The sound of silence

Our favourite band Them Bird Things is collecting good reviews for their sophomore album Wildlike Wonder. Before they start a little tour around Finland to celebrate the release of the album, we sit down with singer Salla Day and producer Will Shade to get an inside look at the album and at the songs of Mike Brassard and Steve Blodgett. Continue reading and find out about it.

It takes a lot of guts to open the second album with a song like Northern Curve, when and why did you choose it?

Will: This was a song that Steve and Bill Kinzie wrote back in the ’80s. Bill Kinzie used to play drums in a band with Mike and Steve in the early ’70s. That band was called Texas Driver. After that and broke up, Steve and Bill did a number of songs together that were just demos. Mike sent me Northern Curve about five years ago. I immediately loved it. It wasn’t really a song, more a tone poem. When I played it for Salla three years ago, she also heard the potential. Obviously, it was not something for the first album, but we always held it in reserve. We had opened the first album with a real barn-burner, Like A Fire. I did not want to repeat the formula and this song demanded that it go first.

Salla: It’s a quiet song and very sublte and absolutely demanded that the listener start paying attention from the very first second the album started. The whole album is much more nuanced than the first album and you can’t listen to it as background music. So, I wanted the listener to be in the mood from the immediate start. People these days are doing music that is loud, louder and loudest – you don’t even notice anymore. I thought quiet was the new loud.

There are hardly any electric guitars on this album, why did you choose this path?

Will: Sonically, I wanted to give Salla more space for her vocals. By clearing out those frequencies, it gave her more room to range. Plus it was just more pleasing to the ear and also more of a challenge. We wanted to do a hard edged rock ‘n’ roll album with no electric guitars. Was it possible? Listen to Silver Oldsmobile and tell me.

Salla: I wanted acoustic guitars, but I didn’t want them to be wimpy sensitive James Taylor ’70s ballads. I wanted acoustic guitars, but I wanted them played intensely. I also thought it would be interesting to challenge Timo and Steve. Stripping away their electric guitars and pedals would leave the player himself revealed emotionally. It would just be his fingertips – no amps, no pedals, no pickups – and I felt like it would make the listener closer to him.

Will: Of course we used mandolins and lap steels as well, but we didn’t use them in a purist way. Usually lap steels have an identifiable sound, but I had Arttu use fuzz boxes and some other effects to take away the cliche… the Mandocaster (an electric mandolin) was particularly raunchy sounding. Mandolins and lap steels are used in country music since the beginning of that genre, but we wanted to use them in a different way… make them spit and snarl.

Once again, Steve flew over to record with you, how did he like the experience this time?

Salla: Steve has played in studios all over the place and one studio looks pretty much like another. He never really gets to see Helsinki or Finland! He just sees the inside of the studio. And it’s always cold when he comes here. He’s from Vermont, which is just as cold and snowy so that’s nothing new for him, but he says next time he comes here to do an album it better be one of these Scandinavian summers we keep telling him about!

As a female singer, weren’t you tempted of changing the character of Marie?

Salla: Yes, at first I wanted to change the gender. But Will wanted it to be a lesbian country song and he talked me out of it. I had to change how I felt about this person who was Marie. I ended up falling in love with her.

White Lipstick seems to be the continuation of Black Petals, what can you tell us about these songs?

Salla: Yes, they’re about the same person. White Lipstick is about the character while she’s still alive, though. “Black Petals” is after her death.

Was it very intimidating to have an unreleased Jake Holmes song?

Salla: Not at all. Will introduced me to the song back when he was mixing the first album. I was already thinking about the new album and wanted to change our picture sonically. I mentioned to Will that I loved the approach Jake Holmes took on his first album, just an electric guitar, an acoustic guitar and a bass. Even without drums it was intense. And that made Will realize that Jake had given him an unreleased song from the late ’60s. Will played it for me and I thought, “Wow, that could be a hit.” Jake’s version was very studio-bound, though. Will wanted our arrangement to be more live feeling. It took us a while to get an arrangement that suited this particular band, but like Jake himself now says it’s as much our song as it is his.

Silences are an important part on the album, isn’t that a contradiction when thinking about modern audiences?

Salla: Yes. There’s nothing as intimidating for modern humans as silence. People even go to “silent lessons” or “silent camps” in the countryside. It’s getting ridiculous. Silence scares people now. And you can’t find any air in music anymore. It used to be an important part of music. What you don’t say is more important than what you do say. Volume used to intimidate people, but now it’s the norm. As I said earlier, silence is the new loud.

Are you afraid that the album will sound very American for the Finnish audience?

Salla: No, I’m not afraid, but you’re probably right. But what’s there to be afraid of? The fact that it’s too American? That’s where all modern music comes from to begin with, whether it’s jazz, blues, country, rock or hip-hop. It’s all American. The stupid thing to do would be to Finnish-ize these songs. They’re so tied to their origins that anything else would be dishonest.

Are there still many Brassard / Blodgett songs in the can for a third album?

Will: The future is wide open for us. I’m already planning the next album for Them Bird Things. First, though, I’m finishing an album with Mike & the Ravens in October as well as Steve’s solo album later in the autumn. Are there more songs in their drawers? Well, they’ve both been writing since the ’50s so, yes, there’s hundreds of more songs from the last six decades, but they also continue to write for themselves, for the Ravens and for us.