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|
| Date |
MAY 20 |
| Type |
Interview |
| Source |
IGN Music |
| Title |
Goldfrapp interview |
| Country |
USA |
| Journalist/Photographer |
Todd Gilchrist / Serge LeBlon |
| Pix |
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| Text |
Will Gregory discusses the group's changing musical dynamic.
Just as the music formerly known as trip-hop was going through its death throes back in 2000, Goldfrapp issued their debut album Felt Mountain a dreamy bit of electronic pop that drew from the same well as folks like Portishead and Air. Flash forward eight years later and Goldfrapp is still going strong, with three more albums under their belt and the well-earned reputation for being musical chameleons thank to an ever-evolving sound that borrows inspiration from classic electronica, film soundtracks and hip-hop for an indelible, distinctively cinematic sound.
Goldfrapp's latest album is Seventh Tree, a disc full of jangly, acoustic flourishes and surprisingly sunny harmonies. Following their performance at the 2008 Coachella Arts and Music Festival, IGN caught up with band member Will Gregory via telephone to talk about his longtime collaboration with lead singer Alison Goldfrapp. In addition to discussing their new album Seventh Tree, Gregory talks about translating the band's classically electronic sound to a live setting, and surviving the commercial pressures of the music industry to remain a formidable creative force.
IGN Music: What generally is the process by which you translate the sound of your albums to a live setting?
Will Gregory: In the studio, with minimal resources you can go pretty much anywhere. We do have a big string section we usually record, but you can layer up the voices and you can get all of these instruments, and to reproduce that live, totally live and faithfully, would be involving a cast of thousands so we can't do that. So there's a sort of slight accountancy of clipboards and wagging fingers saying "nuh-uh," so it's a head-scratch. I think we've got two two extra musicians this time, so we're seven on stage and this time we've got a harp and an acoustic guitar, which is exciting because it opens up the whole thing quite a lot. It means we can do some things totally acoustically, which has been great because we've done some radio sessions and that's fun - just to put a mic up in a room and just play.
IGN: Because your sets presumably feature songs from all of your albums, do you try and update or adapt older, more electronic songs with a more acoustic sound?
Gregory: We are sort of trying a kind of hillbilly version, but I'm not sure how well that's working out (laughs). We've begun definitely to experiment with things like that, but it is very much focused on this latest album, Seventh Tree, and then fit in other songs from the previous album that kind of go along with it. I think we've got something now, I think we're really pleased with it, and because we have four albums' worth, we're really into all of the songs that sometimes you look back and think, "I don't think that's very good," or your feeling about it changes. But we have a set that we feel really good about.
IGN: What was sort of the impetus for changing your sound on Seventh Tree from that of your previous albums?
Gregory: I think we both felt the need to shut things down a bit. I think we felt that maybe with Supernature, the voice had been sort of caricatured or stylized and processed, and we wanted to go back to a much more intimate and personal solo voice where the character of the music and the emotion is coming from that. Sometimes we did some jams which were just with one instrument and her voice to do the writing with, and that just felt really nice, you know, that space. Sometimes we would look back at Supernature and think we're working really hard on our drama here - maybe we don't have to work as hard as that. You can make things dramatic and startling with much more minimal resources and I think that was part of the enjoyment and the fun of working on [the album]. Or the exploration - trying to figure out another way of getting those moments in drama that we're always after.
IGN: Your first album sounded like it was heavily influenced by John Barry, and this one does too - albeit in more of his Midnight Cowboy phase. Were there any sounds or sources of inspiration that you borrowed from when working on Seventh Tree?
Gregory: I think that we always like the sort of Cinemascope drama that you get from some of those '60s films, but I don't think it's anything really as direct as a particular composer or record. I think it's more of an amalgamation of things; there are similarities between Felt Mountain and Seventh Tree, but there's also big differences. There's more of an American flavor - we've been to America a few times and we've gotten quite influenced by the L.A. atmosphere and I think there's more of a ray of Californian sunshine in there than the slightly more glacial atmosphere of Felt Mountain. But it's hard to know what you're doing when you're doing it, and sometimes it's better not to know (laughs). So I think what we ended up with is something warmer and more intimate and working again with a lot of beats; I think we found that once the drums kick off, even though it can be groovy, it can sort of implode that wit and we really want that widescreen sound. Sometimes you can just create that with one strum of the acoustic guitar, and that's quite an exciting discovery. I mean, other people knew about that, but maybe we didn't (laughs). I don't know.
IGN: Did that change the way you collaborated with Alison to combine the music and lyrics, specifically in terms of being more or less literal about the subject matter of each song?
Gregory: It's not really like that. Alison does write all of the lyrics, but very often with the music we're writing music together and there aren't lyrics - she's just using her voice as an instrument and the lyrics come later. At the same time she does have a melody and a lyric that she's playing with that we're both hunting for the musical outfit to go with, but it kind of all works together. I think it tends to be everything building at the same time, and we're both struggling and searching for the musical sort of atmosphere, and sometimes that comes first and the lyrics come later.
IGN: Is the process of discovering what works or doesn't work a largely intuitive one? Is there any kind of process or formula for putting together your songs?
Gregory: No, I don't think we know. I think that we're skeptical about formulas, the idea of them; the idea of turning the handle and something popping out is too redolent of a factory-process that we're not into. I think some people do that and if that works for them, then fantastic, but I think we've always veered away from that, so we're in a constant world of doubt. We don't know what we're doing, we're intuitively stumbling around - but we feel more experienced about it, and sometimes we're able to stop the process sooner because I think we can tell maybe quicker that it's going somewhere we don't want to go. But that's all you can do, really. In some ways, nothing has changed about the way we write; it's always been like that and obviously your life changes and things happen to you and everything you do has a sort of, I don't know if it's autobiographical, necessarily, but you're not really in control of that, either.
IGN: Is that something you have to work on over a period time to create that kind of stylistic continuity?
Gregory: I think that after a point the stumbling becomes a bit more illuminated because you've got maybe four or five tunes that you like going on, and then you can sort of see where things might be going, if there's sort of a direction. But it just comes together, whatever word you use, organically, but it is very much like that. There is a sense that you're just trying to discover what the hell it is that you're doing and that you go along; it feels like more of a judgment, but we were surprised when we had written everything and we found an order for it because it did seem to be a sort of thread that joined it all together. But I guess that thread is the two of us just living through the year-plus it took us to write it, and that's kind of how it happened.
IGN: Is that kind of cohesion important to you as an artist? Particularly now that so much of music is driven and eventually bought in single form, is it important to have an album that is cohesive?
Gregory: It's important, but I just think it's nice that they all exist in the same place. It's nice that there's this sort of cumulative power that builds up, but I think an album should feel like a gig, you know, that you can hold everyone's attention and take them on a journey through the whole thing. And yes, everyone is buying singles or their little snippets of it, and they can do that if they want, but eventually they will tune into what you want to do - and I think we want them to sit down with the whole thing and enjoy it (laughs).
IGN: Do you feel an obligation to continue exploring different musical directions, or does that put pressure on you to maintain a certain kind of public persona as experimenters?
Gregory: You can only maintain your impression of yourself, I think, and I don't think we think very much about the audience - I mean, not when we're writing it. Afterwards we do, we're like oh my God, will people be able to deal with that? But I think when you're doing each [album] you just follow your nose and just go with what's happening, and you can't second-guess yourself, or else otherwise you're in trouble if you try and do that. So that's all that we do, really. |
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