Fresh off the release of their first full-length album and hitting the Big Apple for CMJ and more, all of Los Angeles’ Division Day sat down to chat with QRO. Singer/keyboardist Rohner Segnitz, drummer Kevin Lenhart, guitarist Ryan Wilson, and bassist Seb Bailey talked about their new record, Beartrap Island (QRO review), making the record over a collection of weekends in a different city, playing residencies, L.A.’s Silverlake music scene (including Earlimart and ‘The Ship’ – QRO interview), making a video, covering “not credible” songs, getting their picture in The New York Times for last year’s CMJ, getting their sandwich on TV in Pittsburgh, getting arrested in Spokane, getting banned in Canada, and more…
QRO: How has New York been treating you so far?
Kevin Lenhart: Great, so far.
Seb Bailey: I love it out here.
Ryan Wilson: We came in during rush hour, Thursday, so we came across two bridges and the Holland Tunnel into Brooklyn, at rush hour…
This is our first time to be in the city, in a car, ‘cause last time we flew out, taking cabs everywhere, so this time we have the added dimension of worrying about our gear and where to park.
QRO: You play a few different dates for CMJ. Do you guys approach playing ‘industry’ dates any differently than ‘regular’ shows?
KL: We sorta play whatever we feel like is going to be most convincing.
RW: We play whatever we are enjoying the most. Probably the most challenging part about those shows is preparing to not play your own gear. Because of a lot of them are shared backlines. I guess that just comes with experience, learning to deal with things on the fly.
QRO: Last year for CMJ, you ended up getting you photo in The New York Times. How can you top that?
RW: That’s a good question.
SB: Fireworks, man…
RW: We’re hiring this guy to write our name in the sky…
But that was a surreal moment. We didn’t even know about it.
KL: We had to be told.
RW: We were getting text messages, “Don’t let it go to your head…”, and are like, “What are you talking about?”
KL: My old boss called me, “Hey, I’m reading the paper, and you’re in it!”
QRO: How were your recent dates out west?
KL: Salt Lake City was awesome! The kids there, I don’t think they’d ever heard of us, but they stuck around, and by one song into the set, pretty much, they were all the way the whole set. Kilby Court…
Rohner Segnitz: It’s pretty classic DIY kind of spot. It’s been around for… I don’t know quite how long. All ages…
It was a really rough night, ‘cause Deerhoof was playing across town. And then there was another big festival. Attendance was fairly light, but it was still really fun.
RW: Those times that when you show up, and you play a room, you play as hard as you can, as well as you can, because there are still people there that are watching you, and it’s totally worth it, because those kids come away with the right impression with what we’re about.
QRO: You guys are playing three Thursdays in a row at Brooklyn’s Union Hall (QRO Event Calendar listing). Why are you doing that set up?
SB: Union Hall (QRO venue review) was one of our favorite places that we played last year for CMJ. We met a lot of new people there.
And we also wanted to do something different, besides just play these crazy barrages of random CMJ shows. Try to catch somebody’s attention in the midst of all that.
KL: Skippy [Jack McFadden], who books Union Hall, is a mensch. He’s just been really supportive of our band, trying to get us out to New York, since last year, we’ve just never been able to do it. But now that we have the opportunity to come back out here, he’s all about having us there as much as possible.
RW: It’s been a long road. I mean we would have come out earlier, ‘cause the record was supposed to come out earlier. But the label that we were on fell through, and then we didn’t have any support to get out here again, until we got picked up again by Eenie Meanie. Now we have the means, and it makes sense for us, to be touring the country on our own.
QRO: You also had a residency last February at L.A.’s Spaceland. Are you particularly drawn to that kind of repeat booking?
RS: I don’t know if other cities do that, but that’s a common thing in Los Angeles.
KL: It’s like a rite of passage for bands in L.A.
SB: There are three main residencies in the Silverlake neighborhood. In a sense, it’s kind of a debut, kind of ‘popping out’ onto the next tier. It’s a thing that happens throughout that side of town. Everybody goes out on Mondays to one show or another…
RS: All free, it’s a great way for bands to go see other bands, or go have a drink with your friends. It’s just like a big social thing around our community, where you can just go to The Echo, go to Spaceland, go to Silverlake Lounge, and just sort of like check out your friend’s band, or just have a drink and go to a club for free.
