Dry The River: TAS In Session
Although the genesis of British band Dry the River was rooted in Americana, folk and gospel, there's a muscular, harder-rocking edge that also defines the quintet. That heavier alter ego shows up frequently on Dry the River's confident debut, Shallow Bed, out now in the UK and set for release on April 17 in the States on RCA Records.
Dry the River — singer and former medical student Peter Liddle, violinist Will Harvey, drummer Jon Warren, guitarist Matt Taylor and bassist Scott Miller — also have a new EP, Weights & Measures, out now, which includes the title track, an acoustic version of "Bible Belt" and a Josh T. Pearson cover, "Thou Art Loosed."
The buzzy band, which landed on the BBC's Sound of 2012 longlist and wraps its Stateside tour this month, recently played a session for WFUV and The Alternate Side which you can hear now in WFUV's archives.
Below, check out interview highlights plus a live video of Dry the River's "New Ceremony" and an audio stream of "Bible Belt."
Alisa Ali: I heard that you described your music as folky gospel music played by a post-punk band?
Peter Liddle: I don’t know if I’ve ever said that, but it’s pretty accurate.
Matt Taylor: Now we’re all playing this chilled-out music. It’s easier.
Alisa: It’s very loud.
Matt: I guess it gets loud at points. That’s the old us coming through.
Dry The River, "Bible Belt,"Shallow Bed, live in Studio A
Alisa: The song “Bible Belt’ is one of the first songs that you guys wrote together?
Pete: I wrote that at the start. On the first or second EP that we did. I wrote it in the studio. We had the shell of it, Matt and I, and then we decided we needed another track for the EP so we churned it out in about a half an hour.
Alisa: That’s very impressive.
Pete: We did an acoustic session of it online, right at the start. That was one of the first things where we got loads of [online] hits. It was our first big online [success] that we ever had. That was a funny one, coming from just a half hour studio song to our most well-known song, I guess.
Alisa: It’s on a couple of released, right? You released it as a single?
Pete: The audio on EP of “Bible Belt” is from that video that we did online. We just ripped the audio out of it because loads of people knew that version. It was completely acoustic and kind of different to how we play it live.
Matt: We set up in a little park near our house and recorded it. You can hear birds chirping and stuff in the background.
Pete: People playing tennis in the background.
Alisa: Ah! That’s why it’s called the field recording. That’s so English of you
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm68NlKCJrc]
Alisa: Did you record the Weights and Measures EP around the same time that you recorded the Shallow Bed full-length?
Scott Miller: That’s right. The first two tracks off of the EP are from the same album sessions and then the other two are home recording type demos, like the “Bible Belt” version and the other track was actually something that Pete and Matt recorded in our basement in Stratford.
Pete: A cover of [the] Josh T. Pearson [song "Thou Art Loosed"].
Alisa: You recorded this new album with Peter Katis of The National and Interpol fame.
Scott: That’s right. Up in Bridgeport, Connecticut [at Tarquin Studios].
Pete: We liked his records and asked him if he wanted to make our record.
Scott: We never thought he’d even respond to us, but he emailed back and said, “Yeah, I’m into your sound. Come check out my studio.”
Alisa: What album of his [did you hear] that made you appreciate his work.
Pete: I liked basically everything he’s touched. He’s brilliant. Turn on the Bright Lights, the first Interpol record, is amazing.
Scott: He’s done varied sort of work as well. Some of his albums he’s done are real different sounding so we liked the fact that he seemed really versatile and could make anything sound awesome. He’s like a genius. Really cool and chilled out and we stayed in his house up in Bridgeport where the studio is based. You can wander into the studio when you wake up, go lay some tracks down.
Alisa: Were there a lot of retakes?
Scott: Some! He’s a bit of a perfectionist. Both Peters, actually. Both Peter Katis and our own Peter are perfectionists, so they were insisting that every take had to be absolute perfection.
Pete: We re-recorded the whole of “Bible Belt.”
Scott: We did it once, flew back to the UK with this version that we had tracked, and realized that it was way slower than we’d ever played it live or ever wanted to play it live. When we got back to the studio, we decided we were going to start from scratch and do that one again.
Alisa: Are you writing new songs now?
Pete: Yeah. A lot of the songs on the record are three or four years old. Some of them I even wrote when I was about 19 or 20 and in university. Some of the stuff was mining really old material and some of the stuff we wrote while we were in the studio and it was brand new to us. We started the record in February of last year and finished it in August. Even now, we’ve been playing these songs for years, and it seems that we know these songs inside and out. We’ve already been moving on to the next record. I think I’ve already written half the next record which I refuse to play to any of these guys yet! They’re really boring.
Matt: Wait till we get our hands on them and then they’ll change enough to be good.
Pete: Maybe, yeah!
