When you name your band after the Sun King, you know you've got to be decadent, and that's just what San Diego's Louis XIV sound like -- all sleazy T. Rex classic rock crunch with lyrics that trade on tongue in cheek sexual deviance. One listen to their records reveals that some guys who really know their rock'n'roll are behind all of it, particularly lead-singer, guitarist, and knob-twiddler Jason Hill:
Jason Hill: It's funny, I had to get used to this whole conference call thing. I don't know when it was December or early January and we were doing some videos. I was talking with different video directors. The fantastic woman from the video department at Atlantic, who I didn't really I know at the time, hooked me up with this video director, and then all of a sudden she chimes in and I'm thinking Holy shit! Have you been here the whole time, listening to our conversation? It's a very odd thing to get used to, but I sort of let everyone know I wasn't too keen on that.
Keith Daniels Wait 'til you're on a tight schedule and she jumps in after twenty minutes with Times up!
JH: She's probably listening to us now, and we just don't know it.
KD: You self-released your first record. Is it nice to have someone else taking care of the 'boring' stuff now?
JH: Well, you know you can never really let anybody 100% take care of everything, because that's where everything gets screwed up now, doesn't it? But yeah, certainly. My end on the record label is to make the records. We had a deal between Brian [guitar, vocals] and myself: I would produce the records, engineer them, and labor over them I mean, obviously he was a part of those records but when it came to the sixteen, seventeen-hour day, going all night, that's what I would do. I was going to do it no matter what. So he had to handle a lot of the actual sending things out through the post, printing things out, and actually making the physical CDs. So I didn't have to deal so much with that.
I never did any of the actual sending out, and we sold like 18,000 or something off that label! So that's a lot of sending to do! At the end of that, he'd call me up and bitch about it. Hey man, that was the deal! That was the agreement we had. [chuckles] I'll be sleeping now while you post those things out. It is great, though, it's just that there's a lot more to deal with now. I try to keep my hand on everything that we're doing, and luckily we have great people around us. It's easier every day to trust different people, but you still have to make sure everybody's doing it your own way especially when you're dealing with a big company. They have their own way to do things, and we had to come in and say, We don't like it. We don't need people like stylists. Don't blow your money on someone to give me a haircut, because I'll cut my own hair. I do! I cut my own hair! We don't need you to blow money this way or that way, but we do need you to do this. I'm going to make my own records, and I'm going to give you that record. You're not going to tell me whether you like it or not.
KD: [Laughs]
JH: Well, of course you want them to say I love it, but it's not going to change it if they don't. That sort of thing we just had to make very clear with this deal, and everybody's fantastic over there so far. We said We're going to have nudity on the cover [of our new record]. That's what we want to do. You probably haven't seen the cover...
KD: They markered out the nipples. I felt gipped.
JH: But you just got the EP, right? Have they actually sent the record?
KD: No. I've heard your self-titled record, but I haven't heard the upcoming one.
JH: You have? I'm amazed. You're possibly the first press person outside of San Diego, or L.A.,who's actually heard that thing.
KD: You kidding me? I've got the self-titled, the Pink EP, and the Blue EP. I wouldn't talk to a band without hearing everything they ever did first.
JH: So you've heard some of the songs that will be on the new record? That's great.
KD: I was going to ask, since the new record will be called The Best Little Secrets Are Kept, does that mean Pledge of Allegiance will be on there?
JH: Oh yeah. That, Paper Doll, and Finding Out True Love is Blind were all written during the same week-and-a-half period, and those are actually my three... actually, now I have three other favorites, but those are my three favorites for last year. Those are my little gems, y'know. I mean, I thought they were. [Laughs].
KD: Did you expect this band to be more than just a project? Did you expect it to be a serious, full-time band?
JH: Yeah. You hear that a lot in L.A.. People go Yeah, I'm in this project, and this project, and this project. I set out to be in a group. I don't want to be in a project. That thing was always weird. That reeks of a hobbyist, to me. So, yeah, it was a group from the minute we started. You've got to understand that the other two guys in the group, Mark and Brian, I grew up with. I played in a number of different groups with them, and when we decided to do it we said Hey, let's go to France and make a record.
