interview: Frankie Valet
words: michael brooks
Michael spoke with Frankie Valet about the band’s forthcoming record, what kind of non-musical things have influenced the way they approach music, and what kinds of things make it difficult to be a band in the modern age. Their new album, Waterfowl, is out 2/7 via It Takes Time Records.
The Grey Estates: Are you all originally from St. Louis?
Jack: I’m from Massachusetts, I grew up half an hour north of Boston and I’ve been out here for four and a half years now.
Alison: I’m from Atlanta, I’ve been here for just a little bit longer than Jack and everybody else is from St. Louis.
What brought you to St. Louis?
Jack: Alison and I both went to school out here.
When did the four of you start making music together?
Felix: We started maybe two years ago. There was kind of a few different formations of the band but about two years ago is when we settled on the four of us. We’ve been writing songs together since then, before that it was mostly just me writing the songs and then we would come together and figure it out. But that was a while ago, more like how we did the first album.
So in what other ways did you approach this new record differently than your debut?
Felix: I think there’s definitely a difference in songwriting and in the production, but almost in different ways between the two of them. The first record was more songs that I had written on my own and showed to the group, or ones that we jammed out together. But it was nothing like we have now, which is me, Jack, and Alison who all write songs and bring them to the table, so now we have three vocalists who all write songs. And production wise it’s way more stripped down than the first record, we kind of wanted them to sound more like our live show.
Alison: Yeah, definitely having crisper vocals is a big thing for me.
How did you go about trying to capture the feeling of your live act on record?
Jack: My impression was that we went about it the wrong way at first. We spent a lot of time doubling and playing with effects and at the end of the day we ended up taking off most of that stuff in favor of trying to get the drums to sit right, which was probably the most labor intensive thing we ended up doing but it made such a huge difference. After everything was finished we ran it all through a tape deck, which helped everything to saturate in a nice way.
When working on a new song, which usually comes first: the music or the lyrics?
Alison: Most of the time somebody comes in with usually both, but at least the music.
Felix: Some of the songs were definitely started as little jams that we did, “Water foul” is a good example of that. That might have actually been the first song that we all wrote together in the same room. There were other songs that had lyrics first.
Alison: There were definitely some that didn’t have lyrics until the end.
Jack: We don’t really have a process, which I think shows on this album with how eclectic it is. It’s all within our sound, like indie guitar music, but it’s still kind of all over the place to me versus the last record which felt pretty cohesive. And I like that, and I think it’s because we write things differently every time and ideas come from different people and different levels of ideas come to practice at different stages and that’s what kind of makes it seem all over the place.
Is there any significance behind the title Waterfowl?
Jack: I don’t know, I feel like that song is much more a product of the environment it was written in than an explicit take on the environment.
Alison: We wrote the song near a lake and then we liked the word.
Are there any non-musical inspirations behind the way you approach music?
Gram: For drums, lately my biggest inspiration has been the Bon Appétit YouTube channel.
Felix: What’s your favorite program on there?
Gram: Oh wow, that’s tough. Probably—what is it called? The one with Claire, “Pastry Chef Attempts to Make”
Felix: I’ll say that mid-century art and architecture is a big inspiration for me personally. I don’t think that there’s any way that that wouldn’t be tied to my creative process in some way, I think about angles all the time.
Jack: I think about space a lot, like the three dimensional space of a song but also with the instrumentation. With my writing, I'm always trying to think of specific pockets of space that my parts are taking up and being purposeful about that. Which is often hard in the venues we end up playing in, but in recording it’s nice to be able to try and find where the parts fit spatially.
Gram: That’s what I’m trying to say with cooking, it’s the spices and flavor.
Alison: I feel like I think of songs kind of in terms of color schemes and imagery.
What do you think is the hardest part about being a band nowadays?
Alison: There’s a lot of other bands out there trying to do the same thing.
Felix: I think finding a voice can be simultaneously easier and more frustrating nowadays, because you know the classic answer would be technology and whatnot. Everything’s at your fingertips constantly—I still think that there's a lot of good ways to find inspiration, but there's also gonna be a lot of people around that might say, “Well, now that we have all this information about all these other music groups, we can tell you exactly what your influences are and why you're not doing it well” or something. And the economy sucks, our president’s a maniac, and it’s really frustrating to see all of that happen. It’s just a difficult time to exist period, so trying to be a creative person and trying to understand your role in this society as a creative person can be hard.