Empty Exchange: CRYSTAL STILTS
Crystal Stilts GIF
ASHLEIGH DYE: So your newest album, Nature Noir, (out on Sacred Bones) just came out, where did the concept for this album originate? Was there a specific writing process that you had?JB TOWNSEND: The songs came about the way they have for a while, it was just practices and jams, working them out. In terms of the concept of the album that was lyrically, the noir thing. Noir is anything man made so it’s just the idea that “nature noir” doesn’t really make that much sense. However, in a sense, we are affecting nature and that sort of back and forth dynamic is the concept of the record.AD: So that sort of juxtaposition really fueled the album. How does writing with five people go? Way back when it was just you two, then you grew to this five piece. Do you guys have a certain process you try and stick to?BRAD HARGETT: I don’t know, the thing is, back then, I would mainly play the guitar, and then the arrangement of the song after but, the drums and the bass were pretty simple. It was not generic but exactly the bass line you’d expect for the song. Now we have other people, and they get it, they get the band so they can just play whatever they want. We trust them to play what’s good and fits. It naturally works together.JBT: It’s both easier and harder. I feel like a lot of things come easier because everyone is in charge of writing a part so you don’t have to deal with that, but there’s also five opinions and when we used to play we’d just play for 15 minutes or whatever but now everyone’s like ‘wait’, ‘no, wait’ ‘wait’, so it’s both better and harder.AD: I really like the video for “Star Crawl”; I think it’s a great embodiment of the concept for the album. So how did the filming and planning for that go?[laughter]BH: Well we started out with a very simple idea that I kind of had, then our friend Dan got in touch with me and said he really, really wanted to do a video. So we met up and talked about it and then made a plan to do it. They went upstate, I didn’t go, I had to work, and it was a complete disaster.JBT: It went really bad. Dan, our friend, hired some people to help him with the gear and the cameras and stuff and what they did was they forgot to bring a second battery for this camera so it was almost out. And they were like, “Oh lets just hook it up to the car battery to recharge it.” Not a good idea. It immediately fried the car battery, which was a rental. So we were immediately stuck in that one location and the sky just let loose. There was a park ranger who walk by and pointed at the sky and said “its goin’ rain, ‘bout thirty minutes” and we looked up and within two minutes there were just sheets of rain. Everything just got soaked.[laughter]AD: Well it looks great, you would have never known!JBT: Yea it’s amazing they got enough.
AD: My dad was in town this week so while I was preparing for the interview and re-listening to all the albums I played him some of your stuff and his reaction, to me, was very intriguing. He really liked it but was also pretty weirded out by it. I think he used the word ‘interesting’ like five times. It’s pretty far from his classic rock realm. What are your parent’s and family’s reactions to the music you write? Do they ever come to your shows?
JBT: It’s funny because I feel like he [Brad] and my dads have very opposite reactions. His dad is really supportive, not that my dad isn’t, his dad is just very enthusiastic. Kind of over the top enthusiastic, he calls [the band] the best new Beatles.[laughter]BH: It’s more of just him just trying to be a dad and be supportive. He wants to like it but he doesn’t know about music, at all. So he doesn’t get the references. I feel like some people really get it, but my dads not into records at all.JBT: And my dad’s just really old. He was in his mid-thirties when the Beatles came out. So he doesn’t even like Led Zeppelin. He listened to Benny Goodman, he had like Gato Barbieri records, jazz stuff. So to him music is people that can sight-read, and play instruments. So his initial reaction from our first recording was “are you even saying words or are you just moaning into the microphone.”
AD: Geez, its artsy dad!
JBT: Yeah, he just doesn’t get it, but he’s gotten to appreciate it even if I don’t think he gets the music that much. He got to come to a show that we played in Denver and it was a Monday night in Denver and the place was filled, like 250 people. So I think he was like “huhuh woah, people like them”
AD: I think the generational gap, in that sense, is pretty fascinating to me.
BH: I kind of like it, too, because we can go to certain places, like we played at a festival in Kingston, New York, a small street fair festival, and there was all these ex-pat New Yorkers in their 70’s that probably saw the Ramones, and The Velvet Underground, and Television at CBGBs and they got it, so its cool that we can bridge that gap.JBT: Yea that was fun. There were a lot of people coming up afterwards and they wanted to talk about their time in the city.BH: And how they had been around that scene from the late 70’s and 80’s
AD: This is a great transition. So you guys are both from Florida originally, did you grow up in the same area?
BH: Yeah, well I was born in California. My parents move around a lot, they live in Paris now. So I grew up in Florida, that’s where I cut my teeth or whatever, but I don’t have any emotional ties there.
AD: Would you have any comparisons between what life there is like compared to living in Brooklyn?
JBT: I mean we met, when he was not quiet 20 and I was 22 or 23, I managed a record store called the
CD Connection
. In order to stay open the owner had to sell like pipes and stuff, so it was half a head shop and half a record store.