Here's the first song, 'Louis XIV', and let's go track it over there and make a record that's going to be going to this same party. It's going to be a whole concept. So we sat down and wrote out the song titles -- half on the plane, and half [on the way] to the airport the day before we split to France. So we wanted to actually go and write these songs, and so we set out and wrote and recorded this record in a very specific way. Then we came back and it was sort of like Fuck. We're back in our normal lives. This isn't nearly as fun. Finding Out True Love Is Blind, Pledge of Allegiance, and Paper Dolls were the first songs that came out after those France sessions, and they were basically going to a different place, and that was going to be the next record it made perfect sense. For us it felt like the best thing we've ever done. This is the best rock, and this is the best art that we've ever achieved, so it didn't make any sense to do anything else. The prior band that we were in we immediately quit, and said that we didn't want to do it anymore.
KD: The way I've heard it, you were pretty disappointed with [your previous band, Convoy's] Black Licorice record.
JH: Yeah. Look, I've probably got to watch what I say...
KD: Alright, alright.
JH: No no no not to you! The more I get interviewed... these other articles that I never even get to read... I actually gave Glenn, who handles all the publicity at Atlantic from our end, a little bit of Hell the other day. Man, I've given all these interviews and I never even read any of 'em! My mom sent me an email the other day pointing out a review on E! Entertainment the other day. It was a really great review, and I was like [to Glenn] Man! I want to hear this shit! Let's get my ego going, come on.
KD: They called Finding Out True Love Is Blind a cross between Devo and something... [ed. -- The Fall]
JH: Devo?! Really? I mean, I got nothing against Devo, but they certainly never inspired me to do anything. But still, it was a positive review. People find the oddest things. I've gotten so many comparisons to The Fall, and up until just recently I'd never even heard of The Fall.
KD: Everybody got compared to The Fall last year. Franz Ferdinand and all that.
JH: Is that right? I heard them getting compared to Gang of Four. That was a little bit of a pet peeve of mine, because I heard all these journalists I knew comparing them to Gang of Four, and I was like I know your record collection, man. I've been to your house. You've never even fuckin' heard of Gang of Four. I'd never heard of Gang of Four! Fuck! Now, of course, I've heard of 'em. Everybody seems to know about 'em. Don't give me comparisons you don't know. Make sure you know what you're talking about when you're writing it. But about Black Licorice, I'm sorry. I was very unhappy with the production on it. I was very unhappy with a lot of things on it.
We had signed to a label, and it was one of those things where you want people to be excited about your record, in terms of the company, because you know that they have to push it. I didn't realize how bad they would be at doing their job, but at the same time I wasn't happy with our record. I realized that it was like... we made these compromises. We worked with a very cool guy [David Bianco], who produced the record, and I thought it sounded like shit. I didn't like the production. It was very clean. The songs didn't turn out the way I wanted them, and by the end of production I was sick. I had the flu. I do this thing where, if I'm unhappy with something, I make myself physically sick. I really do. I wish I didn't, but I take everything very internally. So by the end of the record I was very sick, and at that point you can't do anything straight. It was just a very unhappy experience making a record. Look, the guy was great; very cool guy. It just wasn't the right thing, and we ended up making a record that I didn't particularly like -- so I named it Black Licorice. It's the candy that nobody likes. [Laughs] That was my hidden little joke about it.
KD: Those and candy corn.
JH: Yeah. You see it on the aisles, and it's like, Who buys that shit? [Laughs]
KD: You're a bit of an analog junkie.
JH: Big analog junkie.
KD: I was wondering if it bugged you to hear your songs on the radio, with the digital compression that squishes the dynamics so flat.
JH: You know what? I like compression. I'm a big compression fan, if it's used in the right way. A lot of times people don't use it in the right way. Compression is a great tool. I dig it. When you hear stuff on the radio, it sounds good, and the way that I mix the stuff, I plan on it being compressed over the radio. I hope to be hearing it on the radio, so I don't compress it after the fact as much as other people do. So if you put our record up against some other modern record, it's probably going to be lower in volume, and more dynamic because it's not compressed as much. So when it does go through the compressors on the radio, I think it sounds great.
A lot of people have pointed out to me that they thought when our song came on the radio that it sounded really different, really good, and still dynamic and all that. Everybody else gets to the point where their records sound like they're on the radio when you put it in your CD player. I'm not saying I know which is better. I don't know, necessarily, which is better, but I don't mind [compression] at all. I use it all over the place, but I use very specific compressors. I use very analog compressors. I have no problem with digital technology. Suddenly, in the last couple of years, it's gotten very good. I'm still an analog junkie, and I'm all over tape machines. Occassionally I'll bounce something down to a digital format just so I can fuck with it, but I won't digitally fuck with it with plugins and things like that, because that's when you start getting your record sounding like everybody else's record.
KD: There's a neat little stereo pan on God Killed the Queen, the I think you're seein' double bit.
