Freelance Whales: TAS In Session
Since Freelance Whales released its 2009 debut, Weathervanes, the local indie pop band has gone from busking on Brooklyn street corners to worldwide tours, supporting the likes of Foals, Tokyo Police Club and Fanfarlo.
Secure in their own sound now, Freelance Whales' latest album, Diluvia, even takes on a sci-fi and celestial concept with songs like "Red Star" and "Land Features." The band launches a headlining tour in January (check out the TAS ticket giveaway this week) and will play Maxwell's in Hoboken on January 15 and Music Hall of Williamsburg on January 29.
Not long ago, Freelance Whales — Judah Dadone, Doris Cellar, Chuck Criss, Keivn Read and Jacob Hyman — visited The Alternate Side's Studio A for a session, airing on TAS on 91.5 WNYE and streaming online this Friday, December 21, at 11 a.m. EST.
UPDATE: Listen to the Freelance Whales' session now in the WFUV archives.
Diluvia is available now on Mom + Pop Records:
Russ Borris: [Your] brand new record is called Diluvia. Do you want to talk a little about how the process may have differed [from your first album]?
Judah Dadone: I don’t think it could have been any more different. Basically, with the first record we were all looking for bands but not really in bands. I was putting some songs together and putting them up on the internet and using them as these little pieces of bait to find other musicians. That’s how this band got together.
Russ: So instead of want ads, you put out music to hook people that way? Then, initially, instead of wondering, “Am I meeting a guy who really knows what he’s talking about,” now [they] know [your] headspace.
Judah: Totally. Language fails constantly when we try to describe what our project is going to sound like. You’re like, “It’s going to be My Bloody Valentine mixed with some Philip Glass minimalism” or something like that. Language always fails. So the idea was to make some recordings and put them out there. People could hear it and I could say, “Well, is this something you may want to be a part of?” We all gathered around those songs. With this process, after having toured for a couple years straight, almost, working that material, it became really evident that everyone in this band had a lot of great ideas. We needed to find some way to harvest them and work them into some sort of large framework together. That’s kind of how Diluvia started; taking lots of disparate ideas and pulling them into the same part of the universe.
Russ: You can definitely hear that there are a lot of elements coming together. You don’t get the sense they’re coming from one head. You talked about having so much time on the road; at the end of it, do you feel that you have a million ideas? Or do you feel like [you need] to take a few weeks to chill out before you start working on new stuff?
Doris Cellar: I feel like when you’re dealing with art and music, it’s better to be a bit more spontaneous, so I couldn’t even answer that question. You never really know when an inspiration strikes.
Russ: It’s not up to you.
Doris: Right. We got off the road and we tried to write. We wrote a little bit and then we recorded demos in our rehearsal space. And then we went on into a real studio.
Judah: We spent a lot of time in upstate New York, in the Catskills, just trying to open up our receivers. It does feel sometimes like you can’t really pencil in when you’re going to be creative. It’s important to be on call for something like that so I think we’re all “on call” for 24 hours. But we did spend a lot of time after the last bit of touring in the Catskills, to see what we couldn’t coax out of ourselves with brute force. It was a lot of fun and a great way to unwind. Over the course of the next few months, more stuff started surfacing. Certainly, with this group of people, there’s never any dearth of ideas. The trick is more figuring out what they mean, what they feel like, and what sort of landscape they take place in.
Russ: Maybe pare them down a little bit?
Judah: We have so many ideas and we’re so used to ideas not making it into songs, I feel like we have our own Darwinian system of evolution where ideas are constantly surviving and dyiing. I think it’s great because we learn to not take that very personally as creators. We’re just trying to have a lot of idea comes out, look at them externally, and curate them. Sometimes we feel like the songs are little machines or puzzles and you need a certain cog to perform the specific function. That’s a bit part of the creative process: figuring out how pieces fit together and function.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Yc6BqNvpZg]
Russ: It’s interesting, Judah, when you’re talking about these songs being almost like machines. There’s something spacey about this record that feels really expansive. How did these different instruments work their way in?
Judah: It’s a lot of the same instruments, actually. I think we’re using them to a different effect. There’s a lot of synthesizers. We had a lot of synthesizers in our previous work, but it became obvious that when we started using some new synthesizers and nicer ones, we wanted to use them to make a bigger sound. It seemed like a natural progression because I think a lot of bands do something first where they do a piece of work that feels confined and small. For us, Weathervanes was that way. It was almost claustrophobically small. It was supposed to take place in a small house and each song was to make you feel like you were moving to a different room. But I think it’s natural on a second record to try to project outwards into a bigger space. A lot of great bands have done that, so it made sense for us. We needed to figure out a way where we could get that sensation without making it sound like arena rock. We focused on things that, to us, felt celestial; that was because of things that we were being inspired by in culture. Not necessarily in music, but in film, television, science fiction and pseudo-sciences.
Doris: We went from being on the road with absolutely no TV, no entertainment except our ourselves, and then going home and watching a bunch of movies. Some of us were watching “Battlestar [Galactica]” and some of us were watching Carl Sagan.
Judah: Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos.”
Doris: That was a little bit of an inspiration for us too.
Judah: Ancient aliens. Sci-fi and fantasy influence. But it’s almost misrepresentative to say something like that in an interview like this.
Russ: Well, something like that can come off as very cold, but it doesn’t. There’s plenty of warmth in the production of these songs. Judah: It’s the same thing you could say about a show like “Battlestar Galactica” because it’s a show about humans, human emotions and situations.
Doris: Truth is that we recorded in a spaceship.
Russ: “Spitting Image” was another song you put out there. Dory, you took lead on that. How did that one come about?
Doris: I’m just so great! (laughs)
Russ: That’s all it was?
Doris: No, well, I had a song idea and I brought the demo to band. That and “Follow Through,” the whole idea was there as opposed to little bits and parts. I brought the song, everyone just loved it and they tweaked it. We re-arranged some of the vocals and some of the lyrics got changed.
Judah: I wrote some banjo parts to it too. It was a good exercise in taking something that came from one mind and then trying to figure out all of the interesting ways to pull it into this existing framework, or an existing universe.
Russ: Like, here’s a Doris song, but now the Doris song becomes a Freelance Whales song.
Judah: Exactly. For Doris, because she does a lot of her own stuff and a lot of it sounds different from the rest of our group, she has to make a concerted effort to make a piece of music that might work better for us.
Doris: Yes, when I started working on the song, I had it in mind that it was for the band.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IJK4tZ0CGk]
Russ: You’ve got a lot of gear. Have you guys ever misplaced something and didn’t realize it?
Judah: There’s stuff that breaks all of the time. I think for the amount of gear that we have, and what a strange house of cards our entire mix is, it’s really incredible how infrequently things fail. Things should be failing all of the time. Today, for instance, we have a lot of old analogue synthesizers and they have specific cables, so if you break a cable, then you have to hunt for one. We had one break today and fortunately one of the guys [at WFUV] had a soldering gun and fixed it on the spot. Man, you really just saved us.
Chuck Chriss: You guys are pros at WFUV.
Judah: We do forget things all of the time. It’s embarrassing.
Doris: We’ve had mallets stolen onstage.
Judah: We lose mallets for the glockenspiel all of the time. When people are done with them, they’ll throw them on the ground and someone will grab them.
Doris: And they’re so hard to find!
Chuck: Someone once stole our glockenspiel from the van. They broke into the van and didn’t take anything except the glockenspiel. There’s some thief running around with a glockenspiel.
Judah: He’s been trying to pawn that.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPjCGF1XfcI]
