high places q&a

About two weeks ago I spent roughly three hours talking with High Places at a cafe in Brooklyn. You can find the best portions of the chat here at eMusic, but the conversation had such a nice flow to it that I thought I would post the entire thing as well. It starts out abruptly because I didn’t start the tape recorder right at the start, but everything else is pretty self-explanatory. And can I just state for the record: Rob and Mary are 1000000% the best people ever. Say hi to them when you see them play. They’ll say hi right back!

YANCEY: Did you have a picture of an end result at all when you started?

MARY: No, we really didn’t.

ROB: Well, musically a little bit.

MARY: But as far as the band is concerned – we wanted to go on one tour of the West Coast.

YANCEY: But not even, like, “I don’t want to have to have a day job?”

ROB: No way.

MARY: I mean, we dreamt of that, but we didn’t think it was possible. We just didn’t feel with what we were doing, there was any way. We didn’t think the band would last more than a few months and I think every time we’d get another show booked at that beginning stage, we were just like “It’s still happening! It’s still going on!”

ROB: Yeah, we’d get asked to play a show and go, “Weird.” And then get asked to play another one and go, “Weird.” What happened was, originally, we lived in two different cities and it was May and [Mary] was gonna go to grad school in the fall and we were like, “Let just do this project over the summer and go on tour and hang out with friends.”

YANCEY: This is this past May? Like last year?

MARY: 2006.

ROB: So Mary said, “Let’s go on tour and have fun with it.” We played a couple of shows in New York, then went on tour. And when we came back we got more shows offered to us. Then [Mary] just said “I don’t want to go to grad school yet.” So that got put on hiatus and it kinda just kept perpetuating and going and [we kept] having fun. Really early things started happening that were really weird. Three months into our existence, someone from Alaska asked us to come play and we just realized “Wow, this is more fun that what we could be doing.”

MARY: I don’t think it was just that, though. It was what we wanted to be doing, we just didn’t know that it could happen, I guess? We played some outdoor festival shows in Brooklyn that first summer, and those were pretty amazing — the lineups were just great and there were big crowds there. A lot of the crowds seemed to be kids who find bands for their colleges to come play, so then we got all these college shows. Then that’s when we started being like, “Maaaybe someday we wouldn’t have to have a day job.” ‘Cause, you know, colleges have some pretty insane budgets.

YANCEY: You say you didn’t think it was gonna last, but you talk about that in the past tense. So now do you feel like this is what you do?

MARY: Yeah, it’s totally what we do, now. I mean, I babysit an eight year-old a few days a week.

YANCEY: That’s your day job?

MARY: Yeah, that’s it.

ROB: I used to teach printmaking at Pratt, but I hated it, so I split. Now I just do freelance stuff when I need money. Like around the holidays, we don’t play as much.

YANCEY: Freelance design stuff?

ROB: Yeah. I never studied it – I’m kind of a hack. It’s really just, like, pushing buttons. But it’s easy, so I just do it.

YANCEY: Are you good at it?

MARY: [NODS YES EMPHATICALLY]

ROB: It’s not really something you’re good at. It’s mostly text field-based, so you have a bunch of copy and you have to make it flow around images. That’s sorta what I do. It’s not real exciting. I guess it’s a specific skill – some people are really terrible at it. It’s not a fun skill, though. I used to do drywall and roofing and I actually found that to be more creative. Well, roofing and drywall suck, but other things like decks I like building. I kind of feel like carpentry is more interesting to me, but this I can just roll out of bed and work on it when I need to.

YANCEY: You guys are from Michigan, right?

MARY: I am. Rob’s from Philadelphia.

ROB: But I’ve lived [in New York] for awhile.

MARY: I’ve lived [in New York] as long as the band – since May 2006.

YANCEY: And it was the band that made you move here?

MARY: Yeah. Also just thinking we were going on tour.

YANCEY: Where were you in Michigan?

MARY: Kalamazoo. That’s where I grew up and went to college.

YANCEY: So how was it coming here?

