analogues
we cannot be sure what we are listening forKithkin ► the dilettante and the distance
“Etch-a-Sketch” (free download)
Well we can take it and we can shake it / and we can see that everything’s a lie while we search for the truth, but / in the end we can’t pretend it didn’t suck away all our youth. // I know you, you know me / there isn’t a day I don’t think about how it could have gone differently
“When I wrote that song ["Etch-a-Sketch"] I was trying to play ‘Chicago’ by Sufjan Stevens, which is in 5/4. And I thought I had written a song in 5/4 but it’s actually in 7/4. See, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’m not a good musician. … I don’t know how to play music at all. I just fake it really well.” — Kelton Sears (bass/vocals/drums)
Kelton has a problem with Vampire Weekend.
“Ezra Koenig never just shouts,” he said, bewildered. “He never just shouts! They got close on ‘Cousins.’ I love that song. But they never just go for it. Vampire Weekend, they’re really cool, but they just need to unbutton their WASPy clothes and just go for it. They’re at college, but what happens on summer break at Columbia, when you’re driving around?”
Kelton is definitely a shouter. I mean, he’s anything but aggressive, he doesn’t even have a “loud personality,” but he lives in a way that shouts like kids shout when they’re reaching for the next monkey bar or running in for a hug. He has that kid spirit of loud, shameless joy and fearlessness.
And that’s exactly how Kelton picked up faking music and playing instruments he didn’t understand in time signatures he didn’t intend. His first band in high school started with a joke and somehow incorporated playing a TV with bits of rebar found on the side of the road. In his last band, he played accordion, mostly guessing and improvising at shows. He’s a writer, he’s taught himself to play with video and animation just for kicks, he runs track for his college…
“I think not enough people embrace being a dilettante,” he said. “People are kind of intimidated by the idea of taking up an instrument or trying to write a story. Just go for it and see what you can do. I think that’s more interesting.”
He wants, he goes, he tries. He’s prone to quirky social experiments, like calling up pay phones he’s found around the city to ask people random questions, blogging for a week about a one-hour-a-day regimen of Farmville, or seeing how many events he can sneak into just by dressing up.
“If you do anything with any air of confidence at all, people don’t question it,” he said.
And when I ask where that confidence comes from for him, he answers just as easily.
“My mom’s one of the most important people in my life, and she gave me confidence to be able to go around and fake all this stuff, to go up onstage and play accordion when I don’t know how to,” he said. “If it weren’t for my mom, I wouldn’t have the confidence to do that.”
It took a little more time for Kelton to make sense of his father’s role.
Kithkin ► Bob Martin on Bruce Springsteen
“Zephyr” (free download)
I don’t ever want to leave, I don’t ever want to go / Praise the Westwind / I need the breeze, I need the air / Fill up our wings as we ride the swing of the sun / But above all things don’t fly too close / All we see is all we need, All I’ve grown is what I’ve sown, All I know is what I’ve grown
I should make this disclaimer: Kithkin sounds nothing like Bruce Springsteen. But half of my interview with Bob Martin (keys/vocals/drums) revolved around Bruce Springsteen. See, what I loved about these interviews was getting to see what each member brought with them that was not necessarily obvious in the songs. Kithkin may sound nothing like The Boss, but 25% of Kithkin plays music because of him. Bruce Springsteen is Bob’s story of really feeling music even though he grew up on it, on leaving and transitioning, on finding something he could feel permanent about.
Part of Bob, all of his horseshoe tattoo
Bob Martin: Bruce Springsteen’s the reason I play music. Senior year [of high school] I got really into Bruce Springsteen and his album Born To Run, which is about leaving. Senior year being the year you get senioritis and really want to leave high school, it came at the perfect time. And when I got into Bruce Springsteen, I got into a lot of his influences, so I got into a lot of folk acts like Woodie Guthrie and older blues stuff like Robert Johnson. Things more about lyrics and meaning.
Senior year of high school I went to this Bruce Springsteen concert and got a tattoo because of it. It’s a horseshoe. It was, like, a three-hour show, it was ridiculously awesome, I was in the front row. I shook his hand, touched his guitar. I brought like a sign for a song request and he took that sign and played that song; it was “Little Latin Lupe Lu” by the Righteous Brothers. So all of that happening in those few months had a giant impact on my music and just what I think about.
On the wristband at the show it had little cowboys and it had a horse and it had horseshoes. You know the little wristbands they give at shows? They’re not very strong, and it had it for, like, six months. You couldn’t see what it was anymore. It was this gross, like, balled up thing of paper on my wrist, and eventually one day it just fell off and I almost cried. So then, like, two months later I got it tattooed on my arm, so it would never fall off.
