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City Center
Discography:
City Center LP/CD 2009 |
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We have been following Fred Thomas since the idea of 30music.com was hatched onto the World Wide Web in 2002. In our third interview with the man behind Saturday Looks Good to Me, we concentrate entirely on his latest project, City Center, which is fully explained in the ensuing conversation. Thomas is jovial as usual, explaining all things music and why it is he creates the art he creates. Really, how can you not dig this guy?
30: How did City Center come to be?
Fred Thomas: City Center started in the very end of 2007 as my blog. I knew I wanted to do a new project and I was super broke, not working and recording all the time, so I just started posting all the new songs online and writing about things, observing things. It was largely the by-product of loneliness and too much free time. I had played a single, really half-assed show at CMJ that year, but didn't really start playing out until March of 2008 on a little tour. It was kind of a recording project for a long time, until Ryan joined, very slowly in recording collaboration, and then we started doing shows in January of 2009.
30: I remember, in an interview I did with you back around the time that All Your Summer Songs came out, you mentioned that SLGTM evolved out of some experiments with Beach Boys tape loops and what not. With this in mind, City Center seems to be coming from a similar place. Do you see distinct similarities and differences between your approach to City Center and that first SLGTM album?
Thomas: Well, if you're asking me if it was a conscious decision to make a radical sonic or stylistic departure from Saturday Looks Good to Me or some of my past work, I would say no. It's different in that it's not an immediately-recognizable drums/guitar/bass pop format, but it's still heavily arranged, multi-layered pop music in my head. The weird thing to me is that people have had highly polarized reactions to the direction City Center has taken in light of other bands I've been in, but I've been making music like this for a long time, it just never got poplar or well-known. Every SLGTM record has at least one song based on a layered loop, and the first record was almost the exact same approach as the City Center stuff. Almost laughably so! I would just take a fragment of an existing song, loop it in an interesting context and then build another song on top of it. That record came out nine years ago, and though the songwriting has changed some, it's basically a revisitation of that idea, with some new context of what's happened in-between then and now. I feel like a really close look at everything I've worked on between then and now would draw a pretty direct line.
30: Is there a typical process you go through when writing songs for City Center?
Thomas: It's always different. Some ideas come up in a solitary fashion, but mostly we just jam on any and every idea, and record every jam, sorting through the quality later on in hopes of collaging together a good song from many ideas. The working model we came up with was to follow every idea that excited us and then be just as excited about discarding ideas, writing about ten songs for every one that actually got used/played live/recorded.
30: What went into making this record? Where did you record? Did you go in with fully realized songs or craft ideas as you went?
Thomas: Much like the ten-songs-for-every-one-that-sees-the-light-of-day idea, the full-length was kind of a distillation process. There are literally sounds from every single era or major recording spurt that ever bore the City Center vibe, dating back to the first song I finished in summer of 2007. There were maybe like 45 or 50 songs written, dissected, thrown or revamped before the ten or so for the record got picked, and even then there were a bunch of revisions before the finished product. I got deep into the French band M83 when I heard their Saturdays=Youth record, and I wanted to find my own voice in something similar, so layered and impenetrable. That record is so maxed out with ideas that it just sounds ambient again, and trying to pick out specific sounds feels like an impossible task. A song like "Young Diamond" on the City Center record owes everything to that aesthetic. It started out as an acoustic guitar with a weird field-recording sample and singing, but once I got into the M83 record, I wanted it to have every sound in it and still be a basic melody.
30: What else can you share about the album? Your MySpace page says it's coming out on Type.
Thomas: Yeah, Type Records, out of the UK is putting the record out in June in the States, a little earlier overseas. We were introduced when I played a show with Grouper last year in NYC and just kinda kept in touch. John Twells who runs the label is a real amazing music-head kinda guy who's somehow totally positive, friendly and not jaded, so we got along really well. I recently put the whole tracklisting and all the info up on the blog.
30: When are we going to get the song "Cookies"--I heard it on one of the live recordings up on your blog and it sounds fantastic?
Thomas: "Cookies" is one of the newer duo-written songs and actually out entire set right now is what we're basing our next album off of. Hope to record that sometime this fall and see its release eventually.
30: When did City Center become a touring duo? Was there a particular reason for this?
Thomas: It seems impossible to pinpoint why it went from a solo thing that played around Brooklyn randomly to a touring duo. Me and Ryan have a supernatural musical and personal connectivity, and have always worked really well together, but in terms of playing together in City Center, it reached this different plane. I was doing sets for about a year with backing tracks on an iPod and just kind of singing over noise. It was cool, but when we started to play together, it became an instant band, with a lot more interaction and things left to chance. The shows started to get either super hectic and falling apart or really transcendent. A lot less static, that's for sure.
30: Along the same lines, what has performing as a duo changed about the way you approach the live show?
Thomas: Well, it's a huge thing to have someone else to take care of and be taken care of by in a performance sense. It's easy to check out and just play the bass or the keyboard if that's your role in a traditional rock band, but we have this intense set up where we're basically both playing the entirety of these really intricate songs by ourselves, building a house of cards on top of each other and trying to climb it, too. It can be kind of ugly, or embarrassing even, but it's really compelling too. I can barely remember playing shows by myself anymore because it's just so night and day.
30: Is City Center your main project now? This is, of course, a roundabout way of asking if Saturday Looks Good to Me has been retired. But additionally, since City Center seems to cover so much ground through your blog, will there continue to be releases from "Fred Thomas" in the folk/pop tradition, and Saturday Looks Good to Me in the all-things-pop tradition? Or is City Center the new focus.
Thomas: One time I was really bugging out and called up my friend Justin to talk to him about how I had to break up my band and never tour again, etc. He kind of just laughed and said I'd called him like this at the same time the year before and the year before that, too. I guess it dawned on me then that I was taking myself way too seriously and I should give less of a fuck about these concepts I keep making up for myself. I don't have any focus, and I hope everything keeps changing and contradicting itself for the remainder of my life. At this point I've been playing music for 20 years and touring for 13, and I have no rhyme or reason or greater plan for what music I make or play or how I want people to receive it. It's amazing and great how little I understand it.
30: As a follow up, a couple of years ago, I saw you play in Bowling Green, at Howard's Club H, with Saturday Looks Good to Me. After, what I thought was a very exciting and surprising set, a friend of mine told you that the show just didn't feel like Saturday Looks Good to Me. Is this attitude something you run into? Do you feel limited, or like people have a limited sense of what they want your work to sound like? Or has your ability to move between styles and sounds so seamlessly allowed you to pretty much do whatever you feel like?
Thomas: Man, if I considered what people expected I would go so fucking crazy that life wouldn't be worth living. Every artist has someone loving them too much, hating them too much, wanting them to do something like they used to, or wishing they would do something like they almost could have once, etc... It's really something that comes up in every single case of somebody making something that other people can have an opinion about, and thusly has almost no meaning.
30: Are there any other artistic or musical projects you're working on?
Thomas: Yesterday I finished a two-month tour playing with Calvin Johnson and Ian Svenonius' new bands. It was really amazing to work with them and everyone should check out their new sounds, as those are two guys who are always changing and always getting better for real.
30: Finally, back to City Center: Where is this project heading? What are your goals?
Thomas: The goals are really to keep expanding the idea of what feels good and how to come to terms with the fact that it can't be held on to.
-30-
City Center Review
interview on 2009/06/21 by James Brubaker |
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