Andrew Rieger and  Aaron Wagelin
of Elf Power

 

April 29th, 2004 at the E.A.R.L. in East Atlanta, Georgia 

 

LK: Talk about the first music that you heard as a child that inspired you to do what you are doing today.

Andrew: My parents were really big music fans; my dad especially. I listened to stuff like The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel. Stuff like that that my parents were into. Later, as I was getting older I got into punk rock, I was a skateboarder in high school and my parents let me have this big half pipe skate ramp in the backyard. I was into Black Flag and The Dead Kennedy’s and all of that kind of stuff. But at the same time I was so into The Cure, New Order, and R.E.M. and the Replacements, so I was into a bunch of different stuff at the same time.

Aaron: First musical experience? I guess I was like, three, or four and my parents had a VW bus, I guess in the early seventies, traveling across Canada, playing a lot of sixties rock like Crosby, Stills and Nash and shit like that. And I remember that stuff. I’d like tap along to it and I became obsessed with tapping something four times this way, and four times that way, and making it even for some reason. I don’t know, I just remember that. I was listening to The Beatles and all that shit early on.

LK: What was the first instrument you picked up?

Andrew: I had one of those thumb pianos, you know, my parents got me one of those little thumb pianos and I think that was the first thing. And then, of course, my mom made me learn piano. When I was in the 5th grade, I remember at my first recital I was really into Culture Club, and I played “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” by Culture Club at the recital, and I was really proud of myself. I grew up in a small town in South Carolina and I remember I was totally into Culture Club and Duran Duran, and all this stuff and I had Culture Club posters all over my wall, and these guys were coming over after school one day on the bus, and I had a Boy George pin on my Members Only jacket, and everybody was like, “Man, those guys are fags, are you a fag? That guy is a fag!” and I really didn’t know what that meant, but we got back to my house, and I was like, “Hold on a minute…” they were in the kitchen, and I ran back into my room, and I took the Culture Club posters off the wall, and I put them in the closet. So it was like, being gay and putting it in the closet. I mean, I’m not gay personally, but looking back on it, it was like, “Wow. That was pretty intense that I did that.” To avoid these guys making fun of me.

LK: What sort of stuff have you listened to lately, either old stuff or new stuff that you like.

Andrew: Everybody in the band really likes Robert Wyatt, The Soft Machine. And both me and Aaron really like his new album a lot. He always just blows me away.

Aaron: I tell you what inspired me, there was a jazz festival in Athens about a month ago, and all of these great players came from all over the world, Scandinavia, big jazz sounds, and there was a trio of violin, drums, and this guy that played saxophone with voice modulations. They were playing this freak out, free form jazz stuff, and it was very good. For 10 minutes they stopped, and he was telling this story without words, just kind of making up inflections of your voice as you would tell a story and it went on for 10 minutes, and he told this amazing story that everyone could interpret completely different, because there was such a general framework to deal with. And I totally made up a story in my head. But he was musical as well.

Andrew: What was his name?

Aaron: I can’t remember now.

Andrew: I know who you’re talking about; I can’t either.

Aaron: It’s a really common name, and that’s why I can’t remember it. But he was very old, and he looked like Santa Claus, and he was this big roly-poly man, and he had this huge white beard. And when the rest of the band would go off, he just floated around smiling, and it was like the warmest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. So, that was inspiring.

LK: Talk about Mermaid and Pharaoh.

Aaron: Egypt.

Andrew: Darryl Hannah? Sphinx.

LK: White Glitter Notebook.

Andrew: Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.

LK: Black Feather Limbo.

Aaron: The Maltese Falcon. I can’t remember who wrote that movie, but Bogart is in it. It’s good.

LK: Modern Orange Sky.

Aaron: Kit-Kats.

Andrew: Marmalade.

Aaron: Orange flavored Kit-Kats. They don’t have them over here, but they have them in Sweden. It’s just like Kit-Kats but they have orange oil in it. It’s a good direction to go in.

LK: Follow the Prompt.

Aaron: Gay sex. I had to say that, because I took this thing where I had to drink alcohol and watch gay porn and get tested. I don’t want to go into it, but there was a thing that UGA was doing, a psychology test that they would pay me $20 to get drunk and watch gay porn, and they do all of these tests. But, I had to follow prompts, so that’s why I thought of that. I could go into more details, but I don’t want to.

LK: Stereo v/s Mono.

Andrew: A bunch of bullshit, I don’t really care about that argument too much. It all sounds good to me.

Aaron: I like mono personally.

