn’t work.

Where do you see Bel Auburn in 2025?
We hope we’re still all friends, still close, and have gotten another album out by then.

If you could ask Santa Clause only one big gift for 2007 what would it be?
We got the Lullabies album out, so we’re pretty much out of wishes for this year. Over the next year, we’d like to take a few more steps toward being able to do this music thing full time. As far as the immediate future, vespas would be nice.

What is your main wish for yourself as an artist and as a person of this world?
Like we mentioned earlier, we want to do good things and to write good songs. It almost seems inaccurate to separate those two things, because they’re probably pretty closely tied together.

What are the things you can’t live without?
Our faith is important to us, as well as our families. That’s a terribly un-indie thing to say, most likely, but we’re nothing if not unhip.

Did you go in tour a lot this year?
No, this was a year dedicated to practice. There used to be this urgency for us that we had to push and push and push and be busy being a band all the time. But this year–less because of our own decision and more because of circumstances beyond our control–we had to come to a point at which we had to recognize that we needed to slow down a little and really figure out what we did well, what we did poorly, and try to hone ourselves into respectable musicians. We spent a lot of time in our basement this year, just practicing and practicing. It was frustrating in a lot of ways because we weren’t doing what most other bands are doing; in other ways, it was a lot of fun.

Quali sono le band attualmente di cui proprio non puoi fare a meno? Ammesso che ce ne siano”…
Io penso che attualmente ci siano molti artisti che sanno fare cose davvero incredibili e comporre opere veramente valide, non saprei darti un nome preciso, ma se proprio devo dirti la verità  io oggi ascolto quello che ascoltavo anche dieci anni fa per cui sono rimasto un po’ ancorato al passato”… .

Unveil for us something about your new musical direction”…will you change something inside “your artistic song structure”? Will you go acoustic or will you give us a taste of more psychedelic impressions?
Wow. No idea. We like the psychedelic stuff, that’s for sure. We like acoustic stuff too, though. A few of the songs we’ve written lately are pretty short. We tend to jam a bit more than we’d like, and lately it seems like we’ve all been trying to pare it down a little, write really concise little pop songs that don’t necessarily compromise on the layers and layers of junk we like to put in songs. So, maybe look for shorter songs to come. Mr. Mercer and his Shins are trying to jam a little more and we’re trying to kick the habit.

Last question: if you had the opportunity of talking even only for twenty minutes with one famous musician of the past which artist would you choose and what would it be “the center” of the conversation (your most important question to him/her)?
Not sure about anyone in the past; most of the musicians we love were probably too drugged up at their most creative points to offer much insight in to how to make great music. But as far as current musicians go, we’d love to talk with Sufjan Stevens and try to find out how in the world he gets as much done as he does. Holy cow, that dude’s a workhorse. We’d make him draw out schedules for us. Pull out an Excel spreadsheet and lay out our daily routines for us.