ED SCHRADER’S MUSIC BEAT
ORCHESTRA HITS
“It affects your life and relationships, self-worth and gives you a ton of questions about why you are putting yourself out there. On the other hand, we have been touring for a long time and have seen things that we have never thought we could see and do.”
The Baltimore duo of Ed Schrader and Devlin Rice work in harmony to produce a unique blend of music that is wholly their own. A deep understanding of production, musical history and the continual push into new areas of exploration have resulted in their best work to date. We speak with the pair to understand their processes and methodology when it comes to creating new sounds.
Hello Ed and Devlin. Thank you both for joining us at Musicology. Given that you never like to stand still and routinely try to explore new concepts from album to album, how does the reflective hindsight of looking back at your youth for the present subject matter on the album sit with you?
Devlin: I don’t think that we could have gotten to Orchestra Hits without the context of our past work. I feel like a darker undercurrent has always been there but with experience comes more complexity. It does feel like growing up, or going through school. We started with the alphabet, now we are onto creative writing assignments. When we were writing for Riddles we wanted to move in a more traditional song format and take off the minimal parameters we lived in, but ensure that the record still fit with us. It’s kind of like puberty in a way, we had new feelings and abilities that allowed us to demonstrate how we felt our work sounded in our minds that we couldn’t before. That has carried forward here I think. More practiced and comfortable in our skin, not disowning our origins but sharing what we have learned about ourselves and what we are still seeking. We are out of the house, diploma in hand, shouting “Hello World!”
Ed: It’s funny because every album has a handful of songs where I am looking back at some crap that happened in the 90’s – this one is no exception. Oftentimes even the seemingly didactic stuff in our archive is about things that were happening to me in that moment wrapped in a riddle – sometimes I can’t even break the riddle – I write above my own head a bit.
I guess it’s better than singing “my landlady wants the rent but baby I ain’t got it yet”
I don’t wanna give away the treasure map – the “what’s this song about”. It takes away the fun.
Who could possibly care what I think anyways ha ha. I don’t even care what I think. I guess making obvious jams makes your work “sellable” but I’d rather remain at my factory job and have my integrity. Of course I can’t speak for Ed Sheeren (my competition! OH BEHAVE!).
I know a song is good when I don’t know what it’s about. You know what I mean? As much as I sit here and say what the framework is for a piece – it’s kind of a lie cause the little Being John Malcovitch people in my brain make some of those choices – like when you play Mario Kart and for some reason you decide to blow yourself up – the second you think about it you’re like “was that the weed or my subconscious”?
In what ways did you want to push the sonic boundaries on this album compared to the last?
Devlin: I wanted to make something that felt like a whole journey starting from track 1 to the end, no skips. I was also jamming to a lot of the goth classics like Clan of Zymox and Sisters of Mercy, Ed had recently written an article about Heaven 17 and went deep with their catalogue. So maybe all that was floating close to the surface without necessarily being the type of thing we intend to make. I guess I was thinking like Jazz Mind but on the dancefloor less in the pit. Tracks like ‘Silver’ started just with a chord I played on guitar and a bassline then all 4 of us turned it into something I couldn’t have foreseen. Will Hicks (solo project B|_ank) played all the piano and percussion, that wasn’t planned but came out in the studio. So a lot of the boundaries that were pushed just sort of came up as we were going down a path we were following rather than having a full idea of what we wanted to do.
Ed: I wanted to generally go more lush personally. I think it just made sense to give people some three layer Paul Hollywood cake after the pretty sparseness and brittleness of the last record which I truly feel worked for that record and it naturally set us up to bounce off that – it’s what we love to do. I knew with Dylan in the mix it was the right time to do that. I’m always hearing strings and keyboards when I write – even early on in the Jazz Mind era so this was like a volcano that finally found a break in the crust!
In pursuit of new sounds and directions, was the recruitment of Dylan Going into the fold as a co-writer and co-producer the lynch-pin you needed to make the record gel?
Devlin: We wanted to have a writing partner for Orchestra Hits, and our long-time friend Dylan Going was a natural first choice. He basically has seen every single live show that we have ever played in NYC and has intrepid taste. His wheelhouse is in the electronic realm, and we wanted to continue to feature those sounds as we set out to write a suite of all hits. So, songs like ‘Daylight Commander’ are where we ended up, along with the total band collaboration on tracks like ‘Silver’ and ‘Blue Garden’. We would have made a great record no doubt, but we feel like Dylan was essential to what came out.
Ed: I had no idea he even did that stuff – he was just a cool chef who liked to tape himself eating expired MRES as far as I knew and had some weird Moog equipment.. He was in a noise band called White Mice back in the day, but honestly, I just knew him as the cool guy who goes to every NYC gig we play and lets us crash at his place. We would play some crazy show in a sweaty warehouse then he’d put on Golden Girls and make us dinner or take us to a cool spot to get Mexican food. Just a great fella. He once made us barbecued cactus – twas lovely !
Harnessing previous encounters and hard lessons learned, what did you incorporate into this album that came from past experiences?
Devlin: There have been a lot of hard lessons and tough periods for sure, but having belief in what it is you are doing is worth the time, I suppose. I sometimes think about rock in the 70’s and how there was this conversation about where to take music that felt like the big bands/musicians were expressing in their releases. Musicians like Miles Davis, Led Zeppelin, Yes, Moroder, Bowie not to mention so many others in so many budding sounds and genres. I wanted to make a record that could feel like it would be held in that kind of conversation with our contemporaries. This is our dispatch from our corner about where we are taking our music.
