You could be more than forgiven if you hadn’t seen a Sunset Rubdown reunion tour – let alone a new album! – in the cards. The band themselves didn’t, either. Speaking with frontman and songwriter Spencer Krug, for a long time, it’s something he simply never imagined would happen.
Well, a good dream changed all that. The power of the subconscious mind, ladies and gentlemen. I was able to link up with Krug with the band’s proper return, the charming, often contented Always Happy to Explore mere days from release.
We spoke about how it felt to finally return with his bandmates after 15 years, the organic creation and nature of their fifth album, feeling like a cover band of their own music, the pitfalls of nostalgia on creativity, belatedly appreciating The Color Purple and Radiohead’s In Rainbows, Dungeons & Dragons, and much more. Read on for his thoughts.
I read that a dream inspired the band to get back together, but for the readers that don’t know: why now?
Why the reunion? Well, it was indeed, it sounds made up and corny, but that was it. It originated with a dream that I had, and then I woke up. It was a fun dream, the band got back together. We were having fun. We were enjoying being a band again, which was something that I didn’t think was ever going to happen, and neither did anyone else. And then I woke up from the dream, and I was disappointed that it wasn’t true, as one is when you wake up from good dreams. And then realized that I was at a place in my life where maybe I could be open to the band getting back together.
I just wrote them a group email, and they all wrote back the same day, and said they’d be willing to try. They were down with the idea. Well, everything was conditional. It started with hanging out and making music, and if that felt good, we’d relearn the old songs, and if that felt good, we’d go on tour. If that felt good, we’d make a record. Now here we are. Everything’s good so far.
Nice, so how long was the process of hanging out and getting back into a comfortable zone before recording happened?
Well, everyone lives in different cities. Mike was in Vancouver, Camilla’s in Toronto, Jordan was in Montreal, and I’m on Vancouver Island. So the first thing that happened was everyone flew here, and we just kind of hung out at my house and reconnected, and didn’t really think about music for the first day or so, and then we got into the jam space, and I think the first song we tried was “Snakes Got a Leg”, because it was just one of the oldest songs we had, so like, the muscle memory was partly still there for people.
So, first we wanted to just go on this reunion tour, which happened last year. There were quite a few shows, reunion shows, and they were, not only were they fun to play, but I think the audience was having fun too, and there was a lot of good energy around the whole thing, and we were having fun as a group and all that. So that’s when we started discussing a new record. Up until then, it was just, as I said, everything was conditional, so it’s just like, seeing how it would go.
Well, a little bit tentative, because once bitten twice shy kind of thing. Right? Because we did break up once. We were a bit afraid to commit to too much at once. But the tour was going well. So on tour we started discussing the logistics of when and how to make a record, and then just followed through with that plan, which was meeting here at my place again in January of this year, and we just started arranging the songs that we had chosen. We chose all these demos from songs that I had already written, and then we chose them as a group, and just started arranging them as a group for the band, for a week, and then we hit the studio.
Since you are coming back together, how do you see this album in relation to, or in comparison to, the others?
It’s hard to compare, because there’s such a huge gap. There’s a 15 year gap. So I kind of feel like a different person, like a whole other group of people made the first records. So we’re all coming to it from, emotionally, a very different place. A lot changes in a person in 15 years. And then you add that, you times that by four, and then everyone’s different. Plus there’s a new member this time around. Plus, we lost an old member. I don’t mean that he died. [Laughs] I mean that he had to work. As you know, it’s actually really rare to find grown ups who can just be like, “Sure, I’ll just put this month aside to make a record,” like, that’s pretty rare in your fucking 40s, right?
So, three out of four wasn’t bad. I was surprised that three of us could make it happen. But the fourth, Michael Dirksen, who plays electric guitar on all the other records, he just couldn’t get away from work. So in that way, the record’s different. Sonically, there’s hardly any electric guitar on it. And, like I said, emotionally, it’s kind of different because we’re all so much older.
