Hollands

John-Paul Norpoth is clearly ready to move on from his own musical background. After all, it’s quite obvious when the artist you’re talking to is already tired of his new album.

Norpoth and his girlfriend/bandmate Jannina Barefield comprise the core of Hollands, the new musical outlet after quitting his former band Butane Variations. And even though Hollands is releasing two new EPs this year, it’s material made up of BV sessions and years gone by, thus releasing them is simply an exercise in “moving on” rather than an exciting new venture.

As we caught up with Norpoth and Barefield, we found a duo excited to simply make the music they want with friends and to finally close the door on the path behind them. This is the story of Hollands:

SSv: We covered Butane Variations quite a bit back in 2007, so I’m wondering what the transition was like to Hollands and the new musical expressions there.

John-Paul Norpoth: Well, we did a couple tours as Butane Variations on the East Coast and we had some differences, I think. So getting out of that, I had a bunch of music that just hadn’t really gone anywhere. Some of it had been performed in Butane Variations, but none of it had been recorded yet. So basically I just started a new band to try to get something going. Some of them are some of the songs we’re putting out in October, so there’s still something there that I’m excited to get past and work on a new day.

As far as the band, it was just musicians who were friends of mine. It’s a smaller band on occasion. We definitely started to perform right after that band broke up with my girlfriend and she’d played in Butane Variations a bit as well. We started to play out totally haphazard just the two of us and she knew all the songs that I was going to pull out and play and we just started that way. We played a local bar and it just took off from there – adding an upright bass player and then you try to put a real band together to record.

It was almost an instant click to move from one group and jump right into playing with her locally. We started traveling locally but mostly it’s been about getting these first two EPs out there, one of which is pretty old and this other one which is a bit older as well. I was just looking at the master today and that’s a year old.

SSv: So what was that like making music together under this new banner?

John-Paul: Butane Variations was a partnership between myself and Phil Weinrobe. When that finished up, I had a lot of music that I never brought to that band. I had this whole CD that I wanted to put out and I had friends who wanted to help me put it out there and gave me a little money to do it. I slapped the name Hollands on it for lack of there actually being a coherent band behind and it was just this side project at the time. That’s really what we started with.

We started performing with a couple musicians and making those songs from that disc. Then we moved forward with the material that had never been recorded for Butane Variations, so it’s all this really old music and then music that I’d been working on. That basically makes up these two EPs were putting out – one of which came out in the last couple months and then the next one on October 13.

SSv: So what’s the difference here?

John-Paul: The songs on Faces are songs I wrote in ‘03 and recorded in ‘04 and ‘05. So you can imagine what that kind of feels like when it finally comes out four or five years later more provoked by somebody else than what I wanted to do. They’re good songs and we like performing them now and kicking new life into them. But it can feel like old hat and there’s some clunky stuff on that CD that I wouldn’t do now.

Mother is just completely… I think I’m 100% behind everything that’s on Mother while I’m probably 50-75% behind the other. [Laughs] Mother is way more reflective of where we’re at, what we’re doing right now, what we sound like when we perform. It’s just more representative.

SSv: So you’re just ready to move on from all of this?

John-Paul: Completely. [Laughs] It’s just putting them out to get them out. It’s these short musical documents of four to six songs and I can’t wait to put out a full-length. Whether we do that on our own or whether we try to move toward some of the record labels that we really like and have some connection with, that’s what we want to do.

SSv: What are you wanting to write, then, versus what you’ve written in the past?

John-Paul: There was something about Butane Variations that made me feel like I was locked into writing with an acoustic guitar. It was almost as if I had to think about the vehicle of that band and I had to write band-centric. You had to think about who was going to play the parts and how they were going to play it and how it would all come out. I don’t really want to do that anymore. I don’t want to be locked into a band per se.

I’d much rather find something that’s not guitar oriented, even though I will probably always play guitar on stage. I’m trying to get away from the guitar, though. I have this old piano that’s been sitting around in my apartment and I try to write on it as much as possible – although it’s really out of tune. [Laughs]

Jannina Barefield: My background is actually as a classically trained violinist and just over the years, I’ve been listening to John-Paul so much that is just got into my head. When Butane broke up, I was in a group that broke up as well so it came really naturally to start playing music together. I figured by that point that you listen to someone write and record a song and hear it 200 times and I figured by that point, I knew the music better than anyone else. [Laughs]

It’s so naturally for us to play together and since we’re so close, we have a really good rapport when playing the music. So we’ve done a lot of performing since then, both with acoustic settings with the two of us and then up to a lot of musicians with electric violins. I play some keyboards and I did some work on the album coming out in October just to try to expand my own musical horizons through the band. I look for different voices and ways to use the violin and I think that’s becoming much more common in rock and roll to have string players up there. So that’s what I want to add.

SSv: So as you gain the freedom you want, are you finding new things coming to the surface that you didn’t even picture happening?

Jannina: One of the great things about Hollands is that there’s no set band members. There are a lot of people around that we like to play with a lot. We’re surrounded by so many wonderful musicians that when we want to write something and we need synthesizers or flutes or multiple string players, we can write stuff for that and get people up there. So when it comes to writing the music, we have so much flexibility in terms of that.

John-Paul: Sometimes there’s a trend that goes with people like Akron/Family or Grizzly Bear or some other Brooklyn band who will bring in a classic arranger and then contract a group to come in and perform. It’s very common these days to hear that kind of lush, almost overblown at times production, because I think that’s what bands feel free to do these days. There’s no parameters. There’s no restrictions anymore. Music that 20 years ago would have been considered out of this world or something like that is completely okay today.

I can only think of it as bloated. It’s not just a band anymore, but it’s all these extra people brought in. But I think we have an advantage in all of that because we wouldn’t have to contract anyone to come in. This band is not made up of rock and roll musicians. Everyone is making classical music for their occupation, whether it’s orchestral work or jazz or session work. So we can do things that others can’t and it’s not stuffy. It’s organic and you’re friendly with them. You can ask them for anything because they can do them for anyone else.

So it’s great to have friends like this and I’d love to keep it this way. I wouldn’t want it to be like going into some big studio with a large orchestra stuffing it behind a rock band. I don’t know. It’s just one of those things for me.

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Tagged as: orchestral pop

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