You guys were in Europe for a while. Do you get to actually experience the cities you’re in, or is it more of just straight work?
Alex: Not really, like sometimes if it’s just a show night, there’s no time. But sometimes we get time off in cities- like when we go to Europe we have to play a show Thursday, Friday, Saturday night and then we usually have Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday off. So this time we went to Paris and got to hang out there, which was awesome, because neither of us had gotten to spend an extended period there, just experiencing the city a little, hanging out with friends and stuff. We hung out in Berlin a bunch too, but no, on the night of a show you fly in at 6, get picked up by a promoter, go nap off the alcohol from the night before and start again.
So what would you say the best part of being on the road in Europe is, besides all the great music, sweet clubs, great people, great food, all that stuff- something outside the standards?
Alex: I love the Financial Times, which is readily available on planes in Europe, yet expensive in Manhattan.
Nick: Ummm. Well, in the rare event that we do have those days off, well it’s not so rare. Generally when we go to Europe we don’t play on weekdays, so we’ll go to a city like Berlin or Paris, and because we’re on tour we don’t have anything to do. It’s like when we’re home we’re always working on something for the past year, it’s been nonstop, always something hanging over our head. Whereas when we’re on tour, if we have days off, they really are days off, like we couldn’t work on a record if we wanted to, since we’re not in our studio. So we actually do get proper days off, which most days we spend sitting in apartments, reading, watching movies, like not doing touristy shit at all. But when we get those days they make me really, really happy.
You guys do a lot of remixes- take me through that process. How do you decide what you want to remix and then how you want to change the sound of the song?
Nick: I guess it’s different from song to song. Obviously, if there’s an existing song with vocals- you know, verse, chorus, verse, song- it’s infinitely easier because there’s already a structure to follow and obviously all the remixes we’ve done we really liked the vocals. That’s part of the reason we said yes to do it. So you have this song you already like to sort of work around, so you have that as a foundation and then you just kind of- well usually we just sort of start with drums and then just noodling around. With stuff that’s more instrumental, it’s a little more tricky, but sometimes more fun because you have that much more room, but we generally just try and find some element that we’re like ‘that would be cool, that would work if it was recontextualized in a dance song. Like the Moby remix we did there was like this synth melody and it was really slow and we were having a really hard time just getting started, and we were like ‘well, what if we sped it up to 120?’ and then had someone replay that synth melody on a trumpet, and the second that happened it sort of became very disco-sounding and it was just obvious where to go from there. But it really is different from song to song.
Do you ever hear a song and you’re like ‘OK, we have to remix this and I know exactly where to take it,’ or is it more on the fly?
Nick: Yeah, sort of. Like the Panthers remix we did they let us pick the song and I didn’t know exactly what we were gonna do but we knew we really liked the vocal melody on the chorus and we knew we loved all the guitar stuff. So we were like ‘OK, we know we’ll be able to do something good’ just because there was already these existing great elements. But there are a couple of things- there’s this one band a friend of ours is in called Maserati who we really want to do a remix with. Usually remixes we do are when like a record label or a management company contacts us. That doesn’t mean we don’t like doing them, but we don’t go to like MGMT and say ‘hey, we wanna do a remix!’ whereas this was something where they have all these songs that are just begging for remixes and it would be so fun and so easy to do. We wouldn’t have to do much to them and they would make really great 12-inches. So hopefully we’re going to find time to do those in the next couple of months, but we’ve kind of sworn off remixes for a while just because we’ve been doing so many of them.
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