Interview With Ladyhawk: Gloom, Nostalgia & Crappy Tours

What can you do to make that better? Is there anything you can do?

I don’t know. This is like our eighth tour of the States, and it hasn’t really gotten any better, so we’re just like, ‘Fuck it.’ Austin’s usually okay for us, there’s usually been a few people at our shows there, it should be alright. Emo’s is a cool bar; we’ve played there a few times.

The title of the record brings to mind a lot of things, primarily alcohol. Is Shots a record for the pre-drink, the party or the hangover?

Maybe it’s all three. I’m not too sure, maybe it’s a good one for when you come home at two in the morning or three in the morning, and you’re drunk, I think that’s probably the best time: pre-dawn hours.

Can you tell us about the place that Shots was recorded? We’ve read that it was an old barn behind a strip mall in the band’s hometown of Kelowna, BC.

Well, it was actually an abandoned farmhouse that some friends of ours had been using as a little art gallery and place where they put on shows and stuff. It’s in this vacant lot that’s right behind the shopping mall and it’s going to be developed any day, because our hometown is really turning into a mass of strip malls and condos and things like that. So it’s sort of on its way out — it’s sort of like this one last little island of, I guess, the olden days.

Did the contrast between the suburban sprawl and the old image of the town influence the recording in any way?

Yeah, I think so, because we all spent our teenage years in that town, and there’s certain memories and certain things associated with certain places in the town, and I think that a lot of those things and a lot of those feelings are what kind of influenced our songs and the way we make them. I definitely think it had something to do with the sound of the record, for sure.

Can you think of any specific examples? Or is it just an overall feel?

It’s more like a feeling. There’s just a certain feeling I always get when I go back to my parents house and when I go to all my old haunts and stuff, it’s sort of nostalgic, but not always necessarily in a positive way. That sort of mood had something to do with the songs, and on our first record as well.

How does it feel leaving the city to come back and work on your music?

It felt cool to just get out of the city. We recorded our last album in the city at our practice space, and we were all working, so we tried to do it after work, and it was just really stressful. So this it felt kind of nice to get away, get out and not have to think about work. It’s just more isolated, it felt like, we could concentrate more fully on what we were doing and not have to worry about paying the bills or whatever for those two weeks. I was just staying at my parent’s house and eating their food for free, just like the good ol’ days.

Listening to Shots, it seems a little death-obsessed. Am I hearing that correctly?

Yeah, definitely. When I was writing the songs, I was going through a bit of a dark patch — not unlike right now. I had a lot of themes — my mortality — that I was thinking about. There was a bunch of shit going on in my life that was kind of scary. I had some health scares and things like that, and it all kind of came together trying to write songs about vampires and things like that.

It’s just the way it comes out. It’s better to write a song that’s upbeat in some way, but dark in theme, it’s more interesting than having something that’s totally doomy — there’s a place for that kind of stuff, too, it’s just not the kind of music I write.

Is the fourth song on the record, “Corpse Paint” about Norwegian black metal?

Yeah, it is. I listen to a lot of that stuff and, lyrically, it’s my attempt to write a song like that. The lyrics are kind of more disjointed and more imagery-based. It’s actually about the singer from Mayhem — that was the band that was all fucked up, I read a book about them and I used to listen to them all the time. I was pretty obsessed with that kind of stuff at the time when I was going through that particular dark thing (laughs). It all sort of set into my subconscious or my conscious songwriting.

I had this idea about these guys, they’re trying so hard to practice what they preach and then I just thought about this guy that’s obviously just so unhappy about his life, going down into the mirror in his bathroom and putting on his corpse paint. I just thought there was something so lonely about that.

Thanks to Ladyhawk for taking time to talk to Austinist. Interview by Erik Adams for Austinist.com.