Chattanooga Times Free Press entertainment reporter Casey Phillips spoke with Warren Spicer, guitarist and vocalist with the Montreal-based indie pop trio Plants and Animals, about artistic integrity, breaking into the U.S. music scene and the importance of dynamics.
CP: I know you guys formed up in 2004. Under what circumstances?
WS: Me and Woody (drummer Matthew Woodley), grew up together in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We played music back when we were kids. I might have been 12. Then, we visited Montreal when we were probably 16. I don't know if you've ever been there, but it's considerably different from any other city in Canada, especially Halifax.
It was like a window to light opened in my mind. Any 16 year old that visits Montreal probably realizes they can probably have a better time there than they could in Halifax. We moved here and ended up going to music school. When we were in music school, we weren't doing rock music, we were doing weird, electro/acoust art music composition stuff.
Our first record is completely instrumental, and that kind of comes from where we were at when we first met, which was weirdo minimalist music. That's still with us. We made that record because you can get grants from the government. There's a lot of money for arts.
They got rid of that program, but at the time, that first record was the result of getting a grant and doing something that had absolutely no commercial value and was promoted as such. It was supposed to be a grant for music that had no commercial value. It paved the way to be completely free and follow music not having to worry too much about making a life or a career out of it.
We made that record, and then we thought, "Maybe we're a band. Yeah, we're a band." Over the next three years, we worked on our first album, "Parc Avenue," which was an extension of that, again, not having any kind of career or wanting or asking for anything from it. It was an evolution.
We made that record and toured a lot. Then, we made our last record, "La La Land," which was made under a different set of circumstances. That brings us to the current place we're at.
CP: Does any aspect of that early period, the acoustic/elecro art compositional period, linger in who you are today?
WS: Yeah, I think it lingers in the sounds. We do some poppier songs that might, if that's all you hear of us, you might not fully grasp that our strength is in the way we sound in albums, start to finish kinds of records.
I think that comes from the first record because that's what the first thing was all about, being able to sit down and listen to a song for 16 minutes. It doesn't change very much, but it still sounds good. That deduction, I guess, of trying to find something that draws you in. You can keep going back to it and hopefully keep getting something out of it. It's not "washing dishes" music.
CP: Reviews of "La La Land" seem to have picked up on that, suggesting that some songs begin to gain additional meaning with repeated plays. Is that something you intentionally write into your songs - layered complexity of meaning?
WS: I don't think it's intentional. It's just kind of how we do it. To truly get it, you have to kind of go there, for better or for worse. In this day in age, there's so much music and media and news that's by the minute. Every 10 minutes, there's an update somewhere, something about a new song or a new idea or even what you're doing with your time.
That affects people's attention span and how they relate to music and how they handle listening to music, and how they listen to music for the first time, too.
If their idea of listening to music is one time through, then that might not be enough to get what we're doing. Sometimes, you'll lose people that way, but ultimately, the goal is to pursue your own artistic path. Being a band within the pop realm, sometimes, people don't have time for (that approach).
CP: Is that frustrating to you, that your artistic path is in conflict with people's lowered attention spans? Artistic integrity is one thing, but if you're trying to put gas in the van as a working musician, it seems like that could grate.
WS: Not really. If I look at the people I admire for doing what they've done, musically. It's much more comforting when you realize that you're much better off doing what you want because ultimately, you'll have a purpose in life and not just try and be a successful band, which I think is kind of hollow, if you have any ideas about music.
It's a little confusing when you're in a band and you're trying to make a life and a career out of it and be more successful. You can listen to what's going on out in the world and think that, "Maybe this is what people want" or "Maybe that's what people want."
I'll admit that it does cross your mind that maybe you should do this or that, but once you come down to it, you have to do your thing and not worry too much about how it does. The whole point of getting into it in the first place, at least from our point, was to make an instrumental record with four songs on it that's an hour long. That was our thing. Now we do something else.
You'll be better off if you just try to follow your instincts, I suppose.
CP: Many American bands that take their music abroad find that foreign audiences respond to it better than domestic ones. Is that true of Plants and Animals as well? Do you do better outside Canada than at home?
WS: No, we do really well here, actually. Canadians get down with us. America is a lot bigger than Canada, in a lot of ways. Canada is extremely streamlined, especially for music. It's really a straight line close to the border. Things travel really fast here. A Canadian band releases a record, and a lot of people hear it really quickly. You guys have NPR, and we've got a national radio, The Canadian Broadcasting Company.
That makes a bigger country much smaller, in a lot of ways. America has a lot of different scenes going on in the same place. You've got to really go and travel there. If you look at our Canadian tour, we did maybe 12 cities, and the American tour is 30 cities or something. There's a lot more work to do. It's a lot harder to get your stuff out in a cohesive way, especially if you're small and independent. You really have to do the leg work.
Other than that, we've not really been to Europe. Our record is about to come out in Europe, actually, so we'll have to see what they think about it.
CP: As difficult as it is to break into the American music scene, what's the driving force behind continuing to make so much effort to do so?
WS: Well, it's America, you know? I'm Canadian. I look at America, and I think of it sometimes from the perspective of its musical history. It's the place where all the music I listened to was recorded and conceived and came together. Well, not all of it, since I like Canadian music, too, but it's where rock'n'roll kind of started.