JH: That particular song doesn't have as much stereo panning as some of the other things I do. I just believe in hard panning. The thing is, they didn't even come out with consoles or recording desks that were able... nowadays you can go 180 degrees. You can even do more if you go in surround sound, but I've never dabbled in that yet, only because I don't have a surround system. So you have 180 degrees, anywhere in the spectrum you could put it from 9 o'clock to 3 o'clock, you can go to 1 o'clock or 2 o'clock, or any of these little points. Well, that didn't come about until the early '70s / late '60s.
All the Beatles records, you had straight down the middle, or hard pan to the left, or hard pan to the right. It was the same with T. Rex records, or Bowie records. Some of the Bowie stuff, actually, was in the time frame where they started doing these other kinds of panning, but anyway, if you keep that in mind, you have to hard pan it. Those Beatles records sound fantastic! That's the Holy Grail. That's what you try to get to, and so this idea of a big mono -- where you're in the middle but a little bit to the left or the right sometimes that's the way to go, but I always start with this idea of hard panning everything. It's a good place to try to get to. I'm always trying to be as bold with the panning, or with [anything] that I do. You'll notice that a lot of times my guitar solos are freakin' loud, [Laughs] or the drums or vocals might be loud on a particular track. Usually when it comes to a guitar solo, somebody will come in and say, That's a little loud, isn't it?, and I'll go, Exactly! Don't you want to hear it? Look at Sympathy for the Devil, when that guitar solo that Keith plays comes in, it's fuckin' loud, and it's brilliant! Any lower in the mix and you wouldn't even notice it.
KD: It jumps out at you.
JH: Yeah! Exactly! That's what you want to happen. You want that rush of energy. You won't ever see me being safe with anything, and if you do, that means I'm fuckin' up. I'm sure there's been elements where I've safed it out a little bit, maybe not intentionally making it safe, but from hours in the studio fucking around with where the levels sit. I try to be bold with everything. I think that's the way you have to be with rock'n'roll, you have to be bold with every move that you make, everything that you do. You can't be cautious about anything. You can be smart, and deliberate, but you shouldn't be cautious.
KD: I'm excited now to hear your work with Mando Diao.
JH: We did three songs when they came in to San Diego. This was about a year ago, I guess. Their first record's awesome. That Motown song [Motown Blood]. A friend of mine was doing something at the radio station with them where they went in and they played live on the radio. I hadn't heard of 'em. He said, Oh, you're going to really dig this band, and he put 'em on and it sounded like the Beatles on speed the Beatles from the Hamburg era which wasn't very good Beatles, but you saw the promise of it.
He invited me down to the studio, so I went down, and we sort of hit it off. They came back to my place that night, and we went in, tracked three songs [in] like a 24 hour period before they played the Troubadour that night. We just went straight through the night, into the day, and then into the night of the next day. We just tracked in my hotel room, which was filled with all this crazy analog stuff drums, hundred year old pianos, all these crazy old amps. They walked in and were like, Ohhhhh woowww.
I've been collecting since I was a little kid! I was lucky enough that when I first started buying equipment, I oddly enough started buying good stuff. I was lucky that way. My main guitar I play, I've had it for 12 years, and I bought it for $400. The same guitar now is like $4,000. Anyway, those three songs that we did are fucking brilliant! They're just a really great band. They've got great sensibilities, and they're a lot of fun to work with, because they were really into all of these different things that I did with them. They'd never really had that experience with recording. Their first record, you can tell they just went in live and it's really balls-out and great. With me, they had this one song that's really great. It's pretty rockin', but I heard Gustav playing it on the piano, just a slowed down version of it, and it blew my mind! They're so oddly Swedish where sometimes they don't totally understand everything they're singing, but sometimes it's brilliant because they just like the way certain words sound with one another.
KD: Like the ten little soldiers screaming line in Mr. Moon.
JH: Yeah! They have no idea! But it's brilliant! So I said, Listen. We'll do it this way, but we gotta do a version where it's just piano and vocals, and it's incredible. It's like this six minute song, because it's drawn out now, and just a gorgeous song. We did two songs, then two versions of that third song, and they just turned out awesome. I'm playing a real George Harrison-y slide guitar on one, and we did things like slowed down the tape, played a piano solo, and then sped up the tape so it sounded really fast. Really cool little things.
