Catching Up With… The B-52s

True to their commitment to the entertaining, lighthearted and bizarre, this week, The B-52s released their first album in 16 years. It’s fittingly called Funplex, and it finally brought the four pop titans back to the studio.

They wrote and recorded the album in New York and Georgia on their own dime, then label-less after departing Warner Bros. A subsequent search brought them to both a new producer, Steve Osbourne (New Order, Doves, KT Tunstall), and a new home on Astralwerks.

Paste caught up with singer Cindy Wilson to chat about the band's new record and label, its place in Athens musical history, and where they got those trademark beehives.

Paste: What are your hopes and expectations for Funplex, and how does it feel in relation to your previous work?
Wilson: I can’t tell you how excited I feel. We’ve waited so long—it’s been amazing to have to be so patient. We’ve been working on it for about four years. It’s been a long time from getting the business and getting all our ducks in a row to actually recording and mixing and getting Astralwerks involved. So I am just about to burst, personally, because I think it’s one of our better records, and it’s surprising a lot of people. Even people who wouldn’t necessarily be our fans are talking to me honestly and saying, “You’re really surprising me. It’s a strong record.” I feel already that we’re successful with this record just by getting it out and touring with it again. So whatever it does after this will just be icing on the cake.

Paste: Can you tell me a bit about how you ended up hooking up with Astralwerks for this project?
Wilson: We left Warner Brothers. Our contract was up, and we had written this really great bunch of music and recorded it, actually, and were shopping it around. And Astralwerks was so excited about it when we brought it to them. And they were fans as well of the band, and they felt that we would be a great band to have on their roster. We all benefited and they were as excited as we were to sign with them. They’re a cool label. It reflects on us, too, it’s great.

Paste: It’s been quite a while since you guys released a record. Sixteen years, right?
Wilson: Yeah, since good stuff. We did record “Debbie” and “Hallucinating Pluto” and put them on one of those compilation albums [1998's Time Capsule: Songs for a Future Generation], and we’ve been touring all that time. But we haven’t had a product out. We didn’t promote ourselves. We were kind of under the radar, as it were.

Paste: What were your motivations for laying low for a while, and what brought you back now?
Wilson: It wasn’t really a motivation, it was just that we weren’t writing. We were just doing small tours in the summer and corporates, and making a living off of our music that we had done. But we decided that if we were going to take this thing any further, if we were going to go tour any more, then we had to have some new songs. Actually, that was the reasoning behind working on new music. We just wanted some new songs to do.

Paste: Did you think, when you first got started, that you’d ever end up with seven full-length records?
Wilson: To tell you the truth, some people say it’s not enough, that we’ve been lazy. [laughs] And that’s valid, too.

Paste: In your material, a lot of lyrics have always had to do with geography, especially Athens, Ga. geography. On Funplex, the song “Hot Corner,” obviously [is about a specific intersection in Athens]. I was actually on that corner last night, it was funny. What’s prompted you guys to kind of concentrate on scenes like that, and places?
Wilson: When we’re writing and jamming, we definitely like to go to places in our imaginations; some of those places are rooted in real life and some aren’t. It’s all a journey, and it’s a lot of fun. We paint pictures with lyrics and music and harmonies.

Paste: How do you react to the fact that you guys were the first band to really break out of Athens, that people call you the forerunners of what Athens music is today?
Wilson: There was an energy that we kind of kick-started the whole thing. That’s probably true, because there wasn’t really that much going on. We had to entertain ourselves. We were playing parties in Athens until we went to New York and started playing clubs. I think Athens has always been a very creative town, but I think people saw that you could go and make something from the music, and that was a very important step. People followed suit.

Paste: I read that your band’s image when you first got started, the hairdos and everything, was inspired in by Federico Fellini films...
Wilson: That’s true. That’s partly true.

Paste: What else was it inspired by?
Wilson: There was a certain element in Georgia, the waitresses in Athens at the diners that were still wearing them. Also, we had access to the university library, and so we would go up there and look at old Vogue magazines from the ‘60s and ‘70s and see Diana Vreeland stuff, and just some outrageous visuals, and I think we got inspired by that, too. But definitely Fellini movies. Actually, we were very lucky to have all those influences available.

Paste: Do you like that people expect that specific, eccentric visual image from you guys? Is that something deliberate?
Wilson: Well, yeah, we were entertaining ourselves, basically. And using that energy. We were dressing that way at the beginning to be shocking. It was very juvenile. But at the same time we were dressing from thrift stores, and there was an artistic element involved where you wanted to look interesting, not boring. Now we might not necessarily do bouffants, but we do things to entertain ourselves.

Paste: Since the last time you released an album, the formats people use to record and release music in have pretty much changed completely. How has that been with this recent effort?
Wilson: Well, it was very scary. We really wanted to have people around us that understood the changing climate in the music industry. We were experimenting with ProTools, but the actual business is very scary. How do you make money? Or how do you make it even work in this musical climate? So we just tried to surround ourselves with really smart people and just tried to embrace what the future will be.

Paste: Do you think that they’ve helped you find the answers to those questions? Do you feel confident that you’ll be able to adjust?
Wilson: I think we’re doing it. It’s been a real adventure to see how all this plays out, with all the technology, and doing MySpace and all the communication on websites. We started by word of mouth and it seems like it’s word of mouth again.

Paste: Can you think about your new album and sort of characterize it in a few words?
Wilson: All I can talk about is my experience, and it’s been amazing. Each song, we sat in the studio and Keith Strickland brought in this beautiful music. It was a work of love to do this record. I think you can really tell that we took our time, and that we actually enjoyed what we were doing, because you can’t fake that. We knew that if we were going to try to put out some material at this point that it would have to be pretty strong. I’m so excited because people are telling us that it is. So it’s great. We have amazing melodies, amazing harmonies, and I really just think it’s one of our best records.