Interview With TheAlbumProject.net

I'm juggling about 5 projects today, so I thought I'd post an excerpt from an interview I did recently.  Enjoy!

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I really have enjoyed listening to ‘They Reappear,’ I was really looking forward to it and it lived up to my expectations.

Oh, thank you.  I’m at a point where I’m unsure about how any of the reviews are going to come back.  It’s a big step for me and it’s much more of an album in a traditional sense than what people are doing now.

There is a clear musical progression away from guitar and piano based songs to a more string oriented sound.  What caused that?

I think this was the first time I was able to do it and that’s the difference.  I think that I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time, but I didn’t know how to play any stringed instruments.  On the previous two albums, I was using keyboard, strings, and I was kind of learning to play the cello, a little bit, so there were a few points where there was a real stringed instrument on some of the older stuff.  But when I started the very first song on this album, all I could make at the time was scary violin sounds.  When you’re trying to record an entire orchestra by yourself, one instrument at a time, you get a lot of practice in because there are parts for 1^st and 2^nd violins, violas and cellos and each one of them needs to be recorded well at least 12 times.  So, for one thing it would take me a long period of time just to get the part right and then getting 12 good takes of it, you know, it took a lot of time, a lot of practice.  On “Day Residue,” if you listen to the early stages of the songs, the strings were there for effect rather than melody or harmony.  But as I got better—and I think that my skill or whatever you want to call it progressed quicker than some of the other instruments I’ve tried because I had to record them so many times—those were two of the first songs recorded and some of the more advanced melody came later on.  But back to your question, I made this album because it was the first time I was able to. 

This album, with its foundations in the strings, feels very much like a movie soundtrack.  Did that just happen or was it intentional?

It was definitely intentional.  I can remember the day that I decided to take the album in that direction.  There was a guy I didn’t know personally, but some of my friends did.  His name is Nathan Johnson and he’s done some work for a few movies.  He did the music for a movie called “Brick” and he also did the music for the more recent movie called “The Brothers Bloom,” my friend Darren [King, of Mute Math], was friends with Nathan and spoke highly of him as being very approachable.  This was back when people were still using Myspace and I sent him a Myspace message and said “you don’t know me, but you’re doing with your life what I would really like to be doing and I’m getting ready to make a new album and I not sure what direction I want to take it.” … And he emailed me right back and said, “Let’s talk on the phone” and for an hour I was exploring these two worlds and I wasn’t sure which one I wanted to listen.  Did I want to do songs and sing or if I wanted to try to get into film, TV, and try to get into that world, because I felt pretty passionate about both.   And he said, “Well, I don’t understand why they have to be in different worlds, why they can’t exist one and the same on the same album.”  I knew that people weren’t listening to music that way very much anymore—listening to albums from start to finish—but I knew that that was what I wanted to do.  And I wanted this album to serve as some sort of resume; I did want to showcase myself as a songwriter, but also as someone who could write and score for film.  I thought, “no one cares about the idea of an album anyway, I’m going to make this a very functional thing for me which will hopefully get me more work in both areas.” So it was a very intentional move.  There are 6 orchestral instrumentals on the album and there are 10 more traditional songs.  I tried to make it a little more cohesive, I tried to make them play off of each other, where there would be themes that were introduced on the instrumental or song that mirror each other throughout the album, that’s why there’s a sense of conversation between the instrumentals and the songs.

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To read the entire interview, click here.  Thanks for reading!

Jeremy

Comments

[Ruth]

Just so you know, I listen to 'They Reappear' ever single day, or at least every other one lately. It calms me and I listen to it in my studio by myself just before I go to sleep...