The bad part is that I lost touch with them. I got kind of busy since things started picking up with us, but I heard their new record it was like they took these songs... and it's almost the same sort of thing that happened with Black Licorice. It's just sort of soft and clean, and it just wasn't right. They need to make something that sounds nasty. It just hurt me in the chest, because I know they're not getting as much play in terms of people respecting and buying into 'em right now as they were on their first record, which was nasty. They even changed a couple of lines from one of the songs that Bjorn sings, they dumbed down a couple of their lyrics that were so brilliant, because they probably overthought it or somebody said, That doesn't make sense. But it did make sense, in such a great way, in such a bigger way. Then suddenly they changed them and made them more obvious. I was like, Oh man, what are you guys doing? The recording we did was so much better.
KD: The full-length, The Best Little Secrets Are Kept, will be out in March, so why put out an EP in February? Did you just want something cheap out there that people could get and get into ya?
JH: You mean inexpensive?
KD: Inexpensive! I'm sorry. [Laughs]
JH: [Laughs] The thing was that we had our own label, and radio was playing Finding Out True Love is Blind all over. It was added to KROQ, #1 on KROQ now I think, actually, #1 in San Francisco, #1 in Boston, many places on both coasts, but on the west coast we were on every major station without a record label. Which doesn't happen! I feel very lucky, and it makes me feel really good that people got into it just for the music. Anyway, they started playing it, we needed something to sell, and the only thing we had were those Pink and Blues that we were selling, basically, out of our house. We had a CD burner, we're burning the discs, and sending them out.
We turned down every offer that came our way until, finally, it was the right deal, and we had to cease all sales of those things because they wanted to release them as a record. At the same time, it's all over the radio, and it was going to be several months until the record was ready to put out I hadn't finished the main record. So I said Give me until New Years. It had been playing on the radio since August, and that's a lot of time to have something on the radio and not have anything to sell. So it became, Let's release something on our own label through Atlantic and Vice. We needed a b-side, so we went in and did the song Illegal Tender, and Marc, and basically threw something together as a teaser. Their idea was Let's give 'em two good songs, and the rest'll be just b-sides. To me, that was like, Are you kidding me? The first thing you want to do to the general public is put out something sort of shabby? They were really trying to convince me on this! I'll give you b-sides, but they're going to be great just the same. Like Illegal Tender, I think, is one of my favorite tracks, basically because it was so fun to record.
KD: I was going to ask you if the giggling on that track was something planned, or whether something had happened.
JH: We were just loaded on red wine. [Laughs] That was the first song that we did in the new studio. I had a small room, we signed a deal, were able to get a little bit of cash, and we went and rented this old church. One of those old retail Baptist churches that a guy had been renting for a while and then just moved out, and so we had this big room and decided to make it our studio, our place. It was sort of ghetto and we had to really clean it up. We did all this work to it, and then finally were able to go in and start tracking. That night we went in, were having a blast, and it was just fun to start tracking again. Just sort of playing live.
The way that we do it, we just go in and say, Let's make up somethin'. That's the fun in music, to me, going in and making up something from nothing especially [when you don't] have any idea five minutes before what you're going to do. Those lyrics are literally ad-libbed, and that is what's so fun about it. So we're getting wasted on red wine, and it's just the three of us and our tour manager, my assistant, he's in the other room pressing Record. We go in, we did the main track, and the three of us sat around one microphone and just made up jibberish lyrics, and then listened to it and tried to piece together what we thought we were saying. It was just completely bullshit. The only lines that really stood out were illegal tender and it takes a lover, which Brian came in with on the chorus.
Press record, that's the first take, and half of [the lyrics] are gibberish, and half of them are real lines that all stuck. The part that we really started busting up was two in the pocket is better than three, and then Brian goes, three in the pocket is better than four, and then when Brian goes put 'em together and pick up the sticks we were dying! What does that mean? [Laughs] So we went back, pressed play, figured out what we thought we were saying, and we [go back] and sing the next track with these fixes, and that's it. Two takes. Maybe ten minutes. That's how we do most of our stuff, because if it doesn't come really quick it's usually not going to be good. Sometimes there are exceptions, but usually not. When I hear that song, I'm usually starting to bust up by the end of it just remembering the three of us tanked on red wine and making each other laugh. That's the best thing about making music with your friends those moments of 4-in-the-morning and you're just dyin'.
I think there are some solid songs on that EP, and Marc was just a great little song about Marc Bolan which is still, to this day, my favorite guitar solo that I've ever done, and that was the same thing I walked in, pressed record, and BAM it was that solo. I thought that was a really great little moment in my personal history. So anyway, tell me about your website. My friend Dom was like Oh my God! I love that site! Is it something nasty? He was flipping out about it. I can't wait to see it.