MARY: Really different. I had only been to Brooklyn once when I moved here and that was for two days. That was when I met Rob. It’s different, but my family always traveled a lot. I don’t feel like I was totally sheltered in rural Michigan.

YANCEY: You weren’t a farmgirl.

MARY: No, no. But it was still a big adjustment. I remember the day it hit me when I learned how to relax in the city. It’s this new thing.

ROB: Yeah, feeling like you have a sense of space that’s yours.

MARY: Yeah. ‘Cause we started the band right when I moved here. We were kind of holed up in the apartment working on this and I felt like I was secretly living in New York. I didn’t really know anything in the city or anyone, but was in a weird retreat.

YANCEY: Did you start with that three block area that you were comfortable with, then slowly spread that out? Then you had the one train stop where you knew what was outside the station?

MARY: Yeah, totally.

ROB: I think at one point, we thought maybe we were gonna move to California.

MARY: Still might, someday.

ROB: My dream – I don’t know about [Mary’s] – is to see if we can somehow live bi-coastal. I really like it out there a lot. This last trip, I think we did just as well in Los Angeles as we normally do here.

MARY: The problem with Los Angeles is that there are, like, two venues.

ROB: Not really, there are a lot of weird art spaces.

MARY: Yeah, it’s not the same though. Here there are just so many and they’re always changing.

ROB: That why I kinda don’t want to always live in one place. That’s kind of an issue. I don’t think I want to live out there just to do the band. I just like California. I’ve always lived in the Northeast, but everyone always thinks I’m from out there.

MARY: Southern California in the winter time is pretty rad.

ROB: Not the last time we were there.

MARY: Even still, it was like 50 [degrees] when we were there. That’s “cold.” [Laughs]

YANCEY: So it was when you started getting these not-terribly-paying college shows that it started to seem “real”?

MARY: Yeah, I think so. We just started playing all the time. Even until recently, we pretty much played every weekend. Sometimes even two or three times a week.

ROB: What’s cool in New York is you can do that. The scene here is so diverse – nobody sounds like anybody else. When I think of certain bands, I can’t think of anybody who sounds like them. No one sounds like Necking, no one sounds like These are Powers. They all sounds like themselves. I don’t know if you know those bands.

YANCEY: Yeah, I do.

ROB: Ok, yeah. They’re all really unique bands. Even a band that’s more pop structured, like cAUSE co-MOTION! is still really a weird, unique band.

YANCEY: So when was the first Todd P show?

MARY: Our second show. Our first show ever in New York. Our first show ever was in Massachusetts with Japanther. We played the most experimental set of all time [Laughs]. I had my bassoon and we covered Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn.” We shut it down halfway through the song and were just like “This is horrible!” That’s the only time we’ve ever covered a song.

ROB: But we got a show at Alfred University out of that.

MARY: Yeah we played for a handful of minutes [Laughs].

ROB: We played a 12 minute set.

MARY: Did we? I thought that was our tour length.

ROB: Nah, our tour length was about 16 minutes. Our songs used to be really short – they were like a minute and a half long.

MARY: Then our first show in New York was a Todd P show with Matt & Kim. That was kind of a turning point for them, actually. There were like 200 kids freaking out and I think they were thinking, “Whoa, we’re gonna pay our rent this month.”

ROB: What happened was, if you go back even further, we met initially because [Mary] met Japanther and the Death Set when one of the Death Set dudes was roadie-ing for Japanther. They played Michigan and she played with them, solo. Then she was in New York auditioning and hanging out with my friend Bo who used to be in the Death Set and we met. At that point, my solo thing - which isn’t super active, I just do it whenever I feel like it – I was doing this little winter tour through the Midwest with Matt & Kim. She said, “I’ll set you guys up a show” and we just kind of became pen pals. Then we heard each other’s solo projects and we were just really amped on it, ‘cause we saw there were similarities and decided to do a project band. Then she said, “I don’t know what I’m gonna do for the summer, let’s go on tour.” Then you know the rest.

