I’m always fascinated by this: you guys have achieved a level of success that is odd for Boston. It’s not that there aren’t successful bands from Boston but usually they go in different directions. It seemed to me, at least, even initially, you guys were more popular outside of Boston than inside of Boston, and because there’s such an insular music scene [in Boston], it was a surprise to see you guys rise.
I don’t get it. I don’t know how it happened. Being a Boston band, or whatever, I don’t know if I feel comfortable saying that. I think it’s really wonderful that a city wants to claim you in a way because we weren’t really part of a scene or anything – there definitely wasn’t an electro-pop scene here. And when we went to New York and played, everyone was like, this band’s from Brooklyn. You just let people think what they want to think. The trajectory and coming from Boston, those two things together made for a really surreal experience because our trajectory has been so quick and so severe. You know, we’ve done four tours maybe for two and a half weeks at a time and our next tour we’re on a bus with a five person crew and playing 1,000-capped rooms minimum and playing at festivals for 20,000 people. What the fuck is going on? This was not how it was supposed to happen. I almost wish I had started this band in the '90s, because then I could become someone who feels like they really deserved it or worked so hard, and in Boston, it’s so small and if you’re doing something somewhat differently people start taking notice, whether they like you or not, they start taking notice. If anyone asks me how it happened, it’s just really the internet and this is such a college city that like everyone was downloading and downloading and sharing – that’s the one way I can explain it. It’s so weird. I cannot explain it.
The first time I heard about you guys was when Brenda, who was working for Great Scott, was like, “you have to hear this band.” There certainly were people who heard you guys early on and really believed in what you were doing. Do you have in your heads sort of a narrative of what the sort of key points were. Obviously there’s not an answer as to why that happened, but is there an answer as to how?
I don’t know if it’s anything linear because everything just kind of started getting thrown at us in a way that we didn’t really know what we were doing. Our manager at the time, he was a younger manager, and we were all kind of figuring it out as we went along. It sucks, but…I think what happened was we had the songs, and then when “Sleepyhead” started circulating, that’s what was a catalyst.
Was that, when you had that initial backup song, did you have more than was on the original EP?
Yeah, I had like eight songs. Six songs were on the original EP, I took two off, and then added “Sleepyhead” and “Better Things,” which came two months after the original batch of songs that were originally created in winter of 2006-2007.
Did you record those on your own?
Yeah all of them. The only thing that happened was I finally wanted to sing into a microphone so Ian, who plays guitars, I went to his house and recorded, just into his computer. That was as far as it went – it was basically all me, in my room, extremely manic, up all night. I don’t know what happened. I think what it was is that I went through such a period of time being so depressed and being unable to write songs because I didn’t have a way of recording them or documenting them. And then finally I found Ableton Live – everything made sense, I could build things. It was a really fun way for me to practice the classic pop song structure and play with it but also then finally record something. That’s really how it started- I never ever imagined doing electro-pop. And I don’t think it’s really electro-pop. It’s not like Human League or something.
There’s electro-pop that is really fetishistically electro-pop.
Yeah, I always just think I was always kind of striving to not make it sound like electro-pop, but I had no choice because I only had this one synthesis program, and a sampler that I would drop MP3s in and just manipulate the wave forms so I could create synths. It was a new way for me to write, and I just kept doing it. And I wanted to dance, and I wanted my friends to dance. My roommates would come into the room and I would show them the songs and we would sit there. And it was just for our own amusement and I started sharing it, and I have no idea. I don’t even remember what happened really.
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