The ever-loving (clockwise from left) Tapes 'n Tapes and 'n
One of the most difficult things we've ever had to do in order to interview a band is not having heard been sent the promo and having to ask them about the new album. But hold on, this could work to our advantage! SUPERSWEET sits down with Tapes 'n Tapes and asks them to describe sounds and stories of their eagerly anticipated follow-up album, Walk It Off, to us. Not such a bad idea after all!
1) LE RUSE
Josh Grier (vocals, guitar): The first track is 'Le Ruse' which starts out pretty rocking like a primitive rock track. When we first talked to (Walk It Off's producer) David Fridmann on the phone about the album, I hadn’t even written that song yet, but I had a concept that would be cool if the record just starts out like a second or two of feedback and the song just started with all of us are playing, and singing too. Because almost all our songs before there’s some kind of intro and bit by bit coming into the song and it would be cool to play with just disorientating listeners to start off the record (laughs). ‘Le Ruse’ is not appropriate French, I guess it’s supposed to be ‘La Ruse’ but we just decided it would be funny to call it ‘Le Ruse’.
2) TIME OF SONGS
Josh: The second one is called ‘Time of Songs’, it’s got a sweet little bass line in it. It’s a nice old tiny number so it takes us back.
Matt Kretzman (keyboards, multi-instruments): Old tiny? (Laughs)
Jeremy Hanson (drums): It’s a slower number (smiles).
SS: Do you all help write the music for it?
Josh: Usually I’ll come up with a song idea or a riff or something and then make a really poor quality demo of it and then bring in these guys and then we’ll kind of go from there. ‘Time of Songs’ is fun recording, We tried some stuff on that. We worked it out pretty much before we went into the studio.
3) HANG THEM ALL
Josh: That is I guess the first single, to rock and jam, it’s got fun little guitar parts…
Jeremy: It’s got nice snare sound, tight and fast.
Josh: Everything is recorded really closely. This is the one that’s been given out on the website. ‘Hang Them All’ is just kind of like we knew what song was going to sound like. Usually I don’t have an idea for a song, and I’m like, “Alright I want record to start like this and then I write,” (laughs).
4) HEADSHOCK
Josh: I think that’s like the oldest of the new songs. We’ve had that one for a while. That one I wrote before we even on tour, we’ve been on tour like forever. At least in my mind you can kind of tell that it sounds kind of older. The outro we kind of made up of good old-fashioned jamming.
SS: Has there been a lot of change and style since the last album?
Josh: I don’t know, I guess the sound’s different from the last album because the means of recording were a lot different. We could actually record it in the way that we wanted to, as opposed to the way that we were able to. It’s definitely more rocking, it’s more rock. I think it sounds more like us playing.
Matt: It’s more like live, maybe for the size of the room we play, the drums sound a little bigger.
5) CONQUEST
Josh: That one we messed around with that one for a little bit, didn’t we? I don’t really remember.
Matt: That was maybe yeah. That was more like the first batch song, than the second batch song.
Josh: Yeah that was the second batch song. That was like near the end.
Erik Appelwick (bass): Half of the songs we toured on for a couple of months, playing every night, most of them every night, for the entire of tour for a few months. Then the other half are the ones that we’d written between that last tour and when we were recording in the studio. So that was 4 or 5 months so some of them have a little bit more studio sound than others. Songs like ‘Le Ruse’, ‘Hang Them All’, we’ve toured on those for almost 2 months probably. So we were just going in, set it up, bang bang bang bang, do it again until we were happy with it so it’s got that live band sound to it.
6) SAY BACK SOMETHING
Josh: That’s another one we had on that tour, we actually had it on tour April/May last year but I don’t think we ever played it because we were still trying to sort it out. We got the drum sound for that and we were all pretty excited.
Jeremy: We got the whole kind of drum idea there but we were trying to figure out…
Josh: How do we get this to sound darker…
Jeremy: By not using metallic sound?!
All: (Laughs)
SS: Are there any old songs that you have brought over since the last album?
Josh: Like old old songs? No, they’re all new. Basically, how we made the record before was that we took what we figured were the best songs that we had and recorded them so for this record, going back to get other songs and put on this one would be like, “Oh last time it wasn’t good enough and maybe it would be good enough for this one,” (laughs). Oh well we start afresh, clean slate (smiles).
7) DEMON APPLE
Josh: That song grew on the road, we played that pretty much the whole tour of April/May. It was helpful, I think that’s really flushed itself out playing it every night, which is good because then we can really just rock out, recorded it
Matt: It’s got the feel of playing live.