But it was funny because when I’d play with Matt & Kim – I remember the first show we played in Baltimore, there were, like, four people at the show. The best show was probably in Chicago –

MARY: New Year’s Eve?

ROB: Yeah, just because they have a lot of friends.

MARY: And that was with Japanther, too?

ROB: Yeah, but it was still at a tiny, tiny bar that’s maybe a little bigger than this place.

Then how the first Todd show happened was – well, Todd’s extremely stretched thin as far as promoter’s go. He gets a couple hundred e-mails a day from people trying to set up shows. Sometimes people go, “Man, that guy totally ignored my e-mail,” but he goes so much stuff coming in. So what happened was we told him we started this band, then my friend – have you heard of the band xbxrx?

YANCEY: I have the record, I’ve never listened to it.

ROB: Okay. The singer was a friend of mine from Oakland who was playing a show in New York and said that we should play. So Todd basically said, “Alright, whatever,” and then he liked it and offered us some more shows. I think we filled an aesthetic void in the scene somehow. He’s from the Northwest and I think he saw some sort of Northwest thing happening in it and kinda thought that was exciting to him.

YANCEY: Yeah, it’s very K [Records]. This is 2006, I guess you’re talking about.

ROB: Yeah, yeah.

MARY: I think we’ve changed a little since then, too, though. It was a little more child-like then. I think it’s gotten a little weirder, maybe? I was fresh out of college.

YANCEY: What were you auditioning for? You said you were auditioning?

MARY: Oh, it was actually just a lesson with a potential grad school.

YANCEY: What were you going to go to grad school for?

MARY: Music performance for bassoon. Someday, maybe. My mom was a little bummed. But now she sees that things are goin’ alright.

YANCEY: Have your parents seen you play?

MARY: Mmm hmm.

ROB: Mine haven’t. My parents are older than most people our ages’ parents. They were married in ’59. Compared to their military, Catholic families, they would think we were the weirdest thing in the world.

YANCEY: Do they ask about it?

ROB: Sometimes my mom is like, “When am I going to hear it?” And I just kind of skirt it.

YANCEY: Have you ever tried describing it to them?

ROB: Yeah, I try describing it to them and my mom is like “That sounds neat!” But they don’t understand –

MARY: I walked into the kitchen before and my dad was next to stereo just playing our demo CD, standing there listening to it. It was pretty funny. My mom is an elementary school teacher in Michigan and she commissioned us to write their theme song last year.

YANCEY: Right, “Jump in”?

MARY: Yeah. So we went to the school and did three assemblies.

YANCEY: Playing it for the whole school?

MARY: With the kids, yeah, and they did choreography. It was amazing.

ROB: I thought it would be thirty kids at a time, but it was like 200 kids. It was pretty weird.

YANCEY: Did you write the song with them?

MARY: No. I wrote it and sent it to my mom on a CD, then she would play it with the kids and they’d learn it. It was so funny ‘cause we walked in the music room and it was written out on a huge notepad with the lyrics. It was just so weird to see my lyrics written out on an elementary school board.

YANCEY: This is like K through 5…?

MARY: Yeah, we performed it with second through fifth graders. They were really energetic. I threw in lots of “hey”s and stuff in there. There was lots of jumping going on.

ROB: That was the thing when I was e-mailing you stuff, I thought, “Is this a dumb song to put in there?”

MARY: It needs to be explained a little. [Laughs]

YANCEY: Yeah, you put in the song title and “song for whatever elementary school” which I think automatically gets it a free pass, but I also think it’s a really good song. It’s totally fun.

MARY: That eight year-old I babysit makes me sing it to her.

ROB: We wanted it to sound like a weirded out “Sloop John B.” type of song, but I don’t think it came across that way.

MARY: I love the Langley School Music Project stuff – kids singing kinda weird, psychedelic sad songs. I mean, “Jump In” is definitely positive, but it’s still weird to hear little kids sing that song.

