Matt Bishop beats a bass drum behind Patrick Brannon, shaking a tambourine under his sousaphoneband web site buy the album here
There was a sousaphone in the middle of the room. A sousaphone, a massive tuba made for marching bands. And soon enough, Patrick Brannon found himself wrapped in the in the middle of that massive sousaphone. Later still he was reaching for his trumpet, then crouching down--sousaphone still slung on--to pick up a tambourine. Other band members share a similar fate.
"Nick tells me to play a drum part, I've got a tambourine on my high hat, I've got a shaker in one hand, a stick and a mallet, I've got jingles hanging off my leg," describes drummer Colin Richey.
Any one of the guys could be a one-man band, but even seven isn't enough for Hey Marseilles, whose complex, classicized folk-pop also adds cello, viola, accordion, melodica, and so on and so forth. In search of a setting big enough for their sound, no place says big quite like Texas. Between packing their trunks for South by Southwest, some of the band spoke with The Overcast about songwriting, sousaphones, and the quirks of a seven-person set up.
The Overcast: How and when did the band start and meet?
Matt (vocals, guitar): Nick and I met at a party when we were both students at the University of Washington. I played him some songs. He was a DJ, and I went on his show a couple of times, and we jammed in his homemade studio, and after about a year and a half of him trying to get me to come to his place, I ended up going one summer afternoon, when Philip had recently acquired his first accordion. Nick and he had constructed a riff that would become the instrumental for our first song, which was "To Travels and Trunks," the lyrics to which I wrote rather rapidly on their front lawn while sipping a Corona. And they had a studio in their basement. Philip knew Sam [Anderson, cello] and Jacob [Anderson, viola] (they're brothers) as family friends and brought them over to record some strings on that track. And then we got Patrick about a year later when we needed a trumpet player, and Colin is our third drummer.
Influences?
Matt: We're a pretty collaborative group, so we probably have a lot of different influences. I probably bring to the table more of a singer-songwriter, straightforward, folk pop vibe, and I would thus say that I'm influenced lyrically and melodically by, oh, Damien Jurado's a local guy who I really like.
Colin: I like John Coltrane, and Andrew Bird. Radiohead.
Matt: Yeah, Andrew Bird, The Shins, that sort of thing.
Nick (guitar): I grew up being a DJ so I was listening to a lot of types of music, and I just pick random things out. And I've always been intrigued with kind of old-world sensibilities. When I grew up, my mom would always play kind of like French folk records, so I kind of like the accordion and stuff so, natural fit.
What is it like trying to coordinate so many people, even trying to literally fit that all on one stage?
Nick: I think a strength in instrumentation like this is, you don't have to be reliant on mics and sound equipment. Like our fidelity is much better when we play without mics. So when we used to play and get together for all these house shows it sounded awesome.
Colin: But the sound guy also has the ability to completely destroy us if he wants.
Philip: Surprisingly, coordinating rehearsals tends to be pretty easy.
Colin: I've been in bands with three people before where it's harder.
Does the band's size have any impact on your songwriting and your sound itself?
Matt: The fact the we have so many people working on one particular project or one particular piece at a time, I think, is advantageous. Songs are created in different ways. Some songs will be created out of an instrumental. Like [one song] was an instrumental, just a two-and-a-half-minute jam we played during shows, and then I wrote some lyrics and put a melody to it and now it's like a full song. And some songs come out of someone playing some riffs and bringing it to the group.
Philip: The songwriting though is definitely a different process with this many people, though. There's a lot of different ways it can be done, and I think we're always trying to figure out the best way it can be done.
How long have you been playing together?
Matt: 2006, August I think. So, two-and-a-half-ish years. September 15th, I think, was [Colin's] first show. If you look at our first band photos, Sam looks like he's twelve, Jacob looks about the same. Philip had short hair and wasn't able yet to grow the goatee that you see.
It really took you a year to get your album To Travels and Trunks recorded? Why was that?
Colin: They recorded essentially the whole record, and then they sat on it. I didn't hear from them for, like, a month, and the next thing I knew was they wanted to track the whole thing over. The songs that they had recorded had changed a little bit, because they had just gotten Victor [Olivarria, former drummer] on board.
Philip: We wrote many songs in the studio. People had jobs and we were going to school at the same time, so people just kind of put in on weekends when we could. If we condensed all of that into one period, it wouldn't be that long.
Matt: And some of those tracks, like "Rio," before it was mixed down had something like seventy tracks on it? I mean, the amount of layers that we put on some songs, that takes time.
Lyrically, on the album, there are definitely a lot of themes of place, of transience.
Matt: A lot of the songs lyrically that I write happen to be when I'm alone in a hotel room for three weeks straight in the middle of Colorado or Montana or Alaska, which is where I travel for work. So I think a number of the lyrics are influenced by that. Like "Cannonballs" I think I wrote driving over the barren lands of Montana from town to town. And that first song, "To Travels and Trunks," I always looked at that as kind of like a thesis statement, which is why I was a proponent of making it the name of our record, because it was sort of reflective of the type of music and our name, and just sort of the multicultural influences of some of our beats and instrumentation. It all just seemed to make sense.
There's also a thick, literary, layered sort of quality to the album, not just lyrically, but certainly on the musical end as well.
Nick: Well, Philip and I started writing music in the studio sets. We didn't write songs in terms of what we could do live, but in terms of what we could do when we record. So when you do that, you have the option to do whatever you want. There's a sense of freedom to it. So we would make these really huge arrangements, for better or worse.