AD: I’m really into store hybrids
JBT: So, he worked at the coffee shop down the street and I was trying to find, I mean, where we lived there was probably only a group of 10 people that liked Suicide or The Velvet Underground, or any obvious sorts of bands.BH: Artistic people in places like that are really hard to come by. It was very Jersey Shore.JBT: Just nobody, the culture there was like techno, waxing your chest, going to the beach. So he would come over on his breaks and we would just talk about records.
AD: That’s cool that you guys had each other.
JBT: Yeah, and realized we had very similar taste, and we moved to New York around the same time.
crystal stilts
AD: Living in an artistic wasteland can be hard; the town I grew up in was the same way but a different aesthetic. It’s like all cow tipping and Kenny Chesney. What do you think Crystal Stilts would have been like had it been born in Florida?
JBT: Oh geez, it would have been so weird.BH: It wouldn’t have even happened!JBT: I mean maybe we would have tried to do something, but for us, I feel like a lot of bands either have money or come from money, or have other means for support. We just had to scratch whatever we had to just play shows around Brooklyn. Like we couldn’t go on tour. If we were in Florida we wouldn’t have gotten noticed. At least not at that time, it’s a little different now. You can get found on MySpace or YouTube now. At the time [of the band starting] they told us “labels wont sign you if you haven’t toured, if you’re not a functioning, touring band labels wont even talk to you.” So we had to do that whole thing, then in a year a two it wasn’t even a thing anymore! Bands are getting signed based off their MySpace song.
AD: How do you think starting in Brooklyn when you did, in the early 2000s, right before if got super hip, and on the cultural map, affect your sound?
BH: I wasn’t really thinking about it, but then as we were doing it, when we first started recording in 2003/2004, I was pretty surprised there weren’t more bands doing what we were doing, because people really seemed to like it.JBT: I was really surprised that, at that time, there were no bands doing it.BH:I feel like if we had been like ‘lets do this, lets go crazy, lets get a manager, lets make a record, get a label’ – I don’t know if the climate was ready but, we probably could have tapped into something that hadn’t been totally mined. That kind of 60’s guitar pop was sort of passé then, it wasn’t popular.JBT: We’ve even talked about that. I think the first record, without a doubt, the lyrics were for sure, about the new place. If you go back, ‘Shattered Shine’ was our first single, and the lyrics on that are totally just this new feeling of being in a metropolis.
AD: Yea, I mean in that time of just having moved, being in a place where no one is really doing what you’re doing seems like a great inspiration
JBT: Yeah, it definitely affected the lyrics.BH: New York then was this sort of post-Strokes, Rapture, Fisher Spooner, that kind of stuff. There were a couple years that went by that we were like ‘what are we even doing?’JBT: We recorded that EP in 2005, and we recorded
Alight of Night
in 2006 but when they finally got put out it was in 2008. And then it was like part of this new wave we got grouped into. So it’s really interesting, it’s a question that will never be answered, but would we have been championed if those records actually came out when we made them, we might not have been. It’s a total mystery.
AD: So you guys intentionally had a slow roll to fame, it took a while for it to transform from a hobby to something you do year round. What inspired you to make the move to make it more serious? Was there a specific moment?
BH: No, there wasn’t a specific moment. I guess when you realize you can keep doing it, and make enough money to do it and pay yourself with it, its kind of like a part-time career.JBT: All that time was a learning process, too. We didn’t know what to do, like we just totally were making music, and besides that we had no idea. We didn’t have photographs or videos; we barely played shows.
AD: I really like the comparison of people like you who are honestly doing it because that’s what you like to do and if it gets popular then, hey that’s great compared to people who are very ‘one track mind about it’. I’ll do photos for bands sometimes that are so much more formulaic and business like about it and its structured and stuff.
JBT: Yeah, like “we’re going to do this kind of music, this way, and conquer this market.” It’s such a cynical way to make music.
AD: My last question is a ‘Would You Rather’. SO would you rather be able to talk fluently to any animal on the earth, in the sea, in the sky OR fluently converse with any human?
BH: Easily animals![lots of conversing]ANDY ADLER: I dunno. I’ve seen Dr. Dolittle and that seems like a curse.JBT: Yeah, I dunno, talking with animals would really take away all the mystery.AA: I often wish I could talk to my dog,BH: “I want food! I gotta poop!”AA: I’ve got a lot of options for what his voice would sound like.BH: I gotta go animals. If you made the effort, you could communicate with any human if you tried. Animals, though, that’s a line you can’t cross.JBT: Have you guys ever heard of that guy, Lilly? He tried to create a language to talk to dolphins and also had an
,
,
, or even
. He would even take the ketamine and talk to these three beams of light.AD: I dunno, I think doing ketamine near the ocean is a bad idea.JBT: Well, he was doing it in those tanks, what do you call em…AD: A sensory deprivation chamber?! That’s a double dose of crazy, ketamine in a deprivation chamber. Wow. Well what did the dolphins have to say?JBT: Ha, well he never broke through.[laughter]