RW: It’s the one night where everything’s free.
KL: To us, it doesn’t seem weird to be playing three weeks in a row at Union Hall – ‘Oh, it’s a residency. It’s just on the East Coast.’
RW:
Last week, a band called Le Switch are playing; a band we toured with. So the last night’s just gonna be like a big party. That’s really appealing, to have home on the East Coast.
QRO: How’s it been, now that Beartrap Island is out?
KL: Awesome. I feel like Atlas setting down the globe…
It’s been hanging over our heads, a little bit, because we wrote these songs a year and a half ago, thought it was coming out in March, and when it was set to come out in March, we were all like, “Damn, we have to wait until March for this thing to come out!”
And then, in February, the label fell through, and had a couple months, trying to find a new home for it, and set up with Eenie Meanie, and now it’s out in October. It’s great; it’s like we’re finally moving on, wanna record a new album, right away. We wanna tour really hard, and get it done with, and then go right back.
RW: The cover songs that we’ve been putting out have been a big sort of ‘boost’, and also the two new songs on the record we got to record with Eenie Meanie gave it another dimension of vibrance for us. ‘Cause finally the album comes out, and that’s exciting, in itself, to have an album in record stores. And then on top of it, to have these two new songs, that people who bought the original thing from us, directly, hadn’t heard before.
QRO: What are the two new songs?
RW: “Ricky”, the second song, and then “Reversible”.
QRO: You said the covers…
RS: We’ve been releasing them on the Internet for free, just kinda a fun thing to celebrate the release of our album. We decided to do four releases prior to the record, and then three releases after, alternating a cover, and then a remix of one of the album tracks.
We had a remix by Tandemoro, this really great band, Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence”, and then the album came out, and that was sort of its own thing, and then we released a cover of “Plowed” by Sponge. You know the one, even if you don’t know the song’s name, if you heard it, you would know what it is.
KL: It’s one of those guilty pleasure songs. I’ve never heard anyone say they don’t like it.
SB: Oh, I’m not guilty about liking it in the slightest.
RS:
So those are just out, floating around, on the Internet.
SB: We’ve been making these maps, sort of another thing. Rohner’s probably the best person to talk to about this, since he made it. He did all the artwork for the old version of Beartrap Island that we were selling at DIY shows, and then for this beautiful, better version.
But we’ve been releasing a piece, a giant piece of a map of Beartrap Island, and releasing one a week, and in the [last] installment, we decided to pick a fight with Fallout Boy.
RS: Not really ‘a fight’ – we just put their house on the island.
QRO: Wait – is Beartrap Island a real island?
RS: In our minds…
SB: Actually, I found out, Beartrap Island does actually exist.
KL: No way!
RS: Yeah, it’s on the East Coast.
SB: But that’s a different Beartrap Island
QRO: Is it kind of like Lost?…
SB: Yes, that’s pretty much it.
QRO: What was the recording process like for Beartrap Island?
RS: It was long…
KL: It was a lot of weekends, long and fragmented.
RS: It was long, and intermittent, and fragmented, but also really fun. We were funding it ourselves, and we were all working full-time, so it was over many-day weekend bursts.
We wanted to record an EP, and went up an recorded a couple songs, and then we came home, wrote some more, and then we went back up there are recorded a few more songs. And by that time, we had way more songs than could fit on the EP, and we like, “Fuck it, let’s just make a full-length.” But we had to go record, and then go back to work, and save some money or whatever, and then go back up again.
We recorded at two different locations, ‘cause we were working with Scott Solter at the time. When it started, he was in The Mission in San Francisco, a place he’d had for a long time, we started recording there. We had to move out of there about half-way through making the record, so we ended up in kind of a temporary place in the city, right across from the Cow Palace, which we dubbed ‘The Bahamas’…
SB: ‘Cause it was freezing.
KL: Had space heaters going all over the place.
