Bonnaroo 2011: TAS In Session (Audio) with DeVotchKa
Colorado's DeVotchKa is set to play this weekend's Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival tomorrow, June 11, and it's one of many festivals the band has lined up for the summer, both Stateside and overseas. They head to Worthy Farm to play Glastonbury on June 25 and recently signed on for Dave Matthews' Caravan Festival at the Gorge this September.
DeVotchKa, who released their fifth album 100 Lovers earlier this year, play Bonneroo tomorrow at 5:15 p.m. at The Other Tent, preceding - most exciting - Bootsy Collins & The Funk University.
Not long ago, DeVotchKa's Nick Urata and Tom Hagerman dropped by The Alternate Side's Studio A and played something old ("Undone"), something new ("Exhaustible"), something borrowed (Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart") ... and all three were blue:
Alisa Ali: You guys are really known for your grand instrumentation. You’ve brought a fair amount of instruments with you today. How difficult is it lugging all this stuff with you? What have you brought on tour?
Nick Urata: We have a sousaphone which is very large. A stand-up bass. The accordions, of course. A melodica. We brought an extra player named Sergio Mendoza; he’s pretty heavy. He’s got timbales. We’ve got a theramin. Violins, keyboards. We’re ridiculous.
Alisa: Where are the sherpas? So when you’re putting these albums together, do you have an arsenal of instruments in your house or studio? Do you have your own studio?
Nick: We have makeshift studios. We make our actual recordings in a safe place in Tucson, Arizona at Wave Lab Studio. They have even more toys which is probably enabling for people like us. We usually record too much and put a lot on the cutting room floor.
Alisa: But how does that work? Organizing all that sound in your head? There’s a lot of different instruments. What got cut?
Tom Hagerman: Computers are the new scoring, well, overdubbing. You can edit. It’s easy.
Alisa: Everything is recorded separately?
Tom: Not everything. The basics are always on tape. We do it all on tape.
Nick: We’re probably one of the last bands that does it on tape, maybe. We made a conscious effort to be in the same room to get some humanity on there and I think it does help because we’ll do the basic tracks. Then we’ll give it to Tom and he has a whole other twist on it.
Tom: We got an octet of string players together to record all at one time. That was overdubbed, but live.
Alisa: Is that a tough call when you got back to the studio? Who gives that talk to the musicians?
Nick: It’s tough but usually the song speaks for itself. It will let you know if something is a little over the top or too much and it’s getting in the way. The song takes on a life of its own after a while. It directs the rest of us.
Alisa: You had a bunch of musicians with you in the studio, but you don’t have them all on the road with you, do you?
Nick: We like to change it up for different trips, but this time we pared it down and just took a percussionist. We use a lot of percussion on this album. In the past we’ve taken out string quartets and stuff. This time we’re going for pure rhythm (laughs).
Tom: Sergio plays a lot of stuff. For lack of a better term, he’s a multi-instrumentalist. He’s good. We know him through the Wave Lab people in Tucson and he plays in Calexico so it’s good to have him around.
Alisa: Who are the other guests on the record? I know that you have Mauro Refosco of Forro in the Dark.
Nick: He added a lot of fire and brimstone to our record. We pretty much turned him loose on every song on the album. We aspired for a Brazilian sound and he really brought it together for us.
Nick: Tom and I learned this Neil Young song ["Only Love Can Break Your Heart"] for a tribute that happened here in New York and we only got to perform it once. Three minutes goes by [quickly].
Alisa: Did you not feel you got to do it right the first time?
Nick: I could have done it better. I want to redeem myself here.
Alisa: Did you pick this song yourself?
Nick: I got to pick this one. He’s so famous for all of his protest songs, but I always thought that whenever he sang a love song he was always so touching. This one is very simple and visceral. I always found it very romantic even though it’s kind of sad.
Alisa: You seem to be quite the romantic and almost all of the songs on the new record are love songs but hardly any are about successful love.
Nick: True, true. Is there any such thing as a successful love affair (laughs). I don’t want to sound like a pessimist, but just enjoy the ride because it’s all going to end up badly (laughs).
Alisa: But I love that you still have this passion for love.
Nick: Well it’s not all bad. And what else is there in life?
Alisa: When did you write the songs for this new album? Did you write them when you were on tour?
Nick: We started working on them when we were on tour in the brief moments we’d get together without microphones on us. We got the bare bones of them and then we started beating them up over the course of the last two years. We left a lot of room for accidents in the studio. We didn’t want to be totally prepared when we went in. That sounds lazy. Part of it was laziness (laughs). But we wanted to leave room for chance and some spontaneity in the studio. It took us about two years to write that one. The lyrics I’ve been working on for a long time. I usually keep writing them right until the light turns red on the vocal booth. I found this time around that I thought I had great stuff going in, but it wasn’t working when I laid it down so I had to do some on-the-spot inspiration.
Alisa: What was one of the songs that you thought was gold and then you brought it into the studio and thought, “Well, this sucks.”
Nick: I go through that with all of them. One minute we think it’s gold and the next day we’re like, this song sucks. I think everybody goes through that. I went through that on all the lyrics for sure.
Tom: I never felt that writing anything was that easy. It’s sort of laborious, but worthwhile in some kind of existentialist way. (laughs)
Nick: It should be painful. Birth is painful. I don’t know. Some of them, I have had the experience where it sort of writes itself and that’s a wonderful thing. There’s a few lines on the record - I used to get songs, now it’s just lines. Most of the stuff in the song called “Bad Luck Heals” that’s on the record. I don’t remember writing that one, but I was flipping through my lyric book and found it. I wrote it years ago and it still stood this test of time. That one was gift from the universe.
[The song] “Exhaustible” is one of those optimistic love songs with a hint of impending doom. It’s sort of about meeting maybe the love of your life at the wrong time and having to keep on moving on, knowing that should stay but you can’t. Now I’ve just probably ruined it for everybody.