[CUTTING A BUNCH OF CHIT CHAT]

ROB: I grew up playing hardcore and speed metal and stuff. It’s funny if I play acoustic 12-string – not in our band, but say I’m really into Robbie Basho or someone like that.

MARY: There’s guitar in our band.

ROB: Yeah, but all our guitar parts are so multi-tracked and slowed down and sped up. It never sounds like a guitar. There’s only one song where it actually sounds like a guitar. But when I’m actually just playing for fun, I’m not playing it correctly, but because I grew up on speed metal, it put me in a way to play really fast. I knew people who could only fingerpick and when they tried to switch over and play punk it was like they were wearing a mitten. They couldn’t understand…

YANCEY: Strumming is the hardest thing in the world for me to do.

ROB: See, I can’t fingerpick to save my life.

YANCEY: So, the “Canary” song, which I think you said was the more recent song.

ROB: Not really – last winter or so. Everything on that collection was written between I’d say March and September. Well, September was the release date, anyway, it was probably more like between March and June.

YANCEY: When we talked on the phone the other day, you were talking about “Canary” as being dark and haunting and all that stuff.

ROB: Yeah, it’s a song that we feel…I don’t know, do you like playing it? We never play it live.

MARY: Yeah, I like playing it. That song’s about the extinction of the passenger pigeon. [Laughs]

ROB: It’s fun to play live because there’s so much – the percussion is so circular, it’s hard to mess up. There’s a lot of freedom. You can totally start playing and have it get really messy and it still works.

MARY: I kinda secretly rename our songs in my head after old men I admire. [Laughs] That’s the Edward R. Wilson song.

YANCEY: The stuff that you were doing on your own, your own project – did that sound musically like what High Places sounded like? Or did it change when you guys started?

ROB: Lyrically, maybe, a little bit, but not really.

MARY: Yours was more punk.

ROB: No it wasn’t.

MARY: Yeah it was!

ROB: It was punk because I said it was punk.

YANCEY: [Laughs]

MARY: No! It totally was - that’s the vibe I got when you performed.

ROB: That’s because I’d be like, “This song’s a Discharge cover,” but then it didn’t sound anything like Discharge.

MARY: But your vocals were so punk, dude.

ROB: I can only hit notes in a falsetto – I sound like Miranda July, exactly. It’s really weird. I had one with a pitchshifter on it and when I talked through it, I’d sound exactly like her.

MARY: You sounded like Miranda July doing her guy voice.

ROB: That’s true, yeah.

MARY: She was at our show in LA.

ROB: I know, you were so excited about it.

MARY: [Laughs]

ROB: I get nervous [the solo stuff] sounds too much like High Places, but you don’t think so, right?

YANCEY: What about what you were doing?

MARY: It was super minimal. It was voice and bassoon and glockenspiel and shaker. I would sit down, have a glockenspiel on my lap and my bassoon and I would never be mic’d or amplified. I’d have a shaker between my knees, play something on my glockenspiel, play a little part on my bassoon, then sing and have the shaker. Total one man band style.

ROB: Yeah it was total acoustic, versus us being acoustically-treated electronic music. That’s why it seems really different. The reason I get nervous about my stuff sounding too much like High Places…

The way I record is everything and the kitchen sink. I don’t like instruments that sound like instruments, ever. So I kinda feel like I’m recording weird things like that. On one hand, I have the same recording approach on everything, but not really because I’m using all these different things to record with. So I guess it’s doesn’t all sound the same, but it’s not like my solo project is me with an electric guitar and a full stack and just going for it. It’s not different like that.

YANCEY: When you were singing on your own, were your vocals naked or were you doing the reverb on that as well?

MARY: Totally naked. Everything was acoustic. Really quiet.

ROB: Sometimes you had stuff where’d you take walking through the leaves and play it through a boombox.

MARY: Yeah, the field recording stuff was the same. I would just have a boombox with sounds of me walking around. Like stepping on dead leaves, or something.

YANCEY: Was it just an aesthetic decision to go to the reverb stuff, together?

