Chockablock with highly hummable hooks -- songs like "Bang Pop" and "Dream City" have an easy way of lodging themselves into your brain -- pop rockers Free Energy's 2010 album, Stuck on Nothing, was a welcome return to the bubblegum glam pop of the late '70s. The band plays the Riot Room tonight, Tuesday, July 19 (Fall Down Running and Delicate Steve open). We spoke with singer Paul Sprangers by phone about the band's incessant touring and its approach to pop music.
Paul Sprangers: It's been really good. It's just been a ton of shows and we've gotten to tour with a lot of awesome bands, which has really been just a huge joy and honor.
Who all have you gotten to play with?
Mates of State, Titus Andronicus, Foreign Born, Fools Gold, Weezer...
Since Free Energy plays a sort of genre-jumping style of music, do you find it easy or difficult to get booked?
I don't want to say it's been easy, because it's been a lot of work, but certainly, we've been fortunate to be able to tour all year. I mean, getting booked's one thing -- getting people to come out and see you is a whole other thing. In that repect, we're still working our asses off, trying to spread the word. But we've been really fortunate. People keep coming back to shows and it seems like it's going really well.
Playing the sort of glammy kind of power pop you play, how did the band end up attracting the attention of DFA?
Me and the Wells were in a band -- our old band [Hockey Night] -- that DFA was interested in that record, which came out on Lookout, and then we recorded some demos, and I sent those around to blogs, and Jon Galkin, who runs DFA, got back in touch with me, and we stayed in touch for years and he signed me and Scott based on those demos, and just wanted to make a rock record.
What's sort of the response when people who aren't necessarily familiar with what you do pick up the album based on the label? Do you get any interesting responses?
I think maybe inititally that might've been the case, yeah, but at this point, I think maybe we're reaching people who might not necessarily know the other acts on DFA, whereas I would, and you would, it sounds like. You have to realize that most people don't dig and keep track of who else is on the roster of a label, which is what I do. I mean, I used to buy stuff just based on the label. Matador is a really good example. Like, I would just buy anything that came out on Matador, you know?
For us, though, that wasn't really the case. People, maybe because of James's [Murphy, of LCD Soundsystem] involvement, it doesn't seem like it was as big of a deal as maybe it would've been or could've been, for whatever reason. I have no idea.
You said that after Hockey Night, you'd wanted to make a rock record. What sort of bands did you draw from to start Free Energy?
I don't think we knew exactly what kind of record we were going to make, but we were deep into Fleetwood Mac and AC/DC right at the start, two years before we even started recording. So: AC/DC, Bob Seger, we were seriously into. I guess that influenced the record, but more like we kinda wanted to make something clean and really big and simple, regardless of how the songs ended up fitting into a genre. The basic, fundamental, element of the process would be simplicity and less is more. We thought that was like, a tenant of classic rock orthodoxy.
That's what first attracted me to Stuck On Nothing. It really does have that '70s arena-rock approach to it. It goes for the cheap seats, and reaches all the way to the back.
Cool, man. That's good.
What's the process involved in getting that sound, and not just playing to the people in front of the stage? How do you write songs that can be heard by the entire audience, no matter what size venue in which you play?
The only way I can answer that is that we work to make every single component in what we do good and interesting. We don't necessarily set out to to write a song that's going to fill a stadium. How do we do that, right? It's more like, "What makes the things that we love good?" And then, we draw our own conclusions and trust that some of those things are things that are very clear, whether it's an emotion that's expressed, or lyrics, or the production of the guitar sounds, or the way the guitar is played, or the way that the drums sit in the mix. But, what we've learned is that the stuff that we love -- it's just very clear, and there's a confidence and an experience to the art that comes with a lot of work.
So, I think that when you make things like that you're really digging in, and at a certain point, you're looking at things so closely, and you're working at such a micro-level that this paradox happens, where it's going to communicate loud and clear, and wide and far. Whereas, if you fake something, and try to make it sound really big, by putting a lot of reverb on, you can tell that phony stuff on the radio. It's trying to be big, and it lacks any sort of substance or actual bigness.
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