Interview with The Passionistas
Remember The Passionistas? The band behind God’s Boat, one of our favorite new records from last year? Well, now they’re back with a brand new EP called The Flood, and their debut, God’s Boat, is finally set for commercial release on New & Used Records next week. Busy as they may be, though, The Passionistas were able to take a break from their work last month to tell us all about their new record, world domination, and - of course - Gwen Stefani.
Steve: So what were sort of the origins of The Passionistas?
Aaron: Well the basic story is that we met at a math class at a community college and we got together and started working on a little recording project. So we started working together and it slowly evolved into The Passionistas.
Steve: Why did you pick God’s Boat as an album title? Was it meaningful to you somehow?
Myles: I guess we kind of thought of it as like Noah’s Ark. We wanted to sail into the future and take everything we like about music and protect it.
Aaron: You know, we took like the best zebra and the best mountain lion or whatever. Plus we kind of knew it was the last time we’d be doing a real rock album, so this album was a real fulfillment of a lot of dreams for us.
Steve: Listening to God's Boat, it's hard not to imagine what your live show is like. Anything you can tell us about what performing live is like for you?
Myles: We grew up on stage. Performing live is where The Passionistas developed. When we started playing clubs, everyone was comparing us to The Shaggs. We couldn't help it. We didn't know how to play our instruments very well. All we had was curiosity and motivation. I believe when you see our live show, you are really witnessing discovery.
Aaron: We don't approach our live show like it's art. Which isn't to say that it isn't art, but when we play live, we're trying to approach it like we're not even the Passionistas. More like we're a Passionista cover band. Some nights we're a good one, and some nights we're a bad one, and some nights we're just a bizarre one.
Andrew: Power is in dancing - I love making people dance!
Myles: One time after a show, a stranger came up to me and said we are like "really smart eight year olds looking through a telescope for the first time." I think that about sums it up.
Steve: So many of God's Boat's tracks sound so effortless and spur-of-the-moment, but do you have a particular approach to your songwriting?
Aaron: It's funny that you say it sounds effortless and spontaneous - that’s really good, really what we wanted. Collectively, our songwriting approach is always about finding the hook, making music that people want to hear, that we want to hear. When I write a song, I start with a title or a chorus, or if I'm lucky, I end up with both and the title is in the chorus. We're intellectual about our music, but we're comfortable with our intelligence - we don't view our music as a place to say “WE'RE SMART.”
Myles: I don't really write songs. They come to me. By the time I hear them in my head they're done. It may sound like I'm full of shit, but I'm not. It's hard to explain. I guess it takes about fifteen seconds or so. I would say I write orgasms. Writing a song is about feeling, it's not about thinking.
Andrew: I wrote most of my bass lines on the spot, but that's just me. I like Aaron's answer, We really don't try too hard when we write a song, We really want to be a pop band, but something just keeps getting in the way. Maybe we are too smart, but whatever....
Myles: As a group, we all bring our ideas, songs and hooks to the table. We tweak for legibility collectively, but we figure out our individual instrumentation independently. Andrew, for example, introduces a lot of dissonant harmony with his basslines. He hears something different in music, and that's what we want to show: freedom and individuality. If you're in The Passionistas, you can do whatever you want.
Steve: How did you come up with a lot of the lyrical ideas for God’s Boat?
Aaron: A lot of the time, one of us will just come up with a title first, like one day Myles told me he wanted to write a song called “Y2K” and we just kind of went from there. Plus, the title’s generally just about the most important element of what makes a song, like you imagine “what would a song called this sound like?” Sometimes when I’m looking at a record, I look at the song titles, and I know that I’m going to want to listen to it if the song titles get me excited.
Steve: Who are some of your biggest influences? Any all-time favorite artists or albums?
Aaron: At the time of making God's Boat, we were just starting to get out of rock ‘n’ roll altogether. I was listening to the Stooges, the Dead Boys - you know, the real end-of-music sort of stuff, and I didn't know where to go. I was also listening to Gwen Stefani - which had
a MAJOR impact on the record, especially “Y2K,” for example - and I felt like Gwen really knew what was going on. I was over rock music.
