Silversun Pickups

Features • Wednesday June 24th, 2009 • 12:00 am

It was the blank slate that both excited and terrified Brian Aubert. Of course, one quick listen to Silversun Pickups latest, Swoon, reveals there was nothing to worry about. Still it’s interesting to talk to the front man of the Los Angeles rock band about the beauty and nerves of such a creative tension.

Recently, Swoon rocked it’s way to a #7 debut on Billboard’s Top 100, cementing Silversun’s status as one of the country’s best new rock bands. The comparisons to Smashing Pumpkins hold true, but SP holds a sound all its own – an emotion and intensity both virile and sensitive that’s only bolstered by the his/her vocals from Aubert and Nikki Monninger.

Aubert recently sat down with us to discuss the creative tension the band felt after using up all their previously written songs.

SSv: Going into Swoon, how do you get a mindset for creating an entirely new record from scratch? Because I read you used up all your older material for the Pikul EP and Carnavas.

Brian Aubert: The first thing you do is look down at the floor. [Laughs] That’s the reality because at first you’re going all over the place with a million things swimming in your head, you know? There’s a lot you want to do and a lot of places to go and a lot of song ideas in your head and it all swirls around to make you a little insane. So you just have to go brick by brick. You have to focus a little bit and start simply. If you think about the whole thing, it will overwhelm you a bit – at least that was our reality.

With this one, it was the first time we ever wrote a record from beginning to end, so there’s a lot of excitement and a lot of nerves thinking about this album. We knew we could do it, but could we do it the way that we wanted? We were touring Carnavas for two years and it started with Pikul before that, so that morphed into the Carnavas tour. When we were making Carnavas, we were touring for Pikul and it all blended together for two years straight. When we got back home, we just decided to take a month off. That was about it. We didn’t want to dilly-dally, but we did need to sit for a minute and reconnect to our world.

After about two years, you start learning things about your own songs and you start extracting things from them that weren’t there in the first place. So that signified to us that we were moving forward. There’s no good way to make sure you’re growing. There’s no meter. [Laughs] When you’re a kid, you can tell you’re growing from the pencil mark on the wall and I wish the same thing existed for artists. You can never tell because it’s in your head the whole time. The only way it kind of shows is while you’re playing, near the end of the tour there are places live that you want to go and it’s just not happening.

We also knew that we wanted to bring some of the warmth and organic sound that was in Pikul and some of our early stuff, so we knew there would be strings and stuff like that. So we began with that and then we just held on. I mean, we went for it.

SSv: How much of the intensity stemmed from the success of the first album?

Brian: We knew we were lucky because of the bizarre success of the band and we were now allotted time to work on a record, which we never had before and a lot of bands don’t get that chance. Since we knew we were able to only do nothing but work on music, we wanted to make sure that’s what we did. We didn’t just want to fuck off but we wanted to get in there and really, really, really work. So we started in February of 2008 and went into this rehearsal space we nicknamed “The Duck” and kept working.

It was really intense for us and we kept at it really hard. We did that because we knew we really wanted and needed to learn these songs before we got into the studio. This was the first time we went into the recording studio without a history with some of the music, so we didn’t know what that might be like. So we almost overwrote every piece and every part to where we could play all of them live and every part live before we got into the studio. So when we got there, it was actually relaxing. I mean, Chris started with the drums and we just blew through them. Then we thought, ‘Hey, maybe we’re working too hard. Maybe we should have relaxed for a second.’ [Laughs]

You know, fear really does a lot to you. People ask us about the sophomore slump or the pressure that comes with a new record and none of that was true. But we do put a pressure on ourselves to make this worthwhile and not just a second record so that we can hock a product. We wanted it to feel like it needed to be there, in our own sort of world.

SSv: When you have that blank slate, what are the first strokes? Is there a first song that came to life?

Brian: Well, I said we took that month off, but it really wasn’t. It was preparing to get in there and make sure we weren’t staring at each other. [Laughs] When we got our own rehearsal space, I think we did actually stall for a while. The first day, we went in there and someone said, ‘Hey do we need mic stands? Yeah, let’s go get mic stands.’ And then we’d go get them. Then we needed a lamp, so we went to get that. [Laughs]

But in the month, I collected all of these tidbits and moments and ideas that I really remember loving and also some newer things were coming up. We wanted to just have at least seven or eight rough little ideas – not full songs, but things to begin with. So it wasn’t a complete blank slate, but we had a few things to work on. So we went in there and I played those seven things and we thought of what we wanted to start on first.

