Song, by Toad

[At the End of the Road Festival I had the chance to interview Chris, the bass player, and Julian, the front man and main songwriter from The Young Republic. Recently signed to End of the Road Records, their first album 12 Tales From Winter City - review here - is being released in the next couple of weeks. It's taken ages to write this up after our three-month homeless period and Christmas, but with the imminent album release it seemed like a good time to post it. It's also a very long article, but they say a lot of very interesting things, so I reckon it's well worth your time.]

What kind of a group are The Young Republic? “When people ask us we don’t really know what to call ourselves. Our guitar player just says ‘tell them we’re rock ‘n’ roll’.” says Julian.

“Often we’ll say like we’ll play this song in this rhythm which is more like a Stones rhythm or a Beatles rhythm and we’ll say to MJ to play like a Band piano style that would be more honky-tonk. One of the things that we’re trying to do is meld it into one so you can’t tell that there are seams, but at the moment they’re still there. Nate, our viola player, is really into film scores and the original string parts from Blue Skies, I think it was influenced by Men in Black.

‘Really into’ doesn’t quite seem to do it justice: “He’d like record film scores right from the TV. He’d get the tape recorder and get it right up to the speaker. That’s like the most hard-core bootlegging – that puts any scenester kid to shame!”

So how on Earth is it possible to pull all these disparate styles and fascinations together into one coherent whole? Well there are some common threads:

“Well all the boys like Zep and everyone likes the Beatles. And then we all like classical music. Different people, like Matt likes Debussy and Ravel more, I like more of like the Mozart stuff, Kristin the violin player likes Bach – that’s a big deal for her right now.”

Given that the group formed whilst attending Boston’s prestigious Berkeley School of Music, the fascination with classical isn’t much of a surprise, but it’s not something they have gravitated towards because of the school itself.

“It’s not through school so much as the location.” Julian tells me. “I live a block away from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and it’s basically free for students more or less every week, and we also live a block away from the New England Conservatory which is the best music school around.

“It’s like getting into jazz for the first time, or rock if you don’t know rock, except there’s 300 years of back catalogue to get through and some monster composers. Because unlike rock ‘n’ roll people don’t burn out. They keep practising and there’s not an energy thing, like a performance thing, so the writing keeps getting better as they get older.

“It doesn’t matter what style of music you use, because a lot of it, if you dissect the harmony or look at the orchestration you find a lot of similarities.”
“It’s all the same notes.” chimes in Chris.
“There’s only twelve notes you can possibly use in Western music. Louis Louis and some Mozart pieces have the same chords.”

There seem to be an increasing number of classically trained people in indie these days, and I do have to wonder how a classically trained person can pick up a guitar and the first thing that emerges is a rock song. If you’re so immersed in one kind of music, where does that transition to something so seemingly at odds actually come from?

Chris shows a little impatience: “Well it’s the whole stigma of being a rock ‘n’ roll person or a jazz person or a classical person.”
Julian agrees: “A lot of indie people and old classical people are just snobs. You know, like ‘white kids can’t swing’.”

One thing about groups like The Young Republic is that with the wealth of musical knowledge at their disposal, they must have so many more tools to call upon when they put their songs together. Something that has always interested me personally has been the influence of the producer on an album with a lot of instrumentation on it. Who wrote that iconic trumpet solo in Billy Bragg’s The Saturday Boy then? Was it Billy himself? Did he hum something and then Dave Woodhead played back what he hummed, or did Woodhead himself create it out of thin air? More pertinently, when a group adds a sweeping wash of strings to the climax of their songs that makes you go weak at the knees, who do we have to thank, the group themselves, or perhaps a very canny producer?

Julian agrees with this entirely: “If you know music, you learn about arranging, orchestrations, different colours, timbres, instruments, the range of the instruments, transpositions.”
“You really limit yourselves if you only know the six chords on a guitar.” puts in Chris.
Julian continues: “So a lot of people who incorporate like a cello or a horn section into their band, they still only know those six chords.”
In other words, they play what they would have played on a guitar just on a cello instead, or they just double the bassline.

This of course leads to the other benefit of having a band packed with quality musicians: you are less at mercy of the producer just ‘adding strings’.
“The ‘Hollywood Strings!’” cackles Chris gleefully.
“It might as well be done with a synthesiser,” Julian jumps in, “and that’s probably how a lot of people write them, I’ll just play this chord on a piano and that’ll be the strings. You know, we get into these really far-out composers, you know all these modern people that are crazy like Ligeti or Stravinsky and they do these things that are just mind-blowing, and classical music’s the kind of thing that if you haven’t gotten into it it’s probably because you haven’t seen a real orchestra play because it just doesn’t transfer onto CD at all.”