So I wasn’t… I’ve never really thought about it as compared to the previous three records. You can’t say that it’s a natural continuation of things, that this record is just a natural continuation of the ones we made before. That’s not true, because that line was cut. There is no continuation. This is a whole new ‘Sunset Rubdown 2.0’ so it’s kind of a fresh start, more than anything. And, again, it’s sonically different, there’s a slightly different group of people, and different instrumentation.
So, in general, how do you decide when something is a Sunset Rubdown song or Moonface/Spencer Krug song? When you write a song, are you thinking of what it’s meant for, or does it tend to just land somewhere?
More the latter, though it does depend on the project and the time in my life, like in the aughts, in the late aughts, when Sunset Rubdown and Wolf Parade were both releasing and touring all the time, I would just be writing for whatever was in front of me, whatever band was actively making a record that season. That’s who I would be writing with that band in mind, you know, whether it was Wolf Parade or Sunset Rubdown, those are just kind of the main two, right? And Moonface didn’t exist back then.
And now I just, sort of, write songs for myself, kind of as my solo thing, and then, like for this Sunset Rubdown record, we then could sort of go back, and we looked at the pile of songs and chose the ones together that we thought would best suit this record. And all Sunset Rubdown records in the past have been songs that I wrote on piano or guitar and then brought to the band and we arranged the songs as a group, for the group, and this album is no different. It’s just that the songs were all already set aside for no specific purpose.
Some of them go back four years. Some of them just go back a couple months, but I sort of presented the band with about 20 songs that I thought would be good for this record, and then we chiseled it down to these nine songs.
Your saying four years surprises me a bit, because I’ve noticed a shift away from mythology in your more recent songs, so I’d assumed these also steering away from that dated them as newer songs. Regardless, your most recent work doesn’t seem as grounded in mythology. Is that like a conscious choice to do something artistically different? Are you feeling less connected to it?
I guess I’m feeling less connected to it. I guess maybe that well got a little dry. Maybe, you know… I didn’t think I used mythology in my songwriting as much as… let me put it this way, if I did use it as much as it occurs to other people, people such as yourself, bring it up to me, then I wasn’t aware of it. I didn’t think I had that much mythology in my lyrics, but it seems to be a running idea with my past work, it’s like, “Oh, that’s the guy that used to write about mythology all the time.” Not criticizing, it just surprises me.
For one thing, I only have a very surface knowledge of mythology, like Greek mythology, the little bit that I do know, I do think is fascinating and exciting, and I think the characters are just so insane, and I like them because they’re mostly antiheroes, like they are have these deep flaws, even the heroes are still bad people. And I think that’s funny, and I think I was really infatuated with it when I first started songwriting, like in the mid aughts, when I first got into this whole thing, it was very much on my mind. And so it bled heavily into those first songs, and then it’s just slowly thinned out since then, because in truth, beyond my excitement about it and thinking it’s interesting – and I think it does make for amazing metaphor and imagery, because a lot of those characters are so like old and imbued with meaning – but I don’t really have any real knowledge, or anything really vested in, Greek myth, and so I think part of me was just like, ‘Eh, it’d be kind of bullshit of me to just keep doing this, pretending that I’m sort of an authority on it’.
That makes sense. You’ve just touched on it yourself, but you do favor Greek mythology, do you have any interest in Norse, Egyptian, or so on, mythology?
I don’t, to be honest, I probably know hardly anything about it. I studied Greek mythology in college, and that’s why it was on my mind. So, I love the idea of myth and storytelling, of course, but like I said, in truth, I don’t really, actually know very much.
As you’re entering a new era, and you sometimes like to like rework ideas, are there any early Sunset Rubdown songs or things you’d be interested in revisiting or recontextualizing? Or do you just see all that as, as you mentioned the 15 year gap, simply part of the past?
I know I definitely used to do that a lot. Like, “Here’s this song again, a different version of this.” And I still do that a lot with my solo work, because I think songs can change their impact, can change so much based on their instrumentation and the way they’re arranged for an instrument. And I find that really interesting. And then sometimes I find the two results will both be so strong that it’s worth sharing them both.