Philip: Nick and I kind of did a lot of messing around musically before we did the band, and we kind of had that basement computer set-up. Our minds were exploding with how you could do twenty tracks on our little home machine and we could mix strings and guitar and vocals. And then we got into Colin's space, and you could do so much more.
Nick: It was almost overwhelming at first.
Philip: Working with Matt now for around two-and-a-half years, we've also kind of figured out Matt's songwriting style, or his lyrical melodic style. So spending this time with the band we've kinda learned how everyone works, so we can fit our pieces together better.
Matt: And then when you have seven people in here, you always have to figure out what someone's going to do, hence the complexity.
On the impact of the song "Someone to Love"
Matt: That was the only song I'd written before we'd ever met that made it onto the record. Well, "You Will Do For Now" I wrote some of it I wrote beforehand.
Nick: That song is the reason we are a band. Well [Matt] played that song in the studio and I was like, "Wow." That's when I started, like, pestering him for like a year.
Patrick (trumpet): I came and saw [the band] at the Conor Byrne [before joining] and that was the song that I remember when I left.
In response to Nick's complex understanding of the songwriting:
Colin: Nick has these big ideas. He's this constant source of big ideas.
Philip: Like a single idea where knows what twenty people are going to do at one time.
Colin: It seems like he has a lot of the ideas and then you've got a lot of the other guys interpreting it and trying to strip it down until it makes sense to them.
Matt: Yeah, I think that's true. I've always considered Nick as kind of like the producer.
Colin: Nick tells me to play a drum part, I've got a tambourine on my high-hat, I've got a shaker in one hand, a stick and a mallet, I've got jingles hanging off my leg... I get really pissed off trying to figure out a way to do it, but I wouldn't have thought of that kind of thing.
Nick: But I don't have the music knowledge that most of the other people in the band do. Like the classical background that the [Anderson] boys have and that Philip has definitely adds sophistication. It really is collaborative.
Philip, you had talked about bringing together that old-world, classical sort of sound with modern sensibilities.
Philip: Partly due to our instrumentation, you get that vibe, because we have trumpet and strings and accordion, so the fact that we have these instruments makes us sort of reach back to the style of music that they come from. But at the same time we're not playing, like, pop strings, Coldplay-style. I think we do try to bring back the sort of classical kind of feel to our songs while at the same time having songs that are accessible.
Nick: There's a challenge in taking these complex sort of arrangements and getting them in a pop structure, making them co-exist and not be overly complex or overly simple. I think we try and figure that out.
So obviously you guys have South by Southwest coming up...
Nick: I'm super excited.
Patrick: Is it gonna be hot enough to go swimming?
Colin: It'll be very humid and warm.
Patrick: Should I bring shorts?
Matt: I'm gonna go tan.
Philip: I need to go shopping.
Nick: I'm in so much trouble. My mom, yesterday, gave me money. I got three hundred dollars for clothes. That's a big deal, because I don't buy clothes very often. I walked around the mall for a couple hours, bought a piece of pizza...and then spent that money on a guitar.
Philip: What kind of guitar, though?
Nick: It's a used Spanish classical guitar. It sounds great. There'll be plenty of songs coming out of that soon.
Patrick: But you're still going to look like...well, you know...you.
Nick: But I'll look like me playing Spanish classical guitar.
Colin: We should do Spanish versions of all the tunes.
What's it really been like preparing for SXSW and getting pumped for that?
Matt: We're playing a lot of bigger shows and obviously getting out there to South by Southwest. And people have actually heard of us! There's a lot of administrative stuff that goes along with that, and I think that it's exciting, but it makes it difficult to find time to write music and go to work and sleep and then go to practice and do all of those things. So that's simultaneously exciting but frustrating too. But, going to South by Southwest and having people stop by to ask us questions during practice, all those things like that makes stuff like that worth it.
Philip: We're learning more about a lot of the mundane work that you have to do to support more shows and bigger shows and taking a road trip. It's like there's a lot of fun stuff that you do, but before you do the fun stuff, you have to book the hotel rooms and figure out when people can get off work.
Patrick: I don't even do that stuff, but I put in, like, sixty hours this week so I can take it off.
Matt: So we're all super excited for South by Southwest...
Philip: We have permission to start playing in the crowd after the Blue Scholars set, so we might do that.
Nick: I think we're excited about this Austin trip in general. You're supposed to meet a lot of people in Austin, so we're excited to make new friends.
Matt: Networking. Meeting people. Hanging out with famous people.
What else do you have coming up?
Matt: We've got some things confirmed in April. We're playing at the Crocodile April 30th. We're already booked through June I think. We've got a show in May in Tacoma, getting out of Seattle. May 15th, New Frontier in Tacoma, literally and figuratively.
On Cataldo, apparently everyone's new favorite band:
Philip: Did Matt tell you how cool Cataldo is yet?
Matt: You should check them out. cataldomusic.com
Patrick: His first album's called Cataldo, it's really good, and then Signal Flare, it's awesome. He's got a trumpet. And he doesn't have one playing at all of his shows. So I'm just saying... It's not like I'm in love with Eric Anderson, the lead singer of Cataldo...but I just like him a lot. And I wanna know who the girl is who he wrote all the songs about.
Nick: This is getting creepy.
Patrick: I'm gonna go toilet paper her house for being so mean to him.
Is there anything else you want to say?
Colin: Do you think anyone reading your site would want to buy some Nordstrom's gift cards? I have five hundred dollars left from Christmas, and I really need to get some clothes.