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coldsoupy · 7 years

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The Deadly Desert - Interview Transcript, December 2016

The following is an interview transcript with Chris Stern of The Deadly Desert and The Sterns for an upcoming feature in Providence Monthly. He said some great stuff in great length and I wanted to let his full words and thoughts be heard. Enjoy.

The Deadly Desert

Providence Monthly: There's so much going on with your new album in terms of instrumentation, percussion and vocal arrangements, what was your writing process like? How do you compose your music?

Chris Stern: Songs, for me, always start with a melody or a lyric. Some people write at the piano or with their guitar and actively ‘work’ at a tune by fiddling with chords until something happens. I get easily frustrated if I sit down to write and I can’t connect all the dots right away. Great songs sound effortless, so if you’re pulling your hair out to write something magical, the effort shows and the song suffers. The best tunes come when you’re not expecting them, so melodies and lyrics arrive throughout the day. I might start humming something in the car. If I’m still humming it the next day, I know it’s a tune worth working on. If a melody or a lyric is really special, I’ll rush to the piano to start mapping it out immediately.

Home recording is where the bulk of ‘composing’ happens. Once I have a melody and a few chords, I’ll record a demo with just acoustic guitar and vocal to the 8-track. I might do 3 takes or a dozen, and every take, I’m changing the chords, editing the lyrics and fixing the structure. Once there is a solid form, the fun part begins: I’ll add keyboard drums, vocal harmony stacks, lead guitars, piano or organ, maybe a bass line. While I’m building the arrangement I’m evaluating the song and editing, mostly just ditching stuff that doesn’t work. After maybe 10 hours recording and rerecording parts, I’ve seen what’s possible within the song and I can be confident it’s finished.

I am a sucker for big, bold arrangements. Give me horns and strings and back-up singers, 4 pianos, triple-tracked guitars and 3 tambourines and I’m happy. In The Sterns, I was notorious for over-arranging and over-producing. Our third album ‘Savage Noble Steals The Ancient Riffs,’ had a few songs in excess of 100 tracks in pro-tools, which can give you a certain sound, or it can be an awful mess, especially in the mixing process. Tambourine is my favorite instrument, so almost every song has that jangle. Most of the songs were written on piano instead of guitar so I challenged myself to play all the keyboards, which is a joke because I am a terrible keyboard player. I set out to make this album ‘stripped down’ and almost completely failed. ‘Sob Story’ has female vocals, a horn section, vibraphone, timpani and 3 pianos to give it the Phil Specter ‘Wall of Sound’ so ‘stripped down’ went out the window but it’s probably my favorite song on the album and the most fun to record, so go figure.

Chris Stern

PM: There's a big range of influences on your album as well, I hear some Bell & Sebastion, Weezer, some Brit-pop...who inspires you?

CS: I worship the crazy geniuses: the guys who literally drove themselves insane and ruined their lives in pursuit of music like Brian Wilson, Daniel Johnston, Andy Partridge, Sly Stone and Syd Barrett etc. There is something so romantic and relatable about that obsession. I am a disciple of The Beatles and The Beach Boys specifically because those guys wrote songs designed for the studio. All the innovation and all those classic albums happened because they were writing music that didn’t have to be performed in concert. 4 guys on stage can’t play ‘A Day in the Life’ and do it justice. Andy Partridge of XTC quit touring due to crippling stage fright while XTC was still up and coming. They never got the fame they deserved, but they wrote ‘Skylarking’ which is my all-time favorite album. So that ethos of limitless studio creativity and crafting albums that are lush and carefully orchestrated with a broad palette of sounds and colors is important.

Lyrics are so crucial and I think they’re overlooked by a lot of musicians. My favorite artists combine a beautiful melody with meaningful and resonant words. Most lyrics in pop music are garbage; I’ve always been a bit of a snob about this. Some of my favorite songs have dumb or dull or lazy lyrics. Maybe they are bubble gum or just undercooked, I can still love the song. But great lyrics make a song three-dimensional and it’s that intersection of compelling melody and meaningful words that birth real emotions. Some of favorite lyricists are Paul Simon (my musical hero), Ray Davies of The Kinks, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Morrissey, Michael Stipe of REM, Jarvis Cocker of Pulp and Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian. Belle & Sebastian is my favorite current band, maybe my all time favorite band. Morrissey, in spite of his obvious faults, is unparalleled as a lyricist.

