TLOBF Interview :: White Denim

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Renamed again since my last visit in December, the venue-formerly-known-as-Carling-Academy-Oxford-formerly-known-as-the-Zodiac played host to White Denim for the first of my two visits in a week, something of a first for me. Knowing the extent of my horrendous photographic abilities, I took along friend and budding photo-meister Stevie to our pre-arranged interview with the Texan rockers and subsequent gig-going session. Once we’d eventually navigated our way into the venue (a feat which we later discovered even the band sometimes found tricky) we had a thoroughly nice chat with drummer Josh Block and bassist Steve Terebecki about music recommendations, the tour, and so on, and when guitarist and singer James Petralli made his way in, we chatted to him too about the band’s origins and ambitions for the future.

Here we are, it’s 2009, you’ve been together about three years now, and you’ve just released your second album Fits. How does it feel right now to be in White Denim?
Steve: It’s good, we’ve been enjoying it. This is our fifth time back over here, we’ve been loving the humous and the van rides, the old buildings…
Josh: We still get to record and play, so…

It sounds like you’ve had a bit of a hectic time, has it been pretty frantic over the last few years?
Josh: It’s not that bad. We say five times, the first time was like two weeks, a bunch of several dates in London, second time was a proper tour. Third time was a longer tour. Fourth time was again short, two, three weeks. And this one’s three weeks again. It’s OK.

How pleased would you guys say you are with the new album, do feel you’ve moved on from the first one?
Steve: Yeah we’re very pleased with it. We always just try to record cool sounds, and there’s a fair few cool sounds on the record so we’re really pleased with it.
Josh: We wouldn’t put so much time into it if we felt it was a step backwards. If it were a digression it would still be a step forward.

Some bands seem to think they always have to move massively forward, thinking “we must do something much bigger than last time”. But I don’t get that from Fits, it’s a step forward but still in the same vein as Workout Holiday isn’t it?
Josh: A bit, yeah. I think conceptually it’s a much bigger step forward from us. I think sonically or aesthetically as a band it’s similar. I think there’s a perception issue there. A step forward may be easier to see when a band does a really cool promo shot that works awesome with the record, down to your clothes… I’m sure that happened to me once or twice, where visually seeing a band move forward made me think the music had moved forward. It’s still the same writing.

After the interview, we waited through one and a bit support acts (Cali Collect and Riot Park, if Songkick is to be believed…) who were decidedly ordinary and unspectacular, especially in light of what was to come. When White Denim emerged from their rather pokey dressing room at their allotted time of 9:45, there was some genuine excitement in the room. Despite hailing from the other side of the Atlantic and not having what you’d call overwhelming success or radio play in these isles, it was obvious that there were a few fans in attendance, but by the end you could confidently count many more.

How has the tour been so far?
Steve: It’s been great. All the shows have been full, people have been really enthusiastic, you can’t ask for better than that.

We know that bands can sometimes live or die by how their tours go, but you’ve got no worries about attendances and so on?
Josh: No, I think pre-sale-wise we thought it might be bad but it’s not.
Steve: We were a bit worried about tonight but it looks alright.

What do you think is next for the band? What are your ambitions as a band?
Steve: I think we’re just going to continue to record, try to make records, and play live. No next step, or striving too hard for anything like making costumes for a stage show or anything. I mean we love making records and so we’ll continue to do that.
Josh: And if something naturally comes out of that, like costumes…
Steve: We’re not going to rule out costumes…

Maybe that’s something to look forward to on the next tour, 70s Genesis-style costumes, that would be interesting… not following any master plan or planning arena tours then – taking it as it comes?
Josh: Yeah, if anything I’d prefer to do two nights in a row in small places.

What do you guys think makes White Denim different to other bands around – what makes White Denim White Denim?
Josh: I don’t know a lot of other bands right now. Sadly not up to date with modern music. I buy second hand records and stuff like that.
Steve: I don’t how many bands there are recording on their own and releasing. I’m sure there’s a lot, but I only listen to old records and the radio. And what’s on the radio bums me out.

The idea of any musical ensemble, whether it be a rock band or an orchestra, is surely that each member plays recognisably well, but that they constitute part of a bigger, excellent whole – helping the larger unit be more than the sum of its parts. White Denim are a wonderful example of this idea as applied to a power trio. You can focus on any one of the three and become absorbed in how great their playing is, and when you can tear yourself away to focus on the whole band, it’s only then that you really grasp just how excellent these guys are. Most noticeable is Josh’s drumming – enormously varied, it’s also monstrously powerful when it needs to be – which is usually – especially when he stands over his kit, battering the living hell out of it. Similarly gripping is the equally versatile guitar work from James, married to his vocals, which can go from wordless, soulful atmospherics to raging drama. Far from an ordinary bassist, Steve is also fascinating – his walking basslines are frequently a real thing to behold.

