Interview: The State of Samuel
With frequent comparisons to both Apples in Stereo and Guided by Voices, The State of Samuel forged its own identity in the twee/indie genre with its quirky, confident mix of esoteric lyrics and a just-so lo fi sound. The band's Samuel Petersson and Peter Eriksson played me some of the material from the upcoming release -- oh, just you wait -- at their rehearsal space in Stockholm, as they reflected on tape recording, touring like crazy, and knowing a lot of obscure bands.
- Roni Brunn
RB: How has your move from your home town on the West Coast to Stockholm changed your perspective on music?
SP: Well, I went from a no scene to a scene, basically. [Laughs] I recorded some tapes, in Varberg where I'm from. I went downtown and sold them there, but it was just a fun thing to do. Here more people cared and asked me to play shows and stuff. Which was pretty much, nonexistent back there. I wasn't really looking for that back then, either.
RB: Why is Stockholm a better fit for you?
SP: Everyone is here, basically: all the bands and all the journalists that care about this kind of music live here. After living here for like two years, I started to know all these people. So they book me at shows and, now some of those people have moved on to having their own radio shows or write for magazines, so they've become pretty successful.
RB: How would you describe this type of music?
SP: Home recorded, bedroom music, [laughs] at least that's what it used to be. I don't know now. But I still do like to write songs on my four-track. Just not the final product. It's more, maybe computerized now. But we still record some on four-track...
PE: And then transfer it to a computer.
SP: We do like, overdubs.
RB: How do you decide which track to do where?
SP: It depends on the vibe you want on the track too
PE: It's kind of more lo-fi to do it on a four-track tape recorder then on a computer. Maybe I'm to blame a little bit. Because we were recording a lot on the computer, but I think Sam deserves to be...
SP: We need it to progress to the computer to get a bit more hi-fi.
PE: Get a radio hit [laughs].
RB: Describe your songwriting process.
SP: I sit at home with my headphones on with my electric guitar plugged directly into my four-track. And then I play guitar and sing. I have a chorus pedal that's really fuzzy lo-fi that I use. So I basically pad my vocals to get, to get the classic sound on my tape recordings.
RB: Once you've recorded a song, do you go back to change it, or you take it as it is, or throw it all out?
SP: Usually there are just nonsense lyrics. So I have to finish it on my acoustic guitar, maybe. I write the lyrics and maybe bring it down here, we'll play it together, and decide if it's gonna be an electric song or an acoustic song. And then these guys usually add something, like a break. Usually when I bring songs here, they have really simple structures. And Isak, he's a songwriter, too, but he writes more complex songs.
RB: How did you hook up?
SP: I got an email from Isak's brother, Matti. Somehow he heard that I was looking for people to play in my live band, 'cause I always switch people, I really didn't have any steady people to play with. So he wrote me and said like, "I think I should be in your band," And he brought these two guys along.
RB: Why the changing lineup?
SP: I just want to do this stuff live with everything, like the drums, bass. I usually record all that stuff myself. It was around 2001 when I released my first EP, and there was a bit of hype around it, so people were asking for gigs.
RB: How does the lineup change and evolve?
SP: In Glasgow, we played with a new guitarist named Andrev. He might join us for gigs, but I'm not sure if he's gonna be in the recordings.
PE: He's got a different style of playing guitar.
SP: It's basically me, Isak, and Peter. It's like the main core of the band.
PE: Maybe we'll end up a trio. It's enough.
SP: We'll bring someone out for live shows. But those guys, they have stuff to do, their own bands. So I don't know if they really want to be in another band. [Laughs] When you rehearse, it's good to not have so many people who want input. I still want simplicity, the classic structure, in my songs. And if you get too many producer-types involved, it can get a bit messy, 'cause they want to change the bass here, and we should have this cool thing happening here.
PE: There's Sam, and there's me. I'm the recorder, but I play in four bands, they record a lot of stuff. And Isak is also songwriter, so it's enough as it is. [Laughs]
SP: It's still my thing, I guess, and I like the other guys to have their main things. Peter has a lot of main things [laughs]. Isak has Speedmarket Avenue, and that's his big band. So there's no jealousy or anything like that. I hope.