Erik: There’s no click tracker, it’s just the kind of song that changes a lot throughout but it just has its own feeling.
Josh: You know I was doing the overdub to that and the tempo shifts a lot, I didn’t realise. It was really interesting because when we were doing them because there’s 3-4 guitar parts to the end and I was like, “Man, those guitar parts turn out pretty well lined up considered it’s just all listening and feeling it” (laughs).
SS: Do you know more about recording and how the things work now?
Matt: Yeah every time we go in you learn more and Dave taught me a lot.
Jeremy: There’s like placements and stuff, that’s cool. I didn’t know too much about that before.
Matt: He’s a nice teacher. Whenever we’re like, “Dave, how did you do that?”. He’d be like, “Oh well you do this and this and this,” (laughs).
Erik: Maybe he has many other tricks that we’ll never know about (laughs).
8) BLUNT
Jeremy: We played that one on tour, it’s pretty rocking… dirty.
Josh: For a while that we were recording it I really wanted to fuck it up, we distorted the whole track that you couldn’t make anything out. That was a really bad idea but that was definitely fun to try it (makes weird distorted noise).
Matt: Dave was always willing to indulge in our distortion ideas and we didn’t really ever go that far.
Jeremy: He’s just brilliant!
Josh: He’ll tell you if he thinks it’s a bad idea but if you still really want to do it he’ll still let you do it (laughs).
SS: How do you write the lyrics to most of the songs?
Josh: A lot of times I come up with sounds that I want for words for the song and base on how the song feels, try to pick words that match the feel of the song how the actual sound of vowels and syllables sound. Also, in my mind, most of the time I have a storyline with what’s going on in all these songs. Mostly I like to leave it open so anybody can just make it what they want but I just like to make a story in my head. I don’t know if that works but that’s how I do it.
9) GEORGE MICHAEL
Matt: Not particularly about George Michael, we just thought it would be funny to call a song ‘George Michael’ (laughs).
Josh: Originally the guitar riff at the beginning just sounded like ‘Faith’ a little bit. So we jokingly called it ‘George Michael’. I think initially most of our songs have a joke title and sometimes those titles get changed and the other times we keep them (smiles) and stick with that.
Erik: What was it that I was going to call it something and you were like, “That was the James Blunt record,” and we were like, “We’ll call it that, ‘Blunt’!” (laughs).
Jeremy: it’s a very blunt song, it’s aggressive, it’s blunt!
Josh: It’s an ode to James Blunt, it actually sounds a lot like ‘Beautiful’. So the record is an ode to all of our favourite pop songs (laughs) George… We could have called it ‘George Michael Bolton’ (laughs), then we dropped the ‘Bolton’ at the end of it (laughs).
10) ANVIL
Josh: It kind of came later, it’s a pretty song, nice, vibe-y and Matt does some really nice horn work on it and there’s a breakdown where Matt tweaked all the keyboards and I play very open guitar parts, basses, horn bass…
Matt: It's colourful (smiles).
11) LINES
Josh: That song we played on the tour April/May and about a week or two before we went to record the ending wasn’t quite right so we totally changed the end of it. So we got rid of the end we’ve been playing on tour, and put the new end to it. I guess that’s the song that we’ve kept the title Walk It Off to because after Jeremy came up with the title we were all thinking about it for a couple of weeks and I thought it didn’t really have a reference then realised that in ‘Lines’ there’s a lyric “walk it off” so there we go! It’s got a little nice slow vibe at the beginning and rocking out at the end.
12) THE DIRTY DIRTY
Josh: This one’s a different song. We haven’t actually played that song before we went into the studio. Dave would leave the studio open at night so we could mess around with stuff if we wanted to. So one night we had a couple of beers and decided we’d try recording that song based on discussions that we had previously about how we’d come up with a song based on not having ever really played it. We had 4 or 5 hours left over at the last day of recording. Dave heard the song and he went, “Oh I think we should give that a shot, we should record that song.” So we laid down the track and that’s it!
Matt: Basically we just played it the first time through recorded version and now we had to recreate and we were all like, “Er… How do we do that?” But we got it in the end (laughs).
Josh: I hope we would be able to get you a copy since you came over here to do the interview without knowing and now you can listen to our descriptions of the songs. And maybe you'll be like, "This band doesn’t know anything about this record, they obviously have no clues!" (Laughs)