RS: Rained all the time.
KL: At the time, Scott was recording only onto two-inch tape, and mixing onto two-inch tape. We were all really into it, but time efficiency…
That, and then the fact that we all lived in L.A. and recorded in S.F., that’s a five-hour stretch on each side of a recording session, driving. We would have some pretty crazy recording sessions. We would arrive, Thursday night, overnight, to San Francisco, Friday-Saturday-Sunday. Some would have to fly home, some would take Monday off.
So it turned into a pretty extrapolated process. It worked out well; I think the end result sounds like it was made at one time.
QRO: You’re from the Silverlake music scene, why did you record and do everything in San Francisco?
RS: That was mostly a function of wanting to work with Scott. He’d done a lot of really interesting work. A really great engineer who we could arguably afford, and it was a better deal if we did it in his place.
And we all enjoyed, even though it was kind of crazy, we all enjoyed relocating temporarily to get the stuff done. It felt kind of nice to construct this artwork outside of our area.
QRO: Is the Silverlake scene a really tight-knit one? What about Earlimart’s ‘The Ship Collective’?
RW: I’d say so. I think in years past, before the Silversun Pickups got bigger than the scene… That’s not the say that they’re not still friends with all those people. I can’t comment on that; I know they are. Every time they’re in town, you see them at Spaceland or Echo or something.
RS: You don’t need to be a card-carrying whatever… The community is small enough that in not all that much time you meet everybody. “Everybody Knows Everybody”… [Earlimart song on Mentor Tormenter – QRO album review]
KL: We got to know Earlimart as Earlimart, not as ‘The Ship’. They’re buddies; we share a picnic table out back, where everyone will be having a beer. I think for us, Aaron [Espinosa, Earlimart singer/guitarist] was like our big brother. We weren’t part of ‘The Ship’, per se; that’s not our era.
RS: It’s Aaron’s studio. So it’s kind of people in orbit around the studio, Great Northern, Sea Wolf, all these great bands.
QRO: How was making Beartrap Island different than making The Mean Way In EP?
SB: Well, on one hand, the circumstances were pretty different. Like people were saying, we were all working full-time jobs when we were making Beartrap; we had to break the recording up separate times.
We were also working with Scott, like we said, and that was different in so far as we had worked with him before. When we made The Mean Way In, the engineer, Alex Oana, we sought out specifically for that, but we had never worked with him before, didn’t know him.
RW: We’d never been in the studio before.
SB: When we were talking about engineers, I happened to be taking a trip to Minneapolis at the time, and I met him at this awesome place called ‘Al’s’ and we had breakfast, but pretty much, it was like, “Hi, nice to meet you. Let’s go make a record.”
Going in with Scott, we totally knew him, the rapport was there, he knew what we wanted, we knew what he wanted, so that language was already set.
RS: And The Mean Way In was recorded in one block.
KL: Six days was it?
SB: Six days.
QRO: Was that in L.A.?
SB: No, that was in Tiny Telephone.
RS: John Vanderslice’s studio.
KL: We mixed Beartrap Island at Tiny Telephone as well, but we didn’t track it there, ‘cause we just couldn’t afford it, but Mean Way In, we did it all at Tiny Telephone.
QRO: Is there any sort of special, ‘going from EP to debut LP’ kind of pressure, ‘stepping up to a bigger stage’ kind of thing? Or is it, because you guys said, you were originally going to make an EP…
KL:
It was a split, than an EP, than a full-length. So no, it was a really natural progression.
RW: We’re already looking to the next thing now. Beartrap Island is a cool record; I think we’re all proud of it. It’s not perfect, it is what it is, I’m glad we made it, but we’re looking to the future pretty much.
RS: It’s obviously a full-length album that we made, but it’s not like we sat down and were like, “We’re going to make our debut full-length record,” and go record our debut full-length record. It was like we said, it just sort of happened. Maybe if it had happened some other way, we would have felt some pressure.
But we were unsigned; we put out The Mean Way on our own, we put out the EP before that on our own. So it was kind of like, “We’re just doing what we like to do, making a record.”
