TitleTales

Interview: The Low Anthem

The Low Anthem formed as a professional band in 2006 in Providence, RI. The founding members are Ben Knox Miller and Jeff Prystowsky. Their mutual interests in Americana, baseball and morally agnostic narrative necessitated the formation of The Low Anthem. They began a collaboration with classical composer Jocie Adams in November 2007.

The Low Anthem have recorded three full-length records, toured extensively with 100 shows in 2007, won Best New Act in the 2008 Boston Music Awards, Album of 2008 from the Providence Phoenix. NPR, WXPN, WERS and WFUV among other major radio station have been early champions of the band. The Low Anthem has a devoted fan-base across the Northeast and beyond.

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BWI: How did you guys meet? How long have you been together?

Ben: We went to school together. Jeff and I, when we first met, we used to DJ at radio shows together, played on a baseball team, summer league baseball. And we just started playing in a bunch of bands at school, and that was like 7 years ago, though. We started just doing this professionally as The Low Anthem about 3 years ago now. Jocie joined later. We studied music and took some composition classes together. Jocie has a lot of classical training as a composer, and we started working with her about a year and a half ago now.

BWI: You added a drummer, Cyrus Scofield, for your last tour. Does having another person change the dynamics of your process? Do you feel like the more the merrier, or does it take some getting used to?

Jocie: When Cyrus joined it was definitely creative… Certainly, the dynamic and the personalities are good to have… it’s also nice to be just a trio

Jeff: There’s more space with a trio’s sound. When we went to a quartet, that space was filled in and we got used to it. But now being back as a trio, I think the sound that we were hearing is coming through more. That space allows us to be more experimental.

BWI: Was anyone in any other bands before you joined The Low Anthem?

Jeff: Ben and I were always in bands together. The first band we started was called Hi, This Is Otis. None of these ever released any albums.

BWI: How did you learn to play all of the instruments that you used on your latest album?

Jeff: Well, you know, when we first started the band we didn’t play as many instruments. We had more members, like for example in that Otis band. Ben was playing guitar, I was playing bass, and there were other players to play the other instruments. But as the years went on, and the members left, it was just Ben and I left in with the same room full of instruments but less hands to play them.

We said well, we can either spend our time looking for other people or spend our time learning how to play a few things on these other instruments; and we did more of the latter, and learned drums, and organ, and trumpet. Ben already played harmonica, more electric guitar. And then we just kept—on the road we stopped by instrument shops and kept buying more instruments, and we just really enjoyed that process. So I guess we were forced into it. And then we really started to enjoy it. Now our music room has many more than 27 instruments.

For each song that we write, we spend a great deal of time, sometimes up to 2 weeks, just trying every kind of arrangement, and seeing what fits. So we’ll each pick up a different instrument, and try it that way. We’ll take a song and sometimes we’ll play through it, and we’ll play through it in kind of a standard way. We’ll take a folk song, and play it with an upright bass, and acoustic guitar, clarinet. And then we’ll completely transform it. We’ll try it out as a punk song, with electric guitar, drums, and electric bass. We’ll try it with more of a quirky arrangement; we’ll try a gospel arrangement.

We’re pretty open-minded. We want to make sure it’s just so. We try out a lot of things. That’s a bit about how all that all came about. On our last 2 albums, we tried to beat our own number. The first I think we had 24 instruments, and the second we had 27. We’ll see. Maybe our next will be 30.

BWI: How do you then take that to a live show? Do you change it up and play different instruments when you play different shows, or do you try and stick with one that works for you, or do you have some of the tracks pre-recorded to play along? How do you make that work?

Jeff: What we do is we have a different arrangement for the record and for our live shows. The live show has another restriction: and that is whatever we can fit in the van.

BWI: The very first song that we heard was “Charlie Darwin,” (on the Paste sampler) and we loved it immediately. What was the inspiration for “Charlie Darwin,” and did it or did it not have anything to do with Charles Darwin’s birthday this year?

Ben: No, that’s just a nice coincidence. But we like how Charles Darwin and this idea of survival of the fittest just throws a wrinkle into all of our beliefs about where we come from, and about what we’re meant to do; not just the evolution of species but more importantly the evolution of our culture, the evolution of our ideas, and our values; and the idea that all of those are competing in the same way. That the values that exist today are not necessarily right because it’s written somewhere sacred, but rather because they’re the ones that survived. The way that in the different sects, religious institutions will have missionary branches, it’s almost like a reproductive organ, it spreads these ideas that are then burst in other parts of the world or however it is. The way that schools and academia spread this other version of knowledge. We just like the confusion that that creates. I don’t know; it’s hard to say. Charles Darwin’s amazing. He’s inspiring; inspiring ambition and amazing ideas that just shook everything up.