The Illegal Tender EP is in stores now. The bands first major-label full-length, The Best Little Secrets Are Kept, is due out March 22nd. More information can be found at LouisXIV.net.
Jason Hill: It's funny, I had to get used to this whole conference call thing. I don't know when it was December or early January and we were doing some videos. I was talking with different video directors. The fantastic woman from the video department at Atlantic, who I didn't really I know at the time, hooked me up with this video director, and then all of a sudden she chimes in and I'm thinking Holy shit! Have you been here the whole time, listening to our conversation? It's a very odd thing to get used to, but I sort of let everyone know I wasn't too keen on that.
Keith Daniels Wait 'til you're on a tight schedule and she jumps in after twenty minutes with Times up!
JH: She's probably listening to us now, and we just don't know it.
KD: You self-released your first record. Is it nice to have someone else taking care of the 'boring' stuff now?
JH: Well, you know you can never really let anybody 100% take care of everything, because that's where everything gets screwed up now, doesn't it? But yeah, certainly. My end on the record label is to make the records. We had a deal between Brian [guitar, vocals] and myself: I would produce the records, engineer them, and labor over them I mean, obviously he was a part of those records but when it came to the sixteen, seventeen-hour day, going all night, that's what I would do. I was going to do it no matter what. So he had to handle a lot of the actual sending things out through the post, printing things out, and actually making the physical CDs. So I didn't have to deal so much with that.
I never did any of the actual sending out, and we sold like 18,000 or something off that label! So that's a lot of sending to do! At the end of that, he'd call me up and bitch about it. Hey man, that was the deal! That was the agreement we had. [chuckles] I'll be sleeping now while you post those things out. It is great, though, it's just that there's a lot more to deal with now. I try to keep my hand on everything that we're doing, and luckily we have great people around us. It's easier every day to trust different people, but you still have to make sure everybody's doing it your own way especially when you're dealing with a big company. They have their own way to do things, and we had to come in and say, We don't like it. We don't need people like stylists. Don't blow your money on someone to give me a haircut, because I'll cut my own hair. I do! I cut my own hair! We don't need you to blow money this way or that way, but we do need you to do this. I'm going to make my own records, and I'm going to give you that record. You're not going to tell me whether you like it or not.
KD: [Laughs]
JH: Well, of course you want them to say I love it, but it's not going to change it if they don't. That sort of thing we just had to make very clear with this deal, and everybody's fantastic over there so far. We said We're going to have nudity on the cover [of our new record]. That's what we want to do. You probably haven't seen the cover...
KD: They markered out the nipples. I felt gipped.
JH: But you just got the EP, right? Have they actually sent the record?
KD: No. I've heard your self-titled record, but I haven't heard the upcoming one.
JH: You have? I'm amazed. You're possibly the first press person outside of San Diego, or L.A.,who's actually heard that thing.
KD: You kidding me? I've got the self-titled, the Pink EP, and the Blue EP. I wouldn't talk to a band without hearing everything they ever did first.
JH: So you've heard some of the songs that will be on the new record? That's great.
KD: I was going to ask, since the new record will be called The Best Little Secrets Are Kept, does that mean Pledge of Allegiance will be on there?
JH: Oh yeah. That, Paper Doll, and Finding Out True Love is Blind were all written during the same week-and-a-half period, and those are actually my three... actually, now I have three other favorites, but those are my three favorites for last year. Those are my little gems, y'know. I mean, I thought they were. [Laughs].
KD: Did you expect this band to be more than just a project? Did you expect it to be a serious, full-time band?
JH: Yeah. You hear that a lot in L.A.. People go Yeah, I'm in this project, and this project, and this project. I set out to be in a group. I don't want to be in a project. That thing was always weird. That reeks of a hobbyist, to me. So, yeah, it was a group from the minute we started. You've got to understand that the other two guys in the group, Mark and Brian, I grew up with. I played in a number of different groups with them, and when we decided to do it we said Hey, let's go to France and make a record.
Here's the first song, 'Louis XIV', and let's go track it over there and make a record that's going to be going to this same party. It's going to be a whole concept. So we sat down and wrote out the song titles -- half on the plane, and half [on the way] to the airport the day before we split to France. So we wanted to actually go and write these songs, and so we set out and wrote and recorded this record in a very specific way. Then we came back and it was sort of like Fuck. We're back in our normal lives. This isn't nearly as fun. Finding Out True Love Is Blind, Pledge of Allegiance, and Paper Dolls were the first songs that came out after those France sessions, and they were basically going to a different place, and that was going to be the next record it made perfect sense. For us it felt like the best thing we've ever done. This is the best rock, and this is the best art that we've ever achieved, so it didn't make any sense to do anything else. The prior band that we were in we immediately quit, and said that we didn't want to do it anymore.
