I triple-dog-dare you not to smile at these.
Thứ Ba, 31 tháng 3, 2015
This Monkey Snuggling With Some Puppies Will Melt Your Cold Heart
It turns out that NO CREATURE CAN RESIST PUPPIES.
Step One: Get a puddle of puppies!
Any standard puddle of adorable, squirming puppies will do.
Step Two: Add one adorable, sweet-faced monkey.
The more charming the eyes, the better.
Step Three: Let the sweet-faced monkey cuddle and scratch and pet the puddle of puppies:
Even if he is just grooming them for delicious bugs, it's win/win for everyone!
Jay Z And Friends Launch Tidal Hi-Fi Streaming Service In New York
Live stream the press conference here.
Jay Z will announce the relaunch of Tidal, his recently purchased and much-hyped streaming service, at 5:00 PM EST today in New York. Stream the press conference below.
In anticipation of the launch, many of Jay Z's superstar pals — including Beyoncé, Madonna, Rihanna, Kanye West, and Coldplay — shared their support for the new service on Twitter. Watch a video promo featuring those artists and more below.
Tidal, originally launched in the U.S. by Swedish parent company Aspiro AB last fall, differentiates from competitors like Spotify and Rdio by offering high-quality 16-bit audio streaming.
The quality comes at a price: $19.99 per month, or twice Spotify's most expensive option. A standard-quality version of Tidal was recently unveiled for $9.99 a month. Unlike Spotify and Rdio, no free version of Tidal is available.
Tidal.
Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock Wants To Be More Than A Myth
Most people don't know it, but there are actually five, not four, time zones in the United States: Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, and Isaac time — as in Isaac Brock, singer, guitarist, chief songwriter, and all-around mastermind of the very popular underground major-label rock band Modest Mouse. The Isaac time zone is usually situated within the city limits of Portland, Oregon, where he resides, but point of fact it's located wherever he's standing at the moment. Isaac time is kind of like bullet time in The Matrix, only slower. Or better yet, it's like that scene in Interstellar where they explore that water planet orbiting a black hole for 20 minutes, and by the time they get back to the ship, 20 years have passed on Earth.
If you want to experience it for yourself, you really need to go to Portland. Once you arrive, proceed directly to the Ice Cream Party, a three-level mid-century modern structure situated in Portland's Goose Hollow neighborhood in the shadow of Providence Park soccer stadium that serves as recording studio, rehearsal hall, storage space, living quarters, and band hangout — it is, in short, Modest Mouse's Batcave. As instructed, you type in the secret code into the keypad and are ushered in by one of Brock's henchmen, and then you wait and wait and wait, because, well, time is irrelevant to Isaac Brock. Always has been.
His manager, a very nice and helpful fellow named Juan, says Brock called to say he's waiting for a locksmith and is going to be late. A locksmith for what exactly he does not say. So you do what the rest of the band are doing: hang around a table in the center of the Ice Cream Party, shooting the shit, nipping beers and coffees. Some are smoking cigarettes, others smoking something stronger. (Marijuana is technically legal in Oregon, but won't be available at state-sanctioned shops until July, not that anyone's waiting around.)
The band these days is a six-piece that includes drummer and charter Modest Mouse member Jeremiah Green, bassist Russell Higbee (ex-Man Man), guitarist Jim Fairchild (of the late, great Grandaddy), keyboardist and horn player Tom Peloso (ex-The Hackensaw Boys), percussionist Ben Massarella (ex-Red Red Meat/Califone), percussionist Davey Brozowski (ex-The Catheters), and violist Lisa Molinaro (ex-Talk Demonic).
Brock, 39, finally shows up a couple hours later in a beanie and a hoodie, bleary-eyed and red-nosed,a devilish grin splitting his ruddy, lived-in face. He's been fighting a nasty cold for weeks, he says, and the cold remedy he's been pounding has rendered him out of it. "I'm sorry, my brain is so unbrainly right now," he says. He speaks with a slight lisp. (“I like hearing him talk, doesn’t he have the coolest speaking voice?” comedian Fred Armisen texts back when asked about Brock’s appearances on Saturday Night Live and Portlandia. “I mean singing, too, obviously, but I can listen to him tell a story all day.”)
