Kelly Crisp of The Rosebuds: Q&A

<a href="Interviews/Interviews/Kelly_Crisp_of_The_Rosebuds%3A_Q%26A/"><img src="http://www.qromag.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/therosebudsinterview.jpg" alt=" " /></a> Fresh off the release of their third album, <em>Night of the Furies</em> (<a href="Reviews/Album_Reviews/The_Rosebuds_%3A_Night_of_the_Furies/" target="_blank">QRO review</a>), The Rosebuds’ Kelly Crisp (one-half of the...

 Fresh off the release of their third album, Night of the Furies (QRO review), The Rosebuds’ Kelly Crisp (one-half of the North Carolina duo, along with husband Ivan Howard), chatted with QRO.  Crisp discussed their desire to have all ages shows, why each Rosebuds album is really different, everything that went into Night of the Furies, the “altered state of consciousness” that comes from riding out a tropical storm, how getting a Japanese label was a big deal, how the record coming out wasn’t, how Merge Records is bigger in New York than in its Tarheel home, being one of the last bands in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina, and seeing those Nola fans again across other cities.

QRO: How’s it been, this week, now that Night of the Furies is out?

KC: It’s been nice.  We had some friends over a few days to celebrate.  We’re kind of taking it easy, because we’ve got a big tour coming up

QRO: A pretty extensive North American tour, coming up in mid-May.  Is this your biggest tour to date?

KC: Well, it’s big.  Yeah, I guess it’s our biggest headlining tour.

QRO: You’ve said you’ve been trying to make as many of those dates all ages as possible. Do you have a lot of under-age fans?

KC: We do, yeah.  We’ve got music fans, and that’s the people who are all ages.  It’s just kind of shame, kind of terrible that if you’re not 21, that venues don’t care to have you, because they can’t make any money off you, after the ticket price.  So our booking agent really has to fight for all ages shows.  What that ends up doing is making a lot of the promoters have to work really hard to find a venue that will work.

It’s just kind of a hassle, but we really wanted to get as many all ages shows as we could, just because we feel like, we play for music fans, we don’t play for… bar-drunks.  We don’t care if people are drinking or not, but we just want to make sure that the people who want to see the music, can see it.

QRO: With your new album, there seems like there’s been marked change in your three albums, especially with this one.  Did you set out for it to be this way?

KC: Ivan and I treat all of the records like art projects.  Because we’re on Merge Records, we have total creative control.  We don’t have anybody telling us what kind of records they would like, what kind of songs they would like to make, or what kind of clothes, or anything like that.  So we have complete autonomy.

What ends up happening is all our records end up sounding like whatever we want to do.  Because of that, we feel like we’re probably more like an art project than a band, because all of the records are a snapshot of a time.  That’s the kind of music we felt like making at that time.

So like with the first record that we released on Merge, it was really upbeat, poppy, and dance-y.  A lot of people, who liked that record, thought the next record was really somber, but the people who really liked the second record really thought the first record was a little too sharp for them.  And so this one’s gonna be completely different as well, but there it is.

I’m curious to see what people think, but I think it still sounds like The Rosebuds.

QRO: You talk about being an ‘art project’.  Does that partially come out of being a husband-and-wife duo?  It isn’t like you’re this group that exists to make records; it’s just the two of you, just together, relationship and all.

KC: Well, that part doesn’t matter, but what does matter is that the two of us communicate so well as partners, for writing songs.

Ivan’s like a melody-writing genius – he can just write melodies all the time, and he writing some songs all the time.  With a guitar, he can just do it.  And I write short stories, I’m writing all the time.  And we can put those together, and it just kinda works.  We can write as fast as we live, you know what I mean?