BWI: Were the vocal harmonies on “Charlie Darwin” an instant mesh or did you guys really you have to work at finding that balance?

Ben: We did have to work at it, actually. The first version of that song that we had, had sort of like an indie rock drum beat, very poppy almost, and up-tempo. And we tried to record it. We did like 20 takes of it. We thought it was gonna be the radio single for the record—not that we think that way, but we thought that it was gonna be that kind of song. And it just didn’t work, and we exhausted ourselves. And after about 20 takes of this thing, we sort of conceded that it wasn’t gonna happen and came back from the studio where we’d spent these 10 days, and I guess we just started singing it just for our own enjoyment. I don’t know, it just kind of came out of nowhere. It was the last idea we had. It was the last hope before the song died and fell into the place where forgotten songs go.

BWI: So I guess that speaks to some of the different techniques that you use when you create the different kinds of songs, like the ballads and the up-tempo tunes. How do you come up with such a different array of songs?

Ben: Yeah, we listen to all kinds of music. We try…most of the songs that we come up with start as a skeleton of a song and that can be set in a number of different ways. So we’ll basically try everything, and see what really excites us. So we’ll do the same song with a just whole bunch of different arrangements, different tempos and feels, different genres, and just wait until we get excited by it. That’s sort of the process.

BWI: Who have been your influences on music and songwriting? We’ve read comparisons to Tom Waits and Nick Drake; who would you really consider to be influential?

Ben: Those are two nice people to be compared to. I would say also for some of our electric stuff, Neil Young’s electric music is a big thing for us. As far as songwriting, Leonard Cohen is a huge influence. Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan’s first 4 records are just some of the magical records that are kind of at the center of everything, at least for me, this is Ben speaking. And Jocie comes from a classical background so she likes a whole different palette of sounds. Got any composers you want to throw in here?

Jocie: I like Mahler.

Jeff: I also like Charlie Mingus.

Ben: Jeff comes from a jazz background, so there’s folk and songwriting, and there’s jazz and there’s classical.

BWI: That’s great. That really helps you guys to have a more diverse sound, I’m sure. It was kind of hard to pinpoint. Someone asked us what kind of music you did and we were a little hard pressed to put one word on it because it’s kind of far reaching. What do you want people to take from your music?

Ben: I think that’s up to them, really. We try to write the songs that excite us and whatever people take from it, that’s great. I think we definitely have sort of an ethics in the things that we put out, real handcrafted stuff. Whether it’s the CD packaging or the songs themselves, the way they’re recorded…it’s all very carefully considered, you know, there’s not a lot of shortcuts - we hope. But as far as what people want to take out of it, I don’t know. I don’t know.

BWI: We talked about your influences. What about your peers - what sort of music do you like to listen to now?

Jeff: We like these 2 bands. Well, I’ll name you a couple. One is Surprise Me Mr. Davis, which is a band made up of another band called The Slip and a songwriter named Nathan Moore. We also like The Accident That Led Me to the World. Also, Annie Lynch and the Beekeepers. Ben Pilgrim and the Free Union Band. Those are all bands we listen to.

BWI: Speaking of bands, (AV Specialist) Trisha’s is going to be at South By Southwest (SXSW) and she’s going to hear some bands; hopefully she’ll get a chance to hear you guys. How do you feel about performing at SXSW and what made you decide to apply to showcase there?

Jeff: Friends of ours recommended it. We grew up around the Tri-State area, so we knew of CMJ, and we thought that was on the same level as SXSW. We haven’t played South by but we’ve played CMJ, and people told us that really it’s the reverse, and South by is THE place to hear new bands and where the music industry talks about the year in review and the upcoming year. It’s like the annual conference. I don’t know, I’ve never been there, but we’ve heard good things, you know, recommendations.

BWI: Speaking of bands, (AV Specialist) Trisha’s is going to be at South By Southwest (SXSW) and she’s going to hear some bands; hopefully she’ll get a chance to hear you guys. How do you feel about performing at SXSW and what made you decide to apply to showcase there?

Jeff: I like to play rooms that are…I’d say…it depends on the city. The best shows happen when the audience is attentive but not asleep. In Providence we play at Firehouse 13, which is a great venue that is fairly new. In Cambridge, the Lizard Lounge is a great venue. In NYC we’re about to play Joe’s Pub, which we hear is great. We played the Bowery Ballroom in NYC and that was one of the best venues I’ve played in. Yeah, Ben agrees the Bowery Ballroom is the best.

