An Interview With Jeremy Warmsley

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Jude Clarke has a long, fairly analytical phone conversation with folky-electronica wizz kid and all round nice chap Jeremy Warmsley, covering the new album, the benefits of a Cambridge education and whether it’s better making music for yourself or your audience.

Hello Jeremy I’ve just got a few questions to ask you, so thank you for giving us the time for the interview.
Of course.

How did your Transgressive tour go? That’s just finished now, has it?
Yeah, oh – it was brilliant, it was so much fun. All the bands on the tour were just super-talented and really nice and it was great to make some new friends and play a bunch of shows. Things couldn’t have gone better, really.

It sounds like you all got on really well. Did you have any favourites – bands that you particularly got on with, or liked musically?
Every band was different, and had different good things about them. Liam Finn put on just the most amazing show you’re likely to see this year, in terms of what he put into it and the quality of the songs – everything, really. It’s just him and a backing singer and he plays guitar and bass and loops it, and sings, and then goes and plays drums over the loops. It’s really exciting to watch. And then Esser: really really good dancey pop band, loads of fun, loads of energy. Ox. Eagle. Lion. Man. have got some really cool arrangements, some really cool ideas and another really watchable front man. All the bands really had something special about them. I guess the one criticism you could have made of the tour was that it was almost too disparate, because the bands are really very different to each other and…

Transgressive is a pretty eclectic label, would you agree?
Yeah, it is. You look at Regina Spektor and then at So So Modern, and they couldn’t really be any more different. I think that’s the good thing about the modern era: people do listen to a lot of different kinds of music. You get people who go to Fabric every weekend, who love Daniel Johnston. With the internet now it’s a lot easier to get into a whole bunch of different music instead of just having to just listen to the same thing, whereas ten years ago people seemed to be a lot more kind of cliquey about it. Or maybe that’s just because ten years ago I was a teenager, and teenagers are a lot more cliquey. You had “indie kids” and you had “dance kids” whereas now it’s very common for the indie kids to like pop music, and to boast about it and how unsnobbish you are. I think it’s hilarious, but I think it’s great, y’know?

How do touring, recording and writing differ – which is your favourite part of what you do?
I think my favourite is probably writing. When you’re touring, you’re presenting what you’re doing to an audience, which is going to react to you straight away, so there’s always that pressure of having to make it really good. When you’re recording, you have the pressure of knowing that people are eventually going to come back to you and tell you what they think of it. When you’re writing, there’s no audience at all, you’re just writing for yourself. That’s the real difference between writing, and recording and touring.

Do you get nerves when performing live?
I do get nervous before I go onstage, yes. I get very nervous if there’s not very many people there, and then I get very nervous if there’s a lot of people there, and if there’s somewhere kind of in-between then that makes me quite nervous as well!

In all cases then?
different reasons, yeah, and it expresses itself in different ways sometimes. It’s like physically nervous. I get very tired before I play, actually as if my body is getting ready for the adrenaline that it’s going to have to release or something, so I get quite sleepy. Ten minutes before I go on stage I’m always yawning away.

You went to Cambridge University – in what way (if at all) did what you studied there contribute to what you do now?
Not in a very direct way. I studied philosophy – then again there’s not really any job that philosophy particularly relates to, except possibly being a philosopher, which there isn’t a lot of call for these days! I think quite a lot of students generally try and get in to music, don’t they, so I don’t know if that relates too much… I think it really taught me a different way of thinking about things, it made me very analytic. Or maybe I was already very analytic, and that’s why I was attracted to it… It certainly improved my analytical skills, and I think that’s something that’s quite important to me as a human being, and therefore as a musician – to always think about the reasons why I or someone else is doing something. With my music, I don’t write seven songs that all sound the same, at least I hope I don’t. I try not to, because I’m always analysing my music and thinking “well, what’s this got in common with my other tracks, and is that a good thing? Should I try and do the same thing on more of them, or should I try and do something different?” I come to the conclusion that it would be better to try and do lots of different things whilst making it coherent overall. So that’s the way in which my education had an effect.

