August 24th, 2008
Throw Me the Statue: An Interview
To perform at Neumo’s, inside the Capitol Hill Block Party, Throw Me the Statue had to go about twenty blocks south: the band, currently on Bloomington, IN’s Secretly Canadian, is based in Seattle’s Central District. Consequently, for their Seattle gigs, they’re augmented by a live horn section, which accompanies their indie popster style well. Earlier this year, they accompanied labelmate, the amazingly great Jens Lekman, on tour. I’ve lauded their debut album “Moonbeams” in these pages before, and I got a chance to talk with two of the musicians behind the project, Scott Reitherman and Aaron Goldman.
Marcus Kellis: There’s a video for Lolita, featured on Stereogum and others, it’s got—it’s got some free-association type things. Kind of all over. Sort of like the song, too. What went into making it, why did that come about?
Scott: We were dealing with some friends of ours who do video work, and this was the first music video they’d done in a little while. So it was really fun in that respect, because they came from a background of doing short films. And it shows in the video, I think. We tried to tell a narrative that would be interesting and that wouldn’t make sense immediately. Or maybe it does, but they took an interesting twist on it, and we were happy to not have to be too featured in it. Sometimes music videos can obviously run into cliché territory too easily, so we were happy to not have to perform the song in front of the cameras too much, and let the director and the actors craft something that would be hopefully more interesting to watch.
MK: Throw Me the Statue’s mentioned in the same breath as Scott, a lot of the time, but there were six other guys on the stage with you tonight. There were even more setting up—and there was a lot of setting up to do, with the three keyboards, a couple glockenspiels, several guitars, bassist, three horn players. How much of the album is Scott?
Reitherman: We had some friends play on the record, Aaron played on the record—Aaron and I actually went to high school together in California. And, yeah, on the record it’s mostly me playing a lot of the stuff, overdubbing parts, but live obviously that’s impossible to try and pull off. So for a while now it’s been a band. I think that sort of storyline is maybe easy for people to write about, or talk about, mentioning only my name in the course of writing a paragraph-long blurb about our band. But I hope that starts to become less and less present especially with the next record. It’ll certainly be more of a band after that.
MK: What part of California was that, and when did the band form in relation from when you moved to Seattle?
Reitherman: I grew up in Half Moon Bay, California, which is a little coastal town about a half an hour below San Francisco. I moved to Seattle four years ago to start a record label, and start putting out my music through it with another friend of mine. And the friends I made in Seattle, and the friends I had like Aaron who moved here after I came here, all came together very organically. It’s just a group of friends who all played music, and all have their own songwriting projects in their own right, and we banded together to pull off the ones that I had been making. So the band in its current formation has changed a little bit here and there, but basically started a year and a half ago.
MK: So you did start your own label, and the album came out on it, but that was a homebrew type operation, right? How did that end up getting worked onto Secretly Canadian, the best label in the universe?
Reitherman: We’re super happy to be with those guys. They do a really good thing, and they have a really artist-friendly, transparent operation, which we feel super lucky to have been included in it. So I put out the record on the label I run, Baskerville Hill, and about two or three months after we released Moonbeams in the summer of last year we started talking with them. Then they picked us up, and released it in a slightly modified format—we just scraped a couple of songs off the record—in February of this year. That’s kind of how it went down. It was pretty surprising and awesome to have that shift, and be able to just focus on doing the music, and not going down to the post office every day and mail out copies of your own CD and stuff. Which is also a really fun and gratifying thing to do—mail people records and write messages on the envelopes—but it’s really wonderful to also be able to just be in the band for a little while, and focus on pulling off the music and the live act.
MK: The other band from California who I really hear a lot on the album is Pavement, especially the lo-fi type aesthetic you hear on a song like “Date With Ikea.”
Goldman: I’m pretty sure it’s universal that nobody goes into the studio and decides to rip off their favorite band, it just happens because that’s the way influences work. You listen to something your whole life and that’s what your musical perspective is centered on, more than other bands.
Reitherman: Lo-fi recording, whatever that name means to whoever uses it, is a product of the humble process which you have to go through when you begin. So you record a record at home and you overdub it to completion, and it’s not going to sound like “Wowee Zowee,” it’s going to sound like “Slanted and Enchanted.” But we’ll take the Pavement reference any day of the week.
MK: There’s an organic lo-fi, like Microphones or Sebadoh, but then there’s artificial lo-fi like Iron & Wine, which to me is just bullshit.
Reitherman: That started out, as is my understanding, in a similar sort of way… It’s tricky. Iron & Wine has grown into something so much larger than when he started making his bedroom four-tracks. You don’t want to leave that aesthetic behind, because it defines your artistic berth, sort of, to the people who end up listening to you. It’s kind of a tricky thing to navigate, especially with that guy, because you get on a regular, high-powered record label, and you have a lot more money to record with. And you don’t want to be accused of selling out, or making something that’s sparkly clean and sounds crispy, maybe. So I don’t know. We haven’t made our second record yet, so it’s on our minds, a little bit. But I highly doubt we’re going to run in the opposite direction of lo-fi. Whatever lo-fi means.
MK: The first sound on the album “Moonbeams” is this really great, Casio-style synth, then it goes on and you hear the guitar and everything else kick in. How do you go about realizing the instrumentation? Is there a battle for ground between the different parts?
Reitherman: There’s definitely the pursuit of trying to make this happy, interesting marriage between organic instruments, like acoustic, nylon guitars and drums, with drum machines from old Yamaha and Casio keyboards, the sounds that come with the keyboards—trying to make that all exist together in a way that’s cool. And I don’t know to be honest. It’s the stuff I’ve been interested in doing for a while, so finally making “Moonbeams” happen was a logical progression of what I was interested in, the aesthetics of old keyboards and guitars. I think there’s also—what I hope, I guess, that people might find nice about that is the humble quality of not using a bunch of expensive instruments to make musical ideas play out the way that you hope they would. Obviously if you performed all the parts on our record with high-end equipment, it would’ve sounded markedly different. It wouldn’t necessarily be representative of where it’s coming from, or where I’m coming from, so using those tools at your disposal is just the most natural way to do it. And I tried to make that a deliberate move, also, in using some of the drum machine sounds that you hear on the record, because that’s the way that I write the songs. I play a pop/rock beat on the keyboard, and start playing along with a guitar in my room, so it seemed like the most natural way to record it, and fuse that with other instruments and make it layered. But it starts there, for me.