This is something that is only going to get worse, I presume. If you remember my brother’s article on what compression is doing to indie music which I published on Song, by Toad a couple of months ago, it will be most detrimental to people like The Young Republic, whose music contains a lot of the subtleties destroyed by over-compression. Add the ubiquity of digital music to the compression of mp3 files, and I can’t imagine perfectionist music lovers like Julian and Chris are going to be impressed.

“Well it’s like Dylan said, he hadn’t heard a record he liked the sound of in thirty years. I like a lot of production that goes on nowadays but the majority of it is less creative because it’s too easy. All these kids have their own studios.”
Chris is also concerned at this loss of expertise. He points out that even the Beatles’ engineers were full-time professionals.

“Yeah, and they had to learn.” says Julian. “They had to invent backwards tape loops and capture reverb for the first time on record, and feedback.”
He continues: “A lot of the mics we would want to use if we had a billion dollars would be from the 60s. A lot of the best sounding stuff – most of the guitars before 1970 are the best acoustics and the best of the electrics. People just stopped making them as well.”

Whilst the decline in manufacturing quality is one thing, of course that’s not the whole story. To a degree many musicians simply want to imitate the sounds they grew up loving. As Chris quite rightly points out: “It got to the point where the electric guitar, as we love it, is the sound of it coming through a tube amp or through circuit. And the records we love are all recorded on tape instead of through a computer so that’s the sound we’ve come to love as recording, that’s what we think of as recording.

Julian continues: “CDs are increasing in what they can record, but vinyl is everything. Real powerful music… like I’m not sure about the Beatles which is my favourite band. I’m sure it sounds awesome on like super new high quality 180 gram vinyl but the Love CD they just remastered digitally sounds amazing so you can do good stuff. But Zep will never sound as good on CD as it does on vinyl. Classical will never sound as good on CD as it does on vinyl. Jazz will never sound as good on CD as it does on vinyl.

“But we’re musicians, you know. We want the extra bit on top and the really full sound on the bottom. There is a difference to us, it’s just our lives revolve around music and we love to do it and we love to listen to it, so the majority of time we spend listening to music.”

And so now this band of musical obsessives have come to England, because for some reason their particular brand of music seems to be finding a more appreciative ear over here than in the States. The whole of the UK is no bigger than a largish state across the pond, although crucially, the audiences are bigger. On their first tour back home they drove 10,000 miles in two weeks, and on occasions there would be eight on stage and eight in the crowd.

In America it also appears to me that the micro-classification of music is something people take more seriously than here. In music shops in the UK there tends to be one big section entitled rock/pop that encompasses everything. Metal and various forms of Urban music are starting to create their own niches, but in general it seems like a much more fluid approach.

I would guess, although I’m not claiming to know, that this might be why The Young Republic have found more favour over here than they perhaps managed to garner in the States. The End of the Road Festival was a perfect audience for them as well. It seemed to be a gathering point for that mid-thirties, middle class music fan who isn’t quite ready to abandon their indie roots and retire to Radio 2 just yet. It’s pretty much the territory that this blog inhabits, and The Young Republic seem to sit quite neatly in this particular musical environment.

It’s a different atmosphere though, and Chris explains that it has taken a little adjusting to: “in clubs in the United States Which we haven’t seen as much over here.” there’s this tendency to get drunk and talk through the entire show.
Julian continues: “It’s definitely better over here in terms of… well people won’t dance as much as in the States but yet they will listen more to the country stuff.”

As Chris puts it: “Our job is to make people dance and move. And we’ll just like put everything we have out on stage and I’ll just like try and go crazy every time cause I love it. I can’t not do it because it’s just so much fun, but you look out and everyone’s just sitting there.”

So despite the typical head-nodding indie kid being their most appreciative audience in the UK, it seems they might be an audience the group have to adjust to playing just a little. Julian also said something pretty interesting, and something I found quite brave, about a desire to play for people who you really wouldn’t expect to be their audience:

“If you’re marketed towards an indie audience like we are, well… people who are our parents’ age or our grandparents’ age or our little nieces and nephews, we want to play for them as well. There’s no mentality about who we want to play for. I’m really glad that we get to play for things like this, and that’s why we go to places like Hinton, West Virginia or Madison, Indiana which are like the smallest towns you can think of, they’re like fifteen streets long. We want to play for people who know Elvis and Johnny Cash and that’s it, and then compare us to them. And then tell us what they think. And see if our country music stands up. People who saw Led Zeppelin, we want them to tell us how badly we suck compared to Led Zeppelin. Because if you funnel yourself into an indie genre you don’t get the classical broadening of your musical ability.