Modest Mouse are supposed to start rehearsing for their impending tour around 2 that afternoon, but it's almost midnight by the time they finally plug in and start playing. It is not long before someone points out that midnight is a crazypants hour to start rehearsing, and they give up after 30 minutes or so. But not before nailing the positively epic chorus of “Of Course We Know,” the grand finale from the new, eight-years-in-the-making album Strangers to Ourselves.
The next day I show up at the appointed hour of 2 p.m. and join the other knights at the round table and start all over again. Coffee. Beer. Mary Jane. Rinse and repeat. A couple hours later, Juan taps me on the shoulder and says Brock is on his way, that he fell asleep putting on his socks. Eventually he shows up and I get time to ask Brock questions. Lots and lots of time. Because I’m now standing in the Isaac time zone, where every minute is like 20 years back on Earth.
"Even when I was a kid, I always showed up late for school every day," says Brock, his tone somewhere between a shrug and a boast. "It got to the point where they had my late slips filled for every day of the school year in advance, so all they had to do was fill in what time I got there."
Some rock stars are happy to hit their mark and feed you their talking points like trained seals. Brock despises craven self-promotion and easy answers, preferring instead the gentlemanly arts of wit, whimsy, and conjecture, preferably of the surreal variety, wherein no point is ever arrived at until at least five or six fascinating detours from the subject at hand have been explored. Sometimes the point gets completely lost and we have to send out a search party. And that takes time. Lots and lots of time. Twelve hours straight, to be exact. It's like mainlining Modest Mouse.
Matthew Simmons / WireImage (2004)
"My world is so fucking insane and shit I don’t even want to be interesting any more — write a boring fucking story about me because I’m sick of being interesting," he tells me somewhere around the eight-hour mark. "I’ve killed myself making this record. Fuckin’ literally thought I was going to die. I wrote a will on an airplane, and I was like, I know I’m dying."
I try to draw him out on the new album, but Brock’s not ready yet. He takes a slug from his bottle of cider, his drink of choice these days because it doesn’t give him a hangover. He’s going to need to down a few more, he says, before unpacking the agonies and ecstasies of gestating the new album. “Thinking about the record is hard for me," he says, "because every little fuckin’ freckle on this thing I would look at with a magnifying glass, and then decided I needed to look at it from the top of a fucking mountain. My ability to have a perspective on it is so far gone, along with everything else. When the record was done, I was told, ‘You made $200 last year, you’re pretty much broke.’"
After an eight-year hermitage of trial and tribulation, of endless woodshedding, endless recording and erasing and re-recording, of beauty, repetition, and noise and danger and boredom and bloodletting — which is apparently just a day in the life of Isaac Brock — there is a new Modest Mouse album, Strangers to Ourselves. “Eight years is a long time between albums, I mean, there were three children born to members in that time,” says Brock. “But the good news is that I’m not sick of a single song on here and after working on them for five years, I think that speaks for itself."
There is blood in these tracks, and there be monsters too. There is a lot is riding on there also being money in these tracks. In 2004, Modest Mouse had a huge, if improbable, hit with “Float On” — a shuffling, arpeggiated ode to walking between the raindrops of life’s shitstorms — that drove sales of Good News for People Who Love Bad News, the album it came from, through the roof (it went just short of double platinum -- nearly 1.9 million copies in the U.S.) and put a shit ton of mainstream asses in seats. But a lot has changed in the intervening 11 years. In 2015, the incredible shrinking music business is fully half the size it was in 2004. The mass audience that bit hard on “Float On” may have aged out of the concert-going demo. All of which is surely cause for a lot of nail-biting and gnashing of teeth inside Modest Mouse Inc. “A lot of people are counting on me, people with families,” says Brock. “And nobody pays for music any more."