PE: It's more like suggestions. It's never, "I want to play it like this, otherwise, I'm not playing it."
SP: I don't think people want to get too involved, either, because they have their own bands, too.
RB: Do you help out other bands?
SP: Yeah, I do vocals with Speedmarket Avenue, and I play if someone needs a guitarist for a show. Everyone here in Stockholm knows each other, like all those bands you probably dig, Acid House Kings, for example.
RB: What attracts you to simple, classic songwriting? And simple classic sounds?
SP: It's basically what I'm listening to: classic American power pop from the '70s and '80s.
RB: What do you listen to?
SP: Everything. [Laughs] Game Theory, Let's Active, Raspberries, Big Star, Badfinger, Rubinoos, Cheap Trick, The Shoes, 20/20, Fotomaker. And a whole lot more.
RB: And do you listen to current stuff?
SP: Yeah, I still listen to current power pop that has the classic vibe. But those bands are really obscure, usually. Chris Richards put out a great CD last year. And this year, a guy called Devin Davis put out a great CD, too. I listen to all that indiepop stuff too, and all the classic pop/rock. A lot of different things.
RB: How do you find out about all those people?
SP: Usually through, really nerdy mailing lists. [Laughs] Have you heard about Not Lame? It's a pretty geeky mail order website. They've been doing it like for 10, 20 years or something. It's just power pop, and they make recommendations.
RB: Which format do you prefer, the EP or a full-length album?
SP: I prefer the EP. But since no one really cares about EPs, I prefer the full-length [laughs].
RB: What do you like about EPs?
SP: You can put them out pretty fast, I guess. 'Cause they only need four songs. But what I don't like about making EPs, like if you put all your good songs on one, they might disappear, and people don't seem to take notice. This will sound pretty crazy, but if you produce a good album, it will go down in history. And if you produce a good EP, maybe people will write about it, but it won't be the same. I think people appreciate the record more. But I like EPs.
PE: Yeah, me too. But sometimes, you get the feeling that the bands are stressed out, because they want to release something almost every year or something. So you gotta do an EP. And then it kind of disappears. You know they could wait two years and release a full length album. I think it's terrible.
SP: Yeah, you want to save all the good songs for the full length, usually. And now you can put out an EP single, from a record, and add three other songs that are not maybe album material, on it. I think that's a better way.
PE: The classic way.
RB: How has your sound evolved?
SP: It's evolved from being really, really fuzzy, bad sounding lo-fi, to really good sounding, [laughs] tight lo-fi. When I started out, I really couldn't sing that well. I didn't have any power in my voice, more or less. It was more like I was singing in my bedroom, all these short songs about weird things. And I put out tapes.
RB: Has the songwriting evolved as well, you said you were singing about weird things?
SP: Mainly because of the other guys in the band. Isak usually puts an intro somewhere or a bridge. Or backing vocals. The ideas I write is still pretty basic. I bring it here, and we see what to do with it. Some stuff stays basic.
RB: What inspires you to create music?
SP: I don't know. It used to be the only thing I had to do when I felt lonely [laughs]. I really wasn't much of a party guy when I moved here. I went to shows, but on the weeknights, I sat at home and just recorded songs on my four track. About stuff I read in books and old films. I think more recently it's been more about, maybe my life. But it's still pretty abstract [laughs].
RB: Why is that?
SP: I guess I write lyrics down as the song progresses, until I finish a song. Then I'll play the song, and other words will come out of my mouth. I will be like, "oh, that word sounds so much cooler." [Laughs] So I put that word there instead. And the song will actually end up sounding cooler, but maybe with a bit weird content than it started out to be. A lot of the songs that we will release on a new record make sense, if you analyze them, but it's pretty hard to tell.
RB: So they don't reflect what you at first started out saying?
SP: Some of the songs reflect sadness and dark stuff. Then other songs are pretty happy, but still with pretty sad lyrics. But I think I'm happier as a person now than I was, say, last year or the year before that, when I wrote a lot of stuff for this album. I guess you have to progress and start writing about your personal life [laughs] eventually.
RB: Some of the new material sounds darker.
SP: Yeah, that's, if you read the lyrics, like, they might sound dark, but they still rhyme.
