AMERICAN ANALOG SET
interview by James Baumann

Andrew Kenny - looking even taller and leaner than he actually is thanks to the club's low ceiling - finishes tuning his guitar and, with only a few mumbled words for a mic check, eases his band into their first song. Despite the total lack of fanfare, about 80 percent of the night's crowd snaps to attention. Many of them start to slowly nod their heads in time to the song. Meanwhile, the remaining 20 percent at the bar keep their attention on their drinks and "how god-damn hot" it has been. They probably wouldn't have moved if the reformed Beatles had stepped behind the microphones.

The rest of the American Analog Set - Lisa Roschmann on keyboards, Lee Gillespie on bass, and Mark Smith on drums - are gathered around the stage and not everyone bothers to make much eye contact with the crowd. This is probably how they look when they are set up in one of the Texas living rooms where they have recorded over the last five years.

Their third record, The Golden Band, continues the growth of their textural sounds which has earned comparisons to Stereolab and the Red House Painters. Those of an older age would liken the sound to Mazzy Star, a sleepy Feelies or, of course, the Velvet Underground.

With a Farfisa organ laying the groundwork for many of the tracks, the American Analog Set creates lush, lulling songs that have earned praise from publications ranging from Bikini and Milk to Rolling Stone and Alternative Press, as well as the fans who have gathered at each stop as the band makes its way across the United States. The most impressive stat of the tour is that the band had not yet needed to find a hotel room, continuing to benefit from the kindness of strangers and their floorspace.

We caught up with Lee and Mark before their Columbus show, opening for Joan of Arc. An excerpt.

Your press mentions the Dallas area, but I heard you talking about life in Austin. Where are you officially from?

L: We're all from Dallas/Fort Worth area, but we live in Austin now and have for the last few years. Every once in a while we'll go back to Dallas, depending on how broke we are.

What spurred moving down there?

M: We were going to school. Lisa went down first for school then I went down. Then Ken and Lee came down because we were there. Now Ken is in school. Lisa just graduated. And I dropped out.

L: I'm just a lazy student.

One of those third year sophomores or something?

L: I can't even get through a semester.

Is Austin a better place during SXSW or not during SXSW?

L: SXSW has its merits. It's a pain in the ass if you're playing. It's a hassle.

M: You have to go hours early to get a parking space and then you have to walk all over the place. Depending on the band it may be worth it but... I work at a record store there and we do some in-stores. And there will be four bands and the store is just packed.

L: The rest of the year is pretty good. A lot of bands will make a stop in Austin.

Didn't I just hear that one of the famous bars there is shutting down?

L: Liberty Lunch, yeah. It's one of the oldest clubs there.

M: They're not really closing. Just moving.

L: It kind of got forced out by a computer company that wants the space.

M: They're doing the urban renewal program downtown.

L: So they're moving down the street by where all the other clubs are.

It's one of those bars that you always hear about. Like when I was visiting Los Angeles for the first time and I saw the Troubadour, where you guys were playing. In my mind it was going to be a castle or something and, instead, from the outside it looks just like another club. Have you had that experience where you're touring and these clubs in New York or wherever don't exactly live up to your expectations?

L: The Troubadour, actually, was spectacular. From the outside it looks like a dive and it's all sixties-ed out. But inside it's nice. There was actually an upstairs dressing room with a leather-ette couch and a bathroom with a shower. And it was the only place that Macha, the band we were touring with, got everything they asked for on their rider. They asked for a bottle of good whiskey and all these expensive beers. It was probably the nicest place we played.

M: They were really nice there. Dominick, this English sound guy, had us just rolling all night.

What kind of music background does the band have?

M: Lisa was classically trained. She's been playing piano since forever. She's the only one of us that's had any formal training as far as I know. The rest of us are self-taught.

All the press I've read has compared your sound to that of Stereolab and Galaxie 500. Are those bands that you are fans of and that's why you sound the way you do, or does it just happen that way?

L: I don't think I've ever been consciously - or even subconsciously - influenced by bands. When I first started getting into music it was bands like Ride and Lush and the Stone Roses. Then I really got into punk rock. It was my bread and butter for years.

M: I went the other way. I had an older brother so I grew up metal. Then I got into punk stuff and then the Roses and stuff like that. So, we like those other bands but I don't think we ever said, "hey let's sound like Stereolab."

L: Yeah. We like it, but it's not even like we listen to it on a daily basis. We listen to more ‘70s easy-listening stuff or rap. And, like Lisa, her parents are from Switzerland - she' a first-generation American - so she digested a lot of classical music growing up.

M: I don't think she's really into music that much.