Brock’s been running the media gauntlet in advance of the new album’s release and everyone wants to know why it took eight years to follow up 2007's We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. Everyone. It's a reasonable question. After all, a lot can happen in eight years. The Beatles came and went in eight years. But there is no single answer. “I have eight answers to that question,” says Brock. “And I believe them all!”
In the last eight years, Modest Mouse chewed up and spit out four record producers (including Big Boi from OutKast), two mixdown engineers, their bass player, plus Nirvana's bass player, who auditioned to replace him, not to mention the guitar player from The Smiths. In that time, the band racked up 30-plus songs, enough to flesh out the new album with a fairly whopping 15 songs as well as a follow-up album tentatively set for release in mid-2017. Two and a half years of that eight-year span were spent touring We Were Dead. The year after that was supposed to be a year of rest and relaxation, but the band wound up playing another 60 shows.
From there, the first of many, many woodshedding sessions commenced in the hopes of generating material for a new album. "Eight years is a long time between albums, by any measure, but it’s not like there was a lot of downtime," says guitarist-songwriter Jim Fairchild, Modest Mouse's second guitarist for the last six years, during a break from not rehearsing. "There were tons of writing sessions. One thing I learned about Isaac is he doesn’t settle. I’m not exaggerating when I say I heard at least 50 riffs that could have been really good Modest Mouse songs, but for whatever reason he wasn’t satisfied. There really was no downtime."
Then came a devastating loss. In 2011, with most of the new album written and ready to record, charter bassist Eric Judy tendered his resignation, after 18 years of service, without explanation. This was a huge blow. Judy's departure tore a big hole in the DNA of the band's sound. "The way those three guys play is Modest Mouse, to this day," says Fairchild on another break from not rehearsing. "Nothing can ever replace that bond."
Brock thinks Judy simply had enough of the grinding stress and isolation of yearslong recording and touring cycles. "Eric and I weren’t without our problems," he says. "But I’m not sure that this path was exactly what Eric wanted — being in a band touring all the time and all that stuff. I don’t think that he ever fully signed on in his mind to what this life requires."
Perhaps, but Judy's reluctance to revisit the last 23 years of the Modest Mouse saga suggests there's more to it than that he just wanted to spend more time with the wife and kids. Judy originally agreed to to be interviewed for this article via email but then changed his mind, writing, "I appreciate your wanting to include me in the Modest Mouse article but I don't think I'd like to be a part of it. I left the band because of the anxiety it was causing me and it's been hard to get myself back on track. I didn't realize I'd feel so bad reading the questions."
C Flanigan / FilmMagic (2013)
Three years ago, Brock purchased the building that would become Ice Cream Party. Work on the new album paused for months on end as Brock and Co. installed a recording studio, living quarters, kitchen, rehearsal space, offices for both Modest Mouse's management and Glacial Pace (Brock's record label), and vast hangout zones centered around a pair of tables and a few stools that host band meetings and endless shoot-the-shit sessions. As any band will tell you, having your own studio is both a blessing and a curse, easily turning a finite recording schedule into infinite jest. You have endless time and an infinite number of choices, and that way lies madness. "Options are a motherfucker," says Brock. "Most of the best music in American history was made by people with no options. It's like, I was hungry so I built a restaurant when I should have just ordered off the menu.”
Once the recording studio was up and running there were at least four different recording sessions — some lasting weeks, other lasting months — with different producers, with Brock sometimes scrapping all that had come before, other times building on what was worth keeping. The recording was completed in November 2013. Brock spent all of 2014 mixing the album with Chicago post-rock guru John McEntire (Tortoise, The Sea and Cake), only to scrap those mixes and complete the project with Joe Zook (Katy Perry, Pink), who had mixed We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank.
Violist Lisa Molinaro is not just a member of the band; she is also Brock's romantic partner of the last five years. As such, she's had a front-row seat for the trials and errors and, ultimately, triumphs of the past half-decade. She says, somewhat improbably, that if she had to do over again she wouldn't have it any other way. "It has been a strenuous couple years for Isaac and the band and as a result for our relationship — and that’s been hard," she says. "But I am committed to Modest Mouse and I am committed to him and our relationship and that takes an ultimate amount of patience, which luckily I have lots of."
