Bon Savants

<img src="http://www.qromag.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/bonsavantsinterview.jpg" alt=" " />After playing their last show of 2008 – and probably their last show in a while – Bon Savants sat down to discuss things to...

  Singer/guitarist/rocketman Thom Moran and the rest of the band talked about their upcoming new record, their last record, Post-Rock Defends the Nation (QRO review), not being post-rock, creating set lists, music festivals, playing New York, playing Fargo, day jobs (or lack thereof), Air Force, assault rifles, “The most important thing I do in my life”, and more…

QRO: How was the studio time in Brooklyn?

Thom Moran: It was great.  We were at a place called ‘The Fort’.  It was for a website.

I was actually kind of expecting going in, record three songs, whatever you did was good enough.  We actually did close to a legitimate day of recording.  We did six hours, three songs, and we tracked some stuff.  It was great.

QRO: Where are you on the new record?

TM: The tracking for the record is mostly done, at this point.

QRO: Where did you record your new record?

TM: I think the count, at last, was like… six different places?  It’s the modern way to record…

We did, in fact, record most of the drums in Manhattan.  That was with a guy called Caleb Schriev.  He was recording drums.

QRO: Was it the same drummer (Andrew Dole)?

TM: Same drummer, same band as we’ve had going for a little while now.

The basic breakdown is: a third of it, maybe close to a half in studios, and maybe a third of it just me as an engineer.

QRO: Are you trying to find a label?

TM: Yeah.  It’s funny; it is the new reality–

[the rest of the Bon Savants burst through the door, one head popping around after another, singing, “Hello… Hello… Hello… Hello!”]

It’s actually kind of an interesting position to be.  We are tracked, and we need to find someone to mix it.  Going back to the topic, the modern way is just do it by hook or crook, whatever it takes to get it done.  Tracked with some folks in New York, tracked with some folks in Boston, and then we have a ProTools session, just ready to go.

And now, the question is, ‘Well, who do you find to mix it?’  It’s a funny thing – you want to find someone who you can trust to mix it, and that probably means someone who’s done albums you really love before.  But, at the same time, a lot of those folks probably don’t need your time or money to do it.  They’re probably booked solid.

But you never know.  You have to just throw out the queries.  You try to find the right balance of someone who’s not so fuckin’ broke that they need to charge a major label rate, but also someone who’s not so busy that they can actually spare the time.  We’re trying to find a sweet spot, someone who doesn’t need the money, but at the same time…

QRO: Doesn’t not need the money…

TM: Right!  And those people do exist!  That’s kind of how we did the last album, we found this guy Bill Racine, who did some great work with Rogue Wave (QRO album review).  And actually, we found him, because we went to his management about Dave Fridman, who did The Flaming Lips (QRO live review) – ‘Well fuck it, why wouldn’t we ask?’

And they were like, ‘Dave’s is kind of locked up until 2011, and you can’t afford him anyway.  But, what about Bill?’

QRO: How has making this record compared to making Post-Rock Defends the Nation?

TM: I feel like we actually know how to make a record now, which is impressive.

Kevin Haley [guitarist]: And we know how to write songs.

TM: The last album we wrote, we tracked twenty-two songs, and we picked the eleven the best out of them.  ‘Oh, that sucked, that sucked, that sucked, that sucked, oh, good, good, sucked, good, sucked…’ and made a good album out of it.

This time, we’ve only tracked twelve.

KH: These were all essentially essential.  We reworked them.  They’re ‘special’ songs now…

TM: What’s your take, Andy?

Andrew Dole: Uh…

TM: For the record, didn’t see that coming, did you?

AD: I thought we really hashed it out, in the practice space.  It was ‘work’ – not ‘work’ in a bad way, but it was like, we’re going to go, do this song for a week, and really work on the songwriting.

TM: The last album, we went into a lot of it with an idea.

KH: Whereas now, we had an end point.

QRO: I’m a huge fan of how the set flows, but do you feel you guys were tuning up a lot?

KH: Yeah, I think it’s true.

TM: I absolutely agree.

QRO: It doesn’t take away from the songs, but it does take away from the flow of the set…

TM: It absolutely does.  I’m glad you brought that up, because it was definitely on my mind as well. 

It is important, the flow.  We’re the sort of band that will plan out, to the extent, ‘Oh, this will be a good time to say something, or this will.’  Twice in the set, for me, maximum.

It comes from watching bands, like Bob Mould, his bands (QRO live review).  His sets always flow so steadily.  It was just an assault of music.  He is one of my favorite performers, songwriters, of all time.  And that was something I took from him.  Lots of people have done it, but, for me, I took it from Bob Mould, which was this idea of just an assault of songs, one after the other, the idea of being able to build up what you were doing, by not pausing between songs, having some sort of flow.