That said, I don’t see Sunset Rubdown being too concerned with things that happened the first time around, and trying to revisit them. I think we’d be more excited to just move forward. Like, this record, obviously, is already in the can. We still definitely are going to be playing some of the older songs going way back to like early, early stuff. And of course, they’ll sound different live than they do on record. And now with the new lineup, they’ll sound even more different. But I think that’s great. I think it’s boring when stuff is just represented the same way over and over and over again, note for note. Do you know what I mean?
Absolutely. I think I’m somewhat speaking just as a listener. The other day, I revisited an album that I used to like a lot when I was an emotional teenager, and I hadn’t touched it since I was that emotional teenager. And obviously, the song is the same, but how I reacted to it and what it meant to me was completely different.
Well, it’s fun to sort of rework them. I think that the 15 years, if anything, just gives us license to completely reimagine them if we want to because we’re such different people, it’s kind of absurd to be like, “Here it is, exactly as you heard it on the record, you know, 18 years ago.” So that’s sort of liberating. There’s also the sort of the physicality of your muscle memory has disappeared over that much time. So you have to relearn it anyway. So you’re going to relearn it a bit differently. So that’s kind of cool, too.
It just occurred to me when we were relearning them, it was kind of two things that happened. There’s a ton of nostalgia in all that music, and as you’re like, relearning it, you’re hit with all the memories of the first time you played it. And so that was really interesting to sort of tap into that, and then to tap into that nostalgia when we’re playing live and then seeing the nostalgia reflected back to us from the audience. We felt really grateful on stage to be able to do that, and to be able to create that joy for people and for ourselves, and to have people like, you know, bounce that joy back at us, and it was a beautiful, kind of cyclical energy that happens when you play with love.
But by the same token, I sort of felt like we were like a Sunset Rubdown cover band, but the world’s best Sunset Rubdown cover band. Because a lot of time had passed, you feel like a different person made those songs, like a whole different group of people. And then, because we had to relearn them, in the same way that you learn anyone’s songs, it kind of felt like we were a cover band, and that was fun. There’s nothing wrong with that feeling. It was just sort of absurd and funny to me.
I kind of get that, even for myself, when I read poetry I wrote when I was younger, it’s like, “Who wrote this?”
Yeah. But then if you had to get up and read it, you would kind of feel like you’re representing someone else too, right? I’ll be up there being like, “Man, no one does Sunset Rubdown like Sunset Rubdown. We’re great at Sunset Rubdown songs.” [Laughs]
Alright, so purely to my mind, a lot of your work often feels tragic. So, while there’s certainly some melancholy to the new album, a lot of it feels warm and even kind of contented. So, was that a conscious artistic aim, or just kind of like where you are in life? Or would you disagree?
No, I don’t disagree. I think… I think it’s probably a mix of things. The first would be that we chose the songs as a group, like I said, and probably the others in the group would be more drawn to songs that are more celebratory or more joyous, or more optimistic or more contented, than my own personal lonely tragedies that I like to explore. Some of those songs are so introverted that they’re just going to be harder for other people to relate to and invest themselves emotionally into. So that’s probably part of it, that the group wanted to lean on the happier side.
And then, yeah, a lot of the songs have been written since 2020, and my life has changed a lot since 2020. Well, COVID happened, obviously to everyone, but my partner and I had a son in 2020, and we live in the rural countryside on Vancouver Island, which we didn’t expect to do. And right around 2020 is when we really settled down here and realized like this is our life.
We moved from Helsinki to here in 2014 and only planned to live on the island for a year or two. Okay, well, in 2016 we moved into this current house. And then in 2020 we bought it. So we bought our house, had a son, COVID happened, and all these things made our life very quiet, and very sort of isolated, but also calm, and content, and peaceful. We didn’t have any of that FOMO that new parents have, because no one was doing anything. Because it was April 2020, it was the beginning of COVID, and everyone was freaking out and staying home. So we just did that.
