Indie-rock band Rogue Wave is coming to Cat's Cradle on May 18 after releasing their newest album, "Delusions of Grand Fur." Staff writer Davis Rhodes sat down with the band's lead singer and guitarist, Zach Rogue.
DTH: You chose to create this album without any producers or sound mixers — what was that like?
Zach Rogue: Well first, we did have mixing engineers. Pat (Spurgeon) recorded everything and he rough mixed a lot, but we had actual final mixing go through mixing people, but we do self produce and self record everything and all that so we didn’t want to demo anything. I didn’t want anything planned out — I just wanted it to be done in a very kind of spontaneous way, and I thought the only way to do that was to do it on our own. We didn’t want to overproduce, you know, and be indulgent in that way. We wanted to be able to be experimental, but not have it sound split.
DTH: Do you think you've been moving in this direction with your previous albums?
ZR: I think it's all come full circle. I think when I did the first record with Bill we did it together and, we weren’t trying all that hard you know, we were just enjoying ourselves, and I was just thinking about songs, and we were very spontaneously just arranging on the fly. I think we went down a path for a while there where we were just overproducing our music, and it wasn’t even sounding like us anymore. And when you get to that point where it’s not even you anymore, then what the fuck are you doing? So we really decided it was time to get back to who we are and what we like, and we listen to really experimental music and what not, so it's time we sort of embraced our inner kinda weird.
DTH: When did you first get into music, and did you think it would be your career?
ZR: I never thought it was a career, I mean honestly when we signed to Sub Pop, originally I didn’t see it as a career. It’s hard to make a career in this business. But I’ve always loved playing music and I’ve been writing music since I was probably in elementary school. I didn’t realize 'till I was older that I was writing songs — I always thought I was kinda doodling in my head. But music has always been my obsession. My earliest memories of my life are wanting to be in The Beatles. I’ve always been fascinated with people who made music, and trying to understand it, and trying to be part of the culture somehow, and the thing that I was the most mystified by and the thing that made me feel most okay with my own identity.
DTH: Drake listened to Alabama Shakes while recording "Views." Did you all ever get inspiration outside your genre?
ZR: Well you know I don’t make those distinctions — people like you make those distinctions between genres you know I don’t think of it that way — it’s all music. People who are in bands and artists, we don’t think in the terms of like, "I am gonna outside my genre," — it’s not like that. I just like listening to shit that moves me. I like Stevie Wonder, I like the new Kendrick record, I like M83, I love all kinds of music. And you know nowadays there’s such a wide variety of music out there, there’s so much incredible hip hop music being made. There’s a lot of neat stuff out there, and that’s always informed me, and you know, film scoring is an influence too, and the news, books, magazines. And the way a sunset hits a building in downtown Oakland influences me to write a song or be part of something. We are not chapter oriented like, "Okay, we’re done with that album so now we’re into this new thing." It's just the constant flow, you know. Me and Pat have been making music together for a long time now, and we’re always into different things. I never know what’s gonna happen, even on this record. I think we started recording "California Bride" first, but we didn’t even really know when we were done we had recorded so much music. It was a double album, but we had released it as just one album and there’s so much more that we did. It was a very long, and very fun process, that we couldn’t have done, except on our own. No one would have let us do it the way we did it except for us.
