TLOBF Interview :: The Low Anthem

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L-R: Ben Knox Miller, Jeff Prystowsky and Jocie Adams

Murmurings about the The Low Anthem and their fantastic live performance started to rise into a unified chorus of excited hyperbole of late. They recently played at the amazing Union Chapel and gave another stormer, Peter Bloxham met them for breakfast the morning after the epic night before. All questions answered by Ben Knox unless otherwise stated.

Hey guys, did you enjoy last night?
Yeah!

So you were playing like a telephone theramin thing how did you come up with that?
Ben: I was walking down the street talking do to a friend on the phone and it was one of those weird moments were talking without realizing that were were walkig on the same street. So I run into the guy, we’re still on the phone and he says ‘Oh hey, look at this’, takes the phones and puts them against each other and they make this sound. It actually sounds different over here because of the mobile phone networks.

I also heard that you guys had an organ duel at one point…
Jeff: Hahaha, that’s like the only time that’s going to happen! What happened was… it was our first trip over to Europe, we needed to get an organ to play so we ordered a second hand, but then we also decided to get a new one just in case the second one didn’t work. But it turns out that they both worked so we thought, hey we’ve got two…

Why not use them?
Ben: One was ordered from a historical organ store and another was from ebay for £26! The cheap one was completely out of tune and Ben went in the night before the gig and tuned it up.

Uh-huh, how long did that take you?
Jeff: Ben got sick afterwards, he came down with like the Black Lung… because this organ was like 100 years old.
Ben: There was dust in the bellows. Right? And I opened up and there was just all this…

Dust inside! Of course!
Man, I was sick for weeks after that.

Ohh, man! So you caught a disease from an Organ.
I love doing it though, I mean it’s just so beautiful, the workings and inside, the craftsmanship.

http://vimeo.com/3829477

Breakfast arrives, including sausages.

Ben: Do people say sausages for mike checks over here?

Uh, I think they say ‘Check Check – One, Two..’
Sausages is good. Can you think of a word you could say that would test all aspects of the sound?

Erm.. solipsist? Does that work?
Ben: … Yes!
Jeff: Solipsist?
Ben: Solipsist, Solipsist. You know why that’s good, it’s because it has all of esses. And it has the aar, Saarlipsist.
Jeff: Solipsist…
Ben: And it ends with a t so you can hear the decay of the reverb. And that was just right off the top of your head!

Yep. There ya go. Can I patent that?
Jocie: Haha!

Let’s talk about your music, like the lyrics to Charlie Darwin.
Okay.

To me it sounds… well quite horribly depressing, lyrically, really. Was that the intention?
Ben: Well I guess it depends on your perspective.

Well, it was a quite a literal interpretation.
Ben: There’s just not a lot of… anchors out there you know, you’re brought up and you’re taught certain very specific things or probably most people are and when you’re given some of education you’re taught to relate to your community in a certain way… Essentially our knowledge is ideas that continue to get passed down, the strong survive, it kinda makes it impossible to believe in a framework like that.

You think if you fully accept that scientific and logical outlook on the world then everything else just becomes theory and essentially meaningless?
Ben: Well it’s like our morality is a product of the same survival of the fittest of ideas and passed down and whatever institution propagate whatever ideas, the strong survive. Like the Church of England has some brilliant missionary wing and the ethic is to spread their religion into different parts of the empire that they are expanding into, that’s a lot like a natural reproductive instinct.

Yeah, I think that the urge to spread your ideas is many ways probably a part of that instinct to make copies of yourself.
Ben: So its uh, I mean that’s all well and good but I think it puts in perspective things like relationships that you were taught to have.

So would you say that there’s this tide, like the with lyrics about ‘the formless waters’ that are fighting to come in, that they represent this almost irresistible retreat to nihilism?
Ben: I think that what’s most beautiful is people’s efforts to hold onto something despite that nihilism, you know we live in the face of that every day and decide to do things. Maybe it’s a beautiful and pervasive failure at all moments but it’s so beautiful to see humans struggling against that.

Despite that fact that it’s hopeless.
Yes! You get it!

Wow…
No, I think that’s the great stuff of life, you know the struggle despite that.

So I was kinda right, it was kinda depressing, but there’s an uplifting message in there also.
I don’t know!

Haha, okay! So where else in Europe have you been?
Uhhh, Paris, Amsterdam, we’re about to play four shows in Germany a show in Italy, Vienna.

So what’s a Paris crowd been like?
Knowing laughter from Jocie
Ben: Uh, I didn’t really like playing in Paris, I found it a little bit silly playing music that’s very heavy on the lyrics to a crowd that largely didn’t understand them.

Oh right okay.
I mean I think that something comes across anyway., the thrust of it. But it still it felt a bit silly, it was the first time that we had played to an audience that really didn’t have much English or at least not ‘singer English’ maybe.

