Story by: Adam Daniels

Photography by: Dorothy Hong

Rock n’ roll may not exactly have the same sex and drugs credo it used to, but they still haven’t changed the sign at the door. And though Fruit Bats’ Eric Johnson may not be the prototype for the image of lead singer hard-on, he still knows how to wear the uniform. Just as Johnson and I meet up to presumably grab a beer or two, he bumps into his old friend and tour manager Dave and Dave’s two-year old son Ronan. Together they traded in the tavern for a sunny Brooklyn afternoon at the Williamsburg Waterfront Park, home to the rock daze that is the new Pool Party concert series. So there we sat in the grass overlooking the East River, interrupted a few times by Ronan’s general indifference to our interview setup, and it dawns on me: while it can be assumed most every long-haired lead singer has just as many moments like these, playing defender to a be-overalled youngster’s soccer moves, it seems rare we actually get to see them. Johnson’s tucked in everyday button-down and glasses mixed with his warmth make it just as easy to think you’re talking to a nice dude from Portland in the park than the guy headlining the biggest venue in town that night. He just happens to be both.

Johnson has probably enjoyed more headlines in the last couple years than his musical project Fruit Bats have combined since their 2001 debut Echolocation. This is a logical result of joining one of the only three indie-rock bands my Mom has heard of: The Shins. But Johnson treats playing guitar for that famous band like one might treat bussing tables or tutoring 10th grade algebra. “I’ve always just sort of treated it like my day job,” Johnson says. “It pays the bills.” That isn’t to say he doesn’t enjoy the experience (he describes it as a “great ride he would have been foolish to pass up’) or value their music; he means day job in the literal sense. Playing music with Mercer and the boys has allowed him to make music as a full-time gig for the first time. “Until then I’d run my own KRAFT catering company,” he says. “It was a good thing for me because I was my own boss and could tour whenever I wanted to.” And while he supposes his newer gig will do just fine, this does represent the biggest contrast between the two. His catering service, like these Fruit Bats, was just that: entirely his own. He’s become much more than just a simple fill-in guitarist for The Shins, but he writes none of the music and likewise makes none of the big decisions, key differences that probably make balancing two such musical projects much simpler. For nearly a decade he’s been almost the entire body of one musical project. Now, he’s a full-fledged member of another—he just doesn’t get all their Albuquerque jokes.

The other thing that makes Johnson’s new band mates particularly notable is the fact that when most writers have needed a frame of reference for the Fruit Bats sound, The Shins have been their default name-drop. This is not entirely accurate, perhaps more a crude categorizing of what’s become a way to describe the hooks coming from Sub Pop’s mid-aughties roster. But Johnson certainly grasps the inherent absurdity of joining the monumentally famous band his slightly less heard of musical labour of love is most frequently likened to. “I definitely thought about it,” Johnson says. “The thing with that is, I never really got the whole Shins comparison. I mean I understand the need for classification sometimes. And I just sort of think there was a point in time where it started to become ‘If you look like this, then you’re this band.’ But if you were just a dude that looked like a plain ole’ dude playing guitar-driven simple rock then you were The Shins, because they were one of those bands that was big enough to get those assertions but they were also the one that was least defined by sort of visual cues and easily placed distinctions. So for a while, everyone was The Shins. It didn’t matter if you were also a little bit Joy Division or a little bit whatever too. You were The Shins.” And to be fair,  Johnson did allow a little room for comparison. “It’s funny though,” he muses. “I’ve been friends with James (Mercer) for years and hadn’t really picked up on it. But then Dave (their tour manager) will often hear my voice on the phone and assume it’s James and vice-versa. So I guess we do have pretty similar speaking voices.”

But Johnson should be pleased to know that his Bats’ latest musical effort, The Ruminant Band, is the least Shins-like of the Bats entire catalog to date. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to tie Ruminant Band down to a single musical likeness. There are the sort of poppy melodies that drew those Shins comparisons on the impossibly singable “Being On Our Own.” A bit of the sort of alt-country tendencies that have always been dwelt at the surface of Johnson’s music seep through much stronger on tracks like “Primitive Man.” Their live show can create solos and bridges of near-jam band proportions, but on record here one can find something a bit more timeless, more lived-in. This goes further than just an influence, to the point where you could place some of these tracks decades back without a shred of context. Though long before you ever notice any of these sonic qualities of the record, you can’t help but notice how much fun the folks making it are having. While some of that vibe must stem from the fact that Johnson seems to be one of those musicians that heartily accepts the mind view that it’s a unique privilege to make a living creating music, the rest might stem from the fact that the Fruit Bats are actually a band for the first time.