The process by which musicians “create” is always really interesting. How does this happen with you – does the music come first, or the lyrics?
The music comes to me very easily. I can sit down at the piano or the guitar any day of the week and tinkle away and something that seems vaguely worthwhile will usually come up, but for me there’s a big difference between “a piece of music” and “a song”. A song is something that expresses some kind of idea – there has to be some kind of attempt at communication between me and the person hearing the song, and so I tend to get a lyrical idea and then either attach it to a piece of music that I’ve had floating around for a while, or often I’ll just come up with a new piece of music for it altogether that I think suits that lyrical idea. As for where the lyrical ideas come from: basically, because they’re so few and far between I’m always on the lookout, so whenever an interesting phrase crops up in conversation I would make a note of it, or if I see an idea… When I’m on the tube, or other public transport, I often just kind of sit back and think about stuff and an idea for a song will pop into my head.

I make notes on a blank text message on my phone – if I have a notebook I tend to lose it! I think I’m actually quite rare among songwriters in that I actually write all my lyrics out on the computer. I find it makes it much easier to move things around if you decide you want to, say, repeat the chorus twice and save the lyrics for later. It makes it much easier to organise my thoughts. I love the romantic idea of banging away on an old chrome typewriter, and a moleskin notebook, but it just doesn’t really work for me. I’ve grown up with computers, so I guess that’s probably why.

Are you able to make your living completely from your music now? What other non-music jobs have you had in the past?
I don’t have a day job at present, I’m able to survive on my musical exploits. I’ve had all sorts of day jobs in the past: I’ve worked as a security guard, I’ve done filing, I’ve worked in the photocopy room of a law firm for a while – that was really gruelling, actually. Probably the hardest job I’ve ever had to do was photocopying!

Harder than security work?
Yeah, much harder. Security work’s great: you just stand around and wait all day with security guards, it was brilliant. Other jobs I’ve had: I’ve worked as a film extra, I’ve designed websites – very badly… I’ve done data entry. All the kind of usual stuff that nice middle-class kids do for cash on summer holidays, except I carried on doing it after I was a normal student. I’ve never had, like, a “real” real job.

Did you always aspire to a career in music then?
No, not really. It was only just before I went to Uni that I figured out that it might be what I wanted to do. Two years into my Uni course I worked out that it was definitely what I wanted to do. I spent most of my childhood desperately wanting to be a computer games designer, which is quite funny, really. Then I wanted to be a mathematician, although I don’t think I actually knew what mathematicians did, I just thought it would be quite funny. I think if I’d thought about it a bit more I would have realised that it actually just involved lots of sitting down and calculating things. I just eventually realised that you should get a job that involves doing what you enjoy doing the most on a day-to-day basis, and what I enjoyed doing most on a daily basis was making music. That said, it wasn’t really that kind of decision making process, it was more, like “Oh, I’m going to do music, because music is what I should be doing…”, it wasn’t, like, “What kind of job would I like? Hmm, I’d like a job where I get to do music. I know! I’ll be a musician.” It wasn’t like that. I don’t think it is for anyone, really, is it?

Tell me about your second album [How We Became].
Well, it’s released in September, and it features twelve brand new tracks, including ‘Lose My Cool’ which is the current single, but not including ‘Temptation ‘ and ‘The Boat Song’, which was my last single. The twelve songs are quite varied. They go from being very personal meditations on love to being totally third person stories. One of them is a story about a girl living on the Channel Islands during the Nazi occupation.

Musically they vary wildly, again: one of them is just a solo piano piece, and they go from that extreme right across to total electronica. Although this one does feel a lot more coherent than the last one: a lot of instrument recur on different tracks, and all the backing vocals are done by me, this time, instead of by lots of different people.

A big different between this album and the last one is that the songs are a lot more open, they’re a lot more friendly. I actually put a lot of effort into making it a lot more intelligible on the first listen than the last one. The last one, I just did it totally arrogantly and close-mindedly. I just went along with my own feelings and intuitions and I never questioned them. Whereas for this one I tried to imagine what it would be like to listen to it for the first time, and I used that as my guide of how to make the music. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t make it to please myself, because it’s definitely a record that I’m very happy with. But you do have to make these choices, sometimes. There’s this kind of myth that if you make something that pleases other people then you can’t be making it for yourself. It’s like you’re selling out or you’re a genius type artist in the garret, and I just don’t think that’s an acceptable dichotomy.

