Catching Up With... Akron/Family

Photos by Sebastian Mlynarski

The human heart on Akron/Family's soul-baring Love Is Simple sleeve skipped a few beats when original member Ryan Vanderhoof left to join a Buddhist community not long after its 2007 release. Since then, singer-guitarist Seth Olinsky, bassist Miles Seaton and drummer Dana Janssen have spent the past year strengthening the 25-percent-smaller band's psych-rock muscle to make up for the difference. What emerged is Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free (Dead Oceans), an Americana-soaked outing that aptly features a tie-dyed Old Glory on the cover. Akron/Family's America doesn't only intersect with Mermaid Avenue, though. The collection takes side trips into worldbeat, hardcore, soul and electronic music, but don't call it jamming if that's meant as a pejorative. Paste caught up with Olinsky at his Pennsylvania home to discuss his newfound respect for Woody Guthrie, standing the shadows of Motown's greatness and maybe finding out what Devendra Banhart is like.

Paste: How did a tie-dyed American flag get on the cover of your album, and how have people responded to it?

Olinsky: Around December 2007, we were about to do our first tour as a trio in England. There was going to be one less person onstage with us, so there'd be a visual difference. So we got our friend Amy from Lexie Mountain Boys to make it, kind of in allusion to that giant flag hanging behind Dylan during that one tour in England. From that date on, we used it for every trio gig. Later, we had the flag up in the studio when we were recording and I was looking at it. It had a lot of personal meaning to me other than being just political. When we took the picture, it looked so iconic and it looked amazing. Then, I started freaking out and thought that people would interpret it as a huge political statement and we'd get flooded with questions in interviews about our political stances, and what do we think of Barack Obama? I'm one of the least political people I know. It was the furthest thing from my mind, in a way.

Paste: I've read that your band has formed a musical community with other like-minded artists that is inspired by the collaborations of yesteryear within jazz circles.

Olinsky: When Ryan left, it sort of burst this sort of isolationist bubble and forced us to look outward. It's been a really cool year of befriending other musicians and learning more about our music by teaching it to them. All of a sudden we had a network of all these friends. Media creates these scenes. We're playing a show in Oklahoma, and the kids were like, "What's Devendra Banhart like?" We don't even know Devendra Banhart. He [was] just on the same label and categorized as the same type of music as us. Media hypes up these associations, but we kind of felt alienated by that. In the last year, we've gotten to build relationships with people like Megafaun, Greg Davis, Lexie Mountain Boy, Hamid Drake and William Parker. Various jazz musicians, outsiders and insiders and friends. It started to actually feel like an extended family. It feels a lot more human.

Paste: How did you get song ideas across to each other while creating this album?

Olinsky: Part of the way that we communicate is by the common reference of the canon of music that's available to everyone. You look on anyone's iPod (or at least most people I know), and if you hit shuffle it could be Jay-Z followed by some Sublime Frequencies thing or Ethiopiques, some Bach and then a Coltrane piece. They become reference material for conversations about songwriting and production techniques. A little less mash-up, post-modernism to me and a little bit more of a basis for communicating ideas to each other and getting to a point. Nothing was off-limits. If we're all in the car listening to the New York rap station and there's some weird Middle-Eastern hook we think is cool, it's not like that gets turned directly into a song. But it could get referenced at some point in the recording process. It was never like let's start a band and let's make it sound a little bit like Television and sound a little bit like Talking Heads and that's going to be our shtick, you know?

Paste: Case in point, "Everyone is Guilty" ends with a distinct Motown feel.
Olinsky: I'm not sure if people have picked that up yet. We did at least a third of the record in Detroit with engineer Chris Koltay at his Hi Bias Recordings on Michigan Avenue. Detroit is just a heavy, burned-out town. It's a heavy part of America: all of these beautiful old buildings crumbling and burned down from a time past in the auto industry. His studio is right around the corner from that old 30-story train station inside down by the old Tiger Stadium. You can hear people chipping marble off the walls. "Everyone" was one we tracked there, and it has that Motown thing with the reverb fading up and the strings fading out at the end. American soul music was a big influence in general on this record. Obviously some world music and West African music as well, but also Sly and the Family Stone. All of those Motown arrangements are just masterful: two drummers and tambourine. You don't even question it, it just sounds like Motown. It's incredible to hear just the bass track or the conga track. They're all simple little things, but when you put them together, they're magical.

Paste: How did "Last Year," which is one of the most straightforward tracks you've ever created, come together?
Olinsky: I got hugely into Woody Guthrie for a while last year and what I took away from it was a sense of simplicity. When I first heard him, I was like "Eh, it's ok." When I read his biography, I started to realize the scope of what he saw in human beings and how he turned that scope around and whittled it down into a simple piece of music that anyone can learn or play at home and understand. It's like this little doorway that everyone can walk into, and once you're inside it's this grand kind of vision of America. "Last Year" was written in the studio. We were tracking "Sun Will Shine," and I got inspired. It's the same chords and feel, and it was recorded in a few hours. On some of our older records, the lyrics were more spiritual and referencing specific things. I was trying to remove specifics and have words that were more overarching. More people could relate to them, but they would still have the same pregnancy of meaning. Not that I'm comparing us to Shakespeare or Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan or anything, but the common thread for all of these great writers is that they're able to put it in simple, common language. These very human tales, these very human emotions, these very human dilemmas that everyone goes through. People see it in print and they go, "Yeah that's what I was going through; they put words to what I felt." It's complicated, but to do it in a simple way is a beautiful thing.

Paste: What else has come of your new appreciation of Woody Guthrie?
Olinsky: I wrote this song called "Woody Guthrie's America," which we played at some of the shows on our last tour. We tried to record it and weren't totally happy with it. So we e-mailed a bunch of friends who are musicians to have them record different versions of it, and we'll just post it all free on the Internet. It's going back to the idea of folk where everyone played and reinterpreted songs to tell their own story. Everyone from free-jazz percussionists to electro composers to folk singers take it on. We'll get that running in the next month and everyone can post and contribute.

Paste: "Gravelly Mountains of the Moon" ends with the repeated phrase, "Put me in, let me run with the ball." What is that about?
Olinsky: I have an idea for dream-form music where the song shifts. I'm talking to you, and all of a sudden I'm at my parents house, and then I'm at a football game. I don't know how I got from one place to the next in the dream, but you don't question where you are either. The idea is to try to create these shifts that are pretty jarring, but at the same time, you accept that you are where you are at the time. The reference came in because the last line before "put me in" ends with "approach," the idea was to rhyme "coach" with "approach," but not putting "coach" in there. Some playful word game. Only later I realized that was a John Fogerty song.

Paste: So if the NFL calls?
Olinsky: I'm down. I'm not too proud.