So then, what do is, we demo a bunch of songs, and we get all our friends who play instruments better than us to help us make the record, and tour.  Because, we’re really good at writing songs, but maybe…  Like Ivan had our friend Wes [Phillips, of Ticonderoga] guest on the record, play the bass, because, he wrote the bass parts and he can play ‘em just fine, but why not get somebody who’s an expert bass player to come in?  Some guy we really like…

The thing with drums, Matt [McCaughan, of Portastatic], our drummer, is incredible, so we can communicate to him what we want through the demo, but then he can execute that idea so much more completely, knowing what we want, than we could, because he’s got the ability.  So we tour with a five-piece band [with Phillips, McCaughan, and second guitarist Giorgio Angelini, of 1986].

QRO: How did you know when the album is finished?

KC: Well, for us, we worked on the record, we recorded and produced it ourselves, so the album wasn’t finished until we said it was finished, and that wasn’t a problem.  But before, we worked with a producer, and the album’s finished when you run out of money and can’t pay the studio any more.

So we have autonomy more now, with recording, because we can work on it, take our time.  If something isn’t just right, because we produced it ourselves, we kinda started out with a working knowledge of what to do; we didn’t want to sacrifice quality.  If there something that kinda sounded sketchy, we worked on it until it sounded good.

So I guess we know when our record is finished when we’re happy with all the songs.  This was the first record that we’ve been able to walk away from saying, “That record’s finished.  We did everything we wanted to do.”

QRO: Do you know what songs are going to be singles?

KC: We can’t pick singles like other people can, because other people hear it and they know what, they help us out.  After letting everybody at the record label listen to it, and all of our friends and different people, we kinda picked a handful of songs that we liked.  “Get Up Get Out” is the first song they wanted to put on the radio and stuff like that.

QRO: So you like working with [Durham, North Carolina-based] Merge Records.  You live down in North Carolina.  Are they just a really big influence down there?

KC: Yes, in our area they’re really influential, but I wouldn’t say that North Carolina is as Merge-savvy as other places we’ve gone on tour.  Our town excluded, we live very close to Merge, so everybody in the music community in our town knows about Merge and respects them, they’re a big deal to all of us in the music community here, but outside of that I don’t feel that… 

It seems like people are surprised that Merge is from North Carolina.

QRO: You got a Japanese label, Imperial Records, just last Monday.  Is this your first real Asian exposure?

KC: Uh-huh, first time ever in any Asian country.  So it’s a really big deal for us.

QRO: Was your agent really pushing for this, or was it a surprise?

KC: It was a surprise that it was such a solid label.  If you look at their roster, it’s incredible!  I’m a fan of a lot of the bands on their roster [Dinosaur Jr., Echo & the Bunnymen, Metric, Mogwai, Bob Mould, The Pixies, and more], so in that regards it was exciting for us.  We just wanted a label; we had hoped that our records would reach some kind of underground Asian audience, get the attention of a label, so that we have someone to put us out.  But we just looked at this label, loved it, and signed us.

QRO: What was it like, getting on Imperial Records on Monday and having the album come out on Tuesday?

KC: Well, we were in negotiations with that label for a while, so we kinda knew, but we finally found out that it was definitely going to work over the past weekend.

It was kind of exciting, but I gotta tell you, the record coming out was not as exciting for us, personally, because we aren’t in the middle of tour or something.  I woke up, and I didn’t feel any different, and I thought, “I should feel different!”

I still have to eat breakfast, I still have to go check e-mail…  Nothing really changed, but it’s our most exciting record yet.

QRO: Specifically about Night of the Furies, you’ve said you got the idea of The Furies from riding out a tropical depression.  What was that like?

KC: We’re in North Carolina, and Ivan and I used to living in Wilmington, and the short time we lived in Wilmington, we had three major hurricanes, with massive destruction.  I think if you take all of your anxiety that you have about traffic, life, work, and all these things people have anxiety about on a day-to-day basis…

It doesn’t really show itself everyday, but it takes something like having to get on an airplane, or a tropical storm coming in, and you already know what that’s like, and you know it’s going to be horrible, and it could get really bad, and the trees might fall on your house.  It peels back the skin of old fears, and it made us really heighten our awareness to our fears.

So The Furies became a good metaphor for us to write the record. 

So all the songs are sort of about different things, pretty heavy subject matter, but The Furies became a good way for us to talk about it.