Even when I go to New York, I grew up in Halifax, so playing a show in New York - that's kind of a dream for a kid from the east coast of Nova Scotia. It's exciting, still exciting, you know?
To be popular there would be amazing. It has something to do with the history of music , the history of rock'n'roll and bands playing in those cities, those magical cities. They're such magical places where you go and play and read about the place and it has all this incredible history, which you get to be a part of.
CP: Who are some of those bands you're talking about? Who influenced Plants and Animals' sound?
WS: There's definitely something about the earlier recording period, from the mid-'50s on - the dawn of rock'n'roll records, which started out very simply but got complicated within 10 years. I don't know how to describe it, but there's something that happens on those records that doesn't happen very often anymore.
It's more of a sound. It's like a feeling that draws you in. A lot of records nowadays seem to be very impact-based. They want to get it all out on top of the speaker and in your face. Ultimately, I shy away from a lot of that. It makes me want to turn it down.
If you were to sum it up, especially with our last record, our idea was to make a record that you keep wanting to nudge up the volume, ever so slightly. I think that's the sign of a good rock record, that you want to turn it up. There are a lot of records that I want to turn down because they're too saturated.
CP: How do you make a record that people want to turn up?
WS: It's dynamics, I think. It's all dynamics, having a give and take between actually having head room and being able to get louder, so you're record isn't as loud as it's going to be from the start to the end. You can have an arc to it and not have it be a constant wall. Being able to play with the up and down is what music is about.
A lot of dynamics get lost in the recording. They get compressed and squeezed into boxes. Maybe this is going back to earlier records, but I think people had a lot more respect for dynamics than they do. In rock music, it's become kind of unwanted.
CP: Does any of that have to do with ours becoming an mp3 culture, where the sound is necessarily compressed to fit on portable music players?
WS: Yeah, I think it's that, and it's a new culture of people who don't listen to albums. They just buy songs and listen to songs. The need for dynamics in that scenario is much less. It's like a consumer thing. You buy it and you want to get it, you sing along to the chorus and then you're done. So be it. That's the way it is, but it's not very fulfilling, as musicians, to make that kind of music, regardless of the business of how it does.
CP: How does that commitment to dynamic music play out in a live scenario?
WS: You just do it, you know? You do it and hope that people can follow it. Ultimately, it has a lot to do with the room, the venue, and how it sounds and makes people feel when they walk in.
It's very strange when you play a lot of different stages. You bring the same equipment every night and sing the same songs, and in a lot of ways, you do the same thing, but it's extremely affected by the stage. That's what you become when you're a touring band - you become the room.
Some rooms are inherently very musical and make you sound really good and make the audience respectful and interested. Some rooms are just like television sets; they'll make everything into crap. But some of those rooms are really fun, too, because it's a Friday and everyone's crazy and it doesn't matter. Then, it's not about the sound as much as the energy.
It's better not to over analyze things. Hopefully, you just go with it, and you find the right recipe.
CP: When you're writing and arranging songs, do you build in a flexibility to your music to work in any kind of room?
WS: Not really, actually. To date, we haven't really thought about that very much. I have a feeling that our next record will be more about that.
We kind of grew out of a very experimental, studio-based band looking for a sound in a recording because we didn't play live very much. We kind of created ourselves in the studio. The tables are definitely turning because we've been touring so much. We're starting to realize that what make sense in the studio doesn't necessarily make sense on stage.
The studio we always approached very differently than the stage, but now, we've come to a turning point. We're going to make a very different record than we've just made. The next record will be a lot more raw. If you came to hear us play, you would hear what it sounds like. That's what we're thinking now.
CP: So a parity between the studio and the stage?
WS: Yeah. It's been a lot of fun freaking out in the studio and then figuring out how to do it live. It's been very different. We're kind of adapting to the reality of our lives because we play live a lot more than we play in the studio.
CP: Is it difficult, having emphasis moving more towards the live show, maintaining that artful philosophy you started out with?
WS: When we approach our live performances, it's been more about energy than it's been about music, in a lot of ways. Our best shows are always the ones when we're the loosest and least concerned about our performance.
We seem to connect with people and the audience connects with us if we don't try too hard to be a good, tight, professional band. People want to see us mutating on stage, you know? They want to see us feeling it. That's without being a full-on jam band.
We do it in a real way. We're not the tight band that gets up and does the perfect show every night. Sometimes we suck; other times, we're amazing. (Laughs.)
CP: What else can you tell me about your next album?
WS: We want to get it out fast. That's our idea now.
We're pretty new at the game here. We only have two records, and we're trying to figure out how to be a band and tour and play shows and make records. People can tell you how to do it, like, "Well you tour for a while and do the run of your album, the lifecycle or whatever, and then you go back into the studio and record again and then do it all again." We want to try to integrate and make it all together, so we can record and play live and not go to the studio for a month to make the next album. We want to keep working on everything together. In our minds, we want to get working.
I feel like we are very new to this game. A lot of bands are. It used to be where you make two records and you have your stuff together. (Laughs.)
To answer your question, we don't know when it's going to happen, but the idea is to make something very personal and very "us," something extremely transparent and very unfiltered by anything, to try to get in touch with our best qualities.