Peter Wolf Crier: TAS In Session
One of the many hundreds of bands headed to SXSW in a few weeks is Minnesota-born band Peter Wolf Crier, which began as the duo of Peter Pisano and Brian Moen. The group's sophomore album, Garden of Arms, dropped last autumn via Jagjaguwar.
Following their Austin stopover at SXSW in March, Peter Wolf Crier will open for Damien Jurado this April for a West Coast tour. The group also has one-off gigs in Madison, Wisconsin with Milagres on March 31 and with Haley Bonar, in Minneapolis, on April 27. A trip to Primavera Sound in Barcelona follows in May.
Pisano, Moen and new member Kyle Flater visited The Alternate Side not long ago and discussed their unconventional recording techniques (and even treated us to a surprising cover of INXS' "Never Tear Us Apart."). Listen to the session when it airs on TAS on 91.5 WNYE this Friday, February 24 at 11 a.m. and streaming on The Alternate Side.
Alisa Ali: I thought you were a duo but you have Kyle [Flater] with you. Where did you pick up this guy?
Peter Pisano: Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Kyle plays in a band with Brian called Laarks.
Brian Moen: I couldn’t get enough of him in one band so had to bring in on this one too.
Alisa: Still doing Laarks too? What’s up with that band now?
Brian: They’re waiting patiently.
Alisa: How did you two meet?
Peter: My old band played with Laarks. We played a bunch of shows together. We met making Inter-Be, our first record. That was like us getting to know each other, as it was being recorded. I don’t even know how long it’s been now? A year and a half? Two years? It hasn’t quite warmed up.
Alisa: You wanted to do a solo thing, but you thought you needed help.
Peter: I was playing in a really traditional band. We are a band, but it’s not like a traditional band, I think. There’s no bass player. Kyle is a guitar player but has been totally converted into this total sound thing, primarily keyboards at this point. Brian’s drumming isn’t traditional rock drumming, when you see us live, it’s Brian and I up front. Even the presentation of it is very different. What I wanted to do, coming out of a more traditional rock band, was to have something that was more song-and-sound centered. When you get used to playing a certain dynamic, every decision that you make musically is being informed through the instruments. There has to be bass, keys and guitar on every song. But in this band, I think we understand our roles to be so fluid that it doesn’t inform any arrangement of any song. Brian and I go in there and make whatever record we want to make. We have to find a way, at that point, to play it live. It feels what the intital intention was, despite the fact that we’re now three.
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdhirYlEV54]
Alisa: [Garden of Arms] comes on the heels of your debut album Inter-Be which came out in 2010. You didn’t waste too much time.
Peter: It wasn’t necessary. Brian and I made Inter-Be, around October of 2009, possibly. We rented a house in St. Paul. We had a friend who had his own theatre company. We sold tickets online, so when you bought the ticket, you got the address. You showed up at the house and there was this weird mixed-media arts thing that traveled through the house. All through October to Halloween. We did something like 18 shows in two weeks. It was strange. The record had been written so much earlier, we played it 18 times in two weeks. By the time Jagjaguwar picked it up and it got released, it was a record that we’d sat with for a long time. We had reinterpreted it a few different ways. So by the time that we started touring, we were ready to do what was next. It didn’t take too many times sitting down, on breaks in between tours, to see an album present itself. We knew last December that we were going to have something out by fall.
Alisa: Were you working on the new songs while you were touring for Inter-Be?
Peter: Yes. The first August break that we had is when I started writing for it. The next song we’re going to play, “Settling It Off,” was written in the house where we were performing those house shows. My car had broken down in Minneapolis and I was teaching school in St. Paul, so I’d stay in the house. I’d shower at a friend’s house because we filled the shower with broken mirrors as part of one of the [art] pieces. So I wrote “Settling It Off” there. That song pre-dates the official release of Inter-Be, but outside of that, everything else came in August. The likelihood of a song making it came closer and closer as we came to the release of Garden of Arms. I had to grow into it and a lot of the early songs was writing songs to get to the next song.
Alisa: Peter, you’ve moved to the piano which makes me think you’re going to do a different kind of song for us.
Brian: We’re going straight ballad.
Peter: It’s probably going to be emotional.
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKsFTHa5qWc]
Alisa: “Settling It Off” is one of my favorite songs off of Garden of Arms. Had you been performing that song live for a while?