Films and books are a big inspiration. David Lynch, Woody Allen, Hal Hartley, Stephen King and Kurt Vonnegut spring to mind. 2 songs on this album even have lyrics ripped from television comedies, but I won’t divulge which songs or which shows. Many songs on this album were actually inspired by specific musicians and I name them in the songs: ‘The Best of The Dead Composer’/Morrissey, ‘Flames’/Daniel Johnston, ‘Stay Out of The Sunshine’/REM, ‘Are You Staying The Night?’/Bruce Springsteen. ‘The Assassination of Love’ is actually a murder ballad about me killing Mike Love of The Beach Boys. Mike Love is, honestly, the greatest villain in pop music history, if you’ve followed the saga between him and Brian Wilson that started in the 60’s. The song is upbeat and tongue-in-cheek, but I’m dead serious, Mike Love is the worst person. Total Trump voter. I’d love if he heard the song and hated it.

Jarod Cournoyer

PM: Tell me about The Sterns, I noticed some "Sterns" appear in the credits. You were featured on Rock Band? What have your other musical endeavors been?

CS: In high school, all I wanted to do was play jazz saxophone. In 1998 friends asked me to join a ska band called Shanty Sounds, which was my first introduction to the Providence Music scene. We played The Met, Lupo’s, The Living Room, The Ocean Mist etc. and did pretty well for a bunch of 16 and 17 year old white French kids from Woonsocket. Our finest hour was playing the final Providence Payback, which was a mini festival that The Amazing (Royal) Crowns hosted every year. I still think The Crowns are the best Providence band of the last 30 years. That show was a really big deal for me. After Shanty Sounds broke up, I saw Westbound Train at a Slackers show at The Wetlands in NYC and was blown away. They were based in Boston and when their sax player quit I was asked to audition. It’s hard to forget because I auditioned on September 12th 2001. They hired me and I spent over 2 years with Westbound Train. We toured with The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and I learned how to sing and front a band.

Westbound Train released an album and our guitarist was robbed of all his gear so Alex Stern was hired to replace him for a three week tour. We hit it off almost immediately. I had just started trying to write songs and Alex already had a full-length album with his ska band Mass.Hysteria and his songs were just brilliant. We were both obsessed with British pop. We wrote our first song together on that tour. Later that year, I joined Mass. Hysteria on sax so Alex and I were now in 2 touring bands together and we were basically joined at the hip. By the end of 2003 we had a bunch of songs we were really proud of. We formed The Sterns with Emeen Zarookian (Spirit Kid), Andrew Sadoway (Bent Shapes) and Michael Gagne. I took the stage name Stern because I wasn’t fond of my dull very French last name and Alex and I wanted to show Ramones-esque brotherly solidarity. (Adam please don’t use Brunelle. I am using Stern, you can say it’s a stage name but just don’t use Brunelle to avoid confusion )

We self-released our first album ‘Say Goodbye to the Camera’ in 2005 and shockingly, it cracked the CMJ top 100 albums chart which was sort of unheard of for an unsigned band. We started getting a lot of good press around Boston. Music writers liked the album. We weren’t going to succeed on our looks; we were a critics band. All my favorite bands were critics darlings, so we were in good company. The Boston Herald included the lead-off track from our album, ‘This Will Only Hurt for a Minute’, in a round robin reader’s choice of the top 100 Boston songs of ALL TIME! We had no business being in there, but amazingly, we made it through the first round but lost in the second round to ‘Hangin’ Tough’ by New Kids on the Block. I still think that is fucking hilarious.

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This Will Only Hurt For A Minute by The Sterns from the album, "Say Goodbye to the Camera"

We were courting some record labels when we started recording album 2. A local startup media company and label approached us while we were in the studio. They had a lot of money and they were going to focus on us and one other artist exclusively. We needed tour support and a van and we were swept off our feet really, but we signed our first record contract in the summer of 2006 and the label released our second album, ‘Sinner’s Stick Together’ in March of 2007. We were nominated for 2 Boston Music Awards (we didn’t win, but I did meet Bobby Brown at the ceremony) and AllMusic.com called the album “a pop masterpiece” which was very flattering. After that, it was touring, for what seemed like forever. Some highlights were opening for Apples in Stereo at SXSW and a string of tour dates with Meat Puppets, who are best known for playing 3 of their songs with Nirvana on the legendary ‘Unplugged’ album.

