Sea Wolf

Features • Wednesday November 4th, 2009 • 12:00 am

Sea Wolf is a Los Angeles-based band led by Alex Brown Church. The group’s new Dangerbird Records release, White Water, White Bloom, sounds like a Victorian novel set to orchestral music, with a proper literary British sensibility that deftly skirts its L.A.roots. Even so, one of Church’s songs recently landed on the Zombieland soundtrack, and that film placement seems worlds away from Church’s artistic center.

Stereo Subversion’s Dan MacIntosh recently caught Church while he was on tour to talk about everything from French speaking girlfriends to classic movies of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

SSv: I read that a lot of the new songs were written while you were in Montreal, and the lyrics reflect the changing of the seasons, which is something that is more observable in Montreal than it is here in Los Angeles. Was part of the inspiration for these new songs just the sense of awe at being in a place where you could actually see these changes in the seasons, and where you could see nature in a different way than in Los Angeles?

Alex Brown Church: Yeah, I would say to some extent that’s true. But you know I didn’t live in Los Angeles forever. I grew up in San Francisco and lived until I was eight in kind of a gold rush town in the mountains in California where there are definitely seasons – you know, snow in winter. I lived in New York for four years, and obviously it gets cold there. L.A. has seasons, but they’re a lot more subtle.

The longer you live there, the more obvious they become to you. That’s something that’s always interested me because whenever season changes, I find myself being inspired just because of the change in weather. In Montreal, certainly, the changes were far more exaggerated than in Los Angeles, so I’m sure that had a great deal to do with it.

SSv: I also read that you fell in love with a girl in Montreal. My mom was from a small town outside Montreal, so I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for that part of the world.

Church: How cool.

SSv: Are you at liberty to say how you met the love of your life?

Church: [Laughs] Yeah, we met while I was on tour, actually, with my previous band, Irving. And that was right before I signed to Dangerbird for Sea Wolf. I just kind of met while I was passing through one time.

SSv: Does she speak French?

Church: Yeah, French is her first language.

SSv: Oh, really…

Church: Yeah.

SSv: And have you learned any French?

Church: A little bit, yeah. Like I said, I spent some time in France as a kid – oh, I don’t know if I said that. I don’t speak, really, but I understand a little bit and I’m actually learning French right now.

SSv: Good for you! Communication is so important in any relationship.

Church: Her English is totally fluent, so that’s not a problem.

SSv: It’s interesting, with this Canadian connection, because I hear a lot of Arcade Fire in your music. I don’t know if you get compared to them at all, but it’s a comparison in the best sense because there’s just sort of a passion about your music that’s unavoidable, which is what I like so much about Arcade Fire.

Church: Yeah, I guess so. I certainly see them as doing something in the same vein as what I’m doing, for sure. A couple people sent me things that have mentioned that. I sort of feel like we’re making music at the same time and so we maybe have common friends and stuff.

SSv: One other thing I like about your music – and it’s not something often said about alternative music – is that it’s beautiful music. The orchestrations are really lovely. And a lot of times, when we think about alternative music, we think about angry kinds of sounds, and edgier things. And you your music is not at all edgy.

Church: Oh.

SSv: Do you take that as a compliment?

Church: Okay. No, not really. Well, I mean…edgy. I don’t know. I guess it depends on your definition of “edgy”.

SSv: How do you define “edgy”.

Church: Well, to me “edgy” means on the cutting edge. To me it doesn’t mean, like, aggressive.

SSv: So, you’re thinking of the word differently.

Church: But, whatever. It doesn’t matter. I don’t know. I guess everybody kind of does whatever it is that’s inside them, the best that they can, and mine happens to come out that way. Whatever I do happens to come out that way. I think that there’s elements of that kind of angry passion in what I do. There’s actually a string quartet on this record, which I think lends itself to having that lush, pretty feel. I can’t take credit for that. We’ve always had a cello. We had a violin on the last record as well as a cello.

So strings have kind of been a part of our sound. But the lush beauty of that was kind of more [producer] Mike Mogis’ idea. I think he saw that in the band, and he felt that was a direction to push.

SSv: And you were all comfortable with that direction?

Church: Yeah, I mean at first I was a little bit… I wasn’t even sure I wanted to have strings on this record, actually. But I respected his vision. I respect him and in the end, I think it was a great idea.

SSv: You were a film student at one time, right?

Church: Yeah.

SSv: I’m curious as to how you apply what you learned as a film student, to making music.

Church: I get that question a lot. I think the answer is that I don’t actively sit down and say, ‘What can I take from my school experience, and put it to this song?’ I don’t do that. It’s probably more just my education, my background, my status as a storyteller and keeping the viewer – or, in music’s case, the listener – engaged. So, I think that whatever I learned at film school, in terms of, like, dramatic structure and how to keep the listener (or the viewer) engaged, that’s probably what’s carried over into the music.

SSv: There’s also a strong literary streak in the music. You draw upon Greek mythology and your band name was taken from a Jack London story. Do you pull directly from literature to write songs, or do you sort of write songs and then dip into that knowledge of literature and then incorporate those inspirations into the narratives of your songs?

Church: Well, I definitely don’t draw directly from anything. Sometimes, maybe a word or a phrase will come out of a poem that I read. I [might] like the way that it looks or it feels, and it inspires an idea for a song. I would say that’s where it stops at, in terms of infusing any kind of literary substance into the music. I guess I just want to make the lyrics emotionally engaging, as well as interesting. I think that’s all I’m striving for.

SSv: Have you ever had any of your songs appear in motion picture soundtracks?

Church: Yeah, actually. “You’re a Wolf” was just in Zombieland.

SSv: Really?

Church: Yeah. I also just got an exclusive track on The Twilight Saga: New Moon soundtrack, which accompanies the Twilight series.

SSv: Well, that’s interesting because those are kind of…those wouldn’t be my first guesses. I imagine any kind of exposure is good exposure.

Church: Yes.

SSv: It will be interesting to see if you might garner new fans that may not have normally gravitated to your music; finding out about it through these soundtracks.

Church: Yeah, definitely. I’m wondering. Who knows what’ll happen with that?

SSv: Have you seen Zombieland?

Church: No, not yet. But actually I had something to do here in Ohio on tour, where everybody but me went and saw it.

SSv: Did they tell you it was placed in a good part of the film?

Church: Um. I think so. I don’t remember. I think it was, yes.

SSv: Have you ever written a song that could be interpreted as a horror song, about zombies or vampires or anything of that nature?

Church: [Laughs] I hope not.

SSv: No plans to do so?

Church: No

SSv: Do you even like those kinds of movies?

Church: I mean that’s not really my favorite kind of movie, no. But looking at Zombieland, it’s supposed to be fun. I liked Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland was very influenced by that so I’m sure it will be enjoyable.

SSv: They have fun with the genre, instead of trying to take it too seriously. I’m with you there. Speaking of movies, what kinds of movies do you like? Do you have favorite actors, directors and types of movies that you enjoy most?

Church: My favorite films are from the so called golden era of Hollywood, which is from the late ‘60s to the late ‘70s. Which is sort of when Hollywood was cranking out art films.

SSv: So you’re thinking about when guys like [Francis Ford] Coppola and [Martin] Scorsese and some of those guys started out.

Church: Yeah. Five Easy Pieces is one of my favorite movies. And I really like [Roman] Polanski’s films, also, Chinatown was great. I really like films from that era because they kind of had the best of everything, I think. They were thoughtful, yet they were also entertaining.

Tagged as: Los Angeles, Rock