When we last chatted you were just starting to pull your post major label career together and you were talking about how you’d found this wonderful community of like-minded friends in LA to help you out. What are your thoughts on that now, more than three years later?
The good thing about Los Angeles is, as I probably told you before, that it attracts a lot of strange and talented people from all around the world. Some of them are really talented, and some of them are nuts, and all of them being in this kind of circus together creates a really interesting energy. For all the bad press Los Angeles gets, I find it to be essentially quite a spiritual land. It’s in the middle of the desert, surrounded by beautiful scenery, and rather than having a defined centre like most cities it’s more like a circuit board of people and energy. The good thing about that is that it doesn’t automatically direct you to a particular area; it forces you to kind of burrow your own way in, to find your own family. Of course, that can go wrong at any point but if you are careful then it can lead to a really good network of people.
After a couple of years of being in any city you get to really see what it is behind the scenes, not just its cover. I think the people here are, for the most part, really forced to progress because it’s the kind of city where you can’t just come and expect things to happen for you without working really, really hard. Everybody here is trying to do the same thing as you, or better, so you’ve either got to be really, really good or really, really unique. So there are a lot of people who are just creating all of the time. For me it’s good to be around that kind of energy because, intrinsically, I’m a very lazy person. I think that anything that you create – whether it’s music or art or whatever – your location and surroundings have so much presence in the landscape of that record or artwork.
Do you feel like this album presents a very different kind of map of LA than Slow Motion Addict in that respect?
Certainly. For the most part, Slow Motion Addict was written in the UK and there were very different people involved. It couldn’t have been less organic compared with Tigermending. That’s not to say it wasn’t a good experience – it was a great experience – it was just completely different. I think it’s actually really interesting to listen to them back to back. For me, as an artist who likes to progress and change and get better at what I do, to create for myself a network that I feel is a growing life force, it’s interesting to see where I’ve come from.
Speaking of looking back, I wanted to talk about a few of the other things that have been keeping you busy between albums. I was really glad that you did the ten-year anniversary reissue of your debut album, The First Blood Mystery, and I was wondering what you got out of doing that, personally?
The main thing that inspired me to do it, initially, was that I wanted so badly to release that record on vinyl. Even though I find it difficult to listen to now, I still think it’s an important record for me as a person and for my career as a songwriter. Also, it helped me to do a couple of shows in the UK, which is something I had wanted to do for such a long time. Being so far away makes it really difficult and expensive for me to cross the water to tour. Using PledgeMusic allowed me to test the waters of the possibility that it could be a fan-funded expedition – and it worked – but it did make me realise how much money you actually need to do that kind of thing. The amount of money I thought it would take to do a fully-fledged tour was actually only enough to do two shows. It was like, ‘Oh, shit! It costs probably five times more to do a tour than I thought it did.’
Yeah, while fan-funded albums have become quite commonplace these days, it seems that fan-funded tours are still a growing area that not many people have really explored yet.
It’s difficult because you ask people for money so that you can go on tour and then somebody in Aberdeen says, ‘I gave you $200, why aren’t you coming to Aberdeen?’. It’s much harder asking people to fund a tour because, you know, no amount of money will help me to afford to play in everybody’s city.
One of the other things you’ve been working on is your side project band, Early Winters, which is a very different sound for you. Would you say it was a sort of freeing experience to write within a more rootsy, straightforward framework?
Yeah, absolutely. It’s something that I’m really glad I did. I really wanted to write that kind of stuff because I knew that I could come up with those sorts of melodies. I also wanted to be in a situation where I was with other people and all of us were equal, where nobody had the last say. I wanted to relieve myself of that kind of pressure, I suppose, to open myself up to just letting go and using the energy and people in the room to make the best that you can out of what you have. I can get extremely maniacal when I’m writing my own music, really pressured and obsessive, so it really was a freeing experience to not get that way.
I read that when working out the vocal arrangement for ‘The Secret Of Drowning’ on Tigermending, you locked yourself in a room for three days just singing the same lines over and over again.
Over and over and over again. The entire dynamic is made up of vocals, which is something that I really wanted to do with the backing track [sent to Carina by long-time supporter Dave Stewart], so I locked myself in a room – actually this one I’m speaking to you from – for 72 hours and sang that song until it was done. I almost lost my mind but it was so satisfying when it was finally done.
You’d been writing that song on and off for several years. Did you ever get to the point where you were like, ‘I’m never going to be able to do this, I’m just going to give up?’
No. I knew there was something that I was going for, and even if I didn’t entirely know what it was I knew that it was obtainable, that I just had to keep at it. What I wanted was in my head and I just had to make it work. I guess I got in a trance or something, I don’t know. I just know that I was really hungry when I finished [laughs].
On Tigermending you worked again with Dan Burns on production, was that always going to be the case? Was there ever any question of working with anyone else?
No, never. We worked together on Things You Should Know but it wasn’t like we took time off before starting work on Tigermending – we were working on songs for the album before the EP was finished, so it was more consistent than that. It was clear from the beginning that Dan’s production style and my production style were really compatible, and that working together was going to open us both up to new and better things.
Do you have a proudest accomplishment on this album, from the production side?
There’s a couple. For instance, ‘You Will Be Loved’ – I can’t explain what went into producing that song. And ‘Girl & The Ghost’…I completely took that song apart after it was recorded and put it back together again, which is something I also did with ‘Weird Dream’ and ‘The Secret Of Drowning’. It was so unbelievably freeing. There are things on this album that I’ve wanted to do before but I never had the knowhow. It’s hard to experiment, in a way, when you’re relying on someone else to do all of the production. It’s like asking someone to read my fucking mind. Working with Dan was great because he taught me how to do some things, which allowed me to work on one song while he was working on another and then bring the album together that way. Working with a producer has never felt so connected before.
You’ve said that you want to make a video for every song on the album – is that still your goal? And if so, how’s it going?
I’d love to but those things are fucking expensive. I’ve toyed with the idea of giving people the songs and letting them make their own videos. I mean, they can do that anyway if they want to, but just taking the audio from the record, making a video and putting it on YouTube.
Do you enjoy making videos then? Do you get a lot out of it?
I hate making videos. I hate being in them. I hate it more than anything. I can’t even watch them for the most part after they are done. But I really would love to have a video for every song. Not necessarily my own treatment, just the way that someone else sees the song.
As we touched on earlier, you’ve successfully used PledgeMusic to fund a number of projects now. What tips would you give to other artists hoping to make the most of the platform?
I’d say post as many updates as possible, which is something I don’t do. Actually, the best piece of advice someone could have given me is to factor in all your expenses before you decide on an amount that is going to be satisfying for what you need. It costs more than you think it’s going to cost – way more than you think.
Yeah, I’ve heard some horror stories from other artists who have drastically underestimated things like postage costs etc.
I lost so much money when I re-released the first record on vinyl. Like, a thousand dollars. I’m glad I did it because it’s something I really wanted to do, but I lost a lot of money. So I will say to others, factor in all your postage costs and factor in the commission that they’re going to take. Another thing I will say is to get as many of your friends to help you as possible, because I took it on myself and I almost had a nervous breakdown. But definitely do it, because it’s worth it and it’s satisfying. Also, do as many updates as you can. And if you are a lesser known band, I would say to expect the majority of people’s pledges to be under $100, so provide as many interesting incentives under $100 as you possibly can.