MARY: Well it the only way I could be heard over what Rob was doing.

ROB: [Laughs]

MARY: It was loud.

YANCEY: So the music is a competition between you two.

MARY: Well, no – we just didn’t wanna get beaten up, you know?

YANCEY: [Laughs]

MARY: I had to learn how to sign differently, I think. I think I’m always trying to learn how to sign differently, though – just to project more.

ROB: I like music and vocals that blend a lot. Kind of like My Bloody Valentine.

MARY: Yeah, sometimes people don’t get that we don’t want the vocals super upfront when we perform live. It’s just another one of the instruments.

YANCEY: The sound guy, when he’s mixing it, will push you up higher?

MARY: Yeah. We run our own board, too. Some girl just e-mailed us, “I really liked your performance, but I couldn’t hear the vocals.” Well, we’re performing with the Blow and Mirah where vocals are the main event. With us, I don’t feel like I’m just a singer, I studied bassoon. There’s so much music making with High Places that goes on behind-the-scenes and I think a lot of times people think that Rob’s contributions is everything-but-the-vocals and I’m just the singer, which isn’t at all how it works. But live, I’m sure that’s how it appears, ‘cause I just play very minimal percussion stuff and mostly sing.

ROB: We wanted an engaged frontperson. We didn’t want just two people behind –

YANCEY: You didn’t want to be the Chemical Brothers.

ROB & MARY: Yeah.

MARY: I love vocals and lyrics. Whenever I listen to music, I’m always super into the lyrics. My sister, as a writer, is totally different – she’s super into the music, which I think is kinda funny. She says, “How do you know the words to every song?” I love that, but the way we approach it is we want it all to blend and be equal. Our whole thing is everything is 50/50. People have taken me aside and said, “What’s the power struggle? Who’s got the upper hand?”

YANCEY: Seriously?

MARY: Yeah. But there isn’t one. We’re not dating and we’re not related, so for our friendship and band to work, everything just have to be –

YANCEY: Collaborative.

MARY: Yeah, totally.

ROB: We just do what the other person can’t do, or isn’t necessarily cut out to do.

MARY: Yeah, like, you pee standing up. [Laughs]

ROB: Actually, I totally don’t. [Laughs]

MARY: I have the babies.

ROB: Yeah, you have the babies.

ROB: Well I’m a terrible performer.

MARY: Whatever, dude.

YANCEY: Do you get nervous?

ROB: Yeah, majorly. I mean, you hide it – everyone gets a little nervous.

MARY: I get more nervous when I know he’s freaking out. [Laughs]

ROB: Were you nervous at the first LA. show? Oh man…

MARY: No, I was getting less nervous the bigger the venues were getting on that tour. The smaller venues would freak me out, then we’d play some place and I’d be like, “Eh, 1,300 people and I can’t make out anyone in the crowd. It’s fine.”

ROB: The most nervous I’ve ever been was playing the elementary school.

YANCEY: Well, sure.

ROB: ‘Cause we’re in a rural elementary school –

MARY: We’re playing at twenty percent of our normal volume, but the kids are still like, “Owww!”

ROB: [Laughs] We’re the weird hippies from New York. Somehow the school wasn’t like, “These people are dangerous.”

MARY: No, they put our name on the marquee.

YANCEY: There are pictures of that, I hope.

ROB: Here’s the thing – when I was in 5th grade, I was listening to, like, metal and rap and I was skateboarding. I was getting into whatever Thrasher told me was cool to listen to.

YANCEY: Sure.

ROB: So if I saw our band in 5th grade, I would’ve been like, “This shit is corny!” I would have been so not into it. So that made me the most nervous.

MARY: Oh they also wrote us thank you cards that were amazing. We heard about so many bands that were started because of that day.

YANCEY: Really?

MARY: Mmm hmm.

ROB: The last week of shows, everything sounded amazing because it was so big, you know? I could be happy playing like that.

MARY: I liked it.

MARY & ROB: [Laugh]

YANCEY: Really?