KD: The way I've heard it, you were pretty disappointed with [your previous band, Convoy's] Black Licorice record.
JH: Yeah. Look, I've probably got to watch what I say...
KD: Alright, alright.
JH: No no no not to you! The more I get interviewed... these other articles that I never even get to read... I actually gave Glenn, who handles all the publicity at Atlantic from our end, a little bit of Hell the other day. Man, I've given all these interviews and I never even read any of 'em! My mom sent me an email the other day pointing out a review on E! Entertainment the other day. It was a really great review, and I was like [to Glenn] Man! I want to hear this shit! Let's get my ego going, come on.
KD: They called Finding Out True Love Is Blind a cross between Devo and something... [ed. -- The Fall]
JH: Devo?! Really? I mean, I got nothing against Devo, but they certainly never inspired me to do anything. But still, it was a positive review. People find the oddest things. I've gotten so many comparisons to The Fall, and up until just recently I'd never even heard of The Fall.
KD: Everybody got compared to The Fall last year. Franz Ferdinand and all that.
JH: Is that right? I heard them getting compared to Gang of Four. That was a little bit of a pet peeve of mine, because I heard all these journalists I knew comparing them to Gang of Four, and I was like I know your record collection, man. I've been to your house. You've never even fuckin' heard of Gang of Four. I'd never heard of Gang of Four! Fuck! Now, of course, I've heard of 'em. Everybody seems to know about 'em. Don't give me comparisons you don't know. Make sure you know what you're talking about when you're writing it. But about Black Licorice, I'm sorry. I was very unhappy with the production on it. I was very unhappy with a lot of things on it.
We had signed to a label, and it was one of those things where you want people to be excited about your record, in terms of the company, because you know that they have to push it. I didn't realize how bad they would be at doing their job, but at the same time I wasn't happy with our record. I realized that it was like... we made these compromises. We worked with a very cool guy [David Bianco], who produced the record, and I thought it sounded like shit. I didn't like the production. It was very clean. The songs didn't turn out the way I wanted them, and by the end of production I was sick. I had the flu. I do this thing where, if I'm unhappy with something, I make myself physically sick. I really do. I wish I didn't, but I take everything very internally. So by the end of the record I was very sick, and at that point you can't do anything straight. It was just a very unhappy experience making a record. Look, the guy was great; very cool guy. It just wasn't the right thing, and we ended up making a record that I didn't particularly like -- so I named it Black Licorice. It's the candy that nobody likes. [Laughs] That was my hidden little joke about it.
KD: Those and candy corn.
JH: Yeah. You see it on the aisles, and it's like, Who buys that shit? [Laughs]
KD: You're a bit of an analog junkie.
JH: Big analog junkie.
KD: I was wondering if it bugged you to hear your songs on the radio, with the digital compression that squishes the dynamics so flat.
JH: You know what? I like compression. I'm a big compression fan, if it's used in the right way. A lot of times people don't use it in the right way. Compression is a great tool. I dig it. When you hear stuff on the radio, it sounds good, and the way that I mix the stuff, I plan on it being compressed over the radio. I hope to be hearing it on the radio, so I don't compress it after the fact as much as other people do. So if you put our record up against some other modern record, it's probably going to be lower in volume, and more dynamic because it's not compressed as much. So when it does go through the compressors on the radio, I think it sounds great.
A lot of people have pointed out to me that they thought when our song came on the radio that it sounded really different, really good, and still dynamic and all that. Everybody else gets to the point where their records sound like they're on the radio when you put it in your CD player. I'm not saying I know which is better. I don't know, necessarily, which is better, but I don't mind [compression] at all. I use it all over the place, but I use very specific compressors. I use very analog compressors. I have no problem with digital technology. Suddenly, in the last couple of years, it's gotten very good. I'm still an analog junkie, and I'm all over tape machines. Occassionally I'll bounce something down to a digital format just so I can fuck with it, but I won't digitally fuck with it with plugins and things like that, because that's when you start getting your record sounding like everybody else's record.
KD: There's a neat little stereo pan on God Killed the Queen, the I think you're seein' double bit.
JH: That particular song doesn't have as much stereo panning as some of the other things I do. I just believe in hard panning. The thing is, they didn't even come out with consoles or recording desks that were able... nowadays you can go 180 degrees. You can even do more if you go in surround sound, but I've never dabbled in that yet, only because I don't have a surround system. So you have 180 degrees, anywhere in the spectrum you could put it from 9 o'clock to 3 o'clock, you can go to 1 o'clock or 2 o'clock, or any of these little points. Well, that didn't come about until the early '70s / late '60s.
