Catching Up With... The Rentals

After nearly six years off, The Rentals reformed towards the end of 2005 and began playing shows the following year with a mostly new lineup of musicians. Since then the band has been back to work recording new tracks, with the The Last Little Life EP coming out this week (August 14) and plans for a full-length album in 2008. Paste spoke with The Rentals founder and principal songwriter Matt Sharp about returning to the group he disbanded, adjusting to playing the older songs and the effects of the Internet on his band's music.

Paste: After releasing several solo albums, why did you decide to reform The Rentals?

Matt Sharp: There’s a lot that kind of goes into that answer but essentially it just seemed like the most honest place, the most natural place to be at the time. It just seemed like things were guiding me, a whole bunch of different elements coming together to tell me, "This is where you should be." It felt like the right decision at the right time.

P: Did you ever approach any of the old members about rejoining besides Rachel [Haden]?

MS: Rachel’s actually the first person I ever worked with in regards with working on Rentals songs, back around the time we were playing a lot together, when that dog and Weezer were playing a lot of songs together locally. We recorded the majority of the songs that ended up on the first record together in an earlier version of the album. I guess the major difference between what we’re doing now and what we did on the first two albums is that everybody on the first two albums had some great contributions and had their impact on the music but we kind of made those albums with whoever was around at the time, close friends of mine and things like that, but without any sort of commitment or feeling that they really had any sense of ownership to the music. So we really just kind of made the record for fun and for our own enjoyment and afterwards figured out what we were going to do, which was basically what we had to do because everybody that was involved in those first records had some other thing that was an essential part to their musical lives.

P: So does the group now feel more cohesive, like a normal band?

MS: Yeah, that was definitely the first choice of the whole thing, that if we were going to make another Rentals record I wanted to be in a place where the people that were involved were connected and committed and felt that sense of ownership that was sort of missing in the first albums. There’s good things to both methods; the way that we approached the first record that was very exciting because you never knew where things could go and different people could be involved at different times. There was that part of the unknown that was exciting. But at the same time there’s innocence in being able to develop with a group of people and see how they evolve when we get to know each other.

P: What effect has that had on the songwriting for your new EP? In the past it was sometimes difficult to tell if The Rentals were just you writing the songs or if it was a more collaborative effort.

MS: I don’t know if it’s that much different. In some cases with those first two albums I was probably given in some ways more credit than was deserved, maybe people perceived it one way that I was doing everything on the albums. Those people that played on those albums played as they wanted to, it wasn’t completely dictated or anything like that. Basically they would record various things then later on I’d go through them and try to see what made the most sense and try to give the record some kind of focus or direction. With this album it’s rather similar except that the people involved have a sense that this is their group so they have a certain… I’m sorry to say the same words over and over again, but they have a sense of ownership. When we go to perform those songs these are the parts that they came up with. There’s just a connection with the whole process and they’re living with the whole process, which I kind of spared everyone of in the past. Seeing it ferment, the song ideas from their initial place and following through to their conclusion and then releasing them and supporting them and all those kinds of things.

P: Why did you decide to re-record an old song, “Sweetness and Tenderness,” for the EP?

MS: That was one of the very first songs that Sara and I started playing together. Sara was the first person that I talked to when the idea came up to make another Rentals record, she was the catalyst for a lot of that. We’d done a duet of one of her songs together just on her home recording system and the familiarity of interaction, working with female vocals and male vocals back and forth was one of those things that seemed to be effortlessly leading me to say, “Well this is where you should be.” I talked to her about the idea of making another Rentals record and we sat down at the piano and acoustic guitar and started playing “Sweetness and Tenderness,” and I talked to her a lot about not knowing if I would want to re-approach all of those songs the way that they were sonically. I wanted to find a way to approach them that felt more… some kind of bridge between where I’d just been with the solo records and where the first albums were. That was the very first song we started with and it seemed to really feel at home. We would sing that song together and that was one of the songs that we started from when we started asking other people to be involved.

For me it always felt like a highlight of the shows, it felt effortless to perform it that way and also I felt that it gave the people who were generous enough to go out and see those concerts last year some sort of memory from that time.

P: Do you feel more comfortable playing songs from Return of the Rentals than from Seven More Minutes?

MS: With either album that was a little bit of a quandary for me. The wall of sound, the massive amounts of distortion, the more aggressive elements of both albums was a difficult thing to cross sonically. The more I’ve written and the more that I’ve gotten to a place where I think I understand how I like this thing, naturally it doesn’t lend itself to cutting through all those walls of guitars. The second album got more aggressive than the first I think, with the guitar-sided thing, so when we performed last year we performed a lot of the songs that were a little bit more ambient and had a more atmospheric tone to them.

P: Why did you decide to record an EP instead of full length release?

MS: Mainly the songs that we just released on this Last Little Life EP are the beginnings of our home recordings when we started recording in Dan [Joeright]’s house. He’s got a little studio in his garage, a small recording space there, and we were recording for our own sake to see if we were going to make another album where do we want to start from. As we were recording them eventually we realized that these things would probably find their way out into the stratosphere. It seems like everything finds its way onto the net eventually and gets out there, and as we were planning to share those songs with some people, different friends of ours and other people, and get their thoughts on where we’re at we realized that it was inevitable that it was going to be heard, one way or another. So we thought this is a good way for us to get it out, if we release an EP now it was something I was opposed to with the first two Rentals records but I thought, this will give people insight into our process as we’re figuring out where we want to be, where we want to go. These are the first few songs that we’ve worked on together as a group of the new material so it was just a way to let people in on that and kind of get a look at our creative process, the beginnings of where we’re headed anyways.

Many sides of the industry are really changing in a rapid pace. I mean some things don’t change, songwriting and those things and the core part of the creative process and what makes a song good or not good and what makes a band good or not good, those things are the same but everything around it is unbelievable in the way it’s changed. Certainly it’s had an impact on us. I don’t think we would have put out a small collection of our home recordings without that. I think for us that’s been a really good thing. The second Rentals record took forever and a day to get from its inception to its conclusion, and I could probably go through that process all over again and take far too long and get caught up in the details of everything. This is a situation now where there’s definitely more of a sense of needing to do things with more immediacy. It’s kind of exciting in that sense.