PARQUET COURTS

Hi Andrew and thanks for taking the time out to speak with us at Musicology.

You will be returning to Australian shores to perform for St Jerome’s Laneway Festival in February 2019. Do you treat a festival slot differently to what you would with a standalone Parquet Courts show, knowing that there is a broader spectrum of music fans at a festival?

Yes, I would say so for sure. They are entirely different aren’t they. Obviously, at a show you have people coming solely to see the band, whereas at a music festival, you are playing for people who are there to see a lot of different bands that aren’t necessarily you. Their attention is solely focused on you at a gig, whereas at a festival, you are playing to a lot of people, so the pressure is there. In a lot of ways, it is interesting because it is kind of a hard sell, playing to a lot of people who are unacquainted with you in many cases. Unless of course you are Paul McCartney or something.

Coming to play a festival such as St Jerome’s Laneway, is it a little easier or more appealing to perform on the back of a new record and performing that material live?

Sure, it is good to be coming to Australia with new material that we haven’t played there before. It seems people are excited about the record, so of course that always helps.

For your latest record Wide Awake you collaborated with producer Danger Mouse who is fairly removed from the rock and roll world, but was this the very reason you wanted to work with him on this project?

I guess that was one reason. I would say that there are a few reasons, but the chief one being that he was really keen to work with us. That was how I initially heard about him, was when he kind of petitioned us to work with him, and I was impressed that someone from his kind of level would be interested in working a band like Parquet Courts. Once I became more acquainted with what he does in the pop realm, I thought this was kind of odd, but I like that.

In what ways did he challenge the Parquet Courts tradition?

That probably was his biggest contribution was challenging us. It is things that are hard to notice when you have been in the band for, at that point, seven years and you become so used to things that they become commonplace and ordinary. The way you write songs becomes very comfortable and familiar, so certain things you don’t notice, and so being an objective person and not being in the band, he did notice and point them out to us. He did push us further on songwriting and saying things like “why don’t you write another part here and a bassline for this?”, he pushed us to try new things.

As an artist evolving emotionally and musically from album to album, in what ways did you want to extend Wide Awake from that of Human Performance and Sunbathing Animal?

There is always this idea that the next record should be quite different. Before Danger Mouse stepped into the picture, we had already had the record more or less written, so we were already taking pretty aggressive steps on how to make it different. You can talk about how it is different from other records musically and how it is different from other records conceptually and lyrically, but the main point is that it should always be different; otherwise, it wouldn’t be fun, and I wouldn’t have a good time making the same record twice.

To continue to step back further for a moment and taking it back to Light Up Gold, this has become a seminal album not just for fans but for so many other artists, with people and bands referencing it regularly. With the benefit of time, how have you come to view the record in the musical landscape?

I have no idea. I hear from fans that they enjoy that particular record, but I hear that about all the records really. It seems that Light Up Gold is the record that most people first heard us on. I don’t really know what impact it if any, it has had on newer bands or music at all. There are people being a fan of it, that is one thing right, but its impact on music at large, I don’t know if I can say what that is. You’re the Musicologist so maybe you can get to the bottom of it?

Well, thinking of record labels like Captured Tracks and artists like B-Boys, the references and similarities speaks for itself in just how influential your sound has been which takes us to what is one of the undoubtedly characteristic and defining elements of Parquet Courts, your poetic and socially astute lyricism. In formulating your lyrics, are you largely basing your writing around autobiographical subject matter, or tend to take a little more abstract approach in detailing your observations?

Well, it cannot be called truly autobiographic, but I guess it can all be called personal and experience-based for the most part. Not all of it has to directly do with events in my life; a lot of it is my personal voice, and within that is my opinion and emotion about certain subjects, at least I should hope.

In exploring other musical avenues such as the instrumental Monastic Living, your solo record Thawing Dawn as well as the alternatively named Parkay Quarts. Do such ventures provide a new light or direction when coming back to your primary Parquet Courts work?

Well, I would just say that Content Nausea is still very much a Parquet Courts record, so I don’t really consider that to be a separate entity at all, as with Tally All the Things That You Broke. That is one of the band’s records but for certain projects like the solo project, the record we did Milano with Daniele Luppi, those are important diversions. The solo record was for me personally. The Milano record was important for us as a band because it helps you realise what you have, what working with three other people is like, and how important it is to you.

You are a notable artist across multiple domains, one in the musical medium and one in the visual medium.  Do you find that there is a creative division between the art form of music and that of painting / drawing, or more of an inseparable fusion and overlap between the two?

There is definitely a fusion. I mean, with Parquet Courts, there is certainly a fusion because it is very much a visual art project for me to. I do a lot of artwork that perhaps many people don’t know about that has nothing to do with the band. For example, I just finished a show in Los Angeles so there is a lot of stuff that I do that is away from Parquet Courts as my visual arts life, but with Parquet Courts for sure everything that is visual that the band produces is important and just as important as the music.

As an extension to that, and recalling the last Parquet ‘Bloody’ Courts tour posters that were all around town. Are there some countries which you make artwork for that have the concept for the design work just leap out at you?

Yeah, well I make everything for what we are. Usually make a tour poster for whatever tour we are on, be it here in the states or Europe, or Japan. It is just part of the fun for me. It is also about being able to articulate what the band is about visually.

Returning back to your recent exhibition, how is that in artistic terms representative of where you have been in the past and where you are now?

It was a body of work unto itself. It was a large commission for 20 paintings for a small hotel in Los Angeles, and I have been working on it for the past year. Every moment that I haven’t been on tour, basically, I am in my studio working on these twenty pieces. For me, there is a theme to it, a certain feeling that each painting has, but there is a common denominator between them all. It is all on my site a-savage.com

I guess it is fair to say that music has been the one underlying constant in your life and the prism through which the world is viewed, analysed, and reimagined. Such a heavy reliance on music, and more precisely playing music, can be an alienating yet liberating form of expression. As you move through your years, does performing music become more or less the vehicle that drives you?

I don’t know if I would say it is music specifically, but probably self-expression that drives my life. That can take the form of music or visual art. Maybe something else someday, but at this point, it is just those two. It’s not just music, it is expression, but certainly music has become a natural form of self-expression for me after so many years.

It begs the question, what does music give you that nothing else does?

It does beg that question doesn’t it? If I really knew and if I could really articulate that, then I think life would be a lot simpler. It allows me to express myself in a very specific way, but I am not really able to name what it gives me, and I am fine with that.