All the Beatles records, you had straight down the middle, or hard pan to the left, or hard pan to the right. It was the same with T. Rex records, or Bowie records. Some of the Bowie stuff, actually, was in the time frame where they started doing these other kinds of panning, but anyway, if you keep that in mind, you have to hard pan it. Those Beatles records sound fantastic! That's the Holy Grail. That's what you try to get to, and so this idea of a big mono -- where you're in the middle but a little bit to the left or the right sometimes that's the way to go, but I always start with this idea of hard panning everything. It's a good place to try to get to. I'm always trying to be as bold with the panning, or with [anything] that I do. You'll notice that a lot of times my guitar solos are freakin' loud, [Laughs] or the drums or vocals might be loud on a particular track. Usually when it comes to a guitar solo, somebody will come in and say, That's a little loud, isn't it?, and I'll go, Exactly! Don't you want to hear it? Look at Sympathy for the Devil, when that guitar solo that Keith plays comes in, it's fuckin' loud, and it's brilliant! Any lower in the mix and you wouldn't even notice it.
KD: It jumps out at you.
JH: Yeah! Exactly! That's what you want to happen. You want that rush of energy. You won't ever see me being safe with anything, and if you do, that means I'm fuckin' up. I'm sure there's been elements where I've safed it out a little bit, maybe not intentionally making it safe, but from hours in the studio fucking around with where the levels sit. I try to be bold with everything. I think that's the way you have to be with rock'n'roll, you have to be bold with every move that you make, everything that you do. You can't be cautious about anything. You can be smart, and deliberate, but you shouldn't be cautious.
KD: I'm excited now to hear your work with Mando Diao.
JH: We did three songs when they came in to San Diego. This was about a year ago, I guess. Their first record's awesome. That Motown song [Motown Blood]. A friend of mine was doing something at the radio station with them where they went in and they played live on the radio. I hadn't heard of 'em. He said, Oh, you're going to really dig this band, and he put 'em on and it sounded like the Beatles on speed the Beatles from the Hamburg era which wasn't very good Beatles, but you saw the promise of it.
He invited me down to the studio, so I went down, and we sort of hit it off. They came back to my place that night, and we went in, tracked three songs [in] like a 24 hour period before they played the Troubadour that night. We just went straight through the night, into the day, and then into the night of the next day. We just tracked in my hotel room, which was filled with all this crazy analog stuff drums, hundred year old pianos, all these crazy old amps. They walked in and were like, Ohhhhh woowww.
I've been collecting since I was a little kid! I was lucky enough that when I first started buying equipment, I oddly enough started buying good stuff. I was lucky that way. My main guitar I play, I've had it for 12 years, and I bought it for $400. The same guitar now is like $4,000. Anyway, those three songs that we did are fucking brilliant! They're just a really great band. They've got great sensibilities, and they're a lot of fun to work with, because they were really into all of these different things that I did with them. They'd never really had that experience with recording. Their first record, you can tell they just went in live and it's really balls-out and great. With me, they had this one song that's really great. It's pretty rockin', but I heard Gustav playing it on the piano, just a slowed down version of it, and it blew my mind! They're so oddly Swedish where sometimes they don't totally understand everything they're singing, but sometimes it's brilliant because they just like the way certain words sound with one another.
KD: Like the ten little soldiers screaming line in Mr. Moon.
JH: Yeah! They have no idea! But it's brilliant! So I said, Listen. We'll do it this way, but we gotta do a version where it's just piano and vocals, and it's incredible. It's like this six minute song, because it's drawn out now, and just a gorgeous song. We did two songs, then two versions of that third song, and they just turned out awesome. I'm playing a real George Harrison-y slide guitar on one, and we did things like slowed down the tape, played a piano solo, and then sped up the tape so it sounded really fast. Really cool little things.
The bad part is that I lost touch with them. I got kind of busy since things started picking up with us, but I heard their new record it was like they took these songs... and it's almost the same sort of thing that happened with Black Licorice. It's just sort of soft and clean, and it just wasn't right. They need to make something that sounds nasty. It just hurt me in the chest, because I know they're not getting as much play in terms of people respecting and buying into 'em right now as they were on their first record, which was nasty. They even changed a couple of lines from one of the songs that Bjorn sings, they dumbed down a couple of their lyrics that were so brilliant, because they probably overthought it or somebody said, That doesn't make sense. But it did make sense, in such a great way, in such a bigger way. Then suddenly they changed them and made them more obvious. I was like, Oh man, what are you guys doing? The recording we did was so much better.