But we also had this new baby, and every day, we’d just go on long walks down this country road that we live on, and that was our whole life. And then I’d make music in the backyard, I have a studio in my backyard, and then upload it to the internet. And that was our life for quite a while. And that was the beginning of this sort of different chapter in my life wherein things are more content.
I’m getting old. I’m happy to just sort of be quiet and hang out with my kid and walk my dog. It doesn’t make for music, this especially angry or anything, sure, but there’s still something to celebrate there and I think to write about it. And also, of course, like everyone I still have my demons and things that make me crazy, and I use songwriting to exercise those things, and music is my own, it’s my therapy, right? So I don’t know, I think, as people age, their voices just gets a little more centered and a little quieter and a little more introspective and also, maybe more content.
I tend to agree. So going off that warmth, something that can be a problem for quote-un-quote “comeback albums”, is a band feeling pressured to make a “statement” or go “big”. To my mind, the reason this album works so well is that it feels more like pals getting back together and just enjoying themselves. And so, again, was that a conscious energy you guys wanted to capture or did it just come about naturally from having fun doing it all?
I don’t think we thought at all about, “What are the first three records we made and how do we continue on from there?” It just ever crossed my mind, and if it was on the rest of the band’s mind, they didn’t talk about it. I think we were all just surprised we were making a record at all. Camella was tearing up at the end of the session and I was like, “What’s wrong?” and she’s like, “Oh, I just never thought I’d ever make another record.” Because this is the only band she plays in, right? This isn’t her main gig, being a musician. I didn’t really think Sunset Rubdown would ever make another record. I don’t think any of us did. I think we were just surprised at what we were doing and happy to be doing it. Grateful.
Absolutely.
And we also were just we have to just make, we have to go with whatever comes out here, because we’ve made this decision, we’ve picked these songs, we don’t have our original lineup, so it’s going to sound different anyway, so, let’s just embrace what happens. And as we were recording, within the first couple days in the studio, we realized that we felt best, and the songs felt best, when we just did them live of the floor, more or less. You know, there’s very few overdubs on the record.
All the songs attract that way with we’re all out there a few things got overdubbed. There’s electric guitar on “Cliché Town” that Jordan put on there. He put some noise guitar on a couple other things. Or sometimes Camilla would overdub her vocals afterwards, so she could just focus on playing while we’re tracking.
Sure, so we and had planned on and overdubbing more because Jordan and Nicholas are both such amazing electric guitar players. I was like it doesn’t matter if Mike can’t make this record, we’ll just overdub you guys playing guitar after we record them, and it’s not that we ran out of time. It’s that we ran out of enthusiasm for that idea. It just wasn’t something we felt the songs wanted, we really loved the energy and the sound of just what happened with just the four of us playing our instruments, like a band and just being like, “This is what Sunset Rubdown is now.” That’s what we’ll present to the world for better or worse, and some people are going to be disappointed.
I try to not read reviews too much, but I got this notification on one of my socials this morning and it was someone who had reviewed the record already. And I clicked on it, because I’m an idiot, and I read it and they totally panned it, they don’t like the record and their main complaint is “This isn’t the Sunset Rubdown that I once knew and loved. Where is the guitar? Where’s all the yelling?”
I actually often don’t like writing reviews, assessing music on a numerical scale feels wrong, yet also a necessary evil. It’s not something I personally like doing.
Yeah, it’s not something I personally like reading. I don’t believe I’ve ever agreed with the grading thing. I like when reviewers are like if you like this album by this artist then you’ll probably like this. What I’m reviewing now, because everything is like something, right? Speaking from experience with Wolf Parade and Sunset Rubdown, critics want you to do something new, but not too new. Even if your last record was amazing and everyone loved it, don’t do that again, but don’t stray too far cause we don’t like that either, you gotta come up with this weird middle ground. And it’s kind of bullshit, art is just sort of manifesting whatever is in you in the moment, right? It’s like this is what the band is right now and I don’t know the review that I read this morning, which is so focused on like the absence of guitar in the absence of what since I reverend, once was I get it, like it’s right, they’re right, it’s not that.
