The Naked and Famous: TAS In Session

New Zealand's The Naked and Famous, a quintet of tireless road warriors, visited The Alternate Side earlier this summer for a live session of songs from their impressive debut Passive Me, Aggressive You.

The Naked and Famous, led by the dynamic vocal interplay between Thom Powers and Alisa Xayalith, is spending the bulk of their 2011 touring the world with upcoming stops at the Reading and Leeds festivals, Paris' Rock En Seine and Australia's Parklife Festival. In addition to Music Hall of Williamsburg and Brooklyn Bowl this week, they'll also return for a Webster Hall date on October 27. More North American shows in October have been added in Toronto, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago and Boston.

During a recent Stateside stopover while touring with Foals, Thom, Alisa, Aaron Short, Jesse Wood and David Beadle dropped by the TAS studios and played a terrific set - check out the highlights (and video) below ... or listen to the session archived here.

Kara Manning: Your debut album, Passive Me, Aggressive You, just came out recently in the States, but it’s been out since last summer in New Zealand and Australia. It shot to the top of the charts and you are the “it” people in the New Zealand alternative rock scene.

Thom Powers: It’s bizarre. We’d hoped and aimed for the top ten of the college radio in the city where we’re from and it went a little bit further than that. We had no real expectation of the sort of success that we’ve gained off it. We would have been happy just completing the album and putting it out ourselves. It’s been bizarre and a wonderful twist of fate.

Kara: The last song you wrote for Passive Me, Aggressive You was “Punching in a Dream.”

Thom: Yeah, it was finished off weeks before the final mix came back to us. It was a disaster to record. The most horrific recording experience, but very rewarding. It was such a struggle to get through.

Kara: What made it horrific? Thom: The only thing that was simple about it was the drum take which Jesse [Wood] did. He did two takes first thing in the morning and then had a coffee and went to sleep on the couch [in the studio] as he often did after finishing his takes (laughs). Every instrument after that was very difficult to place, lyrics were rewritten, vocals were shifted up a key, down a key, back up a key. Down one semitone (laughs).

Kara: You really have some killer singles on this album. You’ve only been around since 2006 or 2007?

Alisa Xayalith: Yes, around 2007 we were writing but we weren’t a fully formed idea until 2008.

Kara: The lineup has shifted and changed, but the heart of it has been you, Thom and Alisa ….

Alisa: And Aaron actually.

Thom: He was behind the scenes when we first started so a lot of people weren’t as aware that Aaron was as involved as Alisa and I from the start. When we had this idea for the band it was really Alisa and I as the songwriters and Aaron as the producer. At the time he was really focusing on being a studio engineer and working behind the scenes and ended up doing a lot of our live shows, mixing the live sound. He played a lot of interesting and weird electronic stuff with me on the first EPs, but at the time we were writing this four-piece band sound. We weren’t thinking of performing as a five-piece live. Eventually he figured out how to take everything he was doing in the studio into the live realm. That was when we decided we’d make this jump from a lo-fi sound, that we were initially doing with our EPs, to the big, boisterous album.

Kara: Arena-sized. Big album. Thom, you and Alisa have such a gorgeous rapport. In your vocal arrangements, [you remind me a little] of the band Stars.

Alisa: Oh, I love Stars!

Thom: Thank you! You are the only person who has ever made that connection. We love Stars heaps and everyone’s always [comparing us] to the xx. And we’re like, “No! We’re Stars!”

Kara: Is Auckland the place where most of [New Zealand's] bands converge?

Thom: It’s got the most people per capita and most of the bands and record labels are there. The majors anyway. It’s the hub of media and the equivalent of Los Angeles or New York. But it’s still a small music industry.

Kara: So do you automatically look to Australia?

Thom: Yeah, it’s a very natural step for New Zealand bands who haven’t the privilege that we’ve had of interest overseas. We’ve been pulled over to the UK and the US. That’s not a common occurance at all for New Zealand bands. It’s just so far away and such a feat to get them out of the country. It costs so much money. We’re very privileged not to just be going from New Zealand to Australia and being stuck in the Austrasian music industry.

Kara: I heard a story that you purchased a ticket to Big Day Out to see Nine Inch Nails, one of your influences, and then you ended up playing a gig with Trent Reznor?

Thom: It was just to a Nine Inch Nails concert at an arena and we bought tickets to go. News was out that there was a support band slot available so we went into the promoters office for the touring company that was bringing them over. We brought our records and asked if they could send them [to the band]. And they did! They sent them away, [Nine Inch Nails] listened to us and said, yes, we could support them.

Kara: Did you talk to Trent at all? Did he offer you some wonderful advice? Thom: I chatted with him about some stupid fan crap that I remembered (laughs). I spoke to him about an old show where the Melvins were supporting them or something and the crowd was really outrageous. It was at some hockey rink and they started pulling up the floorboards.

Alisa: They had wooden floorboards so everyone was ripping them up and throwing stuff at the Melvins. Thom: And he remembered it.

Kara: Well, Nine Inch Nails is one of your many influences - and you’ve got a broad expanse of bands that you love. But the track “The Sun” has a strong undertow, to me, of what Nine Inch Nails would do if they were The Naked and Famous.

Kara: Do you each claim a song lyrically? Or you share it?

Thom: Some are me, some are Alisa, some are both. All three of those elements put together. A song like “Young Blood” is a good example of shared written parts. I just had the song as a five-piece demo, gave it to Alisa and she wrote all of her lyrics. I think I came up with the “eee yahs.” And that was it. The writing process was very swift. But a song like “Jilted Lovers” was all Alisa. We share lyrical duties all of the time.

Kara: The song that broke you open was “Young Blood” which was the first song, fairly, that you recorded the way you wanted to record.

Thom: Prior to that we’d done it and put it out as a single. The first official album track, though, was “Young Blood.” We had a bunch of demos, we went into a big studio. The five of us working the way that we’d figured out was going to work. Then we went back in and actually re-recorded parts of all of this in that same studio.

Kara: And Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio did a remix of “Young Blood” - how did you hook up with him?

Thom: An A&R fellow at our label, Fiction, flew over to New Zealand when we were playing some shows to sign us. He was the dude we got along with really well. He has contacts with Dave, hit him up, and nagged him and nagged him. But I got to say thanks to Dave electronically.

Kara: You’ve had so much attention paid to you - like BBC Sounds of 2011, the NME Radar Award - how are you keeping yourselves grounded?

Thom: Just by being idiots I think (laughs). Alisa: Things like the BBC Sounds of 2011 and the Radar Awards, they were both surprises. We weren’t expecting anything like that. So anything big that comes our way is just a bonus. It’s like, cool! Sweet! And then we get back to what we’re doing.

You can check out the entire TAS in Session with The Naked and Famous here.