UNWOUND - band discusses latest album - Interview

Thrasher Magazine, Oct, 2001 by Jesse Locks

AFTER 10 YEARS AND EIGHT RECORDS OF creating experimental rock, Olympia, WA's Unwound reached a pinnacle point in their careers with the release of Leaves Turn Inside You on Kill Rock Stars. Written and produced by the band in the basement of singer/guitarist Justin Trosper's house, Unwound subtly question art and music as art on the 14 tracks that make up the densely layered, sophisticated, often instrumental double album. The band calls the work their most "orchestrated" to date, even though they confess much of it is just "smoke in mirrors." Often misinterpreted, Trosper--along with drummer Sara Lund, bassist Vein Rumsey and keyboardist Brandt Sandeno--attempt to explain the unexplainable.

You've wanted to make a double LP for awhile; did you go into recording knowing you wanted two CDs worth of music?

J: That wasn't the exact idea; we just kept writing more stuff We wanted to do that before but it never really worked out due to studio time constraints. It wasn't about making a long record, but the songs.

Sara: We just bad long enough songs. There really aren't any more songs than what was on Fake Train. They're just really long.

Is there a point when songs are too long?

J: Definitely. We've been doing long songs since the beginning. I hope we've figured out a way to make songs that are not too long. We enjoy playing them for that long too, but they're not jammy.

How do you keep the song from digressing into a jam session?

S: We don't do trade off guitar solos.

J: Our songs are actually very structured.

Are long, drawn out albums harder for an audience to digest?

J: Depends on the audience. There are certain audiences that thrive on long space-out music. The people that come to our shows are a variety there are people who like the more straight-forward rock songs and then there are those who like the more trippier aspects.

Have you found your audience after 10 years?

J: Our crowds are less punk than they used to be, probably due to the nature of the venues we used to play.

Do you see Leaves Turn Inside You as two separate bodies of work accomplishing different things, or just an extension of work that needed to fit on two records?

S: Having listened to the promotional CD where everything is on one CD. I think it works really well together as a cohesive unit. The way the songs were sequenced makes the two CDs work really well individually.

J: I like how the album is split up, so if someone wanted to listen to each disc separately they could. A lot of times, when you listen to a 70-minute record, a lot of it gets lost towards the end. Albums in general are pretty good around the 40-minute mark.

Vein said that you wanted half of the songs written like the other LPs and the other half a "studio" endeavor.

S: There is only one song, "One Lick Less," that is a studio song The rest of them were written as a three piece. Keyboards and vocals were added later. I guess in that sense they are studio experiments.

J: All of the songs were written pretty bare-bones. Each got a lot of studio treatment and by the time we finished with them they had become these really layered and dense, almost epic songs.

How do you recreate studio-made music in live performances?

S: We brought Brandt along to play keyboards because we found that they had become an essential part of the final product and it seemed like a shame not to include them. Later on this tour we're adding a second guitarist to make the songs sound filler.

J: Live it's still pretty rock, although we are not as loud as we used to be.

Pros and cons of making this record on your own?

J: The pros were having a new challenge before us. To see if we could do this as a band. I gained a lot of personal satisfaction out of that. We now have so many of our own production ideas, it would be hard to have someone come in and produce us.

What are some of the ideas?

J: Taking the limited resources we had, like our 8-track recorder, to produce an album I'm very pleased with. We were kinda inspired knowing that so many great records were made on 8-tracks or less during the '60s and '70s, which I guess you could consider the 8-track era. We didn't use laptops. It is all tape editing, no computers. Those conveniences encourage people to make bad art. They don't learn to be resourceful. People who don't combine the old with new, or who have anything at their fingertips, tend not to involve themselves in the creative process enough to make something sort of soulful.

How much do you see the recording space, which is basically in the basement of Justin's house in Olympia, playing a part in the final outcome of the record?

S: A lot. I'm sure the fact that it is this dirty, dank, freezing-ass cold place made its way onto the album.

J: Where we were was pretty isolated, so we found ourselves kinda held up in the studio, with limited contact to the outside world. It's quite surprising that we actually finished the album.

Is there any place you would really like to record?

J: It would be fun to record at one of those big major label studios, like Capitol. That would be amazing. One of those fancy-pants places where they recorded the Beatles or something.