It’s funny because we eventually did write – and again, this was something new… The thing exciting to us now is that we can write with each other in mind. We’re not off in separate universes. The difficulty with Carnavas was to take some of the older stuff and bring it up to the point of the newer songs on the record. There was some separation going on there in the way they were written. But this time, you knew where you were and you could write songs that go together and shape an entire album.

“Secrets” is the first song on the new album and that was the first song we started writing. Right after that, “The Royal We” came next, and that’s the next song on the record. Then right after that, “Growing Old is Getting Old” was the next one. We were writing the record literally from beginning to end and the first four songs we wrote are literally the first four on the album.

SSv: So was “Surrounded” the final song you wrote?

Brian: “Surrounded”… that’s funny you ask because “Surrounded” and “Panic Switch” were the last ones we wrote. Before that, we had 16 songs and a couple of them were just fun. One was a quiet little pretty song that Nikki sings and we knew that would be a b-side. Another was a weird little demo thing that I did and that was also a b-side, unless the album needed it. But there were 16 songs and everybody, including myself at that point, was just glazed, red-eyed, so much to take in. Every time we came in every day, we would play through the other stuff before the newer ones. We would play all 14 things and then work on number 15 or whatever was the new one.

So on number 16, I remember telling everybody, ‘Okay, you know what? We’re good. We’re going to end it here and it’s going to be fine.’ I could tell everybody was fried and so was I, so I promised that I wouldn’t walk in with anything more. Well the next day… [Laughs] I had “Panic Switch” and “Surrounded” by the next day and I wondered, ‘Oh god, how am I going to get this to them?’ So I just started playing them early in the studio so when they walked in, they would hear them. They weren’t full songs yet but just the outlines and riffs and things like that. I was just hoping they would go for it and they did. I was playing “Panic Switch” and they were like, ‘Wow, we have to do this.’

I always imagined that “Surrounded” would be the end. The record is really taking shape and how the whole thing is feeling, so it’s not surprising that the last songs you write end up making the record. You become so in it that you know what’s happening and what needs to be in there. You know there are all these pockets in between what you’ve already done and you need to fill them. I always look at the record as a nervous breakdown and “Panic Switch” is the pinnacle of it. It’s angular and just schizo.

Then “Surrounded” came about because it just didn’t go anywhere but the end. I felt the same about a song on Carnavas called “Common Reactor.” There’s so much movement on the record – the guitar lines are climbing, the bass is sort of angular. They’re never staying still, but “Surrounded” felt like the blunt force at the end of it all that just stays on a chord. That was how we were feeling about the end.

SSv: That’s fantastic that you say you were still in love with the older sonics, because I would think after two years on the same songs…

Brian: I’m not a big fan of reinventing and we wouldn’t know how to do that anyway. This is just what happens when we play. So you just push forward and when you move on from those sort of things, I don’t think it’s a conscious choice for us to deconstruct. I think you just do. So it’s not something where you say, ‘Okay, let’s completely change that up here.’ That already adds a big process to the writing of the music which should be, for us, natural and yet uncomfortable.

We’re always going back to before and not knowing how to push that ‘Grow’ button and yet we want to. So we want to make it difficult for ourselves in songwriting or with themes or to make it a little out of our reach. Then that way, we feel like we’re pushing ourselves. We are still in love with the older sound and we felt there was more inside of it that we had yet to hit and who knows if we’ve hit it for ourselves at this point, but we knew there was a lot of areas whether not-so-subtle or subtle that we wanted to move to and that would be really quite explosive or quite playful. There was just a lot more in there that we didn’t see and it’s been really fun revisiting.

It’s also been fun to revisit the older songs live now. We can feel the difference playing them, of how much further for us that we have gone. In the same respect, I think we can now do justice to the Carnavas songs and we’re pushing them to the point of being unrecognizable. We’re putting them into the place they are the strongest because they’re now doing the things that we wanted them to do.

Tagged as: Los Angeles, Rock

By Matt Conner

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“After about two years, you start learning things about your own songs and you start extracting things from them that weren't there in the first place. So that signified to us that we were moving forward.”