Andrew: I got into metal and different forms of "rock" music - Power Pop, Metal, Hip Hop, Glitter!
Aaron: In terms of all time favorites records...The Clash and Nevermind and Live Through This and Call the Doctor and The VU & Nico. I remember seeing Sleater-Kinney when I was sixteen and just wanting to be Corin Tucker so bad, wanting to make a record that would be as good as that.
Myles: My favorite artist right now is the MySpace celebrity Chris Crocker. My favorite artists attempt two things: they try to take over the world, and they try to make something completely alien. When you try to accept yourself, art becomes very easy to make. You shouldn't be the one critiquing your work, saying this was good or that was bad. That's for the world to do. You know, when we die, art is the only thing left. You've got to be really human about it for the sake of generations to come. You must be as naked as possible; you must be free enough to make mistakes.
Steve: You also talked in one of your promo videos about how one of your goals is world domination - how do you, The Passionistas, plan on taking over the world?
Aaron: We’re really inspired by artists like Gwen Stefani who don’t just stop at their music, but that have their own clothing line and fragrance, and we kind of want to do all of that. We want to have like a whole Passionistas aesthetic that everyone can embrace and love, sort of our own Passionistas ideology.
Steve: Why is Gwen such a big influence on your music?
Aaron: In a specifically musical sense, “Y2K” was written as a Gwen song. We were really inspired by “Hollaback Girl,” and we were trying to get some of that vibe.
Her music, though, isn't so much important to us in a musicological sense - we love her music, but it's her ideas about music that really impacted us. Her solo albums - LAMB and The Sweet Escape - are really brave. They are brave because she’s willing to make a fool of herself and to follow her impulses and ideas. She tries out different genres, collaborators, styles and tactics without caring that a lot of people would be critical. Her lyrics are often almost embarrassing in how personal or weird they are.
I love how she writes songs about anything - shopping, lust, fear of HIV, biological clocks - and all of it without any sense of irony or distance. She is totally within herself. Gwen was a real portal for me to discover rap music and how much I love it. I saw in her a real way for me to appreciate and love and even make this sort of music, even if it meant being a little ridiculous. So you could say that we found her bravery inspiring, and we tried to follow it with our own bravery. We want to do whatever we want, without restriction. We want total freedom and she pushed us to get it.
Steve: So what exactly is the Passionistas ideology?
Myles: Well you can’t really make music today without getting involved in the marketing and the clothing and that sort of thing, and we want to recognize that. We want to make our promotion of ourselves sort of part of our art. We don’t just want to make music, we want to make everything, and that’s why we really like pop artists like Jay-Z or Gwen Stefani.
Aaron: That doesn’t really happen on the indie level much because there’s so much pretentiousness with indie bands trying to be all anti-establishment. That’s kind of one of my problems with Bright Eyes, because honestly, he’s a fairly well-off guy who’s had a pretty good life. We don’t want to be another group of rich, northern Californians who just sit around complaining about Bush all the time. Basically the main component of our ideology is just total freedom; there’s nothing more boring than just doing what’s absolutely expected of you.
Myles: If we’re doing something that makes us uncomfortable, then we know we’re doing good. There’s kind of a feeling of victory and overcoming a battle that comes with doing that, and I guess we just want to be heroes.
Steve: Now that you're signed to a label, what do you plan on doing next?
Andrew: I really want people to get into the record. I think it's really good. I have separated myself from the record long enough that I can objectively say it's really good.
