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Artist Interviews
Q&A: Le Loup
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 16 September 2009
Originally a bedroom project for musician Sam Simkoff, Le Loup has slowly grown in sizesince he first began writing songs for the project in 2006. First to join was school friend Christian Ervin, who lent production skills, followed by drummer Robert Sahm. Since then, the band has gone through a number of other musicians before settling as a five-piece. The band’s second album, ‘Family’, is released by Talitres on 21 Sep, and features eleven beautiful songs that are drawing comparisons to the likes of Yeasayer, The Books and Arcade Fire amongst press and fans alike. We managed to drag ourselves away from listening to it long enough to speak to Simkoff and ask our Same Six Questions.
Q1 How did you start out making music?
Well, I’ve been playing music since I was six, when I started taking piano lessons. I didn’t really start making music until early in high school, though, when I realised the piano didn’t have to be used for just regurgitating classical pieces. I learned the blues scales, and went through a pretty lengthy period of making really crappy blues-scaley songs. Which isn’t to say all bluesy songs are crappy, just my young versions of them. Christian and I started recording our own stuff with another best friend of ours later in high school kind of on a whim, but we liked it so much we kept coming back every summer to record whatever we had.
Q2 What inspired your latest album?
At some point during our first round of touring, I became kind of obsessed with the idea of the fundamentals of songcraft – ie what makes a song a song. It struck me that at the heart of every song lies melody and rhythm (even if that rhythm is just the meter or the general cadence). I wanted to make a group of songs that drew out those fundamental attributes – strong, singable, simple melodies and driving, guttural rhythmic patterns. I think originally I wanted to do this because we were having a hard time paring down the old songs for acoustic, informal settings. I always get really jealous when a band – or just a couple people with instruments – can sit down for a crowd and make something really engaging and energetic with minimal input. I wanted us to be able to do that with our songs – really chop them down if we had to, so we could play them in a much more informal setting. Ironically, the songs from this album ended up being maybe more complex and convoluted than those on album #1. So much for simplifying. I guess that’s just not what we do.
Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?
It really depends on the track. Generally speaking, we start with just the bare bones of the song – the melody, the general chord structure (which more often than not with these songs was incredibly simple) and the tempo. Pretty much each one of these ingredients would change over the course of recording, though. So we tried to stay really relaxed about how all of the elements would eventually play out. Once we’d messed around with it in a live setting, we’d start recording takes. We tried not to put off recording for too long, since there’s a certain energy that just comes from playing something new – that’s hard to recapture later on in the process, if you’ve played the hell out of a song or a line. So sometimes the lines weren’t technically perfect, but if they conveyed that energy, we kept them. Other than that, we’d just record a hell of a lot of tracks, and then Christian and I would spend weeks digging through them and chopping them up and repositioning them until they made something we thought was interesting. The devil of it was knowing when to quit, just leave something well enough alone before it started to sound overproduced. Hopefully we stayed on the good side of that line…
Q4 Which artists influence your work?
With five people in the band all making significant contributions, that list could go on for a while. I know we were listening to a lot of Beach Boys early on, a lot of lo-fi stuff later on (No Age, Black Lips), and then there were some constants. Robby got us onto a west African polyrhythm kick – a lot of Fela Kuti and King Sunny Ade. We listened to The Band, The Grateful Dead, Fleet Foxes, Simon And Garfunkel… just a lot of music that made us happy. I’m not sure how much of that actually came through in our album – I kind of hope not much of it, since any attempt to approximate any of those guys would just end in cut-rate versions of better bands. We’d much rather try and make something somewhat unique, as difficult as that is.
Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
Give the album time and space to grow. I don’t think ‘Family’ is particularly an album that throws all of its assets on the table on first listen. It’ll take some patience and active listening to start hearing all the different parts. There’s so much going on in every song that it can just sound like waves of noise and harmonics until you’ve taken the time to parse out the different elements. Even I re-discover stuff in every song with every listen. Listen to the album through every sound system you can, because different stuff rears up when played through different speakers in different spaces. I guess that could be said of pretty much any album, though…? But really, there’re so many instrumental/vocal lines taking up so many parts of the sonic spectrum in these songs that they won’t be revealed until you listen to them through really tinny computer speakers, or big boomy expensive things, or from the other room.
Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest album, and for the future?
We try to avoid calling out any big ambitions for the album – if you’re overly ambitious, it’s easy to get really down about things that shouldn’t take such a toll on you. I mean, a little ambition is good, but I wouldn’t say we want to go platinum, or take up all the blog space for the year, or open for The Rolling Stones, or something. I guess on a simple scale, we wanted to make something we could be proud of, and hopefully something that would inspire a few other people to do their own thing, no matter what medium they use. We are proud of the album, so I guess that ambition can be checked off the list. If we get to visit a lot of new and interesting places and play live music for another year, that would be great. For the future, I hope I can make music for a living for as long as possible. It’s really a blessing when you get to do exactly what you’re passionate about.
MORE>> www.leloupmusic.net
