Inspired by the 1988 Bill Murray movie of the same name, we bring you the eleventh in a series of interviews called Scrooged.
Past
One Thirty BPM: How did you get into making music in the first place?
Gang Gang Dance (Brian Degraw): I kind of was always interested in it, I guess. The first thing that I can remember physically playing was a drum kit that I traded a skateboard for. -laughter- I was probably 14 or something like that. Maybe a freshman in high school.
Before that, actually, I attempted to take these keyboard lessons, when I was 12 or 13. Which was weird, it was not piano lessons but keyboard lessons. -laughter- Some dude in my town that taught kids how to play Van Halen songs. -laughter-
Was there a specific time where you tried to seriously pursue it or make a career out of it?
Not really, I guess the closest thing to that was when I tried to go to college and I tried to go to art school in Washington D.C. and realized that once I got there that I’d rather be playing music than going to art school. I quit art school and put a band together in D.C., so that was the first conscious attempt at being in a band or whatever. But, I don’t ever remember it being, like, this life-long dream.
So, you played in other bands before Gang Gang Dance?
Yeah, mainly just the one band I was talking about, which was called The Cranium. It was with a friend of mine that I convinced to move down there. He was in this band in Connecticut called Gibberish Suction. They were a really mind-blowing band. I used to live in Connecticut, too, and they were incredible, I was basically a big fan. So, I convinced Jim, the lead singer, to move to D.C. with me and quit school so we could start playing in a band. That was 1993 or something like that.
How did you become acquainted with the people in Gang Gang Dance and how did you get the band together?
Well Tim, who is not playing with us anymore but was our original drummer and was also in The Cranium. I had met him in D.C. and he was in D.C. for the purpose of trying to make music, too. I got him involved in The Cranium and we continued to make music for a number of years. I guess I played music with Tim for about 12 years. Then, when The Cranium started to fizzle out, me, Tim, and Jim all moved to the city to try to continue the band, but the guitar player had quit and we were going to try to rearrange it to a more synth-oriented thing. And we did that for a while, but then because we were using the synths, we sort of got rid of the drum kit all together, and so Tim didn’t really have anything left to do in the band, so he moved away. -laughter-
So, Jim and I continued to do a two-piece version of The Cranium, like an electronic version, but that didn’t last long. Then Tim moved back and we played in a couple different projects, a lot of improvisation with different musicians. And through doing that we met Josh (Diamond) and Liz (Bougatsos) and eventually decided to make it a solid band.
That’s weird, because listening to the past few Gang Gang Dance albums, it’s hard to imagine people getting together in a room and jamming it out. It sounds more planned out and carefully put together. Was there an intention when you started out to move to this more thoughtful music?
Well, when we started, we only improvised. We did that for close to five years where we were never writing anything, and if we did it was a mood or something, but we’d play it different every time. The first two records were completely improvised. Then, around 2004 or 2005, we started to take the improvisations and tweak them and edit them and rearrange them and started organizing them into more structured pieces of music, I guess. And we just started doing that more and more and more.
Present
With Eye Contact, there are more pop elements, though it is not really a pop album. But, “MindKilla” has a hook, for sure.
Yeah, we kind of just keep evolving in that direction. The way we actually make music is exactly the same, it’s still starting from improvisation, there is never any kind of idea before. The music sort of creates itself. We never sit down or no one ever comes in with an idea, it’s all about jamming for hours and hours and hours and waiting for something to evolve out of that. The difference now is we kust spend more time after the fact, after we know what is going to be the song, we spend more time turning it into one.
Has this been a natural progression, or has there been some thought that you now have more of a following, and are more conscious that people are actually paying attention?
I think we are pretty sincerely interested in doing that, I don’t think it has much to do with what you are talking about. We were improvising for so long, that once we started structuring it more, we realized how fun it is. It was like a brand new world to us because we had never done that before. I still think of it a very exciting and think we’re doing it because it’s super fresh and interesting.
If we were still improvising, and we still improvise all the time, but if we were still strictly doing that, we would probably be repeating ourselves a lot and getting the same results over and over.
You guys released “Glass Jar” as the first single a couple months back. It’s this 11-minute, pretty epic and awesome track. It kind of almost sounds like a mini-album in of itself, with the mood changes and everything. What was the thought in releasing this as the first taste of the album?
Actually, it wasn’t really our decision, it was the label that decided to do that. I was really, really happy. I expected them to choose something a lot more obvious as a single and try to convince us to do it, even though we aren’t much of a “single” type band. I thought they would have chosen something like “Mindkilla.” But the dude, the main guy, was like “let’s put this out,” and it made me really, really happy that he was open to doing that. That was something that we would have done, but just assumed that they wouldn’t be into so we never really brought it up. -laughter-
It was a bold decision. But, it was a good one, I think, because it is an amazing track and it got people really excited about the album.
I think, also, the song, once it kicks in, if it were an edited version, it would still have some qualities of a stand-out track like that. When we’ve played that song live in the past, we were treating it like that would be the big song on the record, but then we turned it into an 11-minute thing.
Yeah, if they made a radio edit, it probably wouldn’t necessarily be a radio hit, but maybe a satellite radio hit. -laughter-
Future
You guys have tour dates on the East Coast in June, I believe. How is the live show going to shape-up now that you are moving to less improvisation. Are you guys practicing more to accomodate that?
I guess the percentage of improvisation will be slightly less, but we always have these open spaces in the set where we do that no matter what. It think if we don’t do that, we start to feel really uncomfortable. It also just varies from night to night. There will be some shows where the energy in the room feels right to just improvise, like, half the show. And, occasionally we’ll improvise the whole show, but people get upset sometimes. -laughter- But yeah, there is always a big percentage of improv in our live set.
So, now, this is your fourth, kind of your fifth, album. Is there a feeling in the band that you’ve reached this level of success that you have been working towards or do you still come from an angle that you are still trying to make it?
-laughs- I don’t know if we have ever really had aspirations in that way. Whatever is happening is happening and we are just kind of rolling with it, I think. It is weird, though. The last record was definitely a step-up with regards to how intense the tour got. We definitely weren’t used to that and I guess we started to realize that we were an actual band. Before, we were just doing whatever and not really thinking in terms of any type of career. I think we are still not really thinking about it, but it is thinking about us. It’s coming to us rather than us going to it. So, we are kind of welcoming it. But we are not the type of band that sets those type of goals. We are more the slow and gradual building type of band.
Yeah, kind of like your songs.
Yeah. -laughter-