L: She knows some stuff like Blur and Lamb and the Red House Painters. But the CDs she brought with her are all classical.

In an article I read, Ken said that there wasn't a conscious effort to sound like any other band, but the first time you all sat down to play that was just what came out. Tell me about that first time. Was it like a jam session? Did you play covers?

M: Well, there is a kind of a band-before-the-band thing...

The Electric Company?

M: Yeah. That was me and Ken and Lisa and then a couple of friends. And Ken was in another band called Terrapin that got some notice. Ken was called in to sing and play the shaker. But then people started flaking out so Ken started bringing in some of his songs and we recorded them on a 4-track.

Our other friends quit because they wanted to do heavier stuff, more up-tempo. So we stopped playing for awhile. Then a year or so later Ken gave all of us the 4-track tapes for Christmas and we thought we should start doing it again. So we asked Lee to come play bass and the rest is history.

Yeah, we've always been mellow. We've never played covers. It sounds better when we do our own stuff. But Lee had never been in a band. Lisa had never been in a band. I had never been in a band that played out, just living room kind of stuff. Ken was the only one that had ever played out. We really didn't have any expectations. Ken was probably more focused, but we were just having fun.

Do you ever have the urge to just plug it all in and rock?

M: No.

L: I do. We listen to heavier stuff. It's not like we mope around all day listening to Leonard Cohen. Well, sometimes we do.

Many other bands start off like with garage rock or something and then, as they mature, they might start to get more textures in the music and they expand.

L: Ken is a marvelous guitar player. It sounds really simple on record, but there is a lot of really incredible stuff going on with his playing. The rest of us just try to feed off that.

M: I haven't played with anyone else, really, since we started. If I got put behind a drum kit with a rock band I wouldn't know what to do. I really like the way I play now.

What is the standard songwriting process?

L: Ken will bring in a song or sometimes he'll bring something in not on his instrument; like he'll have an idea for a piano part and he'll want to see where we take it. Of course, he might have constructive criticisms for us.

M: Ken will bring in a guitar line and vocal line and ideas for how he hears the rest of it in his head. But he never really dictates how we have to play everything.

L: I think the best thing about music is making mistakes as you are writing the songs

M: And that happens to us all the time. But we don't really just get together and "jam."

L: We've tried to re-write some of our older songs that were on our early demos and they turn into something completely different. Not rewrite them, but one part may be kind of weird and someone else starts playing a different part and someone happens to be screwing around at the same time and they sort of meld together. A lot of the writing is accidental that way.

I can hear where Ken might have come in with the vocal line and guitar line and then everyone else sort of puts things on top of that and then the question is knowing when to stop.

L: Particularly on this new record. This set of songs started off really really complex with parts constantly changing. I was playing way too much, with too many notes in the thing. After awhile we said "we have to edit ourselves somewhat here." And we decided we were going to try to make this record shorter, not have the songs so drawn out. So, we needed to take it to another level and try not to fit so much in there. It's about working with simple melodies and trying to make something bigger than the sum of its parts.

There's not a lot about our music that is conscious, but I think that if you don't think about it either, than you can get into some trouble that way, too. You start too...

M: Noodle.

L: Yeah, that's it. Noodle.

Because you don't follow the standard verse, chorus, verse pattern do you see that as a means to freeing you up, or can it be a pitfall because you don‘t have that framework to work with and wander off to noodle-land?

L: I worry about that actually. We don't want the songs to get into a realm where people are wondering "what are you doing, where is that song going." Ultimately, though, I think we come up with a lot of surprises in the songs that really make the whole thing pay off. You don't really expect something coming - and it doesn't have to do with a lot of volume...

M: Kill ‘em with kindness.

L: Exactly.

The songs on the record that really work for me always do have something that holds it all together. It may not be the song structure, but, for example, on "The Wait" it is the rolling drum part that pulled it in for me.

M: Wow.

And on others the vocals may be more pronounced.

M: I think the vocals are always really strong. I don't have anything to do with that part of the band, but I've always been a big fan of Ken's vocalizing.

It seems that sometimes he really puts the words out there and on others his voice could just be another instrument and he could almost be singing phonetically.

M: It's odd that you say that because I know that sometimes Ken really is honestly about that. At least he says that. I think the words mean more to Ken than he lets on. He says the words are just a phonetic structure for the melody lines.

And you guys produced the record yourself?

M: Produce may be a strong word. "Recorded" may be better.

L: Yeah, not to discount Ken's abilities in that area, but we recorded it ourselves. This record cost $78 to make, the cost of two reels of tape. Everything we've put out has been home-recorded.

In a living room?

L: Yeah, we just moved back and forth between a couple homes. How long did this take us, about three weeks?

