Teaming Up With A Producer For The First Time & Appreciating The Band

Brooklyn indie-rock mainstays Parquet Courts have never feared change, but even for the musically adventurous foursome new album Wide Awake! is something of a sonic departure.

To craft the collection, the band teamed up with a producer for the first time - and not just any producer, but rather pioneering pop producer Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse) - with results unlike anything they've concocted before, favouring hip-swinging bass lines and innovative rhythms while keeping their trademark punk energy firmly intact.

So while it may seem like new sonic terrain, for Parquet Courts it feels like a completely natural extension of what's come before, something co-frontman Andrew Savage explains is somewhat of a mission statement for the band.

"I think in every interview cycle that we do kind of the first remark that I tend to hear from people is 'This is really different,' so I guess the more things change the more they stay the same, right?" he smiles. "I think it's just what Parquet Courts do, really, is we make records that I think are all very unique and which all don't sound exactly like one another, and when we hang up our hats we'll have this body of work and all these records will sound really different, but then people will be able to say, 'But they all sound like Parquet Courts.'

"I like a lot of bands that embrace variety in that way. Wide Awake! will be our sixth LP - which I'm very proud to have done in eight years, along with a live record and a handful of EPs and 7"s - but I look at careers like Sonic Youth or Beastie Boys or Sparks, bands that were around for decades and have very different-sounding records and different eras with people coming in and out of the band.

"It's really cool to witness a band's creative evolution like that - like you do with those bands - and I would like for Parquet Courts to be a band like that someday."

In terms of their relationship with Burton, it's something of a chicken and the egg scenario: while the new stylistic detours on Wide Awake! could be easily attributed to the famous producer, in reality the songs were already written and the album's vibe locked in before Burton - a long-time fan - approached them to work together.

Savage had recently been delving heavily into the aesthetics of bands like Minutemen and Big Boys and how they mixed funk into a predominantly punk framework - as well as relishing the duality between anger and joy displayed by bands like Youth Of Today, Gorilla Biscuits and Black Flag - while his songwriting partner Austin Brown was locked onto disparate acts like Grace Jones, Parliament and Townes Van Zandt for inspiration.

With that foundation already laid, it seems almost fortuitous that Danger Mouse reached out to the band when he did.

"I guess so," Savage ponders, "although we weren't really thinking about that when we told him he could do it, because the record had been written and we were already in that zone. And to be quite honest I wasn't familiar with Brian's work, really.

"I had heard [2004 mash-up] The Grey Album and I'd heard the [2008] Beck record Modern Guilt, but I hadn't been able to apply that to him - I didn't know that he did that - but we were about to go and record the record ourselves when he kind of stepped in and said, 'Hey, I'd love to work with you guys, can we do a record together?'

"And I think we were just kind of at a point as a band where the response was just, like, 'Yeah, sure' - it was just another thing to take us out of our comfort zone, really. It was, like, 'Yeah, why not? Let's try it out.'"

Despite this complete willingness to think outside the box, Savage is quick to admit that the band had initial reservations about how the pairing may be publicly received. "Of course, naturally," he concedes. "It was our first time working with a producer of any description really, so, yeah, of course. We hung out with Brian and talked with him a lot before we finally agreed to let him do it, because naturally there's going to be some reservations.

"We didn't want like an [Ramones' 1980 fifth album, produced by Phil Spector] End Of The Century situation where a producer drastically changes the sound of the band: even though End Of The Century is a great record, it's still an odd Ramones record and feels at times more like a Phil Spector record than it does a Ramones record.

"And we didn't want that, we wanted to make sure that this guy was doing this record for the right reasons and it turns out he was. He was doing it as a fan of the band and not someone who wanted to mould the band to what he does, and in a sense it was really the opposite."

Parquet Courts have always seemed to be a band likely to err on the side of artistic rather than commercial considerations in such situations.

"I think that's fair to say and I also think we're not a band where any producer would get dollar signs in their eyes if they were going to work with us," the singer chuckles. "We're not going to make anybody rich, including ourselves, so of course it's always been about the music."

When discussing the balance between the artistic and commercial, '80s San Pedro punks Minutemen seem a pretty apt comparison given that they lived in the margins but were always careful that nothing they did would be conceived of as "mersh" (their band's shorthand for commercial).

"Yeah, I love that band," Savage tells. "I mean that's a band that's been an influence from day one, really, and a lot of times you get this thing - especially from older music journalists - where people are telling you the bands that you like and the bands that you sound like so you must be influenced by them, and the whole time in those first few years I was thinking, 'No one's mentioned the Minutemen?' That's the band I think we sound like."

Taking Burton out of the equation for a moment, was Savage reluctant to work with a producer at all given that they'd never shared creative control in the studio with anyone up until this juncture?

"Well, in a way making this record wasn't drastically different from making any other record," he offers. "We went in and we had our songs and we knew what we were going to do and we knew how to do it, and I guess we made it very clear to Brian the way we work so he knew what he was getting into.