Sometimes when you make music, if you don’t think about what it’s going to be like for other people to hear it, it doesn’t make it better. After all I’ve heard some of my songs maybe thousands of times, over and over again, and you get really used to them, and that’s not really the ideal state to listen to a piece of music in. If you listen to the same album a thousand times you would probably get really sick of it. I mean, I really like my first album, but I think it’s quite difficult to listen to the first time, simply because I kept on going through it and making changes and making it more unexpected and more unusual. I think it’s just a bit of a whirlwind to listen to sometimes, it definitely takes three or four listens to work out what the hell’s going on on some of the tracks. Whereas on this album almost all the songs make sense, and are structured a bit more conventionally. That’s something I’m really pleased with, because I totally love pop music, some of my favourite albums ever have been total cheesy sell-outs, so I’m glad to have incorporated a bit of that.

Another thing about this album is: the first one was produced entirely at home, and mixed at home, whereas I co-produced this one with a very talented man called Marcus Dravs who recorded the last Arcade Fire record, he recorded a Bjork record called Homogenic, and the new Coldplay album as well. He’s really talented and he gave me lots of advice about how to make things better, and we got this guy to mix it who’s just a total genius, it just sounds really good, and I’m really pleased with that.

So did you find it easy to hand over, or share, some of the control, this time round?
Yeah, definitely, that wasn’t difficult at all. I was quite afraid that it would be, but he was into all these ideas and opinions. He said “If you want to do something differently, that’s fine, but this is what I think you should do”, and that was great. It’s quite funny, actually. I would say about one third to a half of the album was recorded in one day, at Coldplay’s studio, on their day off – which was quite funny, kind of sneaking in there – and the other two thirds of the album were recorded painstakingly over a nine month period in my studio room, in my house, which is quite a funny split, really. Usually you’d spend the same amount of time on all the different parts of the album, but one mad rush, and then months of careful thought.

Can you hear the changes of recording location reflected in a different sound or mood in parts of the finished album?
Well, it’s not that there were whole tracks that were recorded in one place, and other tracks that were recorded in other places, it was actually parts of some tracks in some places and parts recorded in other places. I don’t think that is something that you can really tell when you listen to it. I think each track has its individual “sound world” and is separate from each other. You’ll see when you hear it: I think we did a good job of making it sound coherent.

I’m looking forward to hearing it! Tell me a little bit about your “Welcome To Our TV Show” website / project.
Well, that’s just kind of a fun project that my girlfriend Fay Buzzard and I started doing. She’s a video producer, I’m a musician, we wanted to find a project that we could do together, so this seemed to be a fun way to get all our friends in one place at the same time and have fun parties, and also at the same time do this project that would just be kind of satisfying to do. We never really worried about whether lots of people were going to see it or not. It’s great! All the bands that we’ve had on are either old friends or have become friends, and it’s just really nice to have these fun little music parties in our house, and film them, and put them on the internet. There’s not really a lot more to it than that, to be honest! I mean, people have been saying that it’s part of this “scene”, with all these bands, and I don’t know about that, but if people want to talk about that, then that’s fine…

If not a “scene” then, do you have other bands or artists that you’ve come up with who you rate, as peers, perhaps, or just bands that you currently are enjoying?
Bands that are my peers… It’s funny: when I got asked this question two years ago I would have been, like, “well, there isn’t really anyone, you know”, but now, after two years I’ve got to know lots of bands and there’s lots of bands who I feel a kinship with. Emmy The Great, Slow Club, Noah And The Whale, Laura Groves, err… my mind’s gone blank, as it always does… Johnny Flynn – I used to live with Johnny, and he’s doing fantastically now. They’re all doing great stuff, and they’re all singer-songwriter-y people, and that’s great. And I feel a kinship with them all, but I don’t feel that our music is that similar, because the one thing they all have in common is the use of acoustic instruments and that kind of folky feel. People sometimes claim to find it in my music, and certainly on the first album there was a bit of it, but on the new album there’s really very little in the way of acoustic guitars. I don’t know if that’s going to surprise people or whether anyone’s going to notice . That’s just something that I personally feel: I love all those bands and I love that kind of music but I don’t happen to make it myself.

Then there’s other bands out there in the wider world who I’m not personally acquainted with who I think are fantastic. It’s a really fine time for music at the moment and… hooray!

Hooray indeed! Well, thanks very much for the chat, it was nice talking with you, and good luck with the new album.

Links:
Jeremy Warmsley [official site] [myspace]