Peter: No. Brian and I knew that when Garden of Arms came, it was going to be a different chapter in this band’s story. We knew that we’d have either a third person and rethink the way that we’d make the record. Or starting the show and pre-recording every loop that was going to be popping up in the set. For two minutes you’d hear us creating all these loops and triggering them throughout the entire show. There were so many incarnations of how we were going to do this live. We knew that we’d need at least a month’s time of eight hours a day to find a way to do this live. We didn’t play a single song live until we released the record.
Brian: Well, at least the first time that we performed them [for an audience] We had been rehearsing them.
Alisa: So this song, “Settling It Off,” went through a lot of different changes until you came to this version.
Peter: It started off as a song that easily could have been on Inter-Be. I left it where it was. I was excited when I wrote it, but it faded pretty hard. I was out in San Diego, spending some time there when I was off tour, and the song came back up again. Brian’s drums on it reinterpreted it. We started bringing in these claps, messing with the beat, and it went from being a folk song to being a Warren G song.
Brian: I think a turning point was when we put the organ on the song. It was guitar-based and then it was all organ. That was a drastic change in the mood of the song.
Peter: If it weren’t for those keyboards, the song wouldn’t have made the record. We recorded all the drums in two days on the entire record and we’d taken so much more time to do everything else. We were getting pretty tired towards the end. It was a month straight of living at Brian’s house and recording all day long. I feel that we were running out of steam towards the end. There was one other song that we wanted to hit, but all the magic in the room had been used up. I sat down with this mini-keyboard, played it out, and there was still a spark left in “Settling It Off,” thankfully.
Brian: If it weren’t for the human voice setting on my Casio keyboard, it would have never made it.
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Lgiupton2A]
Alisa: I know that Peter, you were a teacher before, but you quit your day job. What were you doing before music, Brian?
Brian: I’m a graphic designer. I was an art director at a magazine, but now I just freelance. A lot of nights in the hotel, staying up until 5 a.m. trying to design some things.
Alisa: Did you work on the design for the new record?
Brian: I did. It’s a piece of art by a Minneapolis artist named Michael Cina.
Peter: We’re about to play an INXS song, “Never Tear Us Apart.”
Alisa: I love that song.
Brian: So do we. We wouldn’t play it if we didn’t genuinely love that song.
Peter: It’s like a personal, emotive thing.
Alisa: How do you feel about INXS reforming after Michael Hutchence [died]?
Peter: I don’t know if you can call it INXS.
Alisa: Did you know that there was a reality show to find the new lead [singer]?
Brian: Oh, yeah. I watched it. It was really spectacular. There were some pretty talented dudes trying out.
Peter: Brian likes “American Idol.” Those singing contests.
Brian: I produce some records on the side. I like to form my own opinions and see how they check against [the judges]. Was it pitchy to me, dawg? I don’t know.
Alisa: The masses are not always correct.
Brian: Absolutely not. The guy who won this year was a total joke. Worst “American Idol” winner. The country guy. The guy’s got about one octave. One move. Anyone else goes that many weeks in a row sounding exactly the same, the judges give them all kinds of crap. With him, every week, they [were like], “You just keep it up! You know yourself!” America loves country music. I don’t know why they don’t still do “Nashville Star.” Keep country over there. Country has an unfair advantage.
Alisa: Brian is clearly outraged at the winner.
Brian: Oh, if I had a half an hour, you’d get a full analysis.
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz8tqCtqlvo]
Peter Wolf Crier Tour Dates:
3/2/2012 Minneapolis, MN, First Avenue, SXSW Sendoff
3/13-18/2012 Austin, TX, SXSW
3/31/2012 Madison, WI High Noon Saloon*
4/13/2012 San Francisco CA Bottom of the Hill #
4/14/2012 Los Angeles CA Bootleg Theater #
4/15/2012 San Diego CA Soda Bar #
4/17/2012 Denver CO Hi-Dive #
4/18/2012 Salt Lake City UT Velour #
4/19/2012 Boise ID Neurolux #
4/21/2012 Vancouver BC The Biltmore Cabaret #
4/22/2012 Portland OR Holocene #
4/27/2012 Minneapolis, MN Cedar Cultural Center @
5/30/2012 Barcelona, Spain Primavera Festival
* w/Milagres
# w/Damien Jurado
@ w/Haley Bonar