In the past, the Bats had just been a title for Johnson’s art, featuring a rotating cast of musicians to support his ideas and musical whims. And despite him already being in a “real band” that headlines international music festivals, it’s easily noticeable that Johnson is quite smitten with this whole idea that his band is a real band, admitting a similar giddiness to that high school kid that formed a band and calls every single one of his friends to tell them, long before making it safely through a single practice.

“I have to admit I always wanted to be in a band, it just never really worked out like that,” Johnson says. “But it feels really great. Everyone brings their ideas forward and we all work out the songs together.” The change in members and contributions to this more cohesive group felt like such a relevant change to Johnson, he said he came very close to changing the name of the whole project from Fruit Bats to The Ruminant Band. These changes comes through loud and clear, with Johnson even noting a spontaneous “Woo” being left on the record after a brief moment of shift and improvisation in a track. There is a real feeding off of one another during the live show as well, eye contact and smiles coloring the spaces between breaks and the back-and-forth vocals. It was a friendly crowd in Brooklyn that night, which could cause mostly any musician to feed off such an energy. But at the very least it looked like the beginnings of a band that could enjoy sharing a stage together for a good while, and Johnson’s smile made it clear he felt the same way.

I walk over to a bench away from the grass and the recess Johnson is granted with his young friend. The skyscrapers of Manhattan can’t help but look a little surreal in the distance, more like a postcard than anything tangible. For a moment, Johnson and Ronan are framed in this postcard as well. They switch from soccer to basketball, and he doesn’t pick him up on his shoulders and help him dunk or sink a 20-foot hook shot. In fact, he nearly misses the backboard as a whole on his first shot. “I was never much for basketball,” he says. And though Johnson may not have much of a jump shot, it didn’t seem to matter much to the kid. This all made it quickly evident Johnson is one of those rare musical personalities that makes just as much genuine sense entertaining a kid’s Pele impression as he does playing center stage at Bowery Ballroom, something you can only say about so many folks that happen to play in bands that will change your life.

It was a Thursday in New York, the first afternoon in what’s becoming a most wondrous month of October! Four men from Alabama whom together, call themselves Thomas Function, strolled into our living room to share with us a collection of songs from their new, non swine flu-related sophomore full-length, In The Valley of Sickness. They ate sandwiches. They drank beer. THEY BREATHED FIRE. WE FILMED. Oh! What a fantastic month this continues to be!

Returning to New York after finishing recording their next record, we met up with The Soft Pack to shoot an acoustic sesh backstage before their Bowery Ballroom show. We hauled our collective asses up to the third floor backstage area, and as Matt, Matty, Dave and Brian entered the room we knew we had a problem. Dim light wall fixtures gave the green room a bit of a Blublocker’s feel that didn’t vibe with our cameras. However, a mere four feet away from us shone a light so bright and willing, we were forced to surrender to it. Illumination! And so it was that we flocked to the bathroom with The Soft Pack, threw them in the shower and shot “Down On Lovin” and “C’mon”. Ladies and Gents, welcome to the Hotbox.

Story by Gracie Remington

Photography by Nikki Turner

Farrah is pregnant. A popular cheerleader and high school senior in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Farrah’s announcement comes by way of clique-ish backstab job at the hands of her best friends. Though shunned by her cheer squad, it’s news that leaves her in the loving arms of an MTV camera crew, a reality star of the network’s popular show, 16 and Pregnant. She whines about her newfound lack of a social life. She goes to the doctor. She battles her mother for control of her life, her baby, and the family car. Somewhere in the background, the soundtrack of her life is intermittently interrupted by Brooklyn’s Cale Parks, whose soundscaping provides a comforting counterpoint to the drama that swallows Farrah. The brief musical interludes, with their spare, hypnotic instrumentations, serve as a calming point in a storm of (televised) teenage motherhood.

