TLOBF Interview :: The Ruby Suns

On the back of excellent new album Fight Softly and ahead of an extensive tour of Europe and North America, Andrew Grillo managed to squeeze in the time for a few questions with Ryan McPhun of The Ruby Suns.

Hi Ryan, how are things?
Hectic but good.

Looking at your MySpace you’ve got some fairly extensive touring lined-up, do you enjoy playing live or is it just a way to support the record and travel the world some more?
Well if I could afford to travel heaps without playing shows, I would do that instead! I don’t mind playing music live though, but touring generally is very tiring and you rarely get to spend as much time as you’d like in any one place. But touring is a way to keep album promo alive, so theoretically, the more you do it, the further your record will go.

Music and travel seem to always go together with you – do you think that you could travel without it influencing the music you make or indeed make music without it being influenced by the places you’ve been?
Yeah of course. For Fight Softly, a good amount of those songs were written in my little room where I record. The inspiration for many of these songs came from being at home in Auckland and stuff that happened here.

What do you see as the main differences between Fight Softly and your earlier work? Do you tend to listen back to your own work or is it a case of when a record is done then you don’t revisit it?
I’ll listen to stuff a fair bit when I finish it, to sort of figure out what I think of it, but by the time it’s released I’m usually sick of it and probably won’t listen to it again. Basically I didn’t want to make Sea Lion again, hence the sonic shift between records. But really, the changes in sound and technique reflect the music that I’ve been interested in for the last few years. Almost all of it is electronic – whether it be newer dance music, or stuff that I grew up on like Michael Jackson and Phil Collins.

The Ruby Suns have had a pretty malleable line-up, is it important to you to collaborate with others to inspire song writing or is it more of a case of finding the right people to put across your ideas and those people change as the music does?
I’ve actually never been able to properly collaborate with someone. I usually have a hard time expressing my ideas to other people so I think this would normally frustrate a potential collaborator. The line-up of the band has been ever-changing mostly because of the personal situations of the members. I’ve always just got friends or acquaintances to join. I’ve never had rehearsals or anything like that… I fully understand when people want to leave the band because it’s not a project that they’ve been working on for years and they don’t have any invested interest in it. Other than the fact that the band can give them free trips overseas, which for kiwis is a big deal! It’s incredibly expensive to get overseas from down here so people are usually pretty pumped to go on tour and check out other countries.

In terms of song writing do you form ideas and then try and execute them when recording or is it a more organic, jam-based process?
For me, writing and recording tend to happen at the same time. I rarely sit down at my computer to record with a fully formed song. I usually start with one idea and work from there. Sometimes I’ll loop a keyboard riff or something for a while and will improvise vocal melodies on top of it until something sticks.

A lot of the sounds and textures on Fight Softly seem to be more traditionally western than on previous albums, was this a conscious decision and if so was this a reaction to the abundance of World Music (for want of a better term) influence in contemporary indie music?
Not sure what you mean by ‘traditionally western’ sorry.

By traditionally western I meant that the influences seem to be coming from electronic music made typically by European or North Americans rather than Africa and Asia/the Pacific, was this a conscious choice to move away from what a lot of others had started to do or did the shift just happen naturally in terms of what you were listening to?
Just as I wasn’t concerned with others when I started to make what some people considered ‘African’ sounding stuff, the shift in sound for the newer material was a natural progression for me. I only did things differently because I’m never interested in doing the same thing twice and also because my musical tastes were changing, as they probably always will. I was also trying to make a more cohesive sounding album, something I hadn’t put much focus on prior to this one.

Any stuff you’ve been listening to recently that you’d like to recommend to the readers?
Chancha via Circuito – Rodante is a fave at the moment. I’ve also been getting into Douster. I really like a lot of the stuff that Radioclit does, including The Very Best. I really like that Alicia Keys single ‘Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart’.

The Ruby Suns: “Cranberry”