Catching Up With... Apollo Sunshine :: Features Music :: Articles

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Boston band Apollo Sunshine first appeared on the radar in 2003, when it released promising debut Katonah. Two years later, in 2005, the band stepped it up with an impressive self-titled sophomore album that wound up at #13 on Paste’s Best Albums of the Year list. This summer, Apollo Sunshine released psychedelic opus Shall Noise Upon, and today the powerhouse live band kicks off its fall tour, with two solid months of shows scheduled for Europe and the U.S.

Paste recently caught up with AS bandmates Jeremy Black, Jesse Gallagher and Sam Cohen to talk about the new album, their almost-finished stop-motion-animation video, and hitting the road in a school bus powered by fryer grease.

Paste: Last time I saw you guys was about a year ago—you came by the office to play a few songs.

Sam: Yeah, we were on our way down to play Langerado last summer.

Paste: At that time, you were between records, you’d just done an instrumental project that you ended up shelving. With the latest album, Shall Noise Upon, was it a completely new project or was it taken from some of the material you’d already been working on and then developed further?

Sam: It was a new project. None of the stuff from the instrumental album made it on there—it was all more recent.

Jeremy: Actually, some of the instrumental stuff was used for the interludes on the new album.

Sam: What instrumental stuff did we use?

Jeremy: “Wolf Frog White.”

Sam: Oh, that’s true. The drum beat from that.

Jesse: We used about 10 seconds of a drumbeat. Yeah. [laughter]

Sam: The other two hours of material are still sitting on a shelf.

Paste: So where did you record the new album? Tell me a little bit about the sessions for Shall Noise Upon.

Sam: We were at this place Old Soul Studios in Catskills, N.Y. It’s this cool studio, this guy’s house really, and he [he being Kenny “The Wolf” Siegal, of the band Johnny Society] filled it with this amazing collection of instruments and good recording gear. It’s his own studio. Just in the last little while, bands like us have started using it and making records there. It’s a sweet, sweet place because it feels like a home—it doesn’t have the typical professional-studio vibe.

Paste: What did the rest of you like about this place?

Jeremy: It was just real inspiring to be there, and have all the gear and equipment and instruments he has. It’s just the kind of place you walk into and want to make music. There’s something in the air when you’re in there.

Jesse: It was situated in a cool area in New York. It was in the Catskill Mountains, and it was right down the street from this really nice bird sanctuary a bunch of us would go check out in the morning. And you could just get on a bike and roll around in some nature. It had an old American vibe to it.

Paste: That kind of setting, and having all these instruments around—did that shape the sound of the record?

Jeremy: Definitely. We didn’t really go there with too much intention of what we were doing. I mean, I think we knew in our heads what we were gonna do, but...

Jesse: Yeah, we just let it come out as we got there and got comfortable. It was just a really nice place.

Paste: Your past records have been ambitious, but Shall Noise Upon feels even more so. There’s all this complex instrumentation and arranging. Do you feel like you’ve developed as arrangers?

Sam: On this record, we just let our imaginations run wild. It was like the opposite of the other way of making a record, which is: Write the songs, rehearse and then just go in and blast it out perfectly. We were much more imagining things, considering all possibilities, and that led to, “you know what’d be great here is a whole string section, or a bunch of horns,” and just going for it and indulging in every far-out idea we had. And that was the goal, to make a record that sounded like it was from all over the world at all times. And we got a bunch of friends to help us make it sound like that.

Jesse: It was great to have the support of a label [World’s Fair imprint, Headless Heroes] that would put us in the studio for a long time. The situation, the place was just perfect—everyone had their own bedroom, it was this big-ass old house. You’d wake up in the morning and start playing a pump organ; someone would come in and plug in a Theremin. We weren’t bound to the whole, “OK, I’m the bass player, you’re the guitar player”—It was very much like, “let’s just craft some sonic, weird shit.” And the fact that we got to stay there for a long time and experiment without feeling pressured to have something coming out was nice.