LK: Talk about the new record. The vibe.

Andrew: We were playing with some different folks; we kind of have a revolving lineup in the band, and we were playing with some different folks. A great bass player and a great guitar player. They really inspired the way things go. I usually write the songs on acoustic guitar, and everybody comes up with the arrangement. I like the way we do it, when we get different people every time, because it changes the way that the things go, and when I do demos on the acoustic and then I try to bring them to the band, they always sound completely different. And depending on which people you’ve got playing with you it always takes it in a different direction. The guys that we played with on this record really did a good job of doing stuff that completely surprised me and took the songs in different directions. All the times I would write a song that I thought would be a nice acoustic mellow song, and then it would turn into a complete rock song, or vice versa. That’s always nice to be surprised by the way your own songs turn out.

LK: Can you talk about some of the other players in the band? You guys seem to always have unique instrumentation.

Andrew: Well, let’s see. This time most of the new album is pretty straightforward instrumentation wise; we didn’t do too much wacky stuff on this one. We wanted to make an album that reflected our live sound more. A lot of the times, we will just go crazy with experimenting, and overdubs in the studio, which is a lot of fun, but this time we really got the songs practiced up in a good live rock band kind of way, and we wanted to preserve that for once. So, we tried to be more minimal in our approach, and not go overboard and restrict ourselves to keeping it simple, and I think it worked out good. It lends itself to the songs pretty good.

LK: A lot of the jazz guys talk about how notes represent colors, if you could talk about your songwriting process as if it were painting, what would it be like.

Andrew: Gosh, it depends on the song.

LK: From inspiration to final product. What is that process like for you.

Andrew: I guess it would be just really grey and nondescript in the beginning, because usually I will have the chord progressions, and the basic song structure, and I will just sing nonsense lyrics over it, just to get the vocal melody down. And then, once I work on the lyrics for a long time and once I get the lyrics down, and the rest of the band starts playing with it, then that’s like adding the color to it. So, at the beginning, it’s just really plain and drab, and then once everything else comes in that brightens everything up more.

LK: How do you feel that the modern musician, so to speak, fits into what we would call “modern society?”

Andrew: There’s plenty of people who just play music for the love of it, just in their bedroom, and don’t really care to take it out to other people, but as soon as you start touring a lot and doing it in a different way, that changes things I think. It just depends on who the musician is.

LK: What advice would you give young musicians?

Aaron: Don’t listen to the radio.

Andrew: Just do what sounds good to you, and follow your heart and do it for the love of doing it.

LK: What do you think about Blue Screen.

Andrew: It makes me think of the Land of the Lost, that show. The late seventies T.V. show, which was one of my favorite shows as a child. I saw it recently, and it made me remember that I had a big crush on the girl with the pigtails.

Aaron: Fuck you! That’s what I was going to say. I still like pigtails. I saw that show the other day, and I was like, pigtails! Hot girl! She was really hot. And I still like that.

Andrew: I only had a vague memory of the show, and then when I saw it recently, it reminded me of all that.

Aaron: Then it was on to Daisy Duke.

Andrew: Yeah, she was big too.

Aaron: I think she gave me my first hard on. What’s her name? Catherine…

LK: Catherine Bach. What about Adopt-a-highway.

Andrew: If that’s what you want to do, do it. Adopt-a-highway. I’m not going to do it.

LK: I’ll let my sweater figure it out.

Andrew: I guess that makes me think of having a sweater that’s an inanimate object yet it somehow has intelligence and you can speak to it, maybe telepathically or something, and he helps you figure out your problems. You wear him all the time, and when you are going through a hard time maybe you could name him Shawn. Joe. Something simple. And he would just help you figure out a lot of stuff.

Aaron: It just reminds me of walking down the street for no particular reason.

LK: White shoes.

Andrew: David Bowie, “Let’s Dance,” but that’s red shoes. Put on your red shoes. JB had white shoes on.

LK: Can’t see the forest for the trees.

Andrew: I start to hear the Cure song, “A Forest,” which is probably their best song.

Aaron: A watched teapot never boils.

LK: Here’s a word we made up. “Sneepana.”

Andrew: It’s like a truth serum that the CIA uses. When they take you in there, they give you sneepana, and it makes you tell the truth about all of the nasty things you’ve done.

Aaron: Snufalufagus on Sesame Street. He was serious. When he showed up, you knew it was going to be a good episode.

Andrew: Did you know the one of the guys from Phish, his mom was a writer of songs for Sesame Street? There’s a little nugget for ya.