SFist Interviews: Richard Edwards of Margot and the Nuclear So & So's

Miller: You guys come out of Indiana’s very vibrant scene and I’m curious, what do you think it is that makes the Hoosier State such a hotbed of musical activity?

Edwards: I don’t know. I don’t have any other perspective, but I think part of it’s boredom (laughs), there’s not as many distractions I guess growing up. It’s not like, I imagine if you live in Chicago or New York growing up (I love those places), but I think that maybe your social scene accelerates a lot quicker, there’s more stuff to do, and so maybe some of your creative ambitions might get muted a little bit, although there’s tons of good bands from those cities, so that theory’s probably not right. I just think there’s not a lot to do, so it’s cheap to find places to rehearse, it’s cheap to find places to play and everybody knows each other, so you can be playing with people that you kind of idolized locally within, like, months of starting a band and that’s kind of an exciting thing for someone who’s starting to play music and it was for me.

M: Right, it seems like kind of a tight-knit community that you have.

E: Yeah.

M: For our readers who may not already be familiar with your music, can you give us kind of a quick account of how you guys got together?

E: Yeah, we just kind of all knew of each other through other bands and things like that. I was playing music with kind of a loose band, but mostly just playing songs I had and I’d known Tyler [Watkins] for a long time and he’s the bass player and did some engineering too for us. So, he was going to be recording something I was doing, just a record, because we were friends and he’s pretty much the only person who’s ever recorded me until recently. And I met Andy [Fry: guitar] through some other friends and his brother Chris [Fry: drums] obviously came along with that and then mostly just other people from bands. I think we met Eric [Kang], the violin player, he was playing in another band, in Columbus, or somewhere, and we played a show there and met him and stayed in contact and he ended up joining at some point. Emily [Watkins: keys, vocals] was this friend of mine from high school age and we’d not been in touch for a while, but I got a hold of her and we starting doing it, just to record some stuff on it. Everyone just kind of ended up sticking together for the most part.

M: That kind of leads to another question - at eight pieces, you’re a large band and the combination of instruments that you all play gives a very unique, kind of almost an orchestral texture. Can you tell us how you approach arranging the music for this large ensemble? Is there generally a lot of experimentation to arrive at an arrangement that puts the song across or is it kind of you just start playing and it gels pretty quickly?

E: We’ve done it both ways. For the Animal record, it was primarily like construction in the studio, like going back to composition class in college, that type of thing. It was very designed, we didn’t jam a bunch of those songs or things like that. Now, recently it’s been a lot different with the new record. It’s less of that and more of playing it more in a rock setting to get it where we think it needs to be. But for Animal it was definitely a lot of people sitting around and mapping stuff out very slowly.

M: How do you approach songwriting, Richard. Is there a particular process you follow or does it just kind of vary depending on the tune or what?

E: That’s another thing that’s kind of changing a little for me. In the past it’s been kind of a general just playing guitar on the couch and stumbling upon some sort of melody that excites me. It usually starts with a melody, I’m more interested in that. I don’t think I’ve ever written a page of lyrics and then written a song. It’s generally a melody and then gradually start filling in lyrics based on whatever story I’m hearing as I’m doing it. Recently I’ve been coming up with song titles a lot and writing songs based on running lists of titles that I think are either funny or interesting and I think that’s been changing how I’ve been writing and that’s been a kind of nice, exciting change.

M: Yeah, I can imagine that process would probably put you in a different direction than you might normally follow.

E: Yeah. It’s been a fun change, because I’ve never really done it like that before and I think it’s yielded some stuff that’s kind of exciting to me.

M: Cool. Speaking about 'Animal,' that’s a very powerful and engaging album and, interestingly, there were…

E: I’m glad you think so (laughs).

M: Yeah, I really do, but I’m interested…there were two versions of the album that were released, can you talk about that?

E: Yeah, we just made something and we worked about four or five months with Brian [Deck: production, mixing] in Chicago and did a lot of songs, it was kind of…it wasn’t a blank check, but we had a lot of time in the studio and we ended up recording just buckets of songs. We didn’t go in there with any sort of list, of here’s twelve, we just took every song I’d written and on the day we woke up, we decided what we wanted to do. And we ended up with something that we felt very strongly about and we liked and felt like it was what we wanted to do next and it was met with not much (laughs) in the way of positive response from them [the label]. And we’d recorded some of the old songs that I think they had thought were kind of givens that we’d want on the record, so I think they were a little confused, too. So, it just went back and forth for a long time between different ends of the spectrum, like “Well, we’re not going to release anything at all” and I’m saying, “Well, we’ll release everything on the Internet ourselves. Just sue us because we don’t have any money, anyway” and it ended up in a compromise that I don’t think worked out very well. At the time we felt like it might be a good idea and that was to let them just catalog whatever they wanted from the sessions and to leave ours intact and release it on vinyl…and it was supposed to be digital. It took a while for them to release it digitally, which was kind of, I think, a drag for us. So it was just a compromise made in the interest of preserving the thing that we felt strongly about, or at least I did, and letting it exist without too many changes to it. It probably wasn’t in retrospect the best way to do it but, you know…

M: Well the important thing is you got the version you wanted out there, too and I love it and think the results speak for themselves.

E: I hope so. It’s been a very split reaction, but the people who like it seem to feel very positively about it.

M: Your upcoming album, tentatively titled 'Dark Energy In The Spotlight,' will be released soon and the word on the street is that it will be very creatively ambitious, as 'Animal' was in its way. Can you give us an idea of when we can expect it and maybe give us any other teasers?

E: Yeah it’s kind of the opposite of what you’ve described so far…(laughs)

M: Oh, um…okay! (laughter)

E: It’s hard to say when. Right now, the label seemed kind of exciting about doing something, but that could change. That stuff is always up in the air. Right now it’s kind of in the initial stages of working on it. We’ve recorded some stuff. It’s more of a rock record, I don’t think there’s any strings on it right now. It’s kind of just a… I don’t know how to say it the right way, it’s less ornamentation on the songs, it’s more just kind of like the first record we’ve done like, here are the songs. And it’s not dumbed down or anything, it’s just we’re playing songs and I think the songs are really strong and I think we’re steering away from kind of the… whatever it’s been called, the orchestral, or uh…

M: Right, “Chamber Pop” or “Baroque Pop” or whatever…

E: Yeah, the collective, or whatever…you know, it’s kind of becoming more how the songs start out when they’re brought in and more kind of going back to bands that maybe we were in right before. Because all the Margot things were done…it wasn’t supposed to really be like, “Oh, it’s an eight piece band” and every record is supposed to be…Animal was let’s make this really grand thing and let’s get off on composition and orchestration, because that’s really fun, but it’s not something that we want to necessarily do for every one of them and this one seems like it’s kind of going in the opposite direction a little bit. It’s a little bit more uptempo and energetic, maybe.

M: Sounds interesting, I can’t wait to hear it. Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?

E: The tour should be fun! (laughs) Oh, there’s a film being made that corresponds with this tour which will be fun and interesting and hopefully the people at the shows can get involved with the film in some way.

M: That sounds interesting. Who’s going to be working on that?

E: These guys, “la blogotheque,” have you heard of this blog?

M: Actually, I have.

E: Yeah, they’re coming out for this tour and starting a film that will be…it’s not just a tour film, it will have other stuff, but the release should correspond with the next record, so we’re meeting up with them on this tour and just starting it, so that’s kind of a stressful, but exciting thing.

M: Will they be filming at your show in San Francisco?

E: Yeah, they will. And I think they’re pretty much with us until Austin, so pretty much until the end.