M: Yeah, about a month.

L: We worked on it on weekends and evenings. Ken was in school at the time.

And I may be wrong about this, but I can't imagine there are a lot of Texas bands that sound like you guys.

M: You'd be surprised. Texas has a legacy - not that we fit into it at all - of these screwy psych bands like Surgical Elevators, Red Krayola, the Butthole Surfers. This sort of red-neck psychedelic precedent.

And then you have these other bands - I don't want to start naming a shitload of bands - that play this mellower spaced-out stuff. There's a lot of them in Denton, the college town outside of Dallas, and in Austin. They are bands that don't necessarily sound alike but they are coming from the same place and take the music in different directions. There's a lot of more textural music there. Of course there's tons of the blues and rock bands as well. There's just a whole lot of bands in Texas. Everyone in Austin is either in a band or just getting ready to start a band.

So there was never an issue of finding a place to play out?

L: No, especially when we first started playing down in Austin. There were smaller clubs that would have free nights sponsored by the college radio station. Like at the Blue Flamingo it was every Monday night. So if a band wanted to play, they could find a date.

Like Mark said, there wasn't a real scene down there, but everybody is friends. Everybody respects everybody else so you can get on a bill with a larger band. There's lot of mutual respect. People are pretty diverse in their musical taste.

M: You'll see the same kid at a lot of different types of shows that you might not necessarily expect them to be at.

You apparently have an affinity for the older equipment and instruments. Do you have somebody looking out for them?

L: When I first met Ken he already had the Farfisa. It's mostly kind of lucking into finding the stuff. I mean, Ken bought that Farfisa for $100 at a pawn shop. That organ anywhere else would go for much more. Then it's a matter of seeing what you can do with it.

Assuming the band continues its path and success grows and bank accounts swell do you think going into a studio and experimenting with different instruments is something you'd want to do?

L: We don't really search the instruments out. It's great to go to guitar shows and pawn shops and see what's there, but that's about it.

And, not saying this is what you're saying, but the instruments are not a novelty effect for us. We love the bowed string sounds and gritty organ sounds. But it's really peculiar stuff and I don't want it to go to the realm of where it becomes gimmicky.

M: Pretty much everything on this record we've used since the beginning. The only thing we introduced on this record was vibes and there was a marimba on the first record. It's just what we lucked into. I mean, we were in Seattle and went into a music store to buy picks or something and they had this set of vibes that were cheap and we figured we could use this so we bought it. But it's not premeditated.

L: Going into the studio would be intriguing for us because we're so used to doing our own. We tried it early on but we were really inept. We were short on time but we wanted to test it out and see how it sounded. It didn't really come out well and didn't sound like us.

M: What was disappointing about the experience to me was that we played horribly. I was only 20 or 21 and it was my first time in the studio and I just played like shit. The engineer was able to clean it up and make it sound pretty good anyway and that really bummed me out because it sounded okay even though I knew we all played pretty badly.

We figured we can do it ourselves much better and much cheaper so we might as well do it that way.

A question I often ask bands that have this reputation for low-fi production or whatever is that: Is that the sound you hear when you imagine the song or is it that you don't have the time, money, or inclination to go into the studio and get a different sound?

L: I never really thought of us as being low-fi. But we're not opposed to doing stuff. We're not restricting ourselves by recording at home or whatever.

M: It's just easier.

L: And we're such part-timers that it's hard to get us all together in the same place every day for a week. We all work and Ken's in school so it's hard to play together live all the time. So, we're not opposed to it, this way is just easier.

But you're certainly not opposed to the sound you're getting.

L: Oh no. I think we've grown by leaps and bounds. We learn everytime we record.

M: I think this record sounds much better.

L: We had only had the recorder for a short time before the first record and we had just bought a bunch of new microphones so we were still learning.

The final question is, can you find this record on vinyl?

Both: Oh yeah.

Good, because there would be too much irony any other way.

L: We make sure we get vinyl.

Do you subscribe to the analog is better than digital argument? Mark, you work in the record store, you answer this one.

L: Mark is the big vinyl freak as of late.

M: I mostly buy the vinyl because it's cheaper. I have a ton of CDs, though, too.

L: The name American Analog Set is representative of what we are. It's not an argument either against or for.

And you record right onto tape?

M: It's not digital until it gets mixed down onto the DAT. Analog is just much warmer than digital.

L: Particularly in the early days the CD technology made them notoriously cold and trebly. But now with the higher sampling rate, that has helped the CDs overall quality.

Don't you worry that using terms like "higher sampling rate" will get you kicked out of a band called American Analog Set?

L: Well, we have to know what we're up against.