ROB: I felt really separate.

MARY: That’s the weird thing when you’re on a really tall stage.

ROB: Henry Fonda Theatre, in LA., is a huge stage and there’s a barrier too. We were like 20 feet from anybody.

MARY: We really need barriers. We need them up at every show. If I was playing my bassoon live, I would probably actually want barriers. [Laughs]

ROB: I come from a background where skaters are like the enemy. I come from total ‘90s, hardcore, Fugazi ethics, so –

YANCEY: So are you going to feel conflicted if some sort of serious upward trajectory happens?

ROB: No, because you can control that.

To bring Fugazi back into it, I always felt like they got huge and you could tell they’d get progressively grouchier and grouchier about not being able to control their environment. You just fall back, you break up, you do a solo project. Let me put it this way – I can do that type of show, but we weren’t the headliners on this tour, so we can play the next night and headline the Smell, which is actually a pretty big place, but totally run by kids.

YANCEY: Right.

ROB: That was a lot of kids there, too, but that was $5.

MARY: I mean, we can do what we need to do, pay the bills or whatever, make it work as a legitimate job, but I’m sure on our nights off we’ll always be playing those all-ages DIY shows. That’s what we love and it’s important to us.

ROB: I never understood why people when the get to a certain size, they’ll only tour in a certain type of world.

MARY: Like they never make it to Brooklyn, but they’re in New York.

ROB: They’re not from here, but they just stop playing Brooklyn, they’ll only play Manhattan. That’s totally dumb.

YANCEY: Well you have a booking agent and it’s their job to get you into bigger rooms, ‘cause they get paid more. I think that’s just the structure. Do you have a manager or anything like that?

MARY: We do everything. It’s been getting crazy. [Laughs]

ROB: We’re gonna probably have a European booking agent, ‘cause you just have to. We’re doing a tour in the summer that’s a support tour.

MARY: We will eventually have a booking agent. We just can’t do it.

ROB: Then [the European] booking agent wants to then do our booking. We’re going to Europe twice this summer, but that’s sort of a different thing because that’s not where we’re from. The thing that I think is weird is if you only play clubs every night, I think it would be the most depressing thing in the world, but I think if you can mix it up – I think just knowing what the specific town has, like Denver: if you play in a club, no one will go. Same with Baltimore. If you play Otto Bar, no one’s gonna go. If you play the DIY space Flora St. which is run by kids and a bunch of bands there – it’s a huge place, it’s the size of a club – it’ll be good. So if you do have a booking agent – and we’ve been meeting with people who wanted to do it – you just have to make sure they understand, we don’t want a show in a town, we want the right ones. We’ve toured a ton and can continue to do our own booking. We just want them to know that this is the right spot.

YANCEY: How much time do you think do you spend now on logistics?

MARY: A lot. And right now we’re trying to write a record.

YANCEY: How sustainable is that? Do you see a point where you just fucking lose it and –

ROB: It’s too much e-mail.

MARY: We try to respond to every e-mail. Even just some 16 year-old kid in the Midwest who’s writing to say, “What your setup, equipment-wise?” We always respond to that stuff.

ROB: It just takes awhile.

MARY: Right now we’re trying not to play any shows, ‘cause we want to just get this record done. We’ve been wanting to do a record for so long, then we were like, “Let’s give this song to a 7”. Let’s go on this tour. Let’s play this.” Then we’re like, “Oh my goodness, it’s 2008, we need to just record this record.” It’s hard for us, because we say yes to so many shows. We love playing and love playing with our friends. We find ourselves spending hours a day saying “We can’t play this show” and “We’re recording right now, I’m sorry,” and we haven’t been able to record all day because we’ve been writing e-mails saying we have to record right now. [Laughs]

ROB: We need an e-mail monkey. I mean, the stuff we’re doing with [eMusic] is important, but how many e-mails have you gotten that have said, “We’re really sorry for this super slow response.”?

YANCEY: At the very beginning when I e-mailed you guys, I was like, “Fuck, I’m gonna have to find someone else.”

