TVHH Q&A pt.2

the very hush hush

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hallucinations as would be expected. Everything in the outside world was starting to close in, and so I had to finally finish the album or risk losing my well-being. Thankfully, the album finished itself. That is, a stopping point was reached where nothing more could be done without toppling over the whole house of cards. One more card, and... 'Boom!' the whole thing would've collapsed.

The reason I was so consumed and obsessed with the album was that I wanted so badly to preserve that feeling of longing. To really capture that is very hard. And yes, it is scary when you start to lose yourself in an imaginary land that you have made up for yourself. A place where the rules for the songs work, but when you take that isolated view, or that prerogative outside your created world, well, people may think you are acting a bit strange.

I believe it is evident when an artist wants you to see how much time was spent working on a piece. Apparent, like... you can tell how much time Captain Beefheart spent arranging his songs for Trout Mask Replica. But, you don't know how long Gil Norton spent producing and polishing Catherine Wheel's, Chrome, or the Pixies', Bossanova. Gil's job is to make everything appear seamless. To make it seem effortless. Captain Beefheart's songs showed what an insanely articulate and discriminatory person he was. And that shines through in his manic arrangements. As for us, we are obsessed with every little detail. We are not only interested in creating a self-sustaining entity that can exist outside our own reality, but a perfect one at that. A world that is seamless once inside, and tangible enough that you can take a step back and realize what a spectacle it all is.

I'm very interested in the emotional and imagist concepts that came out of your work on "Washingsongs." In your bio, you remark that the EP treats "emotional dislocation attached to obligation and to being forced to live in an environment that refuses to feel like home." You also mention your decrepit (and perhaps haunted) house in Boulder, which seems to relate quite well to the hollowness and vagrancy of being unable to find comfort in a physical location. I'm interested in all of this from a musical standpoint, of course, but also from a personal one. How does your music relate to the physical landscape around you? Do you draw influence and inspiration from the surrounding landscapes, or are they a source of frustration that asks you to react against it?

PETER:

Washingsongs helped us 'practice' what later came to greater fruition in Mourir C'est Facile . Already, even on the EP, we knew how important it was that we stay connected to imagination and our burgeoning sensitivity. This was an underlying purpose that Grant and I have been carving out since we were playing years and years ago.

A large part of our emotional well is drawn from surrounding environments. My favorite cup of tea would be: rainy city streets, dark mountains, unending ocean, mirror lakes and Colorado's snowfall in particular. On our new album, instead of working against these natural forces, we work tangentially with them. In this case, we are not the plow, but the sled.

These environmental cues are directly tied to our emotion. They inform the latter. Mourir C'est Facile can be taken as an organized hierarchy of pure, emotional realizations. Starting off with everything hitting at once, then picking through the innumerous fibers to find and focus on a singular idea/thread. For me, the architecture worked like this: childhood, or raw emotions leading into complex, but clear, concise epiphanies. The feeling of aging and being overwhelmed by everything, and then growing up and understanding what was really going on when you were younger. The process is perpetual and continually repeats until the very end. Our ideas are all interconnected with their natural environments, and this in turn ultimately speaks through emotions. For us, nature is one giant emotional complex.

In short, the album, and our band, is strictly aligned by a collective 'feeling'. We are not (yet) a band that is interested in only focusing on a literal translation of our work- or providing a medium for political discourse. We avoid the post-modern punch line, and go straight for the heart.

In thinking all of this over, I am realizing how self-conscious we are about our art. But we decidedly chose the path of curiosity: listening and studying everything under the sun. Once Pandora's Box was open we either had to deny its existence by only alluding to/making fun of it (ie. the ubiquitous sarcastic gimmick band in any city right now), or exploit/explore every thing that had come before us (ie. the peculiar DJ Shadow methodology of writing music in the 21 st century).

GRANT:

I believe everyone to be affected by their environment, whether they know it or not, regardless if they choose to recognize it. In moving to Boulder, I had just come out of three years of solitary travel across the country, intermittently going to school in upstate New York. Until I forced myself to stay in one place, for better or worse (in Boulder), it was as if changing my location would change what bothered me. But I found that every place I was in America made me feel the same. Sure, some places are more beautiful than others, but there is an inherent ugliness of spirit everywhere you go...

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