Obviously, we were all like, “Yeah, we would like to have a label put this out eventually.” It’s not like we were going to continue–
SB: Making ‘outsider art’.
QRO: So do you have new, post-Beartrap material?
KL: We do.
RS: We’re only playing one of those songs right now. We haven’t had a ton of time. But there’s a whole lot stuff in the oven, as it were.
QRO: What was making your first music video like, with director Chris Levitus (Radiohead’s The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time DVD)?
KL: It was awesome; it was totally home grown. We had worked with some friends of his on a series of shorts for which we wrote.
RS: YouTube.
KL: Yeah. But then the guys who made “You Can Awesome” played our regular stuff for Chris, he really liked it, and he had an idea for a particular song. So quite literally, he said, “Hey guys, I have this idea.” Went over to his house, talked for like a half hour, and then he just got cracking.
SB: Assembled the whole crew, got everything, soundstage… Set it all up. We just had to show up. We paid him about four hundred dollars for incidentals – I think he paid thousands of his own dollars. All shot on film, he did all the camera effects.
RS: Especially for our first video, for a band that… I don’t know… We weren’t like ‘fielding treatments’ or looking to make a video. We were still an unsigned band.
When he came to us with the idea, he was like, “I’m gonna need a couple hundred dollars from you guys to pitch in,” so Kevin started painting for a fundraiser.
KL: Our friend works at American Apparel can get us, at no cost, shirts, and I could get any color, so I just had people send in the color, and what you want on the shirt, and I’ll paint it. And I’m crappy at art, so I’d download images of what they wanted. Like, “I want a dinosaur”, so I’d download a dinosaur, and cut out a stencil on a plastic overhead projector sheet, and then get the pink shirt or whatever, and paint it on.
And it took forever. For money made, it was awfully inefficient, but it raised enough money for the video.
SB: But the cool thing about that video is that, because Chris assembled the crew and pretty much did everything himself, it was at once super rich and gorgeous because he did it, but also super family style. Everybody who worked on that crew works on everybody else’s crew on other jobs. He assists his friends on their projects; they all know each other from school. Super tight-knit.
KL: Another collective…
QRO: Why did you get banned from Canada?
KL: You have to have a work visa to play a concert in Canada. And we thought we were hot shit, and we could sneak in. ‘Cause we’d heard stories of touring bands who could do this, you hide your merch shit in your guitar cabinet, and tell them you’re playing a radio show, not for profit, and they’ll let you through.
We did that, and they Googled us, and found our band as listed as playing a show that night on The Railway Club’s website. They were like, “Hey, yeah. So you lied to us. You’re banned for a year.” We were like, “Yes, I lied to you. I’m going go.”
So we got banned for a year. If we’d come back that year, we would have been expelled from Canada. But that year’s already over…
RS: So watch out, Canada.
QRO: What about being thrown in jail in Spokane, Washington?
RS: Ahh, that story…
KL: That’s Seb and I. We like Spokane…
RS:
KL: We were bringing in goats to burn them, but they caught us…
SB: And the virgins started making out – it was hot shit…
KL: No, we played our show, there was a bar two doors down. We all had a couple beers, and there was a theater, a big, grand theater across the street that was under construction, and just kind of open. We thought it was a genius idea to go explore.
We were in there for about two minutes, and then five squad cars rolled up, because I guess a cop saw us walk in. We came out, they cuffed us, took us to jail. We missed our show in Portland that night. Eventually, they let us go, they dropped all the charges. It was stupid, it was a total run around. We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
RW: Rohner’s watching them and thought it was funny. It kind of was.
SB: They come to visit us that morning, and there I am in my size XXXL jumpsuit – and I’m 5’8”, this thing was huge – was hung over, looked like crap. It was a Friday night when we got arrested, and we heard that we were going to have to stay there for 72 business hours, which would effectively kill our tour, so I was pretty bummed. Plus jail sucks.
So we go down to the visiting place, and they’re all in there, smiling, “Oh, isn’t this shit hilarious!” And their face just went, “Ohh…” Totally changed, ‘cause I looked horrible.
