Pitchfork

Tapes 'n Tapes with Dave Fridmann. [Photos by Liz Hart]

To follow up a debut record like the The Loon-- a rickety, rambling rave-up indomitably awash in influence and promise-- takes focus, pluck, and one hell of a good drum mic. With all that (and a boatload of affability to boot) in their corner, Tapes 'n Tapes hunkered down in esteemed producer Dave Fridmann's Tarbox Road Studios in Cassadaga, New York to record their second album.

Pitchfork got Josh "Tapes 1" Grier on the phone from Tarbox to chat about the recording process, the new tunes, and, of course, blogging.

Fans can get a taste of the new material when Tapes 'n Tapes play their only scheduled show at the moment: November 30 at the Triple Rock in their hometown of Minneapolis.

Pitchfork: So what's the biggest difference between the recording of this album and the last one?

Grier: The last one we recorded in a friend of ours' unfinished basement studio, and this one we're recording in a proper studio. I guess that's the biggest difference.

Pitchfork: Does that lend a certain professionalism to the proceedings?

Grier: It's cool to be able to be at a studio where you're living there and work on stuff all day and mess around with it and work on stuff all night if you want to. But after the first couple weeks of doing it, I was definitely ready to be done in the studio for a little bit. I was like, "How many more times can we go through these songs and mess around with stuff?"

Jeremy Hanson hits the synthesizers

Pitchfork: Do you feel as though you have a tendency to do things more quickly than a lot of bands because of the way you've worked in the past?

Grier: I don't feel like we're rushing through anything at all. Last record, we spent probably 60 hours recording in total, and we've spent that amount of time here in the first five days. It's nice to not be restricted by like, "Well, we don't have any of that stuff here. We only have, like, three things that we can run anything through; I guess we'll have to make do with that," and be in a situation where it's like, "Well, I have this idea of what I want to do..." and we can actually execute that idea a little closer to what we want to do.

Pitchfork: How'd you end up working with Dave Fridmann?

Grier: I really like a bunch of the records that he's produced. After talking to him, too, it kind of got down to, "Well, are we going to produce this record on our own again or are we going to work with a producer?" I kind of wanted to try out working with a producer. And we talked to Dave and we got along really well and I was like, "I really love how you make drums sound." It seemed like this would be a good fit. I don't know. It made sense.

Pitchfork: Now that you're up there, was it a good decision?

Grier: It's been great, it's been a lot of fun. Dave's a good guy. He's very encouraging of doing what you want to do and I think that's a good thing. At least for me, it's a nice progression from not having really worked with a producer before. Our last record we recorded with Erik [Applewick], who's now our bass player, who was a friend of mine at the time. So there wasn't like a major producer aspect of it; he was kind of engineering it and we'd talk about how we wanted things to go. I was a little bit weirded out by thought of like, oh, now we're going to work with a producer and what does that mean? Working with Dave's really nice because he doesn't push anything on you. It's just kind of a logical step for us. He's very much like, "What are your ideas, let's make it work!" as opposed to at least what I've heard-- I've never been exposed to this, but other people, they get producers like, "This is my vision. This is how this record's gonna sound." Like, "Wait a second. That's my record! I don't want you to tell me how it's supposed to sound!" You know?

Pitchfork: Sure, it's the same with editors. [Hey wait a second! - Ed.] Do you feel as though the fundamental aesthetic of your sound-- that kind of lean, terse edge to a lot of it-- can hold up in a context like that?

Grier: I definitely think one of the things that I was most excited about in general with this record was having a studio where we could record drums in a room that didn't have six-foot ceilings. Jeremy [Hanson] hits the drums hard and likes to rock out. To have that be on the record is a good indication of the representation of what you sound like. So, I think that's the thing... it will be a good progression from the last record. This record will be more representative of what they should sound like.

Pitchfork: Do you ever feel like these new digs might lead you to go too far with certain things?

Grier: I think there is definitely a conscious effort not to over-indulge. We weren't calling up string sections and being like, "We need an extra part here!" I didn't want to make a record with a million overdubs and like 45,000 tracks and all this crazy shit that nobody is really gonna want to hear. So I was like, what are these songs, what are they like, let's make them sound good and, like, not spend like forty days on one song. Like, spend a couple days, get it right, and that's how it is.

Pitchfork: I understand, at least for a while, you weren't playing these songs live. Have you had a chance to road test any of them?

Grier: We've played five or six of them live. On our last tour back in April and May we were kind of road-testing them. That was actually really nice and fun because then when we got in here, we played around with these songs and got to explore some of the nuances of them. After we put out The Loon, there were a lot of songs that we had just written and then when we played them over the next couple years, it was like "Oh, man." There's all these things that we kind of discovered about the songs from playing them live. So it's nice that we'd have some of that. Granted, it was only like a couple months, but we got to do some messing around with some of the songs live... there are a couple others that I wrote three or four weeks before we came in here, so it was a good balance, like stuff that we got to play live and other stuff where it was like, "Well! This is what we think it sounds like now, and who knows after we play it for however long if it will change."

Pitchfork: So are things wrapping up in the studio? Have you been paring it down?

Grier: We're getting down there. We're at the last round of decisions about whether certain songs are gonna get cut or not. I've never been in that position really before, when we were recording on our own, basically the first album, it was like, "Well, we've got seven songs, let's record those and there's an EP." Now we have fourteen songs and we have to figure out which ones make the most sense.

Pitchfork: I've gotta ask: We poked a little fun at your blog in a news item a few months back. I assure you we meant well, but one of the things that strikes me about your blog is the almost total lack of self-promotion. Unless you're looking for somebody to come over and watch the game with you, you seem to be one of the rare musicians using your blog as something other than another way to get the word out.

Grier: I do have the best of intentions [with my blogging]. When we're done recording I'm gonna get back and start blogging again. I did see the news article and I thought it was kind of funny 'cause I always thought it was funny that anybody would necessarily even want to read the blog I was writing. Ed from Grizzly Bear blogs, and he knows how to blog and he writes about cool shit and it's really interesting. I'm always like, "Man...Ed's having so much fun." And I was like, well, if I'm gonna blog, I'm gonna blog about what's going on. I'd consider myself to be pretty normal. I like to grill, I like to play football, whatever. If people find that boring, that's cool, they don't have to read it. This is a way of letting people know, yes, we're alive and everything's going good. And I was bored of updating our website and news because there wasn't really any news going on with the band, so I was just like, I'll just blog about some stuff and if people get bored with it then they won't read it, that's totally fine.