TAS In Session (Outside Lands Festival Preview): Vetiver

Vetiver's Andy Cabic found himself an entirely new lineup, formed during the tour for Tight Knit, for the recording of the band's fifth album, The Errant Charm, out now on Sub Pop. Happily, Cabic's breezy, pastel-hued folk pop -  slashed with black strokes of darker lyricism - remains as confident and skillfully crafted as ever. 

The band, which now includes keyboardist Sarah Versprille, drummer Otto Hauser, guitarist Daniel Hindman and bassist Bob Parins,  will be at San Francisco's Outside Lands Festival this coming weekend, a homecoming gig for Bay Area-based Cabic. The group kicks off a new North American trek next month with Fruit Bats, eventually returning to New York on September 13 to play Bowery Ballroom.

Recently, Cabic and his Vetiver bandmates dropped by The Alternate Side's studio to chat with Alisa Ali and play songs from The Errant Charm and Tight Knit and they even added a handsome cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Save Me A Place" (they also do a faithful cover of The Go-Betweens' "Streets of Your Town," spotted at some UK shows):

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rrd9SAKO6xM]

Alisa: I love the line [in "Wonder Why"], When is this old world going to treat me kind?” That’s cool. Has the world been treating you unkindly?

Andy Cabic: Oh no, the song’s not about me, per se. But the world’s been good to me. We’ve just been traveling for the last month. We were in Europe and the UK, we saw some friends and we spend a lot of time in a van.

Alisa: You have a couple of other travel songs on here too. What are your feelings on touring? Do you enjoy it mostly?

Andy: Yeah, it depends on the tour. I like touring, I like being with these peeps, it’s fun traveling with them. And it’s fun playing shows. It just depends on the schedules, the drives. That’s the grueling aspect - the waiting around. The shows are fun and we have a couple of good tours coming up with some fun venues and festivals.

Alisa: What’s the driving schedule? Do you drive? Do you guys take turns or do you have a driver?

Andy: I do a lot of the driving. Otto, our drummer, loves to drive. He’s a very good driver. The more inclement the conditions, the better he is. He did drive one time straight from St. Louis to New York. He listened to a lot of free jazz and tranced out to the fluttering snowflakes all around him.

Alisa: It can get scary when folks are trancing out and they’re driving.

Andy: Tell me about it. And you’re sitting right next to him and you don’t understand what’s going on. He won’t look at you, he’s staring straight ahead, and free jazz is blaring.

Alisa: The Errant Charm, just came out and the last record, Tight Knit, was out a couple of years ago. What were you guys up to in that time period between records?

Andy: Well, personally, I was touring for Tight Knit and in the process, the lineup changed. Sarah and Dan began playing with us. We had a different guitar player. He gradually stopped touring so we switched members and Bob started playing with us. So the lineup that you see in the room right now didn’t exist when Tight Knit came out. That’s a change.

Alisa: What was the reason for the lineup change?

Andy: People don’t want to to tour. To be honest, I’m the only one who lives in San Francisco and everyone else lives in different places. It’s been that way for quite some years so things just happen. It’s not like the band, as we have it now, was from the first album on. The lineup changes on each record and each tour. An evolving thing.

Alisa: Did you not take any time off for yourself?

Andy: Oh yes. Bits and pieces of time off all the time. I’m a pretty boring person. I hang out with friends. Go for hikes. Travel around the beautiful Bay area. Produced other records for other artists. Did some demoing of other things.

Alisa: But if you have a 9-to-5 job, you get two weeks or three if you’re lucky a year. Is it not like that for you?

Andy: I don’t have a 9-to-5 job. It just seems to disappear sometimes, the time. The aspect of touring that’s the worst is the monotony of certain things. That’s the worst of it. But at the exact same time you have the monotony you have something different every night. A different place, different people.

Alisa: Has there been one place in the world that you enjoy playing most?

Andy: I love San Francisco, for sure. I like the north of Spain, the Basque country. That’s a great place to play. Brussels. We had a great show in Brussels on this tour. Manchester is always fun. Amsterdam.

