Interview: Neon Indian, Formerly Of Denton, To Play Granada Saturday
DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) – On Saturday, Brooklyn-by-way-of-Denton electronic pop outfit Neon Indian will play a much-anticipated homecoming set at the Granada Theater.
The band's riding a wave of success and productivity: Frontman and songwriter Alan Palomo holed up for the winter in bitterly cold Helsinki, Finland to record what would become the band's second album, Era Extraña.
Released earlier this month, Era Extraña is a noisier, more emotional effort than 2009's Psychic Chasms. It's filled with Jesus and Mary Chain guitar swaths that wash over Palomo's catchy electronic pop tunes, augmented by a host of synthesizers and electronics. Listen to it here.
To help conjure that sound on stage, Palamo added a pair of old pals to the already Denton-stacked lineup: Josh McWhirter and Ed Priesner, who are also balancing their own side-project called Sudden Laughter. McWhirter will yield a guitar on stage, while Priesner – typically a man who deals in percussion – will man the electronics.
The two new additions spent many years in Denton, playing in bands such as Last Men and Shiny Around the Edges while helping host house-shows at the now-defunct DIY venue/sometimes-living-space Fra House.
The reconfigured band made its debut on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon this month, and are in the midst of a three-month American tour. After that, they'll begin to ping-pong across the globe.
We caught up with the band on their way to Houston from New Orleans. And an old friend was the one tossing them questions. Mike Seman, UNT Research Associate and Denton music stalwart, who is in Shiny Around the Edges with his wife Jen and now Austinite Kerm Rivas, was kind of enough to catch up with the three for this article.
These four have all played together and are good friends, spending much of their time in Denton playing the same shows during the mid-to-late aughts. Priesner and McWhirter even toured with Seman's band, once upon a time. Without further ado, here's a candid interview session between the four, in advance of Saturday's show at the Granada.
Mike: Having been involved in the whole house show thing, if you're in Denton, it's cheap to live, there are places to play, you can rehearse; the difference with Washington, L.A., New York, the band's going to break up, and such, and obviously that's not true. But in New York, how do you prepare? Are there things you have to get out of Denton to capitalize on?
Alan: I can at least say at the practice end of things, it is a challenge. You really kind of have to, you know, New York is such a sobering experience in the sense that the last thing you can ever imagine is that a job that can let you create and play requires so much pre-work at every other angle. That being said, once you do figure out a rhythm, it's not terribly difficult to maintain. At least for this tour, we've kind of practiced relentlessly every single day for three weeks and went straight on the road. In Denton, you could meet casually several times a week to rehearse.
Mike: When Jen and I were watching (Late Night with Jimmy Fallon), we've known Ed since he was a drummer; when I heard he was going to be in the band, I thought it was going to be percussion, and when I saw him manning the keyboards for arguably one of the more complex electronic bands it was just, wow, Ed, how do you do it?
Josh: We rehearsed eight to 10 hours a day for about three weeks.
Ed: I didn't know how much time you had to rehearse and all of that. But, from my end, what Josh was talking about, really, we were just practicing a lot. Part of it was having a good teacher. Alan is really great at that stuff, he showed me everything I need to know. It took me back to being in the 7th grade and having to memorize out of a textbook. I used to have a really hard time with that, but you do what you have to to do what you f–– want to do.
Mike: Another thing Jen and I were talking about afterwards, is that Shinny (Around the Edges) grew up in the DFW house show scene. But opening for the Toadies and you do the devil horns and 700 people do it back to you, that was awesome too. Now that you've been on tour with much bigger audiences, what do you like better?
Ed: It doesn't really matter. What's satisfying for me is playing well, and doing what I wanted to do and meant to do and what I'm realizing more and more … it doesn't matter, it's really just nailing the show.
Alan: You come to find, on a show-to-show basis, the same sort of creature comforts that got you during a house show is the same. When it gets really loud, I'm having a good time. If I can hear people talking, I start stumbling over words, I start singing off key; the same things that motivated me are intrinsically part of the process now. At the end of the day, we keep saying, oh s–– that solo happened nothing was wrong with it! It's just one little obstacle after the next. And there's very few moments you're staring out in the audience. It's funny, my dad always told me, in a weird way, playing to a big audience is like getting attacked by a bear. You just don't make eye contact with it. You literally have to stare directly above them or something, but I find the few moments when you look into the audience, that's when the adrenaline immediately starts surging in, you know? These bright lights in front of you, these cocked heads that are creating impressions around your song, you know?
