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Artist Interviews
Q&A: The Hundred In The Hands
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 28 October 2010
Following a tour with their former band, The Boggs, in 2007, Jason Friedman and Eleanore Everdell decided to get together and play some music on their own. Over a couple of days, they wrote and recorded the song ‘Dressed In Dresden’, and then got on with their lives. A year later, The Boggs had disbanded and the pair decided to brush off that song, using it as the basis for a new project, The Hundred In The Hands.
The duo released their debut album through Warp Records last month and begin a UK tour with !!! later this week. We caught up with Jason and Eleanore to find out more.
Q1 How did you start out making music?
Jason: My dad brought home an old, very heavy, electric guitar from a garage sale, sat me down in the living room and taught me to play ‘Pipeline’ by The Chantays. After that I became obsessed with guitar. I’d come home from school and play along to records. But, right from the start I didn’t have much interest in learning songs, I just wanted to write my own and used tape to tape recorders to overdub parts in my feeble first attempts. Later I got into four tracks and would spend hours bouncing down tracks to add layers, slow things down and reverse guitars. Good fun.
Eleanore: My dad had this beautiful old Martin guitar and he would bring it down to the living room and play folk songs. He taught me Elizabeth Cotton’s way of finger picking which I sat around for hours practicing and at the same time I was spending a lot of time in school choirs and I just loved singing the harmonies. I went to a high school that had a neo-gothic cathedral. Every morning we had to sing these hymns and I would try and learn to read the harmony lines in the middle. I always loved rock n roll but it took me a while to figure out I could make it myself.
Q2 What inspired your latest album?
Jason: One thing we were excited by was using a lot of R&B or hip hop production and combining it with our live bits with the guitars and vocals. Lyrically, most of the songs are basically just love songs. But they’re a bit tweaked or off. And they’re not A B C stories. It’s more impressionistic or like flipping through a book of film stills. But really it’s just a mix of some fictional things and personal lines but all playing off each other to make it interesting.
Eleanore: It’s also a lot about youth in the city. And cities themselves; how they develop and grow but can also get crippled and die, and so every now and then it drifts into post-war or apocalyptic stuff.
Jason: We made our album kind of in seclusion. Like we just disappeared into the bunker for a few months and worked on everything night and day, so in a sense the songs were inspiring themselves.
Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?
Jason: We start by each of us writing on our own. We’ll work separately and each write lyrics and sketches and then we get back together and we start recording and writing together, each adding and changing what the other brought in. For a while when we were in the first phase of writing we would go over to Jacques Renault’s home studio and work on a kind of weekly basis. We did that for months on two album tracks ‘Young Aren’t Young’ and ‘Dead Ending’ and a couple of EP tracks. In the end we had those and a stack of about 20 demos or first drafts of tracks.
Eleanore: From the beginning we really wanted to work with great producers so we could take things further than we were capable of on our own. So after we had our demos, we took the stems and pushed them further with three different producers in Richard X, Eric Broucek and Chris Zane. With them we added and replaced the bits that weren’t working and cleaned things up.
Q4 Which artists influence your work?
Eleanore: J Dilla, Norma Fraser, The Kinks, Diana Ross, Elliot Smith, Gorgio Moroder, Daft Punk, The Beatles, The Cure, Young Marble Giants, The Smiths, Fela, Dinosaur Jr, Ride…
Jason: We were listening to a lot of old ska and dub, 80s hip hop, post-punk and early mod and beat is pretty much in the blood. At Jacques’ we were constantly pulling out all his old mutant disco records and classic house twelve-inches. All pretty inspirational.
Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
Jason: Best if played loud.
Eleanore: This… will change your life.
Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest album, and for the future?
Jason: I just want to keep working hard and getting better at being a band. We both love touring and so we’re loving the way things are going.
Eleanore: And after that, I can’t wait to start working on the next album! We learned a lot making this one and from playing the songs live. It’s all pretty exciting, I just want to see where it goes.
MORE>> thehundredinthehands.com