“I’ve never seen it, thank goodness,” Parks admits over drinks at a bar near his apartment in Greenpoint. “I can safely say I’ve never seen it. I got a MySpace message or a Twitter from a fan, and then I told my manager and he got in touch with the label. We had no idea.”

While he may have been unaware of the role his music played in the soundtrack to Farrah’s life, such odd juxtapositions are nothing new to Parks, who works simultaneously as a multi-instrumentalist in Aloha and White Williams while also performing and recording as a solo artist. Referencing “Dance Dance Revolution-type” music (especially Capsule, described by Parks as “Daft Punk with 200 more notes”) along with the Tough Alliance and Scritti Politti as current favorite bands, Parks floats through genre tags as he would from drum kit to the lead mic: effortlessly and freely. Whether recording with Aloha or cutting tracks in his apartment for his solo work, he imbues his work with a raw, some might say lo-fi immediacy, a bent one might argue comes from his desire to follow a similar path to that of Phil Collins. “He’s a really rad drummer but then he made these pop songs. His solo stuff isn’t flashy drum kit music. They’re just songs; they’re just what they are.”

Parks’ desire to emulate Collins shines through in the sun-dappled pop hooks that comprise To Swift Mars, his most recent EP. Parks’ transition into electrobliss heralds a new direction for the artist, whose previous album, Sparklace, focused more on trance meditations. This time around, no longer hiding his vocals in a dense web of slow, contemplative instrumentations, Parks’ voice sounds utterly triumphant. While he “just started singing last summer,” Parks explains that he wanted his latest release to “mix more like a pop record,” the vocals sitting shotgun.

Drawing heavily on new wave, J-Pop, and now commonplace electro pop (drawing comparisons to tour mates Passion Pit, amongst others) approaches, Parks’ latest release focuses on the sunnier side of life. Album standouts “Knight Conversation” and “One at the Time” are road trip jams, snippets of cross-country sun and horizon. Though its recording intersected with that of Sparklace, To Swift Mars marks an exciting, collagist’s turn for Parks, while remaining true to the fundamentally personal nature of all of his musical projects. Brian from Apes and Androids helped mix the album, while Parks’ fiancée, Kendra, provided the backing vocals on “Knight Conversation.” Recording was done in Parks’ apartment, and Parks will tour with friends Lemonade starting in August, co-headlining and switching spots in the lineup at every show.

Like his idol, Phil Collins, Parks is clearly comfortable working in a variety of situations, as a drummer and as a solo artist, and his flexibility shines through in the varied nature of his solo output. His latest evolution suits him just as well as Collins’ transition from solo artist to soundtrack maestro. “I like to be busy all the time,” Parks explains. “I can’t stand to not do something.” Once his solo tour wraps up, he plans to tour with Aloha following the release of their upcoming LP (due out sometime this fall or winter) while continuing work on his solo project and recording with White Williams. Maybe fifteen years from now Farrah’s baby will hear Parks’ music on TV or Disney DVD or vinyl. It’ll be out there in some form or another.

Interview and Words by Samuel Duke

Joshua Wells lives a desirable existence. His day job–when he’s employed–requires little commitment, so he can spend his ample free time focusing on his music, of which there is a lot. Wells helped form and plays drums in Vancouver rock priests Black Mountain, but, like most of his bandmates, also has something on the side. That project is Lightning Dust, his duo with Black Mountain vocalist Amber Wells. On 2007’s eponymous debut and even moreso on this month’s Infinite Light (both for Jagjaguwar, who release most of the B.M.-related canon,) the two canoe themselves into the darker cave-like recesses of their circle’s preferred musical style–essentially a spookier version of American roots music. On Infinite Light, cellos and Rhodes swell from beneath like levitating deities, and Wells’ voice frequently vibrates like a candle that’s two seconds away from going out. It’s a marvelously well-shaped record, cognizant of space like few albums ever are anymore. We rang Wells earlier this month to talk about the record, his day job, Vancouver’s insular scene, and Canadian music industry organizations. Read that conversation below.

So you’re in Vancouver now?
Yes.