Touring became exhausting and we came off the road and went right back into the studio to start album number 3. Our record deal turned out to be too good to be true: they were very generous and gave us tons of tour support but they were very controlling in the recording process. Alex and I started to fight and I hated it, because I was living out every rock and roll cliché, and I saw it happening, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. They hired an outside producer for the sessions. Alex and I had produced the first 2 albums alone with Richard Marr and I was skeptical. I was constantly at odds with the label because they weren’t giving us the freedom we earned in the studio. I didn’t like how the album was shaping up at all. I refused to record the lead vocals until we resolved our issues with the label, but the band was falling apart. I was under contract but I was miserable and I thought about quitting the band. This was the hardest decision of my life and I went slightly nuts in the process. The longer I refused to sing and continued to postpone recording sessions, the worse things got. In March 2008, I tried to bargain with the label; I would record the vocals and release the album but I needed 6 months off from touring. I was burnt out, completely, and my health, mental and physical was suffering. Alex and I were barely speaking. After a show in Boston, Alex and I had words that escalated into the lamest fist fight that you’ve ever seen. Bouncers pulled us apart. I quit The Sterns that night via email and I didn’t speak to Alex for nearly 3 years. Album cancelled, band broken up, Rock and roll cliché complete. The kicker, of course, was that we didn’t know there was already a deal to include our song ‘Supreme Girl’ on Rock Band 2. Millions of people were going to know our song and our name but now there was no band.

Alex and I reconciled in 2011 and we were both haunted by the unfinished album. The record contract had expired but the label still owned the work we started in 2007 so we went back to Galaxy Park and started the whole album from scratch. Life had pointed us in different directions, so we weren’t back as a full time band but we chipped away the album in 2012 and 2013. We finished album 3, ‘Savage Noble Steals The Ancient Riffs’ in the spring of 2013 and that is when my mom got sick. My mother was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer in late June of 2013. A few weeks later in July, my girlfriend of 7 years left me amidst all the stress and turmoil of my mom’s illness. My Mom died unexpectedly on August 2nd , 7 weeks after diagnosis. So The Sterns were back but everything else in my life collapsed at once. That is the story of ‘Poor Me and The Pity Party…’ This was the darkest time in my life and I started writing music again for the first time since the Sterns breakup in 2008. I needed music to deal with the grief, the depression and the anger. I listened to all the great records about breakups and death and loss: ‘Rumours’, ‘Sea-Change’, ‘Automatic for the People’, ‘The Queen is Dead’, ‘Armed Forces’ etc. Most of my favorite music is somber or melancholy anyway, I am sort of a closet goth. But I found that during this horrible time, I didn’t really want to hear the sad songs that would let me wallow. I was seeking out upbeat music. And I found the self-consciously gloomy stuff that I loved (The Smiths, The Cure, Joy Division etc.) to be almost comical. As I wrote tunes, some were very heavy emotionally but there was something almost lighthearted about writing something so gut-wrenching, so I was sort of laughing at my own misery as a way of coping.

As the songs started happening, I knew I had the makings of a great breakup record, a great death record but weirdly, also an upbeat pop record. The music was too personal to bring it to the Sterns and attempt to resurrect that band. So that was the first time I thought about a “solo” project. I hate the term “solo project”, nothing about it is solo except that it’s my first full-length apart from my established band. The original idea was to record 3 ep’s, each on a theme and create fictional bands for each of the ep’s. The darker, heavy tunes were going to be released under the name “Poor Me and The Pity Party”, a dig at the self conscious gloom rock bands, but also at myself. But after recording commenced, I started feeling like all the songs would work together really well as an album. So instead of releasing them cryptically under false names, I decided I was ready to start an actual band again and that is The Deadly Desert. Ryan Tremblay and Jarod Cournoyer deserve a lot of credit for making this band a reality, because at the outset when we went in the studio, I had no real designs of coming out of musical retirement, but they loved the songs and gave constant support and we loved playing music together, so hats off to them. We have Kathleen Dona-Zavalia playing drums, so now the band is a real thing, and I’m still not quite sure how it happened.

Ryan Tremblay

PM: What brought you to PVD? What attracts you to the scene?

CS: Providence has always been home. Growing up in Woonsocket was rather dull from a creative standpoint. I love my hometown but as a teenager there were no all ages music venues, no bookstores, no cinema, no ethnic food, no decent record stores or music stores so it was very isolating and if you wanted to see a show or buy a certain record, you hopped on 146 and came to Providence. By the time I graduated high school, I was spending most of my time in Providence, working at an east side record shop and going to school at URI downtown. I think we’re all incredibly lucky to live here and most of the time we don’t realize it. Culturally, we have the best features of

Boston or New York without the hassles of big city life. I lived in Boston for 3 years and it’s a beautiful city, but personally, Providence is more my speed.