I’m actually glad that it was brought up, because it is something that I think about a lot.

KH: It can make a huge difference.

TM: It does.

So, when we were touring on Post-Rock, the last time, when we were out on the road, working with Big Shot Touring, and the owner is Kevin French, great guy.  And we played SXSW in 2007 (QRO Recap).  And we’re down there, and we do our set, and afterwards, Kevin says to me, maybe one of the best compliments of all – Kevin French books The Walkmen (QRO live review), he books The National (QRO live review), he books a fucking ton of bands that are so much more accomplished than we are.

At the end of our set, he says, “What I love about you guys, when you guys are really on, and through course of a set – my job is to book, whatever your album did, fine, but you have to do great live; my job is to book you live.  And when you’re on, it’s like you’re playing one long song.  It’s like your bringing the audience through that whole thing.”  That’s the aspiration.

And it’s a good point about tonight.  It’s a responsibility of the band to find a set list where you can find places to tune where it doesn’t affect the flow of the set.  And we’re not quite there yet.  Of the songs we played tonight (QRO photo of the set list), seven were new, three were old, and so we’re kind of still feeling out way through it.  Unfortunately, it’s the sort of thing you can’t really feel until you’ve toured for weeks straight.  At the end of that, you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve got it, and we’re flowing.’  It’s an absolutely legitimate assessment of anyone.  We’re getting there.

KH: I’d put it that way exactly.  It’s never a happy moment for two guitarists…

QRO: When you play now, do you feel you have to not play “Post-Rock Defends the Nation”, to get away from the first record?

KH: No, I don’t think so.  I don’t think we think that at all.  I think it’s really just a matter of laying out whatever makes the most sense. 

I think that the set we’re putting together now, which is mostly new songs, is an advance from what we’ve done before.  I think it’s a move forward.

We had this rule, always, ‘half old songs, half new songs’…

AD: Literally ‘one old, one new’…

KH: We’d count it out.  And once we stopped doing that, suddenly we were playing mostly new songs.  We didn’t realize it until after the show, ‘Oh, well good for us.  I guess it works this way.’

AD: That isn’t how the album’s going to be sequenced, necessarily, but that’s exactly the kind of thing, ‘Oh, this is really how we want the songs to flow together.’

QRO: When you have one/one, you don’t have the flow, new song-to-new song.

AD: Yeah, but you want still to pull that identity and this identity together, as one.

TM: We’re still the same band.

Bon Savants playing Post-Rock's "Between the Moon and the Ocean" live @ Mercury Lounge in New York, NY on December 17th, 2008:

QRO: Do you have any other touring plans?

TM: Not really, other than SXSW, which we’re putting some stuff together to get down there.  Hopefully booking a month around that date, getting down there, back, up the West Coast.  The West Coast has actually been really good to us; I love getting out there.  I’m from Oregon myself, so getting to Portland and Seattle is really important.  Also L.A. has been great to us.

AD: Also really sunny…

TM: All the weather and the positivity…

QRO: How was CMJ (QRO Recap)?

TM: It was good; it was fine.

QRO: What is the music festival that you guys would be most interested in playing?

AD: In the U.S., I guess it’s gotta be SXSW.  SXSW is the standard.

KH: CMJ is like rudimentary; SXSW is the norm.

TM: There’s Pitchfork, but that’s still sort of developing its identity.  As of now, it seems to be, ‘What has impressed Pitchfork this year’.

On the whole, though, of music fests, I would love to do the European music fests.  Kevin and I met when we were in Germany together.  In general, all summer long, in Europe, it’s all about music festivals.

QRO: Do you do anything differently, when you play outdoors?

KH: Turn it up.

TM: You can generally play louder.  Another thing that’s cool: it’s also harder to tune, because you can’t see your tuner, because it’s designed to be seen in the dark.  I don’t think much, really.  I think the whole band, we all fuckin’ love playing outdoors.  Maybe we are more exuberant, just in general, because it’s more fun.

QRO: How was the ‘Rock ‘n’ Romp’ all ages show in February?

TM: Oh, amazing!  There’s kids like four years old, yea tall.  So good.  If we could play an entire tour of that, I would jump on that in a second.

Not even so much the show itself, but afterwards, some friends of mine who were there, a good friend of mine, her niece came to the show, and afterwards, she told me – and they’re going to make fun of me for this, fine, but, a thing, I guess, as far as our band goes, is that my job is at MIT.  I plan rocket tests and such.  Her niece, though, decided, after the show, that she wanted to be in a band, but first she had to learn how to do rockets – because that’s how you get to be in a band: first you learn how to launch the rockets, then you do the band.

