Austinist Interview: William Kuehn of Rainer Maria

Did you have any specific goals for the album, or a focus for it?

Honestly, we had no game plan. We just wrote the songs because we wanted to write songs. We didn’t have a set label situation. We just got back from touring for the last record, Long Knives Drawn, and we just went into our studio and started writing songs with no set deadline of when we wanted to record or even further down on the line, worrying about who was going to put the album out.

How collaborative is the song-writing process? You said that the song-writing has changed over time, could you elaborate on that a little bit?

The process hasn’t changed so much. We’ve gone from just banging it out, to different people working together, like Kyle [Fischer, guitarist] and I working a song, and then Caithlin [De Marrais, bassist and vocalist] will come in and lay down a bass part and vocals. But, now, for this last album, we went back to three people in a room, banging it out. Caithlin would have a little notebook next to her while we were writing music, and she would be writing lyrics down. I think that maybe one of the big points as far as being able to tighten the songwriting is that everything — the lyrics, melodies, everything — was written at the same time. That yielded a more solid product.

With a song like “Burn,” which is just heartbreaking lyrically, do you still compose the lyrics and the music at the same time? That piece particularly almost sounds like it was written out and then later set to music.

That one, I started playing the drum line, and then Kyle added some atmospheric stuff to it, and Caithlin just sat down and wrote these amazingly beautiful lyrics that went with it so well. There’s a certain amount of luck in a lot of these songs that they gelled so well, but, again, that luck coupled with the fact that we’ve been doing this together as a unit for 10 years. When we’re in the studio, we’re living in each other’s heads. We know each other so well that we finish each other’s sentences, so to speak, musically.

Do you think what you’re doing now, or what you’re trying to do now, is in any way different from what you started out doing?

I don’t think so. The motivation is still the love of creativity that drives you to wake up and want to go into the studio and write music. Especially with this most recent album, we didn’t have any motivation as far as a label telling us “Ok, we need songs by this time, and we need to be recorded and done by this time.” We did it purely for the love because of the creative drive we all have. It’s something all three of us have to do, because it’s just a part of us.

You guys came out of a really politically-engaged, DIY-driven scene. How do you guys stay connected to that community?

There’s a lot of that actually going on in New York City, believe it or not. There’s this guy Todd P. who does shows in Brooklyn, and it’s always all ages shows, between five and ten dollars in very non-traditional spaces with these bands that no one’s really heard of who are on tour. It’s total DIY scene, playing for gas money. And, it’s just supercreative, new innovative things going on. It’s great to be able to be a part of that and go to those shows to hang out and talk to these kids who are doing it for the first time and learn from them as much as they’re maybe learning from us when they listen to our stuff at home.

You’ve said that the band has changed and your music has evolved. Do you think your audience has changed over the years?

Definitely the audience that was there in the beginning has grown up. They’re all late twenties, early thirties, some of them have gone away, but a lot of them have stayed with us, and we see the same people at the shows over and over again. At the same time, we’ve picked up a lot of new younger fans, partially we can credit that to touring with bands like Coheed and Cambria and Coupland, who we’ve toured with for the past couple years. Those guys were really young, and we were kind of nervous, because we knew we were going to playing to younger kids, and we were worried whether or not they would get it, or if they’d be into it, or if they’d be like, “Oh, look at these old punk or indie rock people on stage who have been doing this for a while,” but they really really dug it, and we made a lot of great fans in high school or just starting college.

You’ve talked a little bit about being in Brooklyn and being in the community there. What did you guys hope to get out of the move, and have you been able to get that?

The reason we moved, everyone had a personal reason. There was no reason for the band to move out there at all. My girlfriend at the time was transferring from Wisconsin to FIT, Kyle’s sister was attending school at Sarah Lawrence University in New York, and Caithlin actually grew up in Connecticut so her family lived out there. We had been out of school for a couple years living in Madison, and we decided it was time to move to a bigger city. We didn’t know what city that was going to be. We thought about Chicago for a little while, but because of all those factors, for personal reasons, we decided as a band to move ot New York, and I think that it has affected in the band in that it’s kept us busy and it’s kept us moving because there are so many great artists in new york. But, there was no kind of commercial motivation for the band to move to new york at all, but it has been stimulating because you have wonderful musicians living in and around New York City.

Setting out for a huge tour like this, aside from making sure everybody’s got their toothbrushes and amplifiers and everything, what do you guys do to prepare?

We eat a big meal. [laughs] We don’t play well on empty stomachs, I don’t think anyone does. Aside from that, just making sure everyone is in good spirits, you know, smiles all around before we walk out on stage. It’s superimportant to keep morale up.

*Photograph by Danielle St. Laurent from www.myspace.com/rainermaria*