It took 23 years, but Modest Mouse is no longer a boys-only club. Still, it's one thing to invite female energy into the band, but quite another to make your girlfriend a full-time band member, and the two years Modest Mouse will spend on the road promoting the new album will surely test the mettle of their union.
"Up until now I had a pretty hard-and-fast rule: Never be in a band with a person I’m dating," says Brock. "It was a pretty easy rule to follow considering who was in my band. I couldn’t do it with a lot of people, but I can do it with her.
"I’m not the easiest dude to deal with. So she might decide that she can deal with my bullshit, and she might decide that she can’t. For me, it’s not much different than just having another person in the band. She’s an A-student–type person. And I’m an awesome student, I just don’t do much work or show up. A-students keep track of tone and timing and things. Davey [Massarella]'s an A-student and Ben [Brozowski]'s an A-student. None of them have been in the band that long. They’ll lose their grip soon enough. They always come in as A's, and everyone leaves as an F."
Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News
Brock's family tree is a riot of boughs, branches, and deadwood sprawling across the endless grassy plains of the lonesome crowded West. "If I wanted to count divorces and separations, on paper I have something like 16 or 18 fucking stepbrothers and sisters," he says as we tool aimlessly through Portlandia in his metallic green Land Cruiser. "The guy who kind of identified as my dad was my dad’s brother, who was the second person my mom married. [She] left my dad for his brother. It was a family feud for a while — for something like 17 years there was two brothers not talking."
Brock is wary about talking about his childhood, because the more outlandish anecdotes he shared with journalists early on — the commune! the trailer park! the Christian death cult! — have become part and parcel of his lore and legend and are often misinterpreted as indicators of hardship and neglect, much to his mother's chagrin. Which, I suppose, is why, without prompting, he insists I drive up to Issaquah, the leafy exurb of Seattle where he grew up, to speak with her in person and set the record straight.
Issaquah is a quaint Twin Peaks-ian burg situated in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. Low-hanging clouds make it feel nearer the sky. When Brock was growing up, Issaquah was the master of its own domain, but it’s long since been engulfed by Seattle’s vast suburban sprawl and all the plagues of postmodernity that Brock railed against on The Lonesome Crowded West: overdevelopment, chain-store mallification, gridlock.
Kris Adair, Brock's mother, lives in Issaquah with her husband of 20 years, Michael Adair, who immediately gets put on the Cool List — he saw both Jimi Hendrix and legendary ‘60s garage punks The Sonics back in the day.
Kris Adair's home today (left), and the shack Modest Mouse was born in (right).
Jonathan Valania for BuzzFeed News
18 Things You Might Not Know About Death Cab For Cutie
David J. Bertozzi / BuzzFeed
If you grew up in the early '00s and had a love for the emo/indie rock/Warped Tour music era, there's a big chance you became a Death Cab for Cutie fan. The band, which has been playing for nearly 20 years now, is releasing their eighth studio album, Kintsugi, the last made with former bandmate Chris Walla. With the release of their newest project, frontman Ben Gibbard and bassist Nick Harmer stopped by our New York office to answer fan questions asked by the BuzzFeed Community.
1. What are you most excited for about us listening to your new record and how does it differ from the rest of your discography?
Ben Gibbard: I mean, I'm just excited for it to be finally out in the world. We finished it in September of last year, so having to wait for this to come out, it feels like it's been forever. But yeah, we're really proud of the record. It's different because it's 12 songs, and they're all new! You've never heard them before on any other records (laughs). At this point, it's different because it's a new record. Outside of working with a new producer, it's not like we reinvented our own wheel with this, we just made a record.
2. What is your response to people who criticize bands for "changing"?
BG: Well, that's what artists do, right? I mean, artists are constantly changing and evolving, and I would rather be criticized for changing than for staying the same.
Nick Harmer: Absolutely. I wonder if they have the same criticism with aging (laughs).
BG: "You look older than you did than when I was in college."
NH: "Yeah, we're not friends any longer." I can't handle that.