Myles: I really want people to dive into the record. When I was a sophomore in high school, I made a mixtape for my bandmate. It was a bunch of female punk rock like X-Ray Spex, Bikini Kill, Elastica, Kim Gordon, you know stuff like that. He hated it, but his little sister got ahold of it and it totally changed her life. Her friends were into Tupac and then suddenly they were into Bikini Kill. They called themselves "The Dew Crew" after the Mountain Dew soft drink. They made a bunch of silly jewelry out of Mountain Dew bottlecaps and plastic wrappers. They totally took that tape the right way. They didn't adopt it as a lifestyle or an aesthetic. They used it as a launching pad. I hope God's Boat inspires people to be themselves, and to live. Music saves peoples lives, I know it saved mine.
Aaron: If we could make even 10,000 dollars on record sales, it would really change our world. It would open up a lot of doors that are closed now. After that, we want to release our next record, tour the US and Europe, and produce other artists. Besides Harry Merry, Myles has also produced this band called Curls. We love making music, but we're not so ego-tied as to only care about our own music. We love working with other people. Ultimately, we want to tour on jets, work with Mariah, Gwen, Kanye and Beyonce, buy Phantoms and solitaires, and make the raddest records ever heard. We want to be the next thing that shapes the world. We want calendars to be marked Before and After us.
Steve: Do you think that now that you have a record deal, you’ll start to head in sort of a different musical direction?
Myles: Having a record deal is great. We’re constantly trying to work on something new, and we’ve been working on ideas for our second actual Passionistas album. We also made a rap mixtape just because we wanted to rap, I guess. It’s a 29-song rap mixtape about seventy minutes long. I just kind of like the idea of making mixtapes, so I think we’ll make more of them in the future.
Aaron: I think having a label has kind of allowed us to push ourselves farther. Before it was just sort of the three of us sharing our ideas with each other, but now we actually have another person who’s interested and willing to listen. I’m glad that we’re still motivated to push ourselves just because there’s nothing more boring than a group that gets signed and just suddenly goes blank. I think a lot of bands get so nervous, like “oh my god, now I’m signed,” and then they freak out, and we don’t really want to be like that. I really treasure my artistic capabilities, and people lost theirs all the time, and I don’t want to lose mine.
Myles: And I think we’re really lucky for having a label that likes us for us, so whatever crazy ideas we come up with, they say “okay, that’s cool.” It’s not like they’re telling us “only make music like God’s Boat for the rest of time” or anything.
Steve: You mentioned that you want God’s Boat to be insipirational to your listeners - how else do you think it could be inspirational?
Aaron: Well we hope that people will hear it and realize that whole “anyone can make music” sort of classic punk rock thing. Probably from when I was sixteen until I was twenty-two, I listened to almost all old music, and I think for a lot of people the best music’s already done, so sort of what we want to say is that there’s a lot that’s still amazing about the modern world. When we started The Passionistas, we were surrounded by a lot of bands that were really retro, and we didn’t really want to be another retro band, so we wanted to make new music.
Steve: Are you changing anything about God’s Boat before releasing it commercially or are you leaving it pretty much the same?
Aaron: Well first we cut about six minutes off of “American Whale.” Then we also rearranged the tracklist and mastered it.
Myles: So it’s a lot louder.
Aaron: Yeah, it sounds a lot better, you can hear a lot of the guitars more clearly. Plus, “American Whale” before was kind of just this big, noisy brontasaurus we didn’t really know what to do with, and we were going to put it in the middle of the album, but then we thought that might kind of kill it.
Myles: Plus, we didn’t really want to punish anyone anyway.
Steve: Do you plan on going on tour for God's Boat anytime in the near future?
Andrew: I would like to go on tour at some point, but I just don’t know if people are ready for us yet.
Aaron: We'd love to play the East Coast - Boston, NYC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, etc. - but right now it’s not practical for us. None of us own a car, and most of us can't drive, and we don't have any fans/support there. We're really good at music, but we're all a little bad at life. We're totally bad at doing things outside of NorCal. In fact, this month will be our first Los Angeles show that will actually be, you know, hot. Which, considering we've played over 45 shows, is kinda weird.
Myles: We don't want to tour unless we're going to make money. We like to travel for fun, but touring is a lot like work, and it’s stressful. It would have to be worth it.