Ed: I do miss playing for, and with, my friends. Living in Denton, that was kind of a comfort for me, I've always been obsessed with the community and friendship aspects of it, that's the only real difference; I'm not in a house anymore with people I know and love.
Mike: Now, how much longer are you on tour?
Alan: We're basically touring until December 3, and then in February things start picking up again, so we have a little break in there. But we're going to be touring most of next year, recording again, hopefully recording another Neon Indian LP next year.
Mike: I keep thinking how much the new album really reminds me of mid-period Cure. I was wondering, to me, it kind of seems like it's leading up to a "Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me" album, where the Cure got together and holed up in a chateau in France; is that something you're thinking about for the next album?
Alan: I've been toying with the notion now that I've gotten in my head that the next recordings I want to do in Texas. Because it's a little more sustainable, as much as a grandiose gesture (recording in Helsinki) turned out being, I would never try to do that again … I think this time around, I think, conceivably, if I was just in a house in Denton or Austin and could stay there for a long enough period of time, and build a little mini-studio, I would invite people to come out and hang anyway. That's what (Era Extraña producer Dave) Fridmann's studio was like, anyway.
Mike: You guys are basically taking Fra House to the world. You know, look at the Stooges. That was a product of everyone living in a house in Ann Arbor, and sometimes you get these scenes and bands that emerge because everyone lies in a house. You just get that vibe that you understand people more who are in that band with you, that I like hanging out with you and that supersedes even the band.
Alan: It's kind of funny, I feel like, whereas before talking with Josh and Ed at Fra House and riffing on music that we like or being smack dab in the middle of this formative music experience for everyone, their first bands … the band we're all playing in now is a very surreal and weird thing. I think what was definitely part of putting together this band was realizing Josh and I have a lot of overlapping influences musically, even though we played in very different bands when we met.
Ed: I do too! I used to listen to Korn all the time.
Alan: Ed introduced me to Follow the Leader by Korn…(laughs)
Mike: Well, are you finding people across the country that you were friends with in Denton who have spread out that you've gotten to see?
Alan: For the most part you'll see all of those people in Austin. (laughs)
Josh: Yeah, there's a big migration there right now.
Mike: Josh, I know you and Ed have Sudden Laughter, is that still going on while you're on tour?
Ed: Just today Josh I were working on mixing notes to get our first little EP, demo thing put together. Josh has been actively working on samples and loops and s–– for us, it's pretty awesome actually.
Josh: One of the amazing things in having the opportunity to go on the road and play with Neon Indian is that before I was working at a bar. I was working 40 hours a week at the daily grind, but now we're all surrounded by music all the time. Getting the Neon Indian stuff down and making it was refreshing; you know, to have a lot of time to work on music and use the things we've learned from Alan, who happens to be very talented and knows quite a bit about (synthesizers), which is a side of instrumentation I had not been aware with. Similarly, we've been trying to incorporate that into Sudden Laughter, so we're trying to do it and hopefully by the time we get back to Brooklyn in December we'll have a four song EP out.
Ed: For me personally, this whole thing has been pretty amazing. I feel extremely fortunate and, you know, grateful to even have the liberty to f–– be surrounded with music and traveling and having the f–– time and brain space to think about it and operate with it and really harbor and nurture ideas and all the various things that we've always talked about doing. And this is the biggest opportunity we've had to actually focus on it. For Josh and I both, and all of us in the context of what Josh and I are trying to do, we're trying to take advantage of this opportunity in every f–– way that we can. It's cool, it's something that I'm not trying to take for granted and I'm trying to make the absolute most of it that we can and hopefully other things will snowball and come to fruition and all that kind of stuff. That's kind of the idea, and it's really awesome and fun and radical and doing both these things in a really great f–– pop band with my friends who write masterful f––– material and on the side focus on our own weirder jams, it just feels like the best of both worlds. But we just showed up to the venue.
Alan: Now for the unglamorous reality: We're about to take 20 cases up a flight of stairs.
Mike: One last question for Ed and Josh, I was just wondering: Who is it better to play in a band for? Me or Alan?
Josh: Oh s––.
Alan: What are you trying to say Mike? You trying to come join Neon Indian? What's up? Dude, someone get this man a noise maker!
Ed: This is more of a question of whose ego is more inflated, it's kind of a tie in the end. Oh man. There's a billboard here that says Neon Indian, Twin Sister and the Meat Puppets. That's pretty rad.