I see what you mean so you think that some of might have been going over a lot of heads maybe?
Perhaps, I don’t know.

The French like you to speak French too, but fair enough. In Holland I suppose they were different because of the level of English.
Jeff: It’s wonderful!

So you feel maybe there people were slightly more engaged.
Jeff: Oh yeah absolutely. Amsterdam is pretty chill. And the people they were right there, they knew what was going on.
Ben: Paris was also the only the support show we did, we supported My Latest Novel.

http://vimeo.com/3917282

So how do you feel the live show differs from the experience on record?
Ben: you mean to see us dancing around like monkeys? You get to see us running around trying to figure out which song we’re supposed to be playing. Last night we abandoned our setlist and we also changed our stage plan so we were scrambling around…

I like that. Organized chaos. I think people like to see a band slightly flustered sometimes, you get something unique.
Jeff: We’re definitely not uh.. polished live.

I’m good with that. Sometimes you see these amazing, polished sets played by a band bored out of their trees. They do an encore. Leave. I like… I like to see the FEAR in a band’s eyes sometimes. Like they’re thinking “I really don’t know how this is going to go.”
Jeff: Someone came up to us before the show and instead of saying something like “I can’t wait for your performance” she said “Well… I hope it goes well!” y’know, like “It’d be really great if it did!” and I’m thinking “I do too!”. I loved that uncertainly in her voice!
Ben: I think that’s really insightful, like that idea that you want to see the fear in a bands eyes, that’s such a magnetic thing to be aware of, that the performer’s a little scared onstage. It’s like “Oh god, what’s going to happen”. And that tension creates such a creates a platform for the show.

You don’t want to just hear the album-LIVE! Do you?
Yeah but I think that goes both ways, I mean sometimes people say “Yeah it was a great gig sounded just like the record!” It’s just a matter of taste.

Well that’s true, but personally, it’s great if songs sounds lovely when they’re being played but I’m also interested in performance. Someone running around like crazy…
I think a lot of the time people don’t know why they like a live show, I guess, I dunno. But good theories!

So let’s talk about the recording of the album, how did you go about getting the songs down from the live environment onto a record.
Yeah, we took a ten day, twenty-four-seven sort of approach. The previous record we had done over the period of about a year and a half just gradually in our apartment where Jeff and I lived. We didn’t want to get into that situation again and stretch something out and pick everything apart. We wanted to have something more live and also something we could do, let it be in that little window and then move on with.

So we got a producer, he was a student in this great music production program, all of his classmates had like one really nice mike as the start of their home studio and they were all on winter break so all of them fly home to L.A. or wherever music producers come from.

So he gathers everyone’s best piece of equipment and so we had this incredible amount of stuff and we set up this home-style studio and just killed ourselves for ten days and then kinda put it away.

So it was intense. There was no sort of fiddling around, it was just “Let’s get these done and get it recorded”.
Jeff: Yeah
Ben: And we had been working on those songs for a very long time working out the arrangements but in those ten days we learned so much about the songs by not having them not go well. Y’know we would do like twenty takes of different songs, just grind through them until an idea came and we were like “this isn’t working, so what if we do this?” and then get up and switch and do another twenty takes. Charlie Darwin was the one-hundred take wonder, we call it.

We did about a hundred takes of Charlie Darwin with different arrangements, from twee kinda sounding with a full on, kinda poppy drumbeat to the eventual chamber-style choral that it ended up being…

So all of the songs completely surprised us and that might not have happened if we had done it in the other way because we would just be trying to own them all in overdubbing but it had this almost athletic quality, like it was an athletic triumph to be able to get through these takes and do the record in ten days, it was like a pressure cooker, y’know?

And we travelled away from our homes there was quite a bit of focus because we just had out recording gear and our instruments and we knew we had to make an album. So verses the first way made our album, which was slowly, every day among the regular chaos of every day life. But we said we were going to separate ourselves, sleep if we can and play take after take after take and at as we said before there’s a … on the record there’s the intensity of the experience.

So once you’d re-arranged these songs for the album did that then inform the live performance?
Ben: We even added a fourth member for some of the release shows in the US, (the self-release shows) we added a drummer to be able to realize some of the studio sounds during the kick-off and uh, for personal reasons that didn’t last too long. So then we were left with three of us trying to play these songs and a lot of other songs that we’ve added too. So now you get to see three people really trying to do the work of four, so there’s always holes, there’s always a certain sparseness. It’s almost a unnerving at first because you’re wondering ‘Why is there no bass on this song?’
Jeff: Yeah there’s space. Big space.
Ben: Of course, but there’s only three of us so there’s no bass! So you get to hear the three of us doing as much as we can but not more than that.

‘Oh My God, Charlie Darwin’ by The Low Anthem is out now on Bella Union Records.