The whole industry is tricky and weird. Music is funny because people identify with it. Especially with pop music that they make it part of their own persona, their own identity and then you’re responsible for keeping that up for them, if that’s what they want, or like, making it evolve in a way that suits the way they’ve evolved, and those two things, they’re almost never going to line up.
I think there’s honesty and vulnerability in rejecting nostalgia in favor of who you are now.
Thanks, I guess it is a little vulnerable. I don’t know I’m just to the point; I’m fucking 47 now I’ve been doing this for a while, and I’m never like, “I’m never gonna be a star”, right, and that’s that’s fine, that’s not what I’m trying to do right now. If I can just keep paying the bills through making art, whatever that art form is, then I’m the most grateful person alive. I have the best job in the world, but the way that I approach that work is now just from a place of really just asking myself, ‘what do I want to make? What do I want to hear right now? What’s troubling me that I need to exercise?’
It comes from a place of just pleasing myself. I can’t think about pleasing other people because I’m old enough now that I know that’s just a fool’s game. That if you’re trying to please critics, or cater to your fans, or whatever, it’s going to backfire. And it’s disingenuous, it’s gonna make for shitty art, like you just have to sort of trust yourself and make whatever’s in you, and do it as well as you can, and make quality work that you believe in, and someone else is going to like it. You’re not so unique that you’re going to make something that no one else can relate to, that doesn’t resonate with anyone else. If you like it, someone else will too. That’s kind of where I’m at now.
Alright, so distancing from this album in relation to the others, did you all go into it with any particular goals on its own terms?
Yeah, more that, I think the goal was to actually was like, can we do it? Especially as the process unfolded because there were a few hiccups in phase one, when we were at my house working in my studio because we arranged the songs in my studio and then went to a different island to record them. Okay, so part one was the arranging the songs as a group and the drummer got COVID, so he was missing for the first week of a like 12 day arrangement.
And then because it was January the waterlines from my house froze underground, so we didn’t have running water for 10 of those 12 days. It was insane. We could go to my neighbors’ to take a shower and to fill containers for cooking. But that made the whole thing just kind of harder.
Then Nicholas, the new guy, he has friends in a town nearby and so after a few days, he was kind of like, “You know, maybe fuck this right now, like I think I have to go and just take a breath from what’s going on,” because it was kind of intense. Me and Nicholas and Camilla were like, “Okay. Let’s start arranging these songs without drums and just sort of like to a drum machine or whatever and pretend to hear what Jordan might be doing,” and that’s sort of a frustrating way to make art when you’re just doing it theoretically, it’s just not very satisfying. Anyway, the whole process was challenging.
So, by the time we got to the actual studio I think the goal was: let’s not fail at this. That was the main goal. Because we’re all just wondering if we even had a record in us. At that point, the songs were written, that wasn’t an issue. It was whether or not we knew how to play them and could perform them together in a way that emotive something that could just deliver some kind of energy, some sort of emotion that the wicked take in as well as a project, if that makes sense sure, yeah, absolutely, that was the goal, to be honest.
After a couple of days. It became apparent that we were going to make a sort of stripped down, live off the floor record, which Sunset Rubdown had never really done, so that excited me as well. Because I like doing new things, instead of just recreating all the things; I always like mixing up instrumentation and parameters and stuff like that. So, a big part of me was like ‘cool Sunset’s going to do this with a live off the floor record. This is neat!’ And so after a few days, that was the goal, sure, in creating that energy. A loose and live kinda thing.
I think you succeeded. I like that it feels like an album that’s just buddies getting back together and having a good time.