You don’t even get the classic rock ‘I’m going to be an awesome guitar player so I’m going to practise six hours a day.’ We try to practise our instruments. That’s something I wish that, you know, whoever the big rock bands are nowadays… oh, but like Jack White’s a shit hot guitar player.”

This sudden digression lights up both Chris and Julian. They clearly rate Mr. White very, very highly indeed.

With The Raconteurs he played like a ten minute one-handed guitar solo.” says Chris with a degree of awestruck reverence.
“It’s like a heavyweight versus featherweight in that band, man.”
I try and stand up for Brendan Benson a bit who does, it must be said, write perfectly crafted pop songs, and can consistently write a catchy hook.
This doesn’t wash: “Yeah, he doesn’t write groundbreaking shit though, like Jack does. He doesn’t make the guitar fucking squeal.”

“I wish that whoever people really like nowadays like the Arctic Monkeys or whatever, they would be shit hot guitar players, and they’re ‘okay’. And they’re young, they might get better, but a lot of bands like that they don’t get better at their instruments. And that something I feel like not as a competing musician, but as a fan of music. If you just practised more you could be a lot better.

“A lot of the bands that indie music is spawned from like The Replacements and The Pixies and Nirvana and REM had great guitar players, and great songwriting as well. Even Lou Reed is a pretty good guitar player. The Velvet Underground had good guitars, Sonic Youth had great guitars and that’s as weird a shit as you can get as rock music goes, but they can play. And there’s very little of that. No-one to be inspired by – we’ve got like Jack White and that’s it. You have to go to heavy metal to get good guitar and they just suck. We want to the good songwriter paired with the great guitar player. We want Conor Oberst to have fucking Jimmy Page, and a band that rocked and could make his songs great, or we want him to have the kind of band that was on Harvest with Neil Young, you know.

“I love the Strokes’ third album [a Toad favourite], and that’s a good example of people who learned how to play their instruments better. And they got trashed for it by indie people.”
“Pitchfork hated it,” says Chris, “just cause Julian Casblancas kind of learned how to sing better and the guitar player got better as well.”
Julian jumps back in: “It’s more of a rock and roll record. I love the first two records, I love the Strokes and Pitchfork panned it, they gave it like a five or something. But you know, Nick Valensi can play guitar, and he’s learned how to play guitar and it’s cool.”

The discussion goes on for a while along these lines. In fact, it could have gone on for hours, but for the fact that I had to cut it short to run and see The Wave Pictures. These two just absolutely love music. They could go on about it for hours. Honestly, this was one of the easiest and most enjoyable interviews I’ve conducted. You didn’t need to tease information out of either Chris or Julian, as they are just buzzing with music, excited by it, and really keen to talk about it.

At this stage of their careers that’s maybe unsurprising. The Young Republic have been slogging away for a while to an audience that hasn’t been especially receptive. Now they have a label – a label formed explicitly because Simon loved their music so much he felt compelled to start End of the Road Records just to bring them to that wider audience he was convinced was there. Now they’re playing to big venues, actually selling records, and people in England seem to really like them, so no wonder they’re buzzing.

I find myself really hoping this sincerity and enthusiasm isn’t knocked out of them after a couple of years in an industry that people are still struggling to understand. The digital world has thus far been a great help to them, as it has enabled them to get their music out to people like me, Tim at The Daily Growl, and Eddie who writes Another Form of Relief, before ultimately ending up at Simon’s door, which is where the record deal has come from.

Julian’s take on it is this: “I don’t like mp3s because the difference is phenomenal, but if people want to hear it, we don’t have distribution in America how else are people going to hear it? We get emails from California sometimes and we can’t go 5000 miles when we’re all in school. So whatever gets posted on YouTube or someone bootlegs it or if the record company want to put out CD singles when personally I’d rather just release on super high quality vinyl… I’m not going to do that to people who want to listen to our music. Once it’s given to the record label it theirs and once it’s given to the fans it’s theirs. We want as many people to like us as possible.”

That said, once you are in the business of seriously trying to sell an album, it is still very much up in the air. In some ways I think this is a great time to be on a small label because it seems very much like a level playing field. No-one knows how to make money in the post-digital world, so if a small label can crack it, the world literally is their oyster. That said, if they can’t, then the online world poses the exact same threat to smaller labels as it does to the big ones, and they have less fat to absorb the hits. So it’s a world full of opportunity, but certainly still a dangerous and uncertain one.

The Young Republic – Blue Skies
The Young Republic – Modern Plays

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