Interview & Preview: 'Til We're Blue Or Destroy CD Release @ Club de Ville [Friday]

Wofford: It started out as demos basically. Will had some songs that didn't fit in with this projects at the time and he wanted a different perspective on recording. He wanted to try something new.

Rhodes: Kyle (Hunt / The Black Angels) was the first person I invited in and he knew you (Wofford) already. We started recording this album together.

Wofford: Kyle was instrumental to this record, during the early demos.

Rhodes: This was before he left to play with The Black Angels.

Wofford: Will would generally write the songs the night before and he would show up in the morning just with an acoustic guitar part and have Travis (Garaffa) come in and lay down a drum beat. And different friends would stop by during the day and make up a part. It was all about being in the moment. It's been one of the most creative things I've been a part of. The songs were not prearranged at all.

Rhodes: That's what made it so special. I just wanted to something different than I was used to doing. I wanted to involve different sounds and that's one of the things I really like about working with Erik -- there were no boundaries. There was no one ever saying, "Well that just ain't gonna sound good." Because half the stuff we did, if we singled out the track, we'd be like "What?" But it worked in the mix and he had the vision to see that. We just learned our record yesterday finally and played it completely through. Because we had to go back and learn what we had played. We have been working hard over the last month trying to bring parts out that are on the record. I remember when I walked in here one time and you were like "the band doesn't know the songs?" This record is weirdly a demo. We would come here, nothing was rehearsed. We didn't know what we were going to do.

Wofford: A lot of bands arrange the songs as a band in rehearsal and really nit-pick everything and perfect everything. But for these guys, all the arrangements were made up in one day.

Rhodes: The Cacophony sessions is where the band formed.

Wofford: All the friends would stop by during lunch or before going to work, and that's who ended up on the record and in the band.

Austinist: So the way it worked out, do you consider it to be a collective of sorts?

Rhodes: At one point it was a collective, we didn't know what we were doing. It started out that way but really now we're a flat out a six person band that rehearses all the time together. We're tight because we took what we did here and we are able to represent that to an audience. We're a band now. But if Clint (Myers / Sleepercar) and Miranda (Brown / A.C. Newman) come into town, we invite them on stage. Everyone can hold their own on this record.

Wofford: And you let me jump on omnichord.

Rhodes: We did let Erik step in on omnichord -- I hope you do that with us at the CD release on Friday. We're just doing the record from start to finish. The last song, "This Train", we made it up right here. We were just sitting here one day and I had my chord progression.

Wofford: Will had this great idea for it and we said, "Everybody just show up to the studio." We worked from 7 p.m. in the evening to 4 a.m. on this track. Everyone made up their own parts. This band is a comedy of errors. It's all about rolling with the punches.

Rhodes: A lot of times, all we would do is try and make some really cool noise.

Wofford: We'd just walk around trying to find something to bang on. I've kind of developed this studio into being able to do that sort of thing. If you look around, there are little piles of stuff and if someone needs an idea, it's all laid out. A lot of people see the toys here to be a big part of it. That was the element of my idea of really working with the artists. Most recording studios are really technical places -- you have the control room. It looks like a cockpit of an aeroplane. It looks into another room where all the musicians are and there's a disconnect between the musicians, producer, and engineer. They're doing two totally separate things. But here, since it's all one room, light, and lots of open space, there's that little comfort zone of a having a couch like it's your living room, and person who's creating the record is right here with you and it's a lot more personal. That's really the way I work, the way I learned my craft with this record. The most important thing about making a record is getting someone to let go of their creative potential.

Rhodes: As a musician, coming in here, I realized all the things I had done with bands in a studio before was out the window and I could actually ask questions -- "Can we try this? Can we do that?" And that forever will change me in the recording process, no matter whatever session I end up in. I can ask questions and talk about it. One of my favorite things about Erik is how accessible he is. It led to a good friendship and I have lot of other memories with Erik that have nothing to do with music. Erik is very much someone you want to be around all the time. And Erik was definitely a part of this as a musician too.

Wofford: The studio was my instrument. I would use a delay pedal as an instrument or come up with sound that we could use. That was a really exciting time. I was starting to work on my own and coming up with evertying. It was largely an experiment on my part too. That's when it's most fresh.

Rhodes: I was going through a real rough time in my life and trying to get better. I would write a song and it would make me feel better. It would be lost if I didn't do it in a week or two and because Erik wasn't as busy back then, I could come in a few days after I talked to him. These experiments formed the band. This studio holds a very special place in my heart -- Erik might as well have been a therapist. I never came in and said "I'm going to start a band called Til We're Blue Or Destroy." It never happened like that.

Wofford: This record was all about having fun with friends.

Back home, as we looked through our notes, there were two things we remembered vividly about the interview. First, everything we hear on the album was recorded from 2005 to 2007. Wofford laughs, "I know I finished the mastering on it at least a year and half or two years ago." Rhodes is quick to defend this as not being just laziness, saying "I just now know what to do with a record. I just hired a publicist. I didn't know what to do back then. The record is really personal to me, it was an extremely personal time in my life and intimate time between us friends. I was scared to share something that personal with other people -- whether they'd like it or not. "This is mine. I really love it" and I didn't necessarily want to hear anything mean about it.

Second, the fact that they both attest that the band and the record are "an accident." It's somewhat reassuring that something so creative and brilliant can come out of "an accident." Even the name of the album is an accident. Meant to be called This Train, the band settled on the eponymous title after failing to turn in the proper artwork for the CD sleeve with the proposed name in time. Per Rhodes, "We got lazy and we forgot it was going to be called This Train. So now it's just self-titled." And perhaps it's fitting because every sound on the album is the contribution of a unique set of individual ingredients that now constitute 'Til We're Blue Or Destroy.

(Will Rhodes, Travis Garaffa, Hope Irish, Matt Bricker, John Pfirman, and Ben Howard currently comprise 'Til We're Blue Or Destroy; Kullen Fuchs, Erik Wofford, Clint Myers, Miranda Brown, Kyle Hunt, Jonathan Humphrey, Benjamin Howard, Cam Rogers, Amy E. Mitchell all contributed to the album as well. Erik Wofford's band Candi and The Strangers will also perform at Club de Ville on Friday.)

['Til We're Blue Or Destroy MySpace]
[Cacophony Recorders MySpace]
[Candi and The Strangers MySpace]

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[The Lost Soul Revue MySpace]
[Team Fabrication MySpace]