|
Search
|
|
|
Search
|
As Tall As Lions, the four-piece indie band from Long Island, NY, will be playing Voodoo on Saturday, at 11:05 a.m. on the Billboard.com/PlayStation stage. Comprised of Dan Nigro on vocals and guitar, Saen (pronounced Shawn) Fitzgerald on guitar, Julio Tavarez on bass and Cliff Sarcona on drums, three of the four members were friends in high school and have journeyed the long road of music-making together.
Their newest album, You Can't Take It With You, came out in August and almost immediately climbed to #29 on iTunes charts. Voodoo Fest will be their first visit to New Orleans, so go out to see them and give them a reason to come back on their next tour!
NOC: So you're currently touring with MuteMath, and then you have Minus the Bear, Frightened Rabbit and Athlete lined up as tourmates. Y'all have some pretty big names that you're traveling around with.
DAN NIGRO: Yeah, I'd like to think so!
NOC: Well, I was looking at your tour calendar and noticed that this is the only big festival you've got on your list of dates.
DN: This is the only one that we have listed at the moment. We are playing Coachella next year, and we're looking into some other summer festivals for 2010, but nothing's confirmed yet.
NOC: Yeah, I guess we're the tailend of festival season. Will this be your first visit to New Orleans?
DN: Actually it will be. We've never played in New Orleans before, we've never traveled there. We were on tour a few years ago and we were playing in Baton Rouge, and we were going to try to come through for a night off, but we just were too lazy and never made it.
NOC: So yall's newest album just came out in August, and on your blog on your website, you said it was a pretty dark time recording the album.
DN: I don't know if it was a dark time; we ran into a lot of problems making the record, which created a lot of tension. I don't know how to explain it, but we took a lot of time working on the record just in terms of writing it. We probably spent a little too much time on it, trying to perfect this song and that song, and we kind of got lost in the middle of it.
Then, once we were actually done with it, we realized that we had never even decided on a producer, because every time we brought a producer in, we would still be in the middle of working on songs, and a lot of producers would be looking at us like, "Wait, so is this a song or is this an idea for a song?"
A lot of people didn't get what we were doing, and a lot of people just seemed like they wanted in on the project because of the money. It was hard to figure out who was genuinely interested in the band and who was actually just interested in making some money, you know?
NOC: Definitely. I would imagine that could be a problem all over the music industry.
DN: Yeah, so we were guarding our music very carefully from producers because we didn't want to just hand it over to anybody and have them try to make their version of our record. Once we finally decided on a producer, we started working with him, and then we realized halfway through pre-production that it just wasn't working out for several reasons.
Then we were back at square one finding a producer, and we had already booked a house out in California for a few months that we were going to live in and all of this stuff was already set into motion. We had to kind of put the brakes on for a minute and re-assess the situation.
We started working with another producer in haste because we just were trying to get through it, and then that turned out to be a disaster. We had to step outside of the box again and reassess again, and then we finally decided on a producer. It just was a long, drawn-out process for a record that should have been done six months before it was done.
NOC: By the time it was finished, were y'all just sick of it?
DN: No, no one was actually sick of it, we were actually all happy. I remember when we mastered the record and I took it home and listened to it, I was happy with the way it sounded. But it was a frustrating process, and I definitely thought that there was about six months of wasted time in there.
NOC: So, since we're new to you guys down here, what can we expect from a stage show?
DN: Well, we're not sure what to expect in terms of the festival, you know. I don't know what it's like. We play a really early slot at 11:05 a.m., so I don't know if people will even be outside already.
NOC: Oh, there will be people out there dressed up in crazy costumes, people that are drunk already...
DN: I was thinking that. 11 a.m. sounds early, but at the same time, if people are staying over from Friday night, there will be a ton of people already up and about.
NOC: Are y'all going to dress up for the show since it will be Halloween?
DN: No, I don't think so. I think we might dress up afterwards, but that's the thing, we don't know. Do a lot of bands dress up for it?
NOC: I don't actually remember any bands dressing up in years past, but we've got the Flaming Lips, and they're kind of always in costume.
DN: I figured that they would be doing something ridiculous. Who knows? We were thinking about it, but we were having trouble even picking out costumes. We were thinking of dressing up as Kiss, but we thought that might be in poor taste.