Ed: I tried to really have my vocal ideas very solid before coming in so as not to waste anyone’s time so we could utilize that time for Dylan, Dev and William to make their magic. Craig Bowen of Tempo House where we recorded is such a comfortable guy to work with -he has the most gentle way of telling you that last take sucked.
He’d be like “so ……………..what did you think of that last take” that’s when I knew I had to step it up ha ha. But yeah having my stuff more prepared was key – and one should always be professional in that sense. It shows respect to the producer and their time.
That said I also remembered to listen to my gut more like on ‘Water Front’ adding the quiet “does she know” in there in the chorus.
Specifically, what were you exploring throughout this record, and what elements do you think were successfully and synchronically canvassed, and conversely, what remained elusive and hard to pin down?
Devlin: I can’t speak to the lyrics, but I think the feeling of isolation and longing is explored throughout. I wanted to have more complexity with the bass and a focused, intentional electronic component not to mention that I wanted to make an emotional anvil of a record. I think we got that. What’s surprising to me is that we actually wrote a song in a major key, ‘Noonday Sun’. Happy sounding songs have always been hard to come by for us, maybe that isn’t the brand or whatever, but that’s always been tricky to make a happy song sound like we wrote it.
Ed: We were exploring a sound that was bigger but richer in composition, and vocally I wanted to throw in some more style, some twists that would spice things up against the backdrop of the very stoic prior album. I wanted to unleash the forest, toss in some oregano!
What was your approach in instrumentally pairing the stylistic sounds to the thematic notions you wanted to lay down on wax?
Devlin: We wrote the record; we were all in the room together. Even though Dylan and I would have sketched out ideas and would trade some files, it was important for us to be together. While we were building the songs, Ed would be over in the corner, furiously scribbling in a notebook and mumbling vocal lines into their voice notes as we would be playing. Occasionally bringing a line here or there that we would record as boilerplate, and then that would inform some other kind of synth sound or idea for sound treatment. Dylan and I both had Ableton files for demos and we were able to work easily with that tool. We just had the rock band instruments in the room while we were writing and going through those files. Dylan plays some of my guitar lines, and I play some of his synth stuff type of thing. It was a very creative and playful environment in that way.
Ed: In most cases, we started with Dylan’s instrumental bits and pieces, and I’d start singing stuff, and since we all liked it we kept it.
From one minute long keyboard ditties we’d expand section by section till we had a song. Lyrics came easy, though I fine-tuned a couple things here and there.
Dev and I have always gotten each other, and it’s the same with Dylan. As soon as he started playing those parts my mouth opened and the songs formed like they were always there. It really was an honor to be part of something like that. It was very cool.
How much of what you have experienced in live and touring situations found its way into the making of this album?
Devlin: Quite a bit. Since we started as a band, live shows and touring have been our source material really. It affects your life and relationships, self-worth and gives you a ton of questions about why you are putting yourself out there. On the other hand, we have been touring for a long time and have seen things that we have never thought we could see and do. We toured in support for Melt Banana, who are legends in my mind. They were amazing every time, they did it all themselves and have been doing it since I was small. It gave me encouragement to realize that when you feel like a lifer the deal is that you rip it hard all the time, and you can do it yourself.
Ed: The thing which sticks out to me is ‘Blue Garden’. For some reason people went nuts over that, and we took notes.
The band builds and builds and then explodes at the end while remaining in the pocket the whole time. (In large part thanks to Will.)
It was a wild thing to feel on stage when it first started happening, like oh yeah baby here we go yeah! Once Will’s chops come in (right before the chorus) the energy goes from swaying to hard kicking and the crowd eats it up. Will knows what he’s doing, we were really lucky to have him on board while he was in Baltimore.
Do you feel that this album is a linear stepping stone in your musical path or a standalone work that is an intentional sidestep compared to that of a straight-line evolution?
Devlin: I see it as a continuation. It’s cool to listen to the end of Nightclub Daydreaming into ‘Roman Candle’ on Orchestra Hits. It’s like A New Hope into Empire Strikes Back, and I’m not even the Star Wars fan of the group!
Ed: It’s a logical progression from the past. We aren’t gonna sing about rats at this point (well maybe a little ha ha), and the sentimentality of Riddles era did not seem correct in this moment where so many people are choking on nostalgia. I wanted to show the twilight of this strange moment in time and echo back to what brought us here. I think we also wanted it to just be a pleasing album to listen to aside from the pitch-black core of which all resonates from.
What challenges did you encounter during the writing and recording of Orchestra Hits and conversely what fun surprises presented themselves throughout?
Devlin: I guess scheduling was difficult with Dylan having to commute down. Always figuring out the way to present the vocals in the proper way is tricky.
Ed: Honestly, that was also the fun part. That finite time scale propelled the songs with an urgency. One time Dylan missed his train back to New York because of a snowstorm.
Dylan looked at his phone and saw that his train was not to be. Then he looked at me and said “wanna hear this other weird thing I made?”
Upon the release of the album and ensuing tour, can you share with us one of your personal favourite performances you have played over the years and what made it so memorable?