Do you have a day job aside from the music or are you doing that full-time?
Not at the moment. Sometimes I do work, I sort of maintain a causal position as a mental health/needle research person in the downtown East Side of Vancouver, which is sort of an economically depressed area. I work for a company that houses people who are harder to house. But, this year I’ve been mostly doing music ‘cause I haven’t really had time to work.

How long have you been doing that?
I’ve been working for them on-and-off for like five or six years. They’re really cool about just letting me be a casual worker, as they are with many other musicians in Vancouver. So I can go on tour a lot and still sometimes have work.

How did you and Amber start playing music together? Was it before Black Mountain or after you guys had done that?
Basically, Steven, Amber and I–the three of us have been playing music for a long time. We had a band before Black Mountain that just sort of morphed into it. Around the same time that started or maybe just a little bit after, Amber and I just started messing around ‘cause she had a bunch of songs and I had a bunch of songs. And we just made sort of a Christmas album. Not about Christmas, but we just made an EP thing that we gave to our friends. And that’s how it started, just on four-track cassette.

How long ago was this?
That was like 2004 or 2005, something like that.

But your first record wasn’t until 2007…
Yeah, that’s right. So we sort of just kept it at that. And then we just started playing the occasional show. We didn’t have a name back then, either. We played a bunch of shows, just the two of us, as “Amber and Josh”. Just for fun, really, or ‘cause people would ask us to. Then we found ourselves with a summer off, basically after all the first [Black Mountain] record touring and stuff. After the novelty of being around here in the summer wore off after a couple weeks, we got a bit restless and basically just started recording stuff at our jam space, because we had written some more songs and re-recorded a few of the songs that we had done on our “Christmas EP”. We just put that together with no expectations, and by the end of the summer it looked like a pretty decent album. So, we offered it to Jagjaguwar and they were into it.

This record is obviously a bit different. It sounds a lot different. Were you guys writing it while you were on the road for In The Future?
It’s one of those things where the songwriting is pretty slow for Lightning Dust; obviously because we’re busy. But also just ‘cause that’s the way we are. But yea, we had some other things we were working on, and then it kinda got to the point where we had enough songs that were around that it seemed like it was the right to do another album. And we wanted to do it in a more slightly over the top style–a little more orchestrated. We like to keep in mind that space is a major component in our music. But we wanted to get a bit more fancy and orchestrated this time. So we did our best with a really small budget. We have like one violinist friend and one cellist friend and got them involved in it a little more. Other than that, it’s just the two of us.

Were you going into the studio with all those textures laid out in your head?
Yeah, I had pretty clear ideas about what I wanted to do with a song like “Take It Home” that has a big, orchestral bridge and outro. I had written those parts for the string players as well as all the other parts. But just out of necessity we do have to build stuff up in the studio ‘cause like, in general, I play the drums and the pianos and then Amber plays the guitars. So we’ll do backing tracks with me on drums and her on guitar and then I’ll layer some synths and pianos on top of that.

Did you start out as a drummer?
Yeah, I’m a drummer first and foremost. A piano player second.

Did you grow up playing?
Yeah, I started playing the drums when I was nine and I come from a family of musicians. My Dad’s like a rock and roll guitarist and singer; my Mom’s a singer who used to be a folk singer but eventually became more of an opera singer. I was raised around music.

Did you grow up in Vancouver?
No, not really, I was raised all over the place. I was born in Illinois, in a town called Plainfield, which is an hour outside Chicago. When I was really young I moved to Canada, but I’ve lived all over Canada. I’ve lived in Victoria, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, and here. But I’ve been here the longest so this is my hometown.

What brought you to Vancouver?
Well, just really a change of pace. At the time I was living in Toronto–this is when I was like a teenager, like fifteen–and I moved out here ‘cause my Mom lived there and my Dad lived here. So I just moved here for a change of pace.

It seems like kind of a special town, musically.
Yeah, it’s different.

I don’t want to say “incestuous” but the amount of Black Mountain-related projects is pretty numerous…
Yeah, I mean, you have to realize that it’s not just Black Mountain-related. It’s a very small musical community here, and particularly in terms of like…there’s lots of other music going on. I suppose the scenes are small and not very co-dependent here, if you know what I mean. It’s a city, there are like two million people here, but probably one million, eight hundred thousand people have never even gone to a live music club in this city. So there’s not really a ton of support for it, which, in a way, can be really frustrating. But in another way, it’s very liberating ‘cause people just tend to make music without any regard to an audience here–because there isn’t one.

