Deerhoof Q&A originally on Emusic

In keeping with theme of unfiltered Q&A’s , here is the unedited transcript from a fun phoner I did with top five favorite drummer, Greg Saunier of Deerhoof.  This was originally done for EMUSIC’s amazing Q&A section (here is the LINK You’ll LOVE the site DEERHOOF EMUSIC INTERVIEW)

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Here is what was left out:

Deerhoof: Friend Opportunity

The Deerhoof album you always wanted/feared lands face down into your soup. You sniff and paw at it to make sure it’s real, when it suddenly screams “MANGIA!” This is how it works. You don’t listen to a Deerhoof record you stuff yourself, unbuckle the belt three notches and digest it.  Luckily Friend Opportunity leaves you so sated it should come wrapped with a minty toothpick. 

By continuing their sonic strafing of joyless dystopias, Deerhoof manages to evade the shoe gazing irony of postmodern gluttony. Bouncing musically from delicate nuggets of polyphonic euphoria to Zappa style sucker punches to the solar plexus, the band has birthed its defining album.  It should not come as a surprise that by returning to a trio, Matsuzaki, Saunier, and Dieterich are able to serve up such bold and satisfying fare. Just when you think you can’t handle anymore, go for seconds or at least ask for the recipe from drummer Greg Saunier:

eMusic: What goes into making a delicious Deerhoof record?  Do you write on the road, do you woodshed, do you start with music or lyrics?

GS: Well we have three songwriters, so that’s the first thing that tends to remove any formula for how a song gets written, and between the three of us, a song could be written in any sort of way. Such as, the whole song comes to you, music and lyrics, in a flash walking down the street; to you had a vague dream with a couple of melody ideas and you write them down and compile them later; to one person writes the music on guitar and another writes the music and melody which becomes a collaboration.  For example, this one song on Friend Opportunity, “Matchbook Seeks Maniac” I just figured out I have been working on for fourteen years!

eMusic: It’s funny because I thought it was so “Deerhoof” to go from the accessibility of “Matchbook Seeks Maniac” to the dark corners of the end song “Look Away” and have them seem so compatible. To make the mega leap between those two would be the true essence of a Deerhoof fan, right?  Is there a story behind that sequence?

GS: We do end up having themes and stories on our albums for people who care to look for that sort of thing. I mean I am not going to say that someone who doesn’t see a story or doesn’t see a concept in our CD is somehow wrong. You know, I’m happy for people to use our music in any way they wish. But for people who like looking for hidden themes or lurking stories that keep coming back from song to song, yeah; we always try to have that in there.

Strangely and usually, it doesn’t really come together until the very end of the process. We are 80% done with an album and feeling like, you know what these songs do not go together at all! They’re all totally different styles; some of the lyrics aren’t written yet; we don’t have a title yet; we don’t have the artwork yet; we don’t know what we are doing. And, this has happened EVERY single time since 1995. We are pretty much ready to just cancel the whole thing, start over from scratch and just say forget it when something will happen; somebody will say something. We’ll be on tour and every single car ride for hours and hours is taken up with nothing more than, “Hmmm how about this album title or this tile”? Just trying to think how in the world are we going to tie this all together?

In the case of Friend Opportunity, Satomi was talking about somebody we were vaguely acquainted with who recently moved to San Francisco with his Japanese wife. Satomi was thinking, “Wow, maybe this could be a friend opportunity”. In other words, this was an opportunity for her to meet somebody and make a new friend in San Francisco or an opportunity for them to have a friend since they just moved.  When she said ‘friend opportunity’, I thought that was a funny way of putting it and immediately that was it.  That is what this album is about; it just nailed the feeling. I said “Stop! Wait! Don’t say anything for a second. What about that as the title?” Then we realized all the music we had done so far seemed to fit with that idea really well. Then with the lyrics that remained to be nailed down, suddenly it was clear this concept was what we needed to focus on in order to be finished and make sense. All the songs have something to do with that opportunity of reaching out to people when you are alone. I think of the first song, “The Perfect Me”, as a very lonely song, although it’s energetic.

eMusic:  I saw it as a special invitation to new listeners.

GS: Yes, an invitation

eMusic: Yes it’s dark, but it seems like an invitation to come into this world.  John’s guitar work is extremely engaging and there seems to be this golden thread you paint up and spotlight.

GS:  Well “Look Away” was the first music written for the album. John had actually written almost all of that music for a silent movie soundtrack we basically created at the beginning of 2006 and which we performed at the San Francisco International Film Festival in March. It’s an hour long movie but we condensed the music down to this approximately twelve minute song which didn’t have any lyrics. Yet, once we had the album title and had the idea of what we wanted the album to be, I started thinking of that song as about this person that had failed to create relationships with other people and who was sort of lost in their own deluded lonely fantasy world. But “Matchbook Seeks Maniac” is concerned with maybe the last throes of somebody pronouncing something to the world. It has to do with someone obsessed with their own power, and maybe having power makes them more insane. In fact their being crazy gets them more power. If you look at real life examples from the world of politics there seems to be this weird, cyclical relationship between power and insanity. They just seem to feed off each other. Yet, any glory that might have been in this over endowed person’s fantasy fades away and the person ends up lonely, stuck in their room, living out the same fantasy over and over again. I see it as kind of a depressing end. (laughs)

eMusic: You opened for The Roots, Radiohead, Flaming Lips and Wilco before this album. By musical osmosis did any of their sonic qualities bleed into your writing or playing?