QRO: Which one of you came up with the idea of The Furies?

KC: Well, it worked with the songs, and I’d always been a fan of The Furies.

What happened was Ivan wrote some songs, some music, and I just started telling him the story of The Furies.  We were just kinda entertaining ourselves, in that setting, it’s hot, it’s nighttime, middle of the summer, we had this tropical depression coming in, and we didn’t know what was going to happen.  We have this giant tree in our yard that we need to have cut down because it’s going to fall on our house eventually, but we were really worried.  It was almost like an altered state of consciousness.

So I started telling him the story, because I just liked the idea of The Furies.  If there’s ever been a time in the history of humankind that we really could use The Furies, this is it.

I feel like we’re politically active, and we do care what’s going on, and we do consider ourselves citizens of the world.  I feel like in many ways The Furies are a larger significance in our lives.

QRO: Even bigger than tropical storms.

KC: Much bigger than tropical storms.  Sometimes it takes an event – in that particular day, it sort of happened.

QRO: You talk about an event, crystallizing it, not to get sort of political, but does that have any sort of resonance with Hurricane Katrina, being a big thing that made people in America – and around the world – sort of look at things differently?  It being another huge storm…

KC: We were on tour when Hurricane Katrina hit.  We were just in New Orleans, the week before the hurricane hit.  It destroyed the venue we played in.  All the people who survived had to relocate their whole lives.  Some of those people, we’d see them in other cities, and they were like, “You guys were the last good rock show we saw, before our lives… were just wiped clean.”  They had to totally start over.

It was weird, because the very next tour we did, we saw them in all these different cities, and we had this weird kind of connection.  It’s hard to describe.

Not to get too far away from your original question, how could it not be on our minds?  It certainly felt like, having been raised by idiots…  I don’t have a real level of trust with, I guess, if you want to look at the government, of the sort of patriarchy.  I don’t really have a trust for a lot of things like that, and that really confirmed things my beliefs.

We are really out there, totally alone.  Certain events like that, really reveal to everyone, even the people who are supporters, die-hard supporters, that we’ve got a real problem, this is fucked up, this is a systemic problem, and it starts with this awful shit, this terrible, terrible situation we’ve gotten ourselves in.  We’ve got a goddamn president in The White House who’d never been to a foreign country before he was elected.  You know, what are we doing?  Why are we doing this to ourselves?  This is stupid.

We don’t have to have an idiot absentee father running the country.  Just because both of us had to put up with growing up, doesn’t mean we have to put up with while we’re adults.

Anyways, that’s my personal opinion…

QRO: No, yeah, I mean…  If you want to talk about something bigger than a storm…

KC: By now, I think your specifically referring to that song, “When the Lights Went Dim”, we didn’t set out to make that about Katrina, but like with everything else, when you try to talk about something– We set out, trying to write a song about The Furies, but it connects with everyone, because their version of the worst night ever is Hurricane Katrina.

QRO: Where is each of you originally from?  Are you originally from North Carolina?

KC: Yes.  And then our drummer is from North Carolina, and we got a guy in New York, and a guy in Wisconsin right now.  Our band is all over the place, but Ivan and I are born & raised here.

QRO: You were saying about the music scene in North Carolina, do you think it’s sort of small, in that the people who know about these things know about Merge, but it’s not this huge thing like it might be, say, in New York?

KC: What’s funny is that, I guess, people around here just know it exists, but we probably have better access in other cities, the bigger cities, than we have here in North Carolina, to alternative types of music.  There aren’t many of us on Merge who get lots and lots of stuff from mainstream, regular, Clear Channel radio stations. 

We're not Fergie, or whatever the fuck her name is.

So if you are a fan of a different kind of music, and you have really great access to it, like some really great community radio station or something like that (well, not here in North Carolina)…  But we’re working on it; we’ve got a couple of avenues.  So I think that people were more hip to Merge when we were touring, initially.  Now everybody is.  The Internet has really changed things over the last couple years.

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