So would you say that musically, your influences go back to before you, rather than what’s around you now?
Josh: Yes!
Steve: Joyce, various pop princesses… XTC, Dukes of the Stratosphere….
Josh: Henry Cow, Magma… Funkadelic…

People always seem to say that you’re hard to pin down, do you ever classify yourselves?
Steve: It’s always a disappointing answer… just that we’re a rock n’ roll band!
Josh: We’ll have to come up with some cool name…

Maybe you should invent your own genre…
Josh: We tried that, it was embarassing to even say it. We’ll let somebody else do it, if we’re doing something that different they’ll come up with something, and if we’re not we’re just a rock n’ roll band.

You were saying you’re not really up on what’s around now musically but is there anyone you’d recommend, old or new, to TLOBF readers?
Josh: Mihachu. I saw her in Leeds and Steve and I were blown away. She’s talented, her band’s talented too.
Steve: I really like Cass McCombs. I was talking to a few promoters around here about him, he’s released four great albums and an EP, but he doesn’t seem to get a lot of love.

I guess it can be an uphill struggle – have you guys had to build up awareness of yourselves, or is that something that’s come naturally?
Josh: We’ve had to work pretty hard…
Steve: We’ve played a lot, toured a lot…
Josh: We toured for a year and a half – and the first twelve months of touring we were out for seven or eight months of that, it’s hard.

Do you think it’s touring that’s got you this far, in terms of an audience for the albums and singles?
Josh: I hope it’s both… we talk to people at shows who haven’t heard anything of us, besides what they heard on a CD or what their friends told them. But in the States it’s touring. Most of the momentum we have is based on going out there.

White Denim aren’t necessarily doing anything hugely new – they are a rock band, and the enormous list of genres people have attempted to pin on them reads like a bit of a mildly embarrassing farce in the face of their live assault. Yes there are snippets of psychedelia, maybe soul, country; maybe James does sound oddly like CCR’s John Fogerty for a few seconds at a time, but these reference points never overwhelm the pure White Denim-ness of their performance and they rarely, if ever, spring to mind while watching them. Ultimately the feeling is of just watching a band play grippingly, and the realisation that they are great, so much more enthralling than on record.

Labels are always talking about how everything has to mesh together, tours, records, photoshoots, interviews.
Josh: They’re doing that, but in the States we self-release, so none of us wants to tell the others that this stuff is neccesary. None of us wants to be the “label guy”.

The songs are very chaotic, they often seem structureless, how did you go about achieving that in the songwriting?
Josh: James penned most of the tunes and he’s not here to represent that. But he writes a lot – what I can say as far as the chaos goes is, when any of us bring an idea, brings it to the band, we don’t tell the others how to interpret it, and we’re open to make changes to the feel, the arrangement. We’ll have a simple idea, whether it be an arrangement or a simple melody, and let the other band members have their say. So I think that has a lot to say for a lot of the chaotic feels. Musical democracy is a lot more like anarchy than it is democracy.
Steve: Totally.

How do you go about translating all that into a live setting – how different are you as a live band?
Josh: Very different. Everything’s pretty much a medley, the songs are rearranged a lot of the time for the live setting.
Steve: It’s changed for four instruments including voice, whereas sometimes on the records there might be a couple extra. We just focus on playing it as a trio, it ends up being harder.

James, we were talking a bit earlier about songwriting – can you tell us a bit about how the songs go together?
James: Well, I mainly write with an acoustic guitar. I sit on my porch and smoke a lot of cigarettes and think a lot about what parts these guys would be interested in playing. I spend a lot of time playing electric guitar and working on sounds, writing tunes that way as well.

If we take Fits as an example, was there a lot of material that didn’t make the album?
James: Yeah, a ton of material that we don’t get around to recording.

How do you decide what makes the cut?
James: Basically, whatever the other guys respond to most kinda makes it on the record. On most days it’s kind of like an auditioning process, we’ll turn up to the studio and play through quite a lot of ideas and whatever gets the most positive, immediate reaction is what we work on throughout the day. So yeah, we just kind of pitch ‘em. And writing with acoustic guitar, I’d say only 20% or 30% of the tunes I write really work for the group, but I do a lot of damage to my ears on stage so I never really practise with acoustic guitar! But I’ve got a bank of unused songs.

