TLOBF Interview // Liars

Whilst it is not essential for an album to retain an element of mystery- after all, there is a primal beauty in even the simplest of songs- it is unequivocally present in any album that is worth its salt. It is the ambiguity of song meanings that allows us to make them our own, and it is the subtle, often unnoticed sounds that will make even the albums you know by heart sound new years later. It can take one listen to realise this, or it can take years, at which point it feels more like acceptance- that the album will never lose its edge. Finding out just how that magic made its way into the music is always an interesting task. When factors like drugs or mental illness are in play, it’s easy enough for us to put it down to that. It’s almost unsettling when you realise that it could all just be hard work and a gifted ear, as Liars’ Aaron Hemphill seemed to suggest when Leah Pritchard talked to him recently, but anyone who’s heard Sisterworld will swear blind that there are forces at work here which can’t be put into words.

How did you approach moving forward from your last record (Liars, 2007)?
We don’t ever really take a break from working on Liars, maybe sometimes we’re unable to write new songs because we’re touring or what have you, but we don’t ever take breaks. I haven’t had a month where I’ve been not thinking about music. We’ve written music pretty much the same way our whole lives, Angus and I pretty much writing by ourselves- we don’t jam things out. Then we sit down and take a bit more time to expand them. I think the change in style just has to do with exacting our focus. Sometimes it feels like if you work alone, if you concentrate so much on what you’re doing, whatever we’re trying to emphasise will come out. After the record’s done, it generally feels like, yeah, I’m gonna worry less about that concept- we move on, it’s a natural progession. We were still focussing a lot on song structure, conventional song structure, and how to add our own touch to that, I think it’s a gradual thing. The new album may sound a little different because we tried to take our time with it. That’s never really happened in the past. With this last record I was constantly working on it, constantly revising things.

Does being in a band affect the way in which you listen to music?
I’m always listening to music. It changes the way I do anything. It’s not this pretentious process, I’m just always thinking about music. What to make, how anything can help it. Yeah, I guess sometimes it’s like I’m at work when I’m listening to music. There’s certain records that I’ll listen to for a certain purpose- I can add what I like about certain types of music into ours. It’s never recognisable, it’s not like I could tell you a record I listened to and you could hear it in the finished product. Listening to this album after we completed it, I could hear a lot of things that I’d listened to in the past. I could draw lines to certain bands, certain albums, but nothing to what I was listening to immediately. What I listened to during the writing and recording of this record were things completely different from what we could do. I listened to a lot of Wu-Tang records or a lot of, for lack of a better word, classical records, just because it sort of kept the canvas empty.

Do you pay much attention to the critical reception of your albums?
I don’t really pay attention to critics, as far as if they like our music or not. I think we started to pay attention to what information they cling to that we release about the album. Like how we can communicate effectively through the press. Seeing what facts they gravitate towards, whether or not that’s ok with us. For me, I have the opinion that when you get bad reviews, you say, “Oh it’s just one person’s opinion,” and I think it’s the same for good reviews. It’s appreciated either way. It makes us feel grateful but there’s no pressure from the outside. It’s more par for the course that they come up with bizarre comparisons. It’s not that it’s incorrect that they draw certain parallels, it’s just interesting. We sort of realised a long time ago that we hear our own music very differently that other people do.

How did Tom Biller (who co-produced Sisterworld) get involved with the project?
I worked with Tom on another project a while ago, a soundtrack. It was only for a couple of days. Angus and Julian stopped by the studio, Angus did a little something too. We thought that he would be perfect to do the next record, for many reasons. One is the style in which he works- he’s pretty much open to any method of recording. And the other one was that he had roots in LA. He knew musicians, he knew studios. He’s a real community man. I think that expanded the possibilities. If we decided we wanted strings or horns, we felt confidence that Tom not only knew someone who could do that, but knew someone on a personal level. He was more of a facilitator rather than a producer in a dance or hip hop understanding of the word. He enabled things to happen, rather than contributing to the creative process. Angus wrote his string and horn parts on a synthesiser. I wrote mine on a guitar. It was just kept at the back, like if we complete all this, the main track, the main ingredients, then we might get to change these sounds to strings or whatever the instrument is. And we did, and it was amazing, working with other people like that.