ROB: ‘Cause we took three weeks to write back. [Laughs]

YANCEY: Yeah. I had this idea to do this thing, and I was like, “Fuck, the reason why I made this thing, I’m not hearing back from them and what’s gonna happen now?”

MARY: [Laughs] Sorry about that!

ROB: What sucks in your situation is – and you’re thing wasn’t bullshit – but there’s a lot of weird bullshit that comes at you. I actually remember sort of skimming over it and being like, “Cool, well, we’re not there yet,” then going back and –

MARY: Being like, “Oh wait, this is a personal e-mail directed at us.”

ROB: Yeah and seeing what you wrote at the bottom, saying, “I’ve actually seen you play,” and it was genuine – I was like, “Oh, shit.”

MARY: Totally. The one thing – back to the booking agent thing – there are several things we’re nervous about with that. There’s something about having complete control, it’s really nice. I think at this point people are stating to notice that our approach to these thing is a little bit different than other bands?

ROB: I think people think it’s tragic though.

MARY: [Laughs]

ROB: Poor High Places, they just don’t understand.

MARY: [Laughs]

MARY: The one thing I’ve been happy with in booking our own shows is we’ve gotten some really not-standard shows out of that. Playing a solar-powered show at sunrise where kids camped out the night before, or I don’t know. We’ve done a bunch of different stuff that I worry if we had a booking agent it would never happen.

[TAPE STOPS FOR A BIT. RESTARTS ABOUT 20 MINUTES LATER]

ROB: I’m from a hardcore and punk background, and there are a lot of good hardcore and punk 7-inches, but there aren’t as many good LPs. And being that our songs are pretty short and our attention spans are pretty short and we know we have this opportunity to put out a 7-inches, that’s easy. It’s low stress.

MARY: The full length is just a drone. It comes with free drugs, a little packet.

MARY & ROB: [Laughs]

ROB: In other words, I think putting out all these EPs and comps is just playing it safe and being scared of actually –

YANCEY: This is why you’re nervous about the things you’re giving us, right? If it’s a bigger statement, then it’s easier to scrutinize.

ROB: It’s not a big deal if it’s marketed as a six month period of a bunch of prolific EPs and songs. That to me is fine, as long it doesn’t come across as, “Man, did you hear High Places first album? It’s totally the most random bunch of songs I’ve ever heard.”

YANCEY: Right.

ROB: Well, like Yeasayer, since they came up earlier, started with these ten songs and that was their masterpiece LP. It had all the PR push behind it, everything. That’s what they do – that’s their album.

MARY: They had a demo, Rob.

ROB: What, those two songs?

MARY: No, they had some other stuff before then. That’s not totally accurate about Yeasayer. [Laughs]

ROB: It’s not a putdown – I’m just saying that their approach is totally opposite from ours. Our is putting all these bits and pieces out there into the fray and them being like, “Here’s the album.” I mean, I didn’t know they had a demo.

MARY: They’ve been at it for awhile.

YANCEY: They didn’t emerge fully formed.

ROB: Yeah, I didn’t mean they were a flash in the pan. I just mean they have their album and it’s this masterpiece thing and that’s really what they’re known for.

YANCEY: Yeah, they speak in paragraphs and you’re more like fragmented sentences or prepositions.

MARY: Maybe just because we play out so much, we get tired of the same set, so we’re constantly making new versions of our songs, writing news songs, just for our own sanity. That was always one of our big fears, that we become one of those bands that wrote six songs, went on tour, then played those songs for two years.

YANCEY: Like still playing “Popular” in ten years, if you’re Nada Surf.

ROB: Our new single that we finished right before we left for tour, I’m kind of already like “Ugh, those songs again.” They’re only like a week and a half old.

YANCEY: Do you like most of your songs?

MARY: It’s so hard.

YANCEY: It’s an awkward question, I know.