KD: The full-length, The Best Little Secrets Are Kept, will be out in March, so why put out an EP in February? Did you just want something cheap out there that people could get and get into ya?
JH: You mean inexpensive?
KD: Inexpensive! I'm sorry. [Laughs]
JH: [Laughs] The thing was that we had our own label, and radio was playing Finding Out True Love is Blind all over. It was added to KROQ, #1 on KROQ now I think, actually, #1 in San Francisco, #1 in Boston, many places on both coasts, but on the west coast we were on every major station without a record label. Which doesn't happen! I feel very lucky, and it makes me feel really good that people got into it just for the music. Anyway, they started playing it, we needed something to sell, and the only thing we had were those Pink and Blues that we were selling, basically, out of our house. We had a CD burner, we're burning the discs, and sending them out.
We turned down every offer that came our way until, finally, it was the right deal, and we had to cease all sales of those things because they wanted to release them as a record. At the same time, it's all over the radio, and it was going to be several months until the record was ready to put out I hadn't finished the main record. So I said Give me until New Years. It had been playing on the radio since August, and that's a lot of time to have something on the radio and not have anything to sell. So it became, Let's release something on our own label through Atlantic and Vice. We needed a b-side, so we went in and did the song Illegal Tender, and Marc, and basically threw something together as a teaser. Their idea was Let's give 'em two good songs, and the rest'll be just b-sides. To me, that was like, Are you kidding me? The first thing you want to do to the general public is put out something sort of shabby? They were really trying to convince me on this! I'll give you b-sides, but they're going to be great just the same. Like Illegal Tender, I think, is one of my favorite tracks, basically because it was so fun to record.
KD: I was going to ask you if the giggling on that track was something planned, or whether something had happened.
JH: We were just loaded on red wine. [Laughs] That was the first song that we did in the new studio. I had a small room, we signed a deal, were able to get a little bit of cash, and we went and rented this old church. One of those old retail Baptist churches that a guy had been renting for a while and then just moved out, and so we had this big room and decided to make it our studio, our place. It was sort of ghetto and we had to really clean it up. We did all this work to it, and then finally were able to go in and start tracking. That night we went in, were having a blast, and it was just fun to start tracking again. Just sort of playing live.
The way that we do it, we just go in and say, Let's make up somethin'. That's the fun in music, to me, going in and making up something from nothing especially [when you don't] have any idea five minutes before what you're going to do. Those lyrics are literally ad-libbed, and that is what's so fun about it. So we're getting wasted on red wine, and it's just the three of us and our tour manager, my assistant, he's in the other room pressing Record. We go in, we did the main track, and the three of us sat around one microphone and just made up jibberish lyrics, and then listened to it and tried to piece together what we thought we were saying. It was just completely bullshit. The only lines that really stood out were illegal tender and it takes a lover, which Brian came in with on the chorus.
Press record, that's the first take, and half of [the lyrics] are gibberish, and half of them are real lines that all stuck. The part that we really started busting up was two in the pocket is better than three, and then Brian goes, three in the pocket is better than four, and then when Brian goes put 'em together and pick up the sticks we were dying! What does that mean? [Laughs] So we went back, pressed play, figured out what we thought we were saying, and we [go back] and sing the next track with these fixes, and that's it. Two takes. Maybe ten minutes. That's how we do most of our stuff, because if it doesn't come really quick it's usually not going to be good. Sometimes there are exceptions, but usually not. When I hear that song, I'm usually starting to bust up by the end of it just remembering the three of us tanked on red wine and making each other laugh. That's the best thing about making music with your friends those moments of 4-in-the-morning and you're just dyin'.
I think there are some solid songs on that EP, and Marc was just a great little song about Marc Bolan which is still, to this day, my favorite guitar solo that I've ever done, and that was the same thing I walked in, pressed record, and BAM it was that solo. I thought that was a really great little moment in my personal history. So anyway, tell me about your website. My friend Dom was like Oh my God! I love that site! Is it something nasty? He was flipping out about it. I can't wait to see it.
The Illegal Tender EP is in stores now. The bands first major-label full-length, The Best Little Secrets Are Kept, is due out March 22nd. More information can be found at LouisXIV.net.
VIEW 25 of 38 COMMENTS
Louis_XIV said:
This is amusing. I didn't know that I'm a band in your days.
Hahaha
Vive le Roi!