BG: "I liked your record that came out when I was 17." Can I be 17 again?
NH: Forever!
David J. Bertozzi / BuzzFeed
3. How do you pick and choose which songs make it to an album versus making them a solo record, a side project, or scrapping them altogether?
BG: Well, everything I write kind of goes through the band's editing machine first, which is not a real machine. We just want the best songs to be Death Cab songs and sometimes there's a couple songs which slip through the cracks, which I think are really good but don't fit on a record, and I'll use them somewhere else. We just want the best songs that I've written in the period that we're making the record to be on the album.
Do you guys have your friends and family listen and give feedback?
BG: Yeah, of course! I played demos for my friends and my girlfriend. You can always tell when someone is being encouraging of your work and they're like, "Oh, that sounds good, that's a cool guitar thing." They want to be encouraging, but you can really tell when someone really likes something, and you don't get that reaction all the time, but hopefully you get it more than you don't get it (laughs).
4. What books would you guys recommend? Or what are your favorites?
NH: Just on the flight from Seattle I finished Kim Gordon's biography, Girl in a Band. It was great, and I've always had a lot of respect for her. You know, we were kind of reminiscing how many times we've seen Sonic Youth over the years growing up, and it was nice to get her perspective on life in New York in the '80s and being an artist here as well as a musician; it was really good. That's the first book that pops in my mind because I just finished it!
BG: I'm in the process of reading Karl Ove Knausgård's six-volume autobiography, called My Struggle. I just finished volume 1 and I just started volume 2 and it's just incredible, he's such an amazing writer. I started reading the first one because I was just like, why would I want to read a six-volume autobiography about a guy I have never met before? Oh, I know why! Because this author is a fucking amazing writer. It's really inspiring, I'm really enjoying it.
David J. Bertozzi / BuzzFeed
5. You write songs beautifully. Have you ever thought about writing a book?
BG: Uh, no. It's funny, I was talking to a writer friend of mine last weekend who had heard our record and he was really enjoying it, which was nice to hear, but he also said, "Yeah, I think writing songs is the hardest thing to do; it's like writing concise stories." And I was like, "Dude, you've written, like, 10 novels!" The idea of thinking about storytelling on that kind of scope is mind-boggling to me. It's also not my discipline, but I don't know, maybe one day I'll write my boring tell-all (laughs).
NH: Ben in a Band?
BG: Yeah, Ben in a Band!
NH: I find that really interesting in a lot of writers that the writing discipline as a whole, you find your version of writing that best expresses your means. Like, poets wouldn't write novels and novelists have a hard time writing screenplays. You know, there are some people who are able to cross over and do all versions of that effectively, but I'm always surprised when you think about writing as a whole.
David J. Bertozzi / BuzzFeed
6. Which album of yours is your favorite and why?
NH: That's a hard question, and I hate my answer, but it's going to be the new one [Kintsugi]. That feels like a really stock answer, but it's true! In this particular case, for sure. I had a great time making this album, especially because we were working with Rich Costey. I really like the songs on this album, I really like how the process came together, and certainly having Rich at the helm and working with him made me think about the dynamics of our band and how we work and how we make music in the studio together in some fresh ways, and in some ways that I haven't really examined in years. I don't know, I feel like it was the right amount of inspiring and challenging, and there was just such an energy to this experience, which is just right now making this my favorite of all the albums.
BG: I'm going to go in a different direction. I don't think it's the best record of ours, but the first one [Something About Airplanes] is still my favorite just because I remember we were in our twenties making this record on an 8-track reel machine in our house in Bellingham, not thinking that anyone would ever fucking care. Creating music, making art of any sort, it's always exciting and always inspiring when you feel like you're really hitting on something. There's something kind of magical doing it in a vacuum where you don't think anybody is ever going to hear it. I just look back on this very carefree time in our band's group but also in my life, so that will always be my favorite album. Not because I think it's the best record, but it's always my favorite.
7. How did you guys feel about Seth Cohen's obsession with your band on The O.C.? Did you feel like it skyrocketed your popularity?