It had such a huge impact on me. I want to be able to get to where he is and write songs and perform them in a way in which some dude will leave the concert and then a few months later get a tattoo of the show.
read even more: on what it is about Bruce Springsteen and leaving and finding good places
Kithkin ► interlocked, entangled
“Goliath” (free download)
Kithkin have only been a band for a few months, with just five hastily self-recorded tracks and about four shows under their belts. But somehow with so little to vouch for them, they’ve made it into the top 12 of over 130 entries for SoundOff!, the Northwest’s much-hyped underage Battle of the Bands.
There isn’t much written about them yet, but I’ve been listening to their EP an embarrassing amount. So I asked the four to give me their own take on each track, as quickly and concisely as they could manage. They could not manage well. After all, they are the kinds of guys who can spend the first few minutes of an interview joking together about Street Sharks. But I digress.
Ian talked about the first track, Kelton talked about the second. When we got to “Goliath” is when everybody erupted together–first Alexander, then Kelton, then Bob, Kelton again, Ian…
“That was our very first purely, 100% collaborative song,” Alexander said.
“The bass line is wrapped around the guitar line is wrapped around the drums is wrapped around the keyboards,” Kelton explained. “So when we play that song, we feel everybody kind of interlocking and coming out of the entanglement and going back in. I feel the most like I’m in a band when I play that song. If any of us didn’t play a part, the song wouldn’t be together. The sum of the parts make the song.”
Even just talking about the song, it was the bassist’s words wrapped around the guitarist’s around the keyboardist’s and the drummer’s, an echo of the way the song was written. And although “Goliath” was the first song they described this way, it really illustrates their whole approach as a band.
Every song is written painstakingly collaboratively, and each member has found ways to name every other member’s roles in the band, musically and as a band family. Three of the guys share one all-too-cozy college dorm room. The band sets up onstage in a semicircle with the drum kit and bass in front, inverting the typical band hierarchies. All of the guys contribute to drums and vocals, so there is no regular frontman.
It’s egalitarian, sure, and not too surprising for a band of close friends. But it’s also a way of juicing as much of their individual talent as possible. Each man on his own is a multi-instrumentalist, a songwriter, a seasoned member of past bands, a longtime artist.
This week’s posts about Kithkin draw from five separate interviews: one-on-ones with each member and a final one with the whole band. I wanted to explore who each of these guys were as individual musicians and see how their unique voices interlocked.
I Am The Dot ► Rare Creatures EP
“Double Vision”
“Tunnel of Love”
“Struck”
These three songs, in this order, comprised the Rare Creatures EP, released around December ’09. Now they appear with the rest of I Am The Dot’s 2008-2010 catalog here.
Zach Tipton Rare Creatures was made because sometimes I find news articles or short paragraphs in The Guinness Book of World Records (for “Struck”) that are really interesting and I never know what to do with them. I like partially getting an idea of how big the spectrum of the human experience actually is, and it makes me feel like I’m a part of something that’s more unusual than I could imagine. The songs for Rare Creatures are stories about people who’ve stayed with me for some reason or another.
I Am The Dot ► on passion and empathy
“Formaldehyde”
“You just gotta lose everything and just focus on how special each moment that you have is. Because there’s people everywhere in this world that don’t have shit. Even at my poorest, I still have clothes. I’ve been homeless, I’ve been hungry and all that stuff–nothing compared to everyone else. What the fuck do I have to complain about? Get your ass out there and do something. … read more
I Am The Dot ► close brushes
“Detroit, MI”
About 40 minutes after our first introductions, Zach Tipton of I Am The Dot told me an asteroid could be coming.
“Our whole solar system just rocks everywhere, like a shooting gallery,” he told me, “and NASA basically only has 30% of the money to look at the entire sky to see if anything’s coming.”
I looked at him. I looked at the window behind him.
Zach looked away, and I knew he believed he could not be saved. read more
I Am The Dot ► Zach Tipton on Camus
“Mark Twain”
“Love Song for Camus”
Zach Tipton: Everyone has those periods in their lives where they start finding books–I hope–and when I first started that, I read something by Albert Camus, and he’s an absurdist. After that I was like, ‘Wow, this is exactly the thing that makes sense to me. Everything. Where, it’s almost beautifully meaningless.’
Mark Twain’s quote read at the end of his book from the main character (Satan), The Mysterious Stranger (I based my song “Mark Twain” from it) really hits me hard whenever I read it: read more
