Extended Q&A: Bowerbirds

Dive: How did you discover the artist, Monica Canilao, who designed the album’s cover art?

BT: I actually discovered Monica (Canilao) when Phil and I broke up. I was looking online for some other artists, because I hadn’t looked up artists in a long time, and I saw her art and I was really floored. What she does with visual art is so amazing to me, her colors and really awesome use of found objects that she combines in original ways. Her attitude on life is about making do with what you have. She’s really interested in community and sense of home and these ideas that she makes art about are really similar to what we think about and try to make music about. It seemed like a really natural connection.

Dive: Would you say Monica Canilao’s cover art overall reflects the themes you were going after with the album?

BT: Yeah, her idealism and her use of bones and natural objects mixed in with vintage lace, it’s similar. The adornment of the specific pieces we chose, the doily mixed in with teeth of an animal, is just really visually representative of how we wanted these songs to sound. We talk about nature a lot, but we don’t think of nature like “Wee, nature!.”

PM: It’s not like a Bambi thing…

BT: It’s not like a cutesy way of thinking about nature, but instead that it’s the most important thing. The land we rely on is the only reason we are all alive. The other animals are actually our cousins, literally, and we are all from the same ancestors. In our songs, we were trying to honor that and those feeling we have about nature. I think she’s doing a similar thing.

Beth Tacular on tour. Photo credit: Guillaume Sautereau, flickr user djenvert

Dive: Were your two dogs, Olive and Spice, an inspiration for this album as well?

BT: I’ve had Olive for 11 years and she is a total sweetheart, but very anxious. It’s actually perfect because a lot of the album is us talking to ourselves, telling ourselves, “Don’t be anxious, don’t miss all the beauty, focus and calm yourself down.” We are singing these sorts of things to ourselves and trying to share those ideas with other people.

I ran over Spice in the car, over her back leg and her pelvis, and she almost died. The vet told us to put her to sleep, because it was going to be too expensive to fix her, but then we found another vet who could fix her. She is just so grateful that she is living now, because it is an easier life. She is so positive and always loving, and it was really useful for us.

She came into our life right at a point where we were kind of worn out from touring for three years and when we came back to our cabin and it wasn’t finished. We were trying to build this cabin and it was the middle of summer and we were trying to patch up our relationship. I had just had a broken rib and I was healing from that. So it was a lot of stuff to make you feel worn out and jaded. So then, Spice just takes away all of that, she’s so inspiring.

Olive is really special too. Olive became more happy, because I think Olive was bumming out because of us separating, she was thinking “What’s happening in my life.” Once we got back, Spice and Olive were happy and Olive likes having a sidekick. Spice is a foot long and Olive is three feet long. Olive has always the one who gets beaten up on, she’s like our little sidekick. Like me and Phil, I’m his sidekick.

PM: And I can beat up on you.

Dive: Overall, what was the most rewarding part of the recording process for this album?

BT: I think it was really rewarding to realize we couldn’t record everything up in the studio in Wisconsin. It actually ended up being cool because we bought a bunch of microphones and had so much time, the whole summer and into September, to try so many different things [at home]. I felt like that part was really rewarding, to be that experimental and have everything be recorded permanently and you could just move on from it. All our other recordings were done live. We knew how to play all the songs and would play them all at once, record them and then maybe add backing vocals and strings if we needed to.

PM: Our first record was like that and our second record was similarly done, in a very fast way. We didn’t really have as much time to sit around and think of all the little details, which I think is really nice.

BT: I also liked mixing the album. We went up to New York and worked with this guy Nicolas Vernhes. We wanted to work with him because he had mixed two of our favorite recent albums of last year, which was Beach House’s Teen Dream and Dirty Projectors’ Bitte Orca, which are both really good sounding albums. So we were really excited to work with him.

Since we recorded a lot of it ourselves, his ear was cool and very complimentary to what we heard. We could be like, “We want this to be more like this,” and we it something we don’t have the skills to bring out. He was like this little wizard. He would sit down and before he would even listen to a song, he would go through the first ten seconds and do all these changes, and then the next ten seconds and do all these changes. Then an hour later, he would listen to the song after he’d done all these changes and we were like, “What are you doing?” But it worked. He could hear the song better because it was more crystal clear.

Dive: What’s the progress with the cabin you’ve been building? Is it finished yet?

BT: It’s really slow…then we really got into this album. The plan was to go up to Wisconsin, record our album in ten days, come home and finish the cabin over the next [few months]. We were actually going to release the album in September [2011], because we thought we were going to be able to finish it in Wisconsin and we were going to build the cabin all summer and practice. But then it took us until November to finish the album. Then it was really cold and we were doing interviews and practicing. So we just decided to lower our expectations…

PM:…on that, which is fine because we are renting an old, neat place right up the hill from our cabin.

BT: Hopefully in between tours we can work on our cabin. The cabin building can be put off until this album is done.

Dive: What inspired you to take on this project and build your own house?

PM: We just have high expectations of ourselves and wanted to do something original.

BT: Why should I live in a house that someone else made? I want to make it myself.

In 2005, Phil had taken a job birdwatching out in the wilderness in South Carolina and it was an hour’s drive from any other people and really amazing. That was when Phil was finishing writing the songs that were on our EP, Danger At Sea, and after that we moved back to Raleigh for a few months. After that, we were like, “We need to move somewhere more natural.” Then in 2007, in January before we put out Hymns for a Dark Horse; that summer, we moved out here and bought land and were living in the Airstream while building the cabin.

It really helps us to be in a quiet place with nature around when we are writing instead of being with the distractions of the city, the parties every night and the noise. It also silences all the other voices and helps you be more original and not think about what everyone else is doing in the world right now, for us anyway. But we didn’t realize how long it would take to build the cabin, we thought it would be three months, like the recording of the album.

Dive: Is it really hard to come from the country and go back to touring?

PM: It’s just like the ebb and flow. When we haven’t toured in a long time, we are really excited to get back out. The momentum of that excitement gives you enough momentum to get back out there. But if you are on the road for so long, you really just want to get home and sleep in your own bed. It doesn’t take too long, two months is a long time, but not in the scheme of things.

BT: You miss your privacy, your sleep.

Dive: You’re a band of five now. Is this the first time you’ve toured with this many members?

BT: Well, we did five for about a week a year and half ago with Mark and Rachel, different, because Leah’s in the band now.

PM: We’re going to have a sound person in the band this time, so it’s actually six.

Dive: What do you think is going to be different about having your own sound person?

BT: I think having our own sound person will be nice because a lot of times when we played a show in the past it was a house sound person. Sometimes they would be reading a book and you were trying to get their attention because you can’t hear yourself. Because you have no idea how you sound out there, and there is no one to honestly tell you, you can’t trust that this person is going to make you sound as good as they can.

PM: Or they’re just not going to know what you’re supposed to sound like. They’re going to make you sound great in a different way.

BT: It will be really cool to have [a sound person] with us. And it’s really fun to have all these musicians with us. Even the old songs, there are a lot of parts we could never play with three people, that we will layer on top. This allows us to have so many different instrument choices on stage.

PM: And then touring in general with six people is going to be harder to move people around. But I think it is going to be more fun, because we are taking more of home with us, our friends with us.

Bowerbirds’ The Clearing is available as of Mar. 6 via Dead Oceans. Bowerbirds play the Cat’s Cradle on Mar. 17 at 9:30 pm with Mandolin Orange. Tickets are $12 in advance and $14 day of show.