BG: It was just a weird time. One day, somebody calls you on the phone, "Hey, there's this new show on Fox and they're going to use one of your songs," and it's like, Oh, it pays a little money, that's great, it will also pay the rent. And then all of a sudden, completely without —
NH: Permission or —
BG: Well, no, it wasn't like we were upset about it, it was just a strange phenomenon, like, OMG they just said our band name, and now it's happening again the next week. It's really strange to be part of this cultural phenomenon where there is a scripted show with fake people who are talking about your band, which is a very real band, like active in the world at that time. I think it certainly helped us at that time, but things were kind of changing at that point. Indie rock was reaching a much larger audience at that point due to a lot of things, and there was this cultural shift that was happening all around. I definitely think it helped, but I always think about when people are like, "Well, you're popular because you're on The O.C.," but it's like, "Well, yeah, but The O.C. isn't on the air anymore and I'm sitting here talking to BuzzFeed in 2015." So, you know, it clearly helped us, but it didn't define our career; it's a strange chapter in the book that I'm someday not going to write.
I mean, plenty of us liked you before The O.C.!
BG: At that time, it became this weird point of derision where, like, there were people who were upset because there were new people at the shows who had heard us because of The O.C. I understand that perspective, which usually happens amongst young people (because I was that age at one point), but it also kind of begs the question to, well, what is the right way to get into a band? What's the right time? Who is a bigger fan because they knew the band in 2001? "Well, I was a fan in 1998, so, oh, you must be a bigger fan than me." It's ridiculous!
David J. Bertozzi / BuzzFeed
David J. Bertozzi / BuzzFeed
8. What song is the most exciting for you to perform live?
BG: I still love playing "Transatlanticism." It's one of the reasons we still play it almost every night. I just feel like when we first broke that long outro for the song, I just remember when we were rehearsing it, I never wanted it to end. Sometimes you come across these core progressions and you're like, this is why that song is 20 minutes long, because it feels so good to play. And it still feels that good to play.
NH: What he said. That's actually one of my favorite songs as well.
9. Are there any songs that you're tired of playing?
BG: Not really. I mean, I've had friends who have been in bands who've had a big hit single and then they decide after a while that they get sick of it and they don't want to play it anymore, even though that's one of the main reasons people are coming to see them play, even now. I just feel that there's a social contract that you sign when you have a popular song, and you just have to play it when you play shows. For me, I feel like making the records is about art and doing the shows is about being an entertainer. So when you're playing a show, you can't please everyone and play everything that everyone wants to hear, but at the same time, we're not going to not play "Soul Meets Body," we're not going to not play "I Will Follow You Into the Dark." These are songs that were really big for us and they're part of the reason people are coming to shows, so why would I be a dick about it and just not play them because I'm tired of them? Thousands of people came to the show, they paid good money, they want to hear the songs they want to hear. It seems pretty cut and dry to me. There's nothing I'm tired of playing.
NH: Yeah, after, what, 80-plus songs in our back catalog at this point, anytime that there would be a song that would even approach that, we'd just cycle in something new for a show and it's like a reset. There are definitely songs we'll play every night and then thankfully you rotate through almost every night.
BG: But it's a good problem to have! I mean, to have songs that people want to hear? Like, "OMG I can't believe I have to play that song from years ago that everyone wants to hear, it's been 10 years!" That's a fucking amazing problem to have. I don't mind.
David J. Bertozzi / BuzzFeed
10. How do you find inspirations for new songs to avoid repeating yourselves?
BG: Like any creative person, just keep your eyes open and keep observing. I feel like a lot of the questions I've posed over the years are the ones I still don't have answers to. So, you know, in some ways, I'm still trying to answer a lot of the same questions that I was looking for answers to when the band started. I find life very inspiring, which is pretty fun.
NH: But it necessitates a change (laughs).
BG: Yeah, definitely.
11. Who have you listened to within the past five years that you want to collaborate with?
NH: Who do we want to collaborate with?