That’s really nice to hear. I’ll take that as a compliment, because yeah, we were not, we’re not trying to make a big statement. We’re not really trying to say anything specific to the world about, Sunset Rubdown or it’s more if it’s more personal. It’s about proving to ourselves that we could do it. But like to say no, with anything at stake throughout the whole process, when things were going sideways, I would say to the group I’m saying to them like we don’t have to do this there’s no on if this isn’t fun, we’ll just put our instruments down and we’re all still going to be friends and we’re also going to have love for each other. But there’s nothing riding on this record. It’s like our careers aren’t invested in it. It’s not like the world was waiting for it anyway, like no one was expecting another Sunset Rubdown record. There’s no reason to keep doing it if we’re not enjoying it, if we’re not getting some fulfillment out of it. Whenever I made that little speech, it was always met with, “No, we absolutely want to do this.” like let’s do this, but it was for each other park sauce.
I feel like that comes across in the music, I really do.
Okay, so I often approach music from a lyrical perspective, so time to dig in a bit there. In “Candles”, for example, you sing, “I’m still here, in the last place that you found me.” Then in the last track, it’s, “I’m always in the garden that we made.” A lot of these songs consciously seem to have a lack of ‘movement’ in them, do you see these notions of staying in place as most relating to contentment, stagnation, or consistency?
I know what you mean and yeah, there’s the songs that don’t have a lot of conflict. Instead they’re already resolved by the time they start. It’s an exploration of what it means to be sitting still and sometimes the answer is contentedness, or sometimes what I’II get out of the exploration is like a bittersweetness; the sweetness being the content and the peace and the love and the bitterness being, just like missing a city life – basically ‘the exciting days are over’.
And now my life has become more calm and that’s not to say that nothing exciting is ever going to happen again. There is a bittersweetness to aging and I think the people who do it, we learn to lean into the sweet and forget about the bitter.
There’s a bit of exploration of those ideas like stagnation. I don’t feel stagnant, but I’m just quieter and I move slower and I make things in a slightly more introverted way than I used to. But it’s sort of looking at that new way of life and asking myself what it means, how does it actually affect my life? How does it affect the way that I view myself? How do I affect the way that I exist within this insane industry that I work in affects my relationships with those around me like my partner, friends and family.
I was worried that stagnation would sound rude, because it’s not in terms of… It’s more like what I felt the song itself was saying, not something that reflects on your work or you personally. If that makes sense.
There’s nothing wrong with words like stagnation and, yeah, the songs aren’t necessarily “me” anyway. Yeah, a narrative voice and what they are is me. Exploring ideas and exercising the bad thoughts in celebrating good thoughts. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m always the speaker, like any art.
No, I tend to think of songs as a character.
Yeah, exactly. And they are, I would like to say, short stories. There are songs about being like comfy, I’m still here or I’m always in the garden. There are songs about loyalty and dependability and someone coming to a place in their life where they realize they’re going to be good for those around them and good for themselves. You know, to put it very vaguely.
That’s something that I think is quite rare in music, albums dwelling less in angst or despair or so on, that more go, “Hey, I’m a pretty good guy, and I’m happy with where my life is.”
So, I would agree. Where I would disagree with you is that these songs are not without looking at the other side of the coin. There’s always, “Hey, I’m a good guy and I’m happy in life,” but there is still a cost to that truth and to that concept.
I’m certainly oversimplifying.
No, no, it’s okay, but I’d like to explore what is the cost of happiness, too. I look at the light and the dark at least, maybe not equally, but at least acknowledge the dark. I like to think about that in my songwriting. The reason I’m not sad is because there’s sadness in my songs. Like I said, it’s therapy for me.
Moving forward, in the past you’ve collaborated with a wide range of great musicians, do you have any plans to link up with anyone in the near future? Or even just hopes?
In fact, it’s the opposite. Once this record is out, and toured, and represented, and shared, you know, thoroughly with the world, I look forward to diving deep back into my solo stuff. Even my last “solo” record was a collaboration with two other guys, Eli and Jordan, and they’re great friends and they’re amazing musicians and I loved making the record and I love going on tour with them, but I’m gonna get back into like “just me” mode of just me and keys, or just me and guitar.