I think one benefit of the compactness of Rhode Island and Providence specifically is that the music scene is very incestuous. Everyone knows everyone else so I think it helps foster a stronger sense of community without the competition. The music scene is Boston for example is more fractured and there are so many musicians vying for the attention of a dwindling live music audience that it becomes a competition. And I don’t think art should ever be competitive. A band that gets a buzz in Boston starts thinking nationally very early because Boston, like Austin, New York, Seattle, Nashville and L.A. is viewed as one of the big music towns where young bands are plucked from obscurity and vaulted to stardom. So there is a lot of posturing and jockeying for status within the music scene. There is none of that pretense in Providence, it’s more about the show, the record, the song. The focus is on the audience, not starting a career as a pop star.

PM: Where did you record the album? What was the process like? Are you very hands on?

CS: The album was recorded at Galaxy Park studios in Watertown, Massachusetts by my close friend and collaborator Richard Marr. He recently relocated the studio to downtown Salem. This is the fifth full length album I have recorded with Richard so we have a process in the studio that revolves around a lot of goofing around, drinking coffee and gossiping and then gradually we get down to work. He recorded all 3 of the Sterns albums so we communicate by osmosis because he knows what sounds I like and which sounds I don’t like, so we are able to skip a lot of hand wringing and debating because he instinctively knows what I’m hearing. It helps that he was raised on gloomy 80’s British guitar rock that I love because if I tell him, “You know that guitar tone on ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’?”, he’s already twisting knobs and dialing in the sound we need.

I am a control freak in the studio. Richard and I have been making records together since 2003 so he gives me free reign, like any good engineer or producer should. Most of what I know about recording comes from Richard anyway, so I am intimately involved in every part of the process. Richard runs pro-tools because I am somewhat computer illiterate when it comes to recording. It’s necessary, but it’s my weakness, so I focus on the sounds and we limit the use of digital tricks. We will spend a few hours finding the perfect combination of room sound, amp, microphone and analog effect rather than fishing around the computer for a digital plug in. I insisted that we record to tape, because, apparently, I like burning studio time and money. Richard hesitated but we did it, putting drums, bass, some acoustic guitar, piano and even some vocals to the tape machine. This only works because all the parts, including overdubs, are mapped out in advance. There is no composing or arranging in the studio. All the parts exist on the home demo, so when I’m behind the fancy studio mics, it’s about executing the parts and finding the sounds I can’t get in my bedroom with my 8 track and one mic. There is some improvisation, but not much. I pushed myself to learn theremin because I was fascinated by it and I wanted to use it on 2 tracks. I practiced for a few weeks before the session, went in and recorded theremin tracks for 6 or 7 hours. We ended up using maybe 10 seconds of theremin on the entire album, mostly because I performed it terribly. So ideas don’t always pan out, but we don’t experiment with parts, just sounds.

PM: Where would you like to see this album go? Why record it now? How will you translate the lush instrumentation live?

CS: I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I would love to sell a million copies of an album. That’s not going to happen. I always thought that The Sterns were sort of a cult band. We had a very small audience, but maybe 10 or 15 years later people would rediscover the albums and we’d be the great lost indie band that time forgot. I think anyone who is serious about music and works hard at it craves the validation and adoration of an audience, whether that’s 50 people at a concert or 1000 downloads on iTunes. But there is really no point doing the real work of writing, recording and releasing records if you don’t absolutely love to do it. If only 20 people hear this album, that’s alright, I’ll make another one. If we play shows and only 5 people come, that’s ok, we’ll book another show. So the album doesn’t have to go anywhere, it can just exist. On the other hand, I know it’s very trite, but in 2016, you can name your life a success if you can make a living doing what you love. So, of course, there is still that elusive dream of doing ONLY music and still paying my bills. I haven’t figured out that trick yet, but if I do, I’ll let you know.

I can live without playing live. I enjoy it, but it’s temporary. And honestly, as an introvert, playing live can be utterly exhausting. A recording lasts forever. I have great memories of my favorite concerts, but there is nothing like putting on your favorite song or album when you NEED to hear it. After years of touring, playing 100-150 shows a year, I realized the writing and recording process was my greatest strength. I don’t need “success” to spur me on. We started recording this album in September of 2014 and finished it in October. It took over 2 years, not because I was unmotivated or scrambling for ideas, but because the studio is expensive and I would work my day job, save up and then schedule a block of sessions every 6 weeks or so. I self-funded the recording because I love being in the studio and building the songs. Nothing for me is more fulfilling than starting with a tiny notion of a song and watching it blossom over time. So regardless of how this album is received, I already have another albums worth of songs that I am slowly working out. I’ll save up and when we’re ready we’ll go back into the studio and do it again and always try to improve on what came before.

-Cold Soup

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