Were you in many bands before Liars?
I actually was in a lot of punk rock bands. None that I really thought of as my main project. I was in bands since I was in high school. We would play Tijuana and just a lot of fun things. The reason for me being in bands was mostly just to play with other bands we liked, to get into the show for free. It was that sort of feeling, we practised once a month. It was an amazing experience. Pretty different from Liars now, but it also helped me prepare for this. It’s just a different background, a different approach. An interesting way to get into a show or, for us, get a flyer with our band name on it. Angus and my collaboration was about making new songs, making music every day. In fact, the designer of the Sisterworld packaging, Brian Roettinger, was the singer of the first band I was in. We played really bad areas of LA. This one club, it was in this really bad part of town- you know, I think we got banned from that club. We got arrested. We were drunk 16 year olds, it was amazing.

Am I right in saying you studied Biochemistry after high school?
It’s not so specialised or advanced as that sounds. I went to community college- I don’t know what the equivalent of that is in the UK. I was enrolled in a placement program where, after the two year course, you get a job in a biotech lab in San Diego. I dropped out during the second year, just because, I don’t know, I went straight to college after high school and it seemed like I wasn’t sure if that was the route I wanted to go. I was really young. I was hoping and just really wanting to experience other things. I wanted to act like someone my age. I lived in Angus’s photo studio, I didn’t pay any rent. I just saved my money to move to New York and make songs with him. It was a really amazing time. I learned so much about myself- it was really important. That experience is so beneficial, just being aware to learn more about who I am. I was so unsure of what I wanted to do. I didn’t grow up in an environment where it was a practise for me to develop my own opinion on things or… make things, really.

Were you confident you’d be able to make a living off the music when you got to New York?
It didn’t really matter if we couldn’t make a living off music. I mean, I think that was the ultimate goal, just to make some sort of income from what we were doing. It wasn’t a goal that we thought of consistently, maybe I can’t call it a goal- it was the light at the end of the tunnel. We just wanted to make the best music we could, make as much music as we could and play as often as we could. However we paid the rent was inconsequential so long as we were making good work. We went on a 3 month tour, we played constantly. We never played New York too much, it was like, you play the same club twice in a month, it’s kind of a little too much. We had a really good approach, it was all based on working hard.

Did you still have day jobs at that point?
When we first moved to New York, I had some of the worst jobs ever. I had a job at a 24 hour record store where the guy put merchandise on the sidewalk to attract customers. My job was to sit and look out the glass door to make sure no one stole anything. It was the winter. I was completely bored, freezing cold. I had to wear my coat and sit on a stool for, like, 8 hours. A ridiculous amount of time. I also did some freelance stuff with an artist friend of ours. So I had that job where I was freezing cold and I was walking through Soho- that’s where all the fashion boutiques are- it was pretty dead because it was winter. I saw these people and they were just sitting in these warm, fancy places, talking to each other, wearing nice clothes and I was like, “I’m gonna get a job in one of these places.” I went door to door wearing the best clothes that I had, which were ridiculous looking, and basically lied about my experience. I didn’t know how to tie a tie. I got a job at Yves Saint Laurent, learned as I went. When it wasn’t busy, I’d just read all the magazines about fashion and learn about all the materials. It was such a small outfit that he had a real hands-on approach to everything. He wanted us to learn how things were made, what they were made out of. He had a real care about how things were presented. I got out of the snow, that’s for sure.

How do you feel about playing the Matt Groening curated ATP festival?
I especially like when it’s a non-musical curator, then it’s a cross medium where you see how music informs another outlet. You can see what music informed a cartoon. I think you learn more about an artist or a musician by the non-field specific influences. It helps get bands who are lesser known over to the UK from the US. That’s serious, because it’s not like people haven’t heard of some of these bands, but maybe they can’t afford a tour and they can book it around that festival. It’s a amazing way to get good music to the UK.d