I feel like that might have been the most important thing I do in my life: convince someone that both science and music are important.

[snickers from the rest of Bon Savants]

KH: The most important thing, ever

QRO: How is it being the rare rocker/rocket scientist?

TM: I don’t know if there are any others.  As far as I know, the only.  I don’t know what it’s like.  What do you think it’s like, Ben?

Ben: I think it’s gotta be weird, because he’s the only one.

TM: Is there any legitimate answer?  No.  It’s just me.

QRO: What ‘day jobs’ do the rest of the band have?

TM: Almost none…

KH: Sad question…

TM: We’re victims of the economy right now.

Andy is a bike courier, Kevin has recently succumbed to the economy, Dave [Eugene, bass] is temporarily back working, who knows how long.  Tia [keyboards]…

KH: Our answer is that we live off of our music.

TM: Is it?  I don’t know.  We live off of our ‘love’…

QRO: You weren’t wearing the suit.  Have you stopped wearing it?

TM: No, it was just dirty.

QRO: Is it hot on stage, wearing that suit while you play?

TM: It is hot.

KH: It is hot

QRO: How do you keep it clean when on tour?

TM: It absolutely is hard to keep it clean.  I went to pack the practice suit when I left, and I looked, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I haven’t washed this since we last toured…’  And it was just gross.  ‘Cause I think the suit is great.

QRO: You had a residency at Piano’s (QRO venue review) here back in July of 2006.  How was that?

TM: It was good.  It was kind of tricky, because it was before we put an album out, so it was just kind of hard to gauge – there were some really good nights, of the four, and some kinda sucky nights, and so we weren’t quite sure if we were good or not.  But Piano’s is great.  I cannot advocate Piano’s enough.  They do some great stuff.

But it kind of gets into a more general question of playing shows in New York, versus elsewhere. 

And when you play any show in New York, there’s a chance that, on a given night, there’s a chance that someone there can actually contribute to your progress as a band.

While, on the one hand, ‘oh those shows were okay’, no, it was actually really important.  A couple of people came out to that show.  Some of them were Chip Adams and Aaron Chandler, who used to work at Cornerstone Promotions as college radio promoters.  Then they moved to Austin, Texas, and now they’re actually working for Dangerbird Records.  And they’ve been unrelenting supporters of us.

They also used to, Chip in particular, and maybe Aaron used to as well, do Tripwire.  That was their thing.  They hooked us up with XM Satellite Radio, in particular, who played a bunch of us.

That’s the thing: on the one hand, when I look back at those shows, I think, ‘They were okay’.  On the flip side, ‘Oh yeah, that one night where… seventeen people showed up?  Two of them were people who did huge things for us!’

QRO: How did the band all meet?

TM: Kevin and I met when we were both teenagers, over in Germany.  Years past, and then we were back in Boston, and then we started this band.  Dave was the next person to come in.  We kicked out the drummer we had at the time, and then Andy came in.

Actually, Andy came in because… So we kicked out our drummer because he was enthusiastic, but not good.  We were actually looking for someone to play specifically with us because we were going to play Halloween in 2000-something… ‘03?  ‘04?  We were going to play a cover set of Pulp songs, and we needed a drummer for it.  Andy answered a Craig’s List ad, but Andy didn’t play for us – we had to pick someone else.  But afterwards, ‘Holy shit – that guy was awesome!’  So we pulled Andy in.

QRO: But you guys changed your keyboardist?…

TM: We didn’t have a keyboardist for a long time, and then we did, and that was our friend Brian [Hamilton].  Then he had something else he was doing…

KH: The show you saw was with Ad Frank.

TM: Someone altogether different.  Bon Savants has probably had…

KH: More keyboardists than Depeche Mode.  And probably ten people through the band, total.

QRO: But is Tia just for this one-off?

TM: No, she’s in the band.  Well, she’s Andy’s girlfriend, so as long as they stay together…

This line-up is as steady as it gets for Bon Savants.

Tia telling a poorly-received dirty joke in between songs live @ Mercury Lounge in New York, NY on December 17th, 2008:

QRO: Have you gotten any flack from the title of your first record being kinda misleading, making people think you’re post-rock?

TM: Yeah, all the time. The point is that it’s not a post-rock album.  It’s an album about

KH: Post-rock.

TM: It’s about being into post-rock.  It’s about a time being into post-rock.  People like, “Well, it’s not really post-rock.”  Well…

I would be surprised if anyone’s been disappointed.  I don’t think anyone’s called us out – other than press.  Press people are like, ‘Well, it’s not really post-rock…’

KH: It was actually kind of a give away to people who hate post-rock.