The scene may be really small, but everything that I hear from that circle is really good…
Yeah, and that’s what I mean. People sort of make music that is unanalyzed, ‘cause no one is really paying attention apart from their musical peers. I think people just come up with some interesting ideas by not really caring about what people like or what’s trendy. Basically, you get to make music without a critical eye apart from that of your peers, which is critical in the right way. It still drives people to be ambitious, but they don’t really expect that they’re going to ever make a dollar doing it. It’s purely on creative terms.

Before I called, I was reading this article about a program in Canada called FACTOR, where I guess you can receive grants from this organization as an artist?
Yeah, it’s an interesting thing. It’s not really a government granting organization. There is a government granting organization called the Canada Council for the Arts, which funds visual arts and “serious” music. They basically don’t touch what would be called popular music or that sort of stuff. Folk music, indigenous music, classical music–that’s what they deal with. So there’s this thing called FACTOR, which is this music industry organization. And it’s kind of strange, ‘cause it’s like music industry people that get together and review proposals, and yea, you can get grants through them. But one thing that’s interesting about FACTOR is that they tend to help those who need it the least.

That was what I was reading. This guy who runs a tiny label wrote an open letter on The Daily Swarm and it was just sort of like, “The people that get this money are the people that are already established…” and that it seemed like a cool idea that might not have been instituted the right way.
Basically, they have standards for qualification, and one of the main qualifications, for a tour support program, is that you have to have sold at least 2000 records in wherever you’re touring. So, that sets the bar a bit high, right? And one weird thing about FACTOR is that regularly, like every year, they dispense money to people like Sarah McLaughlin or Sum 41–bands that make a lot of money anyway–while they ignore bands you’ve never heard of.But it’s an interesting thing. Sometimes it can help, and if you fall in that zone where, say, you have sold a little bit, but you really want to go somewhere, it can help you out.

Yeah. I mean, it seems like a good idea. Just doesn’t really play out that well.
Yeah, and I guess their whole thing is that they only want to support stuff that’s already “proven popular music,” and so you can sort of see their point because they are a record industry association. It’s not an independent or government-based thing.

Getting back to your music–you guys mentioned that you really wanted to play with space on this record, and that’s pretty evident. Does Lightning Dust allow you to play with that stuff more than in Black Mountain?
Definitely. Especially the way we record–we don’t involve a lot of people. There’s never that thing where it’s like, there are a bunch of people in the band and they always have to be doing something. ‘Cause it’s just Amber and I. We just choose when to make things dense and when to make things simple. In Black Mountain, there are five very distinct musical personalities in that band, and just by its very nature, it’s denser.

Amber’s voice has this sort of tremble to it–is that something she does naturally?
Yeah. She’s always sung like that. And she’s never had any kind of formal training. That’s just what her voice sounds like.

It’s crazy, ‘cause it totally adds this haunted vibe to everything.
Yeah, it’s kind of disorienting and cool. I like her voice a lot. It’s neat, ‘cause I can’t think of anyone that really sounds like that.

So what’s next, the record’s coming out and then you’re headed out on tour?
Yeah we’re gonna be touring for all of September, part of October, all around the States and Canada.

And then, go back and make another Black Mountain record?
Yeah. We’ve been kind of working on writing and stuff like that this summer, Black Mountain has. We want to make another record this winter.

Do you guys just get together and jam or do people bring songs?
Oh we just kind of jam, and people bring songs. It’s sort of like people bring in skeletal songs and then we just jam until they’re good.

One last question: where is the album cover from?
Jeremy, the synth player from Black Mountain, he is a budding rock album artist. He did the cover for the last Black Mountain album as well. He’s just super talented in that way, he nails it. We were basically like, “Yeah, you should do our album cover.” And then he just came up with it and we were like, “Yeah, that’s fucking amazing.”

So it was something he came up with specifically for the record?
Yeah. We just gave him the record to listen to and he just made it. That’s sort of his style–he makes otherwordly collage art. He’s really a perfectionist too, and works really hard in that world of collage. It gets really interesting results. Especially in the world of album covers, his art just looks like a really great album cover.