Every few years, I like to sort of check-in with myself and see what I’m capable of doing alone, if I can still write something engaging just with the piano and voice, for example, or just synthesize your voice, which is what I’m getting into right now and try to really exploit the the less is more card, and so that’s what I’m excited about right now is like. Simplification, less is more stripping things way back.
So that actually doesn’t involve other people are any collaborations. So nothing as of right now in terms of that.
Alright, one I ask of everyone: what’s the last great book you read?
I just finished Tenth of December, a book short stories by George Saunders. It’s light reading, but it’s good. He’s a great short fiction writer. The last book that I read that surprised me was, well, it’s sort of a long story, but it was The Color Purple. You know The Color Purple?
I’m familiar.
Have you read it?
I haven’t.
Because I read that…I feel like most people that I know haven’t read it, and I think maybe the reason I had never read it or had no interest in reading it, is because when I was a kid, it’s like the 80s, or the early 90s, the movie adaptation came out starring Oprah Winfrey.
Isn’t it Steven Spielberg?
[Laughs] It could be. I never watched it. I might have watched parts of it, but it came across as very sappy, just full of tropes…so I never had any interest in reading that book, and then I lost my Kindle. I do my reading off a Kindle because when I’m touring, I don’t have to carry books around, and so when I’m reading at night, I don’t have to keep my partner awake with a light, so I just read off a Kindle, but I left it on a plane. So then I borrowed my partner’s Kindle and she had The Color Purple in there for some reason, I don’t think she even read it. And I just started it and it just is like a way better book than…I don’t know why I thought it would be bad. It’s a fucking classic. People love it and it’s been made into so many different productions. But it’s just way darker and deeper than I thought it was. It’s mostly a story about queer love between two black women in the American South, and it just really caught me by surprise.
Gosh, yeah, I’m not super familiar, I’ll have to look into it more, because, yeah, I got, like, Driving Miss Daisy vibes from what I’ve seen of the movie.
Exactly. And I think the problem is that, and I think the critique with productions of the book is that they always gloss over sort of, the biggest vein of the book, the main crux is that there’s this gay love story between these two women yeah, that slowly unfolds in the first half, and it’s really beautiful.
What are you listening to lately?
I don’t know, man. I listen to a lot of classical music. Yesterday I put on In Rainbows by Radiohead because I’ve never listened to that whole record start to finish.
Oh yeah?
I was at a campfire on Saturday night, a song from In Rainbows came on, we were listening to someone’s phone or some bullshit playlist and then I was like, “Oh, this is a cool song, is this their new band, The Smile?” And then my friend is like, “I’m pretty sure this is off In Rainbows,” and then it occurred to me. I’m going to really listen to that record.
I do like a lot of, like, Kid A, Amnesiac, that era of Radiohead, I really love it, but I never really moved past that. So, yeah, that was what I put on yesterday while I was tearing down a bunch of insulation. In our pump house for like hours and I was, I’m really into a lot of it.
Alright, the last question, a very, very stupid question to end on: ever since I heard Dragon Slayer, I kind of arbitrarily wondered, have you ever played, or do you play, D&D?
No I don’t, and I have…I remember trying it once as a kid, very young, and being like, “What the fuck is this? Like, this is so boring. What’s going on?” I just have a notoriously bad attention span, I love fantasy stuff, I love the idea of fantasy and I like the stories. I love watching shit where there’s old timey knights having sword fights and stuff like that, sure. But as far as like going in deep, and thinking, “Am I a wizard?” No, I’ve never been into, what are they called, RPG’s?
[Laughing] Role-playing games, yeah.
Yeah, but now that I’m older, I would love to get into it. I think Camilla from Sunset Rubdown is into it. Probably they all have done it more than I have? And I think we were talking about trying to do a bit of D&D or this upcoming tour in the van.
Sunset Rubdown’s Always Happy To Explode is out now. You can follow the band on Instagram.