RS: He looked bad…
SB: We put our fingertips up against the glass. It was really cute. But we got out, everything worked out fine.
QRO: How did the band all meet?
SB: I’ve known Kevin pretty much as long as I’ve been cognizant. We’ve known each other since we were two years old. Our parents knew each other. We met Rohner when Kevin and I were sixth graders, and he was in seventh.
Then we all split up and went to different colleges. Kevin and Ryan did work-study together.
KL: It wasn’t until we graduated in like, I guess it was, ’03?… that we started. We all moved to L.A., and bought a practice space next to The Ship.
RS: It was actually ’04. I lived in New Orleans for a year.
QRO: Are there any songs you really like playing live?
RS: Almost all of them.
SB: Pretty much all of them.
I personally like playing “Malachite”.
RS: That’s a new song.
RW: “Reversible”. I like “Reversible” a lot.
KL: I play “Reversible” and a couple of other songs with a maraca instead of a drum stick, and I always get mad when I have to, late in the set. And lately that’s been “Reversible”. So “Reversible” is really fun to play, but I’m always pissed at it.
QRO: Are there any that you don’t like playing live, or just don’t play anymore?
SB: There’s a number that we don’t play anymore.
RS: Our whole first record.
RW: Our first first record. Before The Mean Way In.
We don’t play “Hello”, never even arranged. We tried, I guess, but it always gets too complicated. The last song on The Mean Way In.
RS: But we still play a couple songs from The Mean Way In.
KL: We never had played “Littleblood”, but just for this tour, arranged that, put it together. Thought it was going to go the way of “Hello” and just never be, because we have a vocoder on that song in recording, but don’t have that live. But we just kinda found a way that works for us.
RS: That’s like a new thing.
KL: That one’s fun for us.
RS: As far as not liking certain songs, there are songs that you like now that you didn’t used to like playing. It’s a time and place thing. There are other songs that [one of us] hate playing, and we’re just gonna keep playing.
And as consummate professionals, we’re not gonna tell you which songs we don’t like playing.
QRO: Do you guys play any of the covers?
RW: We will be.
KL: It was too crazy during this tour. Have to buy some gear, a sampler. Couldn’t pull it off.
RW: We have some days off in Boston coming up. We’re kind of hoping to maybe get some of that stuff underway.
QRO: Have you guys planned a larger tour, now that the album is finally out?
KL: We don’t have any specific plans yet.
RW: We’re going down to Atlanta, back up to Chicago, at Schuba’s.
KL: Yeah, we’re psyched about that. Chicago’s great. So is Pittsburgh.
We totally love Pittsburgh now. We played with this cool band called School of Athens, and they took us out on the town afterwards, showed us this great view. That city has got something special to it. It’s like Gotham City, kinda.
RW: We had Primanti Brothers sandwiches.
KL: Lots.
RW: Lots of French fries.
QRO: In the sandwich?
RW: Yeah, in the sandwich. And then like a patty, like a hamburger, but it’s more like meatloaf, kind of loaf-y.
SB: It’s cooked somehow in a slightly different way.
RW: So it’s like a very strange cheese steak.
KL: And then, oddly enough, we go to the bar after eating those, and they have the football game on TV. And with the football game in the background, the stats come up, “Top Sandwiches”, and it listed Primanti as #2, then it shows a picture of our sandwich. So we’re like, “Why is our sandwich on TV?”
SB: I saw that soon enough ago.
QRO: What other cities have you really liked playing at?
KL: Chicago…
RW: Portland…
SB: Portland’s rad.
KL: Visalia, California. It’s this tiny little town by Fresno, kind of. I imagine people outside of California have never heard of it, but it’s got its little scene going, really fun.
RW: Howie’s Stuffed Pizza there is kind of a legendary venue.
QRO: Are there any places in America you haven’t been to that you’d really want to?
KL: The South.
RS: We’re going as far as Atlanta this time, but we haven’t really like…
RW: We’re excited to go to Chapel Hill. Kind of the ‘indie-rock epicenter’.
KL: I’m a huge Archers of Loaf fan.