"But it was different to have someone there to do what he did very well, which was hold a mirror up to the band and point out things that we couldn't see for ourselves because we were so involved in it. He could be critical in a way that we couldn't towards ourselves and could offer an insight on things that only an objective person - and really only someone who knew the band's catalogue very well - could see. I'm talking about song structure kind of things, and just kind of the way we write songs and what a Parquet Courts song quote-unquote 'sounds like'.

"I guess he was really good and ultimately his best contribution to the record - which is no small thing - is to be able to say, 'Hey, you do this thing a lot, why do you do it? Maybe this time try and switch it up.' Or he'd encourage us to kind of push our ideas further than we had anticipated pushing them."

Wide Awake! is a long and substantial record with swathes of diversity in both vibe and arrangement, yet Savage believes it comes off so well as a cohesive whole because of the band's inherent chemistry.

"On this record the main songwriters are me and Austin, and it's different because we're different people spending time apart and listening to different music, and writing songs differently," he explains. "But then when you come in the studio you're playing together and you're listening to music together, so those songs which were once really different from one another start to sort of meet each other in the middle because you're in this process where you're kind of like... it almost feels like sharing a mind with those guys at this point.

"We know each other's playing style so well and we all hang out, listen to music together - especially when we're recording - so what starts off as very different, I think, comes closer to one another, and I think that's something that Brian was cognisant of as well: when he was recording these songs he'd be asking, 'How can we make consistency in what these guys are doing?'"

Parquet Courts' rhythm section - Savage's younger brother Max on drums and Sean Yeaton on bass - seemed to revel in Wide Awake!'s more rhythmic focus.

"It's the most rhythm-forward Parquet Courts record and, yeah, they both absolutely killed [it] and both of their playing is at its best on this record," Savage enthuses. "Yeah, the bass is wild and I think maybe a song like Normalization is Max's drumming at its best."

As far as the lyrical side of things go it's a typically dense affair, with Brown tending to look inwards to focus on matters such as love and loss, while Savage takes a more acerbic swing at the travails currently facing contemporary society, his verbose tracts rife with righteous indignation.

"It's strange times, especially in this country," he says wryly. "I think the record in general tends to deal with this duality of anger and joy, in a spectrum from its most extreme forms. I don't know, I guess I wanted to make a record that was angry, but I didn't want to make a record that was so angry that it seemed really sour. I wanted it to be constructive and to do that I think it's important to be optimistic - people in this country really have to be right now.

"As Austin says on the record, "It's the only fist we have to fight with", and he's talking about love, and I think that's a form of optimism. I would have felt weird not addressing certain things at this moment in time on this record - some things just had to be addressed."

Last year Savage released his debut solo album Thawing Dawn - a fascinating diversion into more contemplative singer-songwriter territory - but admits to enjoying being back making a ruckus alongside his bandmates.

"It made me appreciate the collaborative nature of the band a lot," he proffers. "I was definitely seeking perhaps a bit more control with doing a solo record, but it definitely made me appreciate my band.

"And also it definitely helped me zero in on what exactly this Parquet Courts record was going to be about because I knew I didn't want to make another really melodic record like [2016 predecessor] Human Performance was, but I knew that I had a lot more really melodic songs to do.

"So there was never really any confusion during the songwriting process as to which song would be on which record, it really helped me by saying, 'Ok, I'm not really going to focus on melody for this next Parquet Courts record, I'm going to focus on rhythm and lyrics,' and it really helped me focus in on what I was doing by, I guess, knowing what I wasn't doing."

Savage has stated in Wide Awake!'s press material that the album has the noble aspirations of trying to get people dancing to guitars, something that should be no trouble given how well the songs have translated in the live arena so far.

"Rock music can be dance music, too," he laughs. "I'm into dance music - as in electronic music - and I think some of that makes it in here, and I'm into bands like say Happy Mondays who threw some dance music in with rock music. But I always think that rock music is the best music to dance to really anyway, I think people are just shy about it now."

On how these news songs have been received live, Savage tells, "We've played six [of the new songs] so far and they've gone over really well. Normally I think there's a grace period when you're playing new music that hasn't been released where people choose to listen more than they do react, but there was a lot of reaction.

"And I guess the tracklisting for the record had been leaked so a lot of people were even requesting songs just in name alone - they hadn't heard the song at all but they'd seen the title so they were just throwing random titles out there - which was pretty funny."

Excitingly for Aussie fans it seems we might be finding out for ourselves during the album cycle how good these new songs are in the flesh.

"I think [we'll be coming down], yeah," he tells. "It feels weird that this past northern winter was the first time in five or six years where we didn't go to Australia, so it's definitely been too long.

"I think so, in fact I was just recently having a coffee with an Australian friend of mine who works in the Australian music industry and she seemed pretty confident that it would be the case.

"And we love [coming to Australia] anyway. I mean I've got so many friends down there at this point, and it's always nice to be on the other side of the world experiencing an opposite season from when you get tired of either extreme heat or extreme cold. Usually we come down during our winter and it's always really nice coming back with a little bit of sun on our cheeks."