Jocie: Churches.

Jeff: Yeah, we like to play in churches too. Because of the acoustics.

BWI: Any place you’d say is the worst?

Jeff: Carnegie Hall.

BWI: How do you feel that promotional arenas have changed the way music is released? We’re going back to SXSW on that one. Do you think it changes it at all?

Jeff: I think the Internet has changed it more than SXSW. How we run our band is very much current, the current strategy used by bands. We have our own website; we sell our albums off our website. We have a My Space page where you can get all of our information. We do a lot of Internet promotion on Facebook and on blogs. As we’ve all seen with the record industry, the Internet has just fundamentally shifted the way the music business operates and the way that labels make money, because it’s not happening with CD sales. Although we sell a lot of physical CD’s, more than digital downloads.

BWI: “To Ohio” was NPR’s Song of the Day. What was that like? Did you get a lot of hits that day?

Jeff: That was our high watermark for website hits, definitely. That was great.

BWI: How about the concert that you guys did at WXPN (University of Pennsylvania Public Radio)?

Jeff: The concert at XPN? Oh, that was great. It’s always fun to play a radio show that’s recorded live -

Ben: With a live audience.

Jeff: Yeah, with a live audience. It feels like a concert.

Ben: It’s weird when you play a radio show and there’s nobody there. It kind of feels like you’re playing into a vacuum, where you sort of don’t know. There’s no interaction, there’s no feedback. That was pretty cool. They had a great studio audience there. That was also our first time in Philadelphia, which has become a really great city for us because of that show and a lot of promotion that the local NPR station has done for us. That was exciting.

What do you do to keep your act fresh for yourselves and your fans? It sounds like you guys have a lot of fun.

BWI: We hear that Jeff is a baseball scholar. What does that entail?

Jeff: Well, really I was just a baseball fan, until this one day that I was called upon to teach a baseball course at a high school, at which point I became a baseball scholar. So I taught a course in high school called “Baseball History.” Big day for us, being that Cooperstown just selected Ricky Henderson and Jim Rice. I agree with the selection.

Jeff: So what do you guys do, you guys sell, you work with public libraries and sell them new releases, new books and music?

Deanna (BWI): And DVD’s and video games. I don’t know how often you frequent your local public library there in Providence. A lot of people don’t think of the public library when they think about music, but music has a high circulation for public libraries in general. How do you feel about a library as a way to make music known: Do you think it discourages people from going out and buying the album? Do you think it works against the band, or do you think it works for the creators because it gets the word out?

Ben: I think it’s wonderful. I think that if, sure you can go to the library, and take out a CD, bring it home and put it on your computer. I’ve done that many times in my life. But if you want to get music for free there’s a thousand of other ways to get it too; and the things that really move you, you’ll probably start following that band in other ways. Maybe you’ll find the CD for free at the library, but then you’ll go see a show of theirs, or maybe you’ll want a copy of it for yourself when the library starts sending you overdue notices.

Jeff: I think it’s great. If you can get the album for free in all these different ways, I’d rather it be by walking to your local public library to get it. You’re probably going to poke around and get a book too, at least be social, and engage with your local community, which I think is important. I’m all for it.

Ben: I think it would be so wonderful if my public library had had, when I was growing up, a featured new releases section, so that it had some new bands. It seemed like my library was sort of behind the curve, they would only get something once it was canonized, whatever genre it was. Everything they had was 15 years old, maybe. Also, they [public libraries] could even feature old stuff at historically relevant times, like anniversaries and things like that. It would be great. I always went there and just browsed. But there was never a featured section with any editorial…it seems like a good opportunity.

What if public libraries were up on new music also? This is great, that you guys are interviewing us; because why not help people know about something great now rather than just…

Jeff: Or featuring new bands and then also feature whomever the librarian thinks are the influences. If you like Low Anthem, check out Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan. Something like that I can see working, too. Best of both worlds.

BWI: Last year Bon Iver was the person that Deanna came in and talked about at length, “I love Bon Iver. He’s going to be at SXSW and he was on NPR.” And this year it’s you guys.

Ben: That’s awesome. That was one of those real amazing new music industry stories: you know, that somebody’s music can spread in just such a viral way, and now everybody knows about him. He’s leapt from just being sort of an indie thing that blogs talked about, and to just, I see him everywhere. And he happens to be one of the nicest guys that we’ve met on the road, which is good. It’s good to have such great things to happen to a great person.

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