Besides allowing photographers to potentially stay in the photopit for a cheeky few minutes longer than they’d usually be able to, White Denim’s technique of playing their gigs as a series of three to four lengthy medleys is a great way of building audience tension in a naturalistic, fluid way. Dispensing with the usual song-clap-song-clap-song-clap formula, the medleys let the crowd gaze and nod in awe for a little longer, each song in the medley ratcheting up the excitement that little bit more, until it’s allowed to pour out for a correspondingly longer stretch of time when the medley ends. The band aren’t too big on stage banter, preferring to break only briefly before launching into the next barrage, but their reliance on playing rather than talking is still somehow endearing.

How did you guys get together?
James: Well, we had all been playing in bands of different styles for quite a few years. I started playing with Josh within a year of getting my first guitar, so it was really great. I feel like I might have learned at an accelerated level because I was lucky enough to play with musicians more talented than I was… so we played together on and off for a long time, we knew we wanted to start a band, we just didn’t know what to do. And we met Steve on the circuit, once we’d decided to start a rock band. We were playing in the same clubs in Austin. Steve had a really cool attitude on stage and also shredded his instrument. Those were wilder days, there was a club in Austin you could definitely trash, when you got on stage.
Steve: And we did, every time. We just trashed everything.
James: We trashed the stage, and Steve was in a band who trashed the stage…

So you were bound to get together! Do you think you’ve mellowed out, or is it just that there are more rules keeping you from trashing everything?
James: I think that at that point, at least for me, I was really interested in that because I was seeking a response, you know what I mean? I’d never gotten any real positive or negative feedback. The town that I played in was in the sticks of east Texas so there was no live music at all… so moving to Austin, I really wanted to do something to get attention, playing loud rock n’ roll music and being obnoxious, was what I thought would be a good way to do that. We don’t do that now because I think we’re a little but more comfortable with ourselves, we kind of got that out of our systems. Having played out for the better part of three years, you can start to see where you fit, we’ve had a lot of time to work on our playing, on our songwriting, and stuff like that so we’re a little bit more comfortable. I look back on wanting to trash the stage as a kind of subconscious thing to do.

So you can look back and say to yourselves that you’ve matured, to use that cliché?
James: Yeah, definitely. I think all of us are pretty comfortable in our musical roles in the band. We have a really open atmosphere in the studio and as far as the writing goes as well we all put a lot of trust in one another and try to respect the work that each of us does.

From what you’ve all said it sounds very collaborative, like there’s never one of you steamrolling over the rest.
James: Yeah, we all really appreciate the oppurtunity and recognise how fragile it is, you know? So anything we can do to preserve our sanity and stay in it… we’re still trying to figure it out of course but we are focused on trying to maintain a sort of harmonious relationship.

What do you think is next for White Denim, what would you like to happen next?
James: All I care about is making songs with these guys, I think that’s definitely in the near future! I what’s immediately next is to take a couple of days off after this tour and get back in the studio. We’ve still got a ton of ideas. I think we’ll continue to record and see what we can come up with. We don’t have any like direct goals as far as what we’re going to do next… this place is on one end of the kind of spectrum, I like to play smaller clubs. I wish the stage were a couple of feet lower, and that the ceilings were lower-
Steve: No barrier!
James: Yeah, no barrier! A huge part of what makes performing fun is a lack of space, a real connection with people. So we’re definitely not all that interested in writing a hit single to get on a bigger stage.

It reminds me of Led Zeppelin writing “The Ocean”, which supposedly is all about the thousands of fans they couldn’t see at their huge gigs because they’d become so massive.
James: Yeah, that’s not a situation we hope to be in… you never know, maybe the world will go crazy again and everyone might get into weird music! But then I guess our music isn’t as weird as I’d like it to be… we do play a lot of things that make us chuckle, we’re not doing a lot of brainiac stuff right now. But I think we all have it in us, definitely. What we were all doing before this group was probably a little bit too heady… It’s a weird climate, I think that a lot of people on the business side of things aren’t taking as big risks as they would have. I was listening to a Frank Zappa interview in the 80s, how a lot of the hippies thought they were on the cutting edge, like “we’re the bosses of the labels now” and they kind of felt like they had an insight, and didn’t take as many risks as the older guys who’d had no clue and had just thrown money at freaks to get them int the studio! There’s not a whole bunch of that going on, I guess. It’s a DIY music scene, I guess.

When White Denim wrap up the show, they do so by slowing down gradually, leaving the stage and still playing quietly as they make their way down the stairs and through the door that leads to their dressing room. It’s a lovely little touch, one that results in a brief pang of disappointment from some when technicians start taking the drum kit apart and then away, precluding an encore. Disappointment was not the order of the day though – this was an enormously satisfying show, a thrilling shot to the arm.

Photos by Stevie Denyer

White Denim on MySpace