RB: Is it hard to play something that was much more meaningful to you a while ago?
SP: Not really. Even though I write them from my perspective, the lyrics are abstract. People really need to analyze them, so I don't feel weird playing them at all. It's not like I write, "I'm feeling sad and I want to die." They're not trying to describe depression, 'cause I didn't really have a depression. They're just trying to describe feeling lonely and to describe the dark side. In a positive way. But some of the songs can just be about a character in a movie. I still write those songs, so it'll be a jolly good mix, I guess.
RB: What sort of movies do you like?
SP: I used to buy a lot of bad, crappy American movies, like, B-movies. But I like all the classic stuff, "Planet of the Apes" and "Spartacus."
RB: What's in the future for The State of Samuel?
SP: The future is to put out a new record.
RB: Are you gonna tour it?
SP: Yeah. We're gonna tour like crazy [laughs]. Definitely gonna do a European and an American tour.
RB: How is it different playing in the U.S. versus at home?
SP: Well, here, Stockholm, is kind of special, I guess. 'Cause if we play, maybe, a city 10 miles away from Stockholm, people will be really appreciative, but here, people are...
PE: More like 100 miles...
SP: I mean, like, Norrköping.
RB: 10 Swedish miles?
SP: Yeah, 10 Swedish miles [laughs]. And here, people are your friends and they don't care too much.
PE: Depends on the venue. If it's a big venue, and you're an opening act for some other band or something, when we played, we were the opening act for Essex Green, you know, it's like different. Sometimes you end up playing for 10 of your friends and five people you don't know. It's mostly quite a good crowd in Stockholm.
SP: If you play a medium sized city, where they don't get a lot of shows, people would come more than here.
PE: Yeah, it's more fun to play out in the country.
SP: It's like New York or like any big city where people get so many shows, they can't go to all of them. Something like that.
SP: Is it similar in the States? Do you find that playing smaller cities is better?
PE: We didn't play in the smaller cities.
SP: I want to play the big cities in the States. I find that people are really more appreciative there. They're really into it -- they talk to you after the shows, and buy your record, usually. But I think next time we'll try to tour with a bigger band. If you're going there, you're still assured that people will come to the show. I have some contacts overseas so we'll see.
RB: How do you see your audience? Is it a different crowd in every city?
SP: Here it's mainly middle aged and thirties guys. [Laughs] But that's mostly Stockholm. Outside Stockholm, it's a lot of young people, like 16, 17 year olds.
PE: It's more fun to play an all ages show than a 21 and over place.
SP: I guess what you see happening in the States right now is that there's a lot of young people liking indie pop bands, and those people go to shows. They're usually more crazy and appreciative when you go there. So there's a lot of those fans. The last album came out two and a half years ago. When this comes out, we will support it, and, hopefully, get a newer teenage fan base. But I still find that people seem to find out about older records online and write me, so it's pretty cool.
RB: Where else do you think your music would fit?
SP: In Japan, they like Swedish music and really obscure music. After I released my first EP, I was contacted by this label that mostly releases like dance, techno or Japanese music, not really what I was doing. They contacted me in 2002, and they wanted to release a compilation of songs from my tapes and the seven inch. So I put that together, and they mastered it and put it out. I got Japanese fan mails, pretty exciting. Totally unexpected. So it was a really fun thing to happen. I want to go to Japan. People seem fun and crazy. If they like bands, they seem to really be into them and go to shows. So it'll be like just see the culture and see if I have any fans over there, who they are, where they are.
RB: Were you happy about the song structure? The track order?
SP: Yeah, it's a pretty good overview of what I've been doing since I started out, the best songs from the tapes and the seven inch. But now we sound a bit different. Before, I wrote the verse and chorus, and then I recorded in like one minute [laughs]. And now, we're doing the fourth and fifth recording on songs. It's pretty different.
PE: It's going to be quite different record from the last one.
SP: After that, I put out a record in 2003 on a Canadian label and on a Swedish label. I guess that progressed a little bit from the Japanese release.
.:About the author:
Designer/musician Roni Brunn dreams of Stockholm while residing in Los Angeles, where she runs a math club. Of course.