TM: It’s absolutely fair – and we knew it’s a loaded thing.  The whole point though, the whole songs was about me and Kevin being in Germany when we were teenagers, and being totally into post-rock, and writing a song about an era where post-rock…

I was in the military at the time, I was in the Air Force, and Kevin’s dad was in the Air Force.  So post-rock music was a soundtrack to our lives at the time.  So it’s about that time.

QRO: How’d you end up in the Air Force?

TM: I don’t know, somebody signed me up, I woke up, someone gave me a gun, I started shooting things…

No, I grew up in a little tiny town in Oregon, a little logging town in Oregon, Sweet Home, six thousand people – what up, Sweet Home! – and it was just a good way to get out of a small town.  My parents didn’t have money, so it was a way to get money for college, and just get out of a hick community.  It seemed the most innocuous of the armed services.

QRO: Did you ever fly a plane?

TM: No, I wasn’t a pilot.  I did fly on planes – I was a flight mechanic.  I worked on cargo planes.  I did a lot of flying into and out of Bosnia, during the Bosnian War, doing humanitarian efforts over there.

QRO: Are there any songs that you particularly like to play live?

TM: “Everyone” is a lot of fun to play, off of Post-Rock.  I think that some of the new stuff, the second-to-last song tonight, which is either titled “Angel” or “Come”, we haven’t decided which one, it’s one of the slower songs we play.  I guess, because it’s new to us, to slow the set down at some point, and get in the moment, that’s fun to play.

Bon Savants playing "Angel" (or "Come") live @ Mercury Lounge in New York, NY on December 17th, 2008:

“Between the Moon and the Ocean”, I like that song.  I don’t know if the other guys in the band like playing the song or not, but I think it’s a pretty great song.

QRO: Are there any songs that you don’t like playing live?

KH: The ones we didn’t play tonight…

TM: I don’t think there’s songs that we necessarily don’t like to play – there’s songs we probably forget how to play, ‘cause we haven’t done them in so long.  There’s songs off of Post-Rock that we’ve played twice, maybe three times, like, I don’t know, “Final Grade”.

But most of them, we kind of recycle.  Putting together a set list is, in large part, about doing things that interest you.  Tonight we played a song that we hadn’t played live in maybe a year until a couple of night’s ago, when we played in Boston, “What We Need”, the first track off of Post-Rock.  We actually hadn’t done that in forever.  It just fell out of the set list because we were doing new songs.  And one night, a couple of weeks ago, Andy calls, ‘Oh, let’s do that!’  And we played, and ‘Oh, that’s a good song – let’s do that!’

So the answer is no, there’s no songs that we don’t play because we don’t like them.

QRO: But are there some songs that you’ve recorded that you can’t do live?

TM: Oh, there are definitely songs we can’t do live.  I think some of the songs we played tonight that we can’t do live…

Bon Savants playing "Between the Moon and the Ocean" live @ Union Hall in Brooklyn, NY on January 26th, 2008:

QRO: What cities or venues have you really liked playing at?

KH: Actually, Mercury Lounge (QRO venue review) is fucking awesome…

AD: Stillwater…

TM: Stillwater, Oklahoma.  Small towns are fuckin’ great.  The crowds that you get, they’re just enthusiastic.  So yeah, Stillwater, Fargo, places like that are great.

And then there’s just the usual few: it’s always exciting to play in L.A. or to play in San Francisco, or places you don’t get to very often.

QRO: Do you have a favorite tour story?

AD: That’s a big question…

TM: It probably involves the last question, too.

Fargo was pretty great.  We rolled in, middle of winter, it was bitter cold, and it was Sunday, and a bunch of kids showed up, and we had a great time.  And these kids invited us to come over to their place afterwards, in part, going back to earlier, because they were huge fans of XMU on XM Radio, Tobi, who did a great job – she’s not actually with XM anymore, since the merge.  This kid is like, ‘Oh my god, you guys know Tobi!’

It was a microcosm of all the things that are great about music in small towns.  This kid, he was just fucking psyched because the only good music he gets is off of satellite radio, and he wanted us to come over to his place.  So we crashed there, and the kid had fuckin’ assault rifles in his house.  So we got pictures of some of the guys in the band, our last keyboard player, posing with assault rifles, just because it was kind of fucking bizarre.

But they were really nice kids.  They just wanted to get drunk and get high.  And we were like, ‘You know, I guess if I lived here too, that’s all I’d want to do…’

I think that what you’ll find though, is that any band’s favorite tour stories are finding a sincere connection with people and the town.

  Whether it’s Stillwater, or Fargo, or wherever else we’ve done, those are the best stories, about the kids that you meet, and about how fucking psyched they are.

Bon Savants playing the new "Destroyer" live @ Mercury Lounge in New York, NY on December 17th, 2008:

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