GS:  To call it osmosis would make it sound a little too accidental. Even before we played with any of those bands we were huge fans.

eMusic: I remember receiving a call from ?uestlove asking me to put you in touch with the Roots regarding opening for them and thinking that seemed like an odd pairing. However, in a way it makes perfect sense.

GS: You might not even be aware of how much of a thrill or full circle feeling was happening there for us. Satomi and I first saw the Roots in 1996 in San Francisco and basically we were totally devastated, just blown away. So for Deerhoof opening for the Roots didn’t seem weird at all.  I still have this vision in my mind of hearing and seeing him play and the way he tuned his drums and attacked them and how simple his kit was and using that as some kind of standard or benchmark. It’s the same with The Flaming Lips; it’s the same with Radiohead, and it’s the same with Wilco. When we hear their music it’s not necessarily that we want to imitate any of those bands, but when we recorded Friend Opportunity we were trying to create a response to their music. As if the Roots concert was the question and now we have to try and come up with an answer, a response to their call. The same is very much true with Radiohead. We were actually mixing Friend Opportunity while we were on tour opening for Radiohead, so literally we would play a show in a soccer stadium in front of twenty thousand people somewhere. Then go out in the audience, stand there and watch the greatest concert you’d ever seen in your life. You know shedding tears with everyone around you, total strangers, with everyone’s jaws on the floor saying “I can’t believe a concert can be this good” and then going straight back to our room, sitting down at the computer and saying, “okay, let’s do our album now” while just feeling like, god this pales so miserably in comparison.  I mean all these bands are just so ambitious.  They are all popular but they’re also extremely artistic. I mean the Flaming Lips’ At War with the Mystics was a deliberate model we chose for this album.  We were constantly comparing the mixes we were doing to say, “Free Radicals” and wondering why doesn’t ours sound as good? We were amazed just how close up everything sounded and how everything just had so much punch, while sounding funny and surprising. So with any of these bands if you are doing a response to their call you can imagine the thrill of then realizing they not only heard our response and must have heard something in it to reach out and ask if we wanted to play together. It is mind blowing. Once you’ve put these people up on pedestals, you know, here’s my hero ?uestlove, here’s my hero Wayne Coyne, or here’s my hero Thom Yorke and then to meet them and find them to be real human beings who don’t disappoint you in the slightest, it’s just mind blowing

Emusic: How did returning to a trio effect the album musically? Was it a natural evolution?

GS:  Well it didn’t change the evolution of the band because I don’t think Deerhoof has ever had anything firm enough from which to evolve. Evolution also implies getting better or going higher up the chain and rather I feel we always just done something different each time like starting from scratch. In a way it’s like we started over the band every time we started an album. Even when we haven’t had line-up changes, every time we sit down and play something new it’s like we are just starting from zero. It’s not as though we necessarily try to do that, it’s just that we can’t think of anything else. When somebody thinks of a new song we don’t have any control over what that song is going to be beforehand.  I can’t plan out and say, “okay, I’m going to write a ‘rage-rock’ song now. I mean it’s just as hard to predict what you are going to write as it impossible to predict what you are going to dream about tonight.

Emusic: Isn’t that just a matter of being open to the muse? If you are really and truly receptive to the powers that be when looking inspiration, when the inspiration tells you to play a Motorhead riff than if you’re truly open you should play a Motorhead riff even if it doesn’t fit in with your scene…

GS: or target demographic

eMusic: Then that’s not really art; you are simply fabricating instead of being a vessel right?.

GS:  Yet, I don’t want to put it down and make that sound awful, because my point is I actually admire and envy the talent of people who are able to do that, but we just aren’t those people.  We don’t know how to do anything according to a system, formula, or plan, so even when we did three different albums with four people in the band there still is total upheaval every time we sit down to record something because we find ourselves saying, “How in the world are we supposed to play this! We’ve never played anything like this before. I don’t know the first thing about trying to play a song like this.” But, we teach each other how to do it as if total beginners with almost every song.

eMusic: After thirteen years as a band is being an independent curator of your own career a boon or a bane?  Do you ever wish Clive Davis would call?

GS: Hmm that a good but tough question. For us it’s worked out amazingly well. I really don’t wish to be on any other label, although I think there may be times our label wishes we were on a different label. (laughs) In a way I can’t answer the question because we have never been in any other situation, but in a way I feel like with the digital distribution now available to bands like us, we’re really on the Itunes label, the eMusic label, or even just leaking stuff you are on the Internet somewhere, it’s all your label and I think that has been amazing for us.  Every time we travel to a new city where we have never played or some small town where there is no uber hip record store, people still come to the show and say they found us online somewhere. In other words we are totally into ANY format that music can take be it an MP3, an LP, or a tape, and any use that our music can be put to is okay by us.