explosionsinthesky
Explosions in the Sky (photo: Munaf Rayani)

Once upon a time, a flier at an Austin, Texas record shop read, “”wanted: sad triumphant rock band”. Shortly there after, pizza and chat about movies yielded a four man band called Explosions in the Sky . Eleven years later, said rock band has toured the planet many times over, captivated some of the greatest music venues on said planet, soundtracked award-winning NBC television shows and happens to be on the verge of releasing their fifth studio album. If you’ve listened to EiTS, you didn’t forget em. If you haven’t, well, you should treat yourself to it asap. Before the April 26 release of Take Care, Take Care, Take Care and the ensuing tour, guitarist Mark Smith graciously answered our questions.

Apes On Tape: To start, I know you guys have all professed your love for Austin and it’s support for music. Will you get any time to enjoy SXSW before things get crazy busy with the release of Take Care and the upcoming tour?

Mark Smith: I do truly love Austin, we all do. I can’t really see any of us living anywhere else at least for a really long time. We’ve had a pretty great last few years writing the album and now just collecting our breaths before it all starts. But I think we’re ready. And SXSW is indeed pretty incredible, but to be honest we’re all kind of in “collecting breath” mode, and we probably won’t be out there too much.

AOT: With as dynamic and nontraditional as EITS is, I’ve always wondered about the creative process. Does one person just suggest a foundation and everyone else finds complementary pieces? And do you refine things to a T or keep them slightly improvisational for recordings?

MS: The one question I can easily answer is that we fully write out all parts of all songs before we go into the studio. We spend a lot of time making demos of songs to iron out how we want it to sound when we ultimately do the final recording and mixing. In the studio we can then spend all our time actually doing it rather than worrying about how the song should go. We do end up doing different things or adding different instruments in the studio, but basically it’s all written. As for how the songs come about… At the outset, it’s not so much of a mystery—yes, one person will often start playing a part and then the other three will try to write parts around that. Then, if something sticks, we’ll try to extend that part onto another part. Et cetera. I guess it’s just the turning it all into a cohesive song that is the elusive part. So much trial and error. And when it’s going right, so much discussion. It takes a lot of self-editing and self-evaluation, and I admit I have some pride in how we will only release songs that all four of us feel 100% about. It’s awesome that all four of us have different sensibilities and then there will come a time when all four of us are “Yes—yes, that is the song.” I guess one thing that we tried this time that was different from other records is that we did a lot more writing electronically. Like say Michael wrote a basic guitar track, and then he would send it to the rest of us, and then Munaf would write a part on that or extend it onto another part, and then send it out, and so on. That was pretty cool because it allowed us to do things at our home computers that aren’t so easy to do at our practice space. That’s where a lot of the samples came from—just us screwing around at home. So that was pretty fruitful, but then we would take these bits that we would send around and then get together and try to flesh them out and see if they worked in person. I’m just going to stop now—basically either the answer is “trial and error” or “hell if we know.”

AOT: You’ve used vocal narratives before, but it seems “Trembling Hands” marks the first use of singing vocals in your tunes. Were you just trying to add a new dynamic, getting more comfortable with singing or what was behind that?

Trembling Hands by Explosions in the Sky

MS: That song went through a ton of iterations—at first it was another eight-minute long song with a lot of different parts all in different order. Then we changed the parts around and put in a few more and took some out, but it was still an epic behemoth. Then we took our favorite part of that version and made it the first part, and it had so much energy that we thought it would be interesting to try to fulfill our longstanding goal of making a three-minute rock song (okay, three and a half). So we wrote two more parts and it finally started working. It is really fun to play. And this will sound strange, because it doesn’t actually sound like this, but the first part just kept reminding us of a kind of fist-pumping punk rock. So instead of using “Oi! Oi! Oi!,” we started saying “Oh-Oh-Oh.” I’m sorry, I know that sounds kind of stupid, but that’s how it happened. Just kind of naturally, not out of a desire to add a new vocal dynamic. And then the humming melody just sounded better when it was hummed, rather than being played on an instrument. We kind of look at vocals as another instrument now, so if a song could benefit from it, then we’ll use it.

AOT: Take Care was recorded at Sonic Ranch, which seems pretty much like a musicians’ fantasy. That’s got to be very rewarding for you guys considering the resources available with past albums, no? And how was that entire recording experience for you?

MS: They had a pet raccoon, a basketball goal on the back of our studio, miles of ranch roads to ride bikes on, and homemade Mexican food at every meal. I don’t know, I just don’t really have anything bad to say about it–it was, to put it mildly, severely awesome. We gave ourselves two weeks just to do the tracking for the record, which is far more than we’ve ever had in the studio, so the whole thing had as little stress as making a record could possibly have, which frankly is the best thing for us, since we kind of stress sometimes when the red recording light comes on. We would recommend it to anyone and I hope we will be back ourselves.

AOT: It was recently announced that you’ll be headlining Wales’ Green Man Festival in August! I’ve actually chatted with founder Jo Bartlett about the philosophy behind that festival, and it truly seems like one of the best in the UK. Are you guys psyched about that or has the whirlwind of the whole new album/touring schedule process just been overwhelming in general?

MS: I didn’t really know much of anything about Green Man, I have to be honest. And I will chalk that up to the second part of your question—this buildup to the new album and touring plans has been, how shall I say, intense. But I just read a little about Green Man and it sounds beautiful, both the setting and the philosophy. It’s awesome when festivals differentiate themselves in some way. To us, the gold standard for festivals has been All Tomorrow’s Parties—just so unique and personal. It’s a little strange that, because of our release date, a lot of our first shows in certain places will be at large festivals. That’s kind of good and bad, because a lot of people get to see you all at once, but in most cases we will be coming back to play smaller shows later on in the year. It is sounding like it will be a pretty long schedule for this album, spilling over into next year, through the summer, before we stop and work on the next step in our lives, whatever that may be.

AOT: At this point, more than a decade into a highly successful career, the incredible reception of all the albums, the Friday Night Lights collaboration, the festival headlining, do you still have “pinch me” moments? And as one of the most passionate live bands I’ve ever witnessed, how do you keep it at that level and not get burnt out?

MS: All I have to do is open up our band email and I get pinch me moments galore. I of course love our music—we make it because that is what we want to hear. But to hear what it means to other people… Jesus. I can’t believe it sometimes. It’s pretty much the best. And that’s how the live show turned out the way it has—it’s a very palpable thing to feel how excited people are, and yeah, you feed off that. And on the bigger things… sure, some stuff is mindboggling. We’re going to headline Radio City Music Hall? Us? That can’t be right.

AOT: Finally, I hear you’re a massive Dallas Mavericks fan. They’re what, 2nd in SW and 4th in Western Conference now. They ever gonna win a championship or just play Texas’ 2nd best to San Antonio? (I’m a recovering Seattle SuperSonics fan btw, so I have no room to talk)

MS: Okay, when I first read through the interview I saw this question and I briefly decided to call off the entire interview. Not really. I at least floated the idea to my wife to name our son either Dirk Smith or Nowitzki Smith, so yeah, big Dallas fan. This could be the year. Dirk is still in his prime, Tyson Chandler is fantastic, and Beaubois is the wild card. You get to the playoffs and anything can happen. Man, Seattle, that must have been rough. I’m sorry.


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