BG: Hmmm. On a Friday night I did a DJ set on KEXP, which is a station in Seattle, and I played a song by this guy Emitt Rhodes, who was in a garage band called The Merry-Go-Round in the '60s in California and he made a series of solo records starting in the early '70s. He made this record, when he signed a solo deal, in his garage, where he bought all the equipment and played everything himself. And now he's in his sixties, but I would really be interested to meet this guy and hear how he went about this process and kind of hear stuff he's been working on. He's just a great songwriter. I don't tend to hear a new hot artist and be like, "Oh man, I want to get that sound that that new guy has!" I want the music that we're making to be fairly timeless. You want something that'll kind of span generations, you know? So I hear a record from 1970 that feels still fresh and really vinyl to me and I wanna know that person. I wanna know how that person's creative process works, because they made something that I'm listening to now, 40 years later, and I'm still enjoying it.
NH: Same, I mean, I feel like recently I've been really inspired by just people that work completely different than the typical band arrangement with, you know, bass drums, guitars. The remix artists or producers that aren't working in the box, just on their computer in a small bedroom somewhere and just throwing all of the traditional band arrangements out the window. That's exciting just from a workflow perspective. I don't know if there's anybody specifically that pops into mind, but when we did that Codes & Keys remix EP, just giving back some of those reimaginings of our music was really inspiring in some ways, to think about cutting things up and changing things. There's just a ton of really exciting experimental things that are happening in that world. I really like that Thundercat record. He'd be an amazing guy to see how he thinks about music, how he writes music, what that process for him is like. Those kinds of artists that are sort of redefining their approach to music in a way that feels nontraditional seems exciting to me right now. So I don't know who we'd collaborate with — there's not a specific list — I think it's the longer that we play music together, tagging on to what Ben said, the process of people arriving to what they make, as you become familiar with your work process, starts to become infinitely faster when you help people arrive at the same place.
David J. Bertozzi / BuzzFeed
12. Becoming a musician must require a huge leap of faith in the beginning. What was it that made you decide to pursue music professionally? Were you scared, or did you know on some level it would work out and was right for you?
BG: I mean, we never set out to be professional musicians. All of the people that we kind of looked up to in our scene were people who had jobs at a record store and so on. I think our ambitions early on were fairly pedestrian. We were just like, "Yeah, let's make a record, maybe go on tour, maybe we'll make enough money to where we can come back and not have to work for a couple of months..." I think when we first started I was just resigned to working temp jobs as long as the band was a thing. I don't know, I don't think that being a professional musician is something that chooses you, you know. There's not a series of, you know, "If I do this then I'll get this." I find sometimes when I'll talk to people who are, like, college-aged kids, there's this kind of, they've been programmed to be like, "I want to be a doctor, so how do I do that?" Well, you go to this school and that school, do this, this, and this, and then you're a doctor. But that kind of application doesn't work for being a musician. Like, "Well, first you make a record, then you go on tour, then people pay you, then you're a professional musician!" There are no guarantees. You just have to do it because you love it. For some people there comes a time where it's like, "Maybe it's time to go to law school!" And then for other people they are able to squeak by for a while, and sometimes people are really able to hold a job for a long time. I just feel really thankful that I've fallen into the latter category. It's not because we're any more worthy or talented than anybody else, we were just in the right place at the right time and things just kind of worked out.
13. Are you flattered when someone tattoos your lyrics on their body?
BG: Totally! Absolutely, that's a huge commitment. I don't have any tattoos, because I can't make that kind of commitment myself. I do have this funny thought, though, of someone who's young and really emotional and then 20, 30 years into the future thinking, "Why did I tattoo 'Transatlanticism' on my arm? God damnit."
Have you seen any really weird ones?
NH: No, but I've seen some commitments.
BG: I've seen some really cool ones, actually, I've seen more than I would expect of the bird from Transatlanticism. It's a really beautiful piece of art that Adde Russell made, and it just translates really nicely into a tattoo. Our friend Ryan has the running people from We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes.
NH: I've seen the rowboat.
BG: Oh yeah! I've seen the rowboat too. I think it's cool.
David J. Bertozzi / BuzzFeed
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