Alisa: Thoughts on New York?

Andy: New York’s great! It’s overwhelming. There’s a lot of people you want to hang out with and then there’s the hassle of the reality of where you’re going to park your van. There’s always a little too much going on which is awesome. I have a lot of friends here. Bob and Otto live here.

Alisa: That’s very convenient. You did recording on the East Coast here, you recorded in Hoboken.

Andy: Yes, a lot of music.

Alisa: Why did you come East? Because of the players on the East coast?

Andy: A little of that. We had a tour scheduled and it ended on the East coast, so instead of flying everyone out to the West coast where my engineer and I live, I was already on the East coast, as was everyone else, so we just flew our engineer out and worked here.

Alisa: So it’s not because you love Hoboken.

Andy: I like a lot Hoboken bands and Hoboken is a cute town and the studio is super nice.

Alisa: Yo La Tengo.

Andy: Yo La Tengo, Feelies. For sure. The Bongos. It was cool. It was autumn and beautiful. The weather was great and the people at the studio were super wonderful.

Alisa: This record has such a summery feel to it, but you recorded it here on the East coast in autumn where it was probably pretty chilly.

Andy: Yes, but the roots of the album and the template for it were contrived in Los Angeles in September where it feels like summer.

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrVO1Ry1zjw]

Alisa: That song, "Everyday," is from the last Vetiver album, Tight Knit. So when you went into the studio to make The Errant Charm, your current album, did you have any ideas about the direction that you wanted to go in for this new album? Or is it a matter of going in there and seeing what happens?

Andy: In the past I never really booked studio time or bothered to get going with my engineer until I had an album’s worth of songs completed. I pretty much had an idea of how the album was going to be shaped. This time, I didn’t. This is the fifth record I’ve done with Tom so we both know each other so well and how the album is built, we [wanted to try] something different. Not to mention, everyone else in my band being in a different city, I just wanted to start this time going down to Thom [Monahan's] studio. I had a few songs finished, but I had pieces of other songs and a vague idea of how it might look. We just started tracking and playing with keyboards and building the record in a slightly different way. It’s more like the way we did our second record which is called To Find Me Gone. Once we built a foundation, certain songs we left to track entirely in Hoboken and the rest of them, I sent those tracks out to everyone in the band and then we overdubbed or tracked into them at the studio. The shape of the record - the textures and arrangements - changed, but the imprint of it happened in Los Angeles and was brought to Hoboken.

Alisa: Do you enjoy this method more?

Andy: Then doing it live? They’re both cool. I did the last two records the exact same way in the exact studio - the covers album and Tight Knit. Those were done with everyone in the room playing live for the basic tracks, in a studio in Sacramento. I was happy to do something different and logistically it makes more sense to get a framework for the record and then bring in everyone else involved. I don’t usually write on the road; I write at home.

Alisa: But I understood that you had these demos and you’d walk around your neighborhood listening [to them]?

Andy: Well, to get lyrics esssentially. At Thom’s, I got the shape and structure down, minus the lyrics. But walking around and listening to demos I’ve done that for every record. The reason the PR sheet talks about walking around - and why that keeps coming up -  is that I helped to write that PR sheet and I thought if people were going to listen to the album for the first time, a good way to listen would be on headphones [while] going for a walk. Somehow that got turned into: “He did the album walking around!” I didn’t make the album walking around. But the way the songs change, fits places you know. The topography of the songs goes with changing scenery.

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y03Qca0MD_o]

Alisa: Is [Fleetwood Mac's "Save Me a Place"] one of the songs that you listen to a lot in the van?

Andy: We listen to a lot of Fleetwood Mac in the van. The [album] Tusk, which we love, and Mirage. Those two records.

Alisa: If I gave you a guest DJ pick, would you pick a Fleetwood Mac song?

Andy: You know what I’d pick? I just discovered this record by a woman who we played with on tour named Devon Sproule and she has a great new record out - the title track, "I Love You, Go Easy."