MARY: I think because my voice is involved, it’s so personal. There’s nothing you can really do about your voice, it’s part of your body. I’ve gotten to where I don’t scream in anguish when I hear it come on somewhere, or turn totally red. It’s still totally awkward, but –

YANCEY: When VH1 comes on and you’re at the gym.

MARY: Yeah. When someone’s cell phone goes off and it’s me singing. [Laughs]

ROB: I feel like if it was just me, I would hate it. But because there’s another human involved, who brings a bunch to the table, it makes me embrace it a little more. I think what I like about us is how our approach to making music is unique, so I feel like, “Wow, I didn’t expect that song to come out that way at all. We started out with this idea and it came out completely different.”

MARY: But I didn’t expect it either, so it doesn’t feel like either of our music.

YANCEY: So how often does something come out the way you hear it in your head? Never? Would it be a good thing if it did?

MARY: No, it would be my solo project.

ROB: The way we record is so non-pro. We’ve said this before in other interviews, but we record pretty much 98% of the stuff using an old program I bought in 1998, it came on two floppy disks, it only runs on Operating System 9 on a Mac, all it does is cut and paste and we record with a little mic. It picks up so much room noise, we can play around. If we had this exacting studio thing, I think it would make it more finite of a result. But because there’s a lot of haphazardness to the way we record, that’s what makes it kind of cool and surprising.

MARY: And when people ask us about our “power struggle” and, like, “Who’s band is it secretly,” it’s totally – I don’t know, I think there are bands that are like that. The person where it’s their band and they have people playing with them.

ROB: People they allow to play with them.

MARY: It’s like, what’s the point of playing in a band? I know what my ideas are, I can’t escape them, I’m so sick of them. What Rob brings to the table – he probably feels the same way about it – but when we combine the two, it makes this brand new thing. It’s almost like it becomes a third person who’s making the music.

YANCEY: The third person called High Places.

MARY: It sounds so corny, but it’s true. I think we’ll both listen to the end result of the song and think, “That sounds so weird.” I wouldn’t have thought of that, you wouldn’t have thought of that, but when we compromise on all these ideas we had and made this new thing that is so weird, but I guess if we were trying to be objective we’d say we liked it. It’s almost like an out-of-body thing, like, “Who made that?”

ROB: I’m coming from a more experimental side of things and I think I bring to the table more of the weird recording techniques. That’s what I had been doing for so long, but without her ability to, like, write songs and put songs together, my stuff would just be weird noise music.

MARY: I think people think that I’m totally “poppy” and I want everything to have –

ROB: I didn’t say “poppy.”

MARY: — a catchy melody to it.

ROB: No, that’s more me.

MARY: I think we were just like: we can make a noise band, it could be really weird and two people could like it, or we could try to make something that could stick in someone’s head or they could sing in the shower, but it’s also maybe kinda weird.

YANCEY: It’s always fun when there’s a melody buried underneath something. That’s always my favorite shit.

MARY: Yeah, we both like stuff like that. When we started the band, we were really into Beat Happening. We both still love them, but were listening to it a lot. We were listening to Moondog a lot. We just really loved those melodies. A lot of Beach Boys and stuff – I mean, they have some weird stuff, too.

YANCEY: Yeah, when you were talking about “Jump In” being a “Sloop John B.”-kinda thing, I hear it, for sure.

ROB: I don’t think people realize this, but if you look at people we’ve toured with – Lucky Dragons, my friend Hisham who does Soft Circle and used to be in Black Dice – that’s my background, Black Dice, that kinda stuff, so that’s why we’re really loud. When we were playing shows with Lightning Bolt, we just doubled our soundsystem just to make it bigger. I think people hear it recorded and think, “Oh, it’s cute,” and then they see it live and it’s mega loud. I thought it would be cool to channel something like Beat Happening and filter it through Black Dice. That’s how I looked at it, at least. And you being from Michigan, you were like, “I hate noise music!” [Laughs]

MARY: I don’t hate it, I just…

ROB: You’re wary of it. [Laughs]

MARY: I’ve just been to one too many shows where a dude got naked while playing.