Interview with Saint Bernadette – Part 2

DOA:  Now, Keith, you do backing vocals also for at least one of the EPs. There’s a lot of your backing vocals on I Wanna Tell You Something.

Keith:  Yep, we like to have this format in the band where we’ve got a female singer and a male back-up singer.  It’s a little bit of a role reversal from the more traditional set-up of a male vocalist and female back-up singers, so we kinda like that aesthetic for our band.  But on the new album I’m singing lead vocals along with Meredith on a few tracks, I think about three songs on the new record, so I do a little bit more singing now.

DOA:  I was wondering about that.  If you would progress to that stage, because I think it is interesting to have the two different types of singers.

Keith:  Yeah, that works for us.  We have a lot of fun.

Meredith:  I think we’re kinda moving away from even the concept of the lead and the back-up.  It’s more just complimentary.  I think in the indie world at this point there are so many bands that have multiple singers.

Keith:  And we’ve never referred to our guitar-playing as lead or rhythm either, between me and Joe.  Sometimes I’ll do lead parts and Joe does a lot of lead parts. We like to mix it up and let everyone have their moments and feel like it’s more interesting to us and hopefully for our fans and listeners.

DOA:  So, Joe, you’re doing slide guitar then?  Is that on all of the songs, because I haven’t heard every single song of yours, but I’ve heard a lot of them.

Joe:  I think pretty much all of them.  I occasionally play trumpet on some of the songs but usually I play slide on those as well.

DOA:  You do use additional instruments on some of your songs, like horns.  Is it just trumpet or…?

Keith:  Joe plays trumpet.  There’s a little bit of trumpet on every album, and he plays live, and then we’ve added strings to the new record.

Joe:  A lot of harmonica on the new record.

Keith:  We’ve been playing with Joe Roberto of Joe Roberto and Poverty Hash.  He’s been joining us on stage for the past year and he’s been on Word To the Lourdes and he’s on the new Cover Thy Neighbor album as well.  He’s doing harmonica and back-up vocals.

DOA:  Going back to Joe here, for the slide guitar, is it the main instrument you like to play?  When you were growing up is that what you wanted to play?

Joe:  After a certain point I think. I started playing trumpet as a kid and then picked up guitar and started playing that more and then kinda picked up slide guitar, lap steel-ish, and started focusing on that in my later teenage years.   Pretty much since then that’s been my main focus, and I still use guitar to write sometimes, and sometimes keyboards, and I still play trumpet sometimes, but the lap slide guitar is my main instrument.  My uncle built an instrument for me after I finished school that we designed together and that’s the main thing I use.  It’s a very versatile, kinda weird, kinda custom instrument.

DOA:  Not quite lap steel guitar, but…?

Joe:  Yeah…it’s a…

Meredith:  …a hybrid animal.  Custom head to toe, just like Joe.

(amused laughter)

Joe: That’s right. It lends itself to a lot of different sounds that we use with the band which is fun because sometimes we tend to be very dynamic in a way where we’ll go very loud, sometimes abrasive rock ‘n’ rock and then bounce back to folk and blues and soul, and all over the place.  The instrument manages to work very well.

DOA:   Going back to Keith, and this is more of the business side of it, you’re also a producer of your recordings.  All of them or…?

Keith:  Yeah, Meredith and I have a recording studio and produce other bands as well and so we’re mostly self-produced, but we do like to bring in some help so that when we’re in the studio working on our own records, we can take a back seat once in a while and just be the musicians and the artists and not have to also be the producers, which can be somewhat distracting.  Sometimes you can wear too many hats and lose focus of the creative side, so occasionally we like to employ some help during the recording process, but I think we know what we want and what we want to sound like, so we’re very hands-on in the studio on our own projects.

DOA:  You actually have your own record label, Exotic Recordings, so that’s the distribution side of it, for releasing the albums through the label.  Is that a lot of work, because basically you’re doing everything!

Meredith:  It’s a lot of work.  It’s a ton of work.

Keith:  It’s very rewarding for us.  It’s what we love.

Meredith:  I don’t really love the label part of it that much, putting all the CDs in the envelopes and sending them out, accounting, I don’t love accounting.

DOA:  Right.

(laughter)

Keith:  But we do love finding new talent and new artists and cultivating and discovering and developing talent.  That’s rewarding for us.  I love to work with bands over the course of years or a few albums and watch them grow and become great and be a part of that.  That’s really satisfying.

DOA: The bands that you pick and that you work with, do they share a sound in common with you?

Keith:  I think the idea behind Exotic was to have a pretty eclectic mix of styles and genres and that was our plan, to be sort of a worldly label that can have a common denominator of great music but each in its own style and we don’t like to have artists that sound the same as other artists.  We like to spread out the sound of our catalog and incorporate lots of different flavors.

DOA:  Speaking of the music side of it, I want to go into detail more about your actual music and the sound.  What I love about a lot of your songs is that there’s always something a little bit unexpected in them.  A lot of them sound like it’s going to be the “verse, chorus, verse” traditional song structure, but then you tend to mix it up.  I wanted to give an example of that, the song “Love Is a Stranger” from the EP I Wanna Tell You Something.  First it sounds like it’s going to be this straight-ahead heartbreak number, with the soft verse and more bittersweet chorus, but then there are certain changes, like Meredith, for your vocals, on the chorus there’s a part where your vocals go up and the music goes down, and usually you’d expect everything to do the same thing, but here it’s the opposite effect, so I think that’s interesting.  And then near the end of the song you hold this note for a really long time…

(muffled laughter)

Meredith:  I try to do that once per record.

DOA:  I was wondering if you do that live because I would think that would wear on the vocal cords.

Meredith:  Oh, yeah.  I do do that live.

Keith:  She does.

Meredith:  And live sometimes we do a couple of the different songs where I do that, with the extra-long hold.  Yeah, just to show off a little bit, just to prove that I can hold my breath for an entire lap in the pool.

(laughter)

DOA:  Because, really, it’s the show-stopper.  And in that song too there’s an instrumental break where it gets really fast ‘n’ frenzied and it’s exhilarating.  For that instrumental break, what instruments are being played?  Is it guitars, because it’s really like a fast fiddling sound, almost.  I don’t know if that was just guitar?

Joe:  That’s Keith on guitar.

Keith:  That’s me doing the fiddly stuff and it’s over the rest of the band doing really tight, orchestrated, punchy hits underneath it.

Joe:  There’s a distinct rhythmic change from the rest of the song.  It’s in double-time, so the time is cut in half.  We all just kind of go nutty for a little while.

Keith:  That part of the song was designed to be the release.  The sentiment kind of builds to a head and then it’s the explosion of the feelings.

Joe:  This is a vague memory, but if I remember right, it was the second or third time we had rehearsed and we were starting to write the parts of the song together and somehow the idea came up of “Something’s gotta happen there.  Let’s do this”.

Keith:  We were playing with my brother Kevin on drums and rehearsing for that album and that was one of those full-band collaboration moments where everybody works on this idea to take the song to that different place.

Joe (in British accent):  Take it to 11.

Meredith:  Yeah, turn it to 11.

DOA:  In other songs of yours, it’s kind of like that, where there are those unexpected moments, so I was wondering if it was something that was deliberate, when you’re creating the songs, or if it’s something where you’re all playing together and then it just happens.

Meredith:  It’s pretty much every way that you can imagine how some of these things get created.  Sometimes whoever wrote it has a very clear idea and other times there’s more of a sketch and it grows out of that.

Joe:  And we all have converging, yet different tastes in music, surely, but something we all share is a love for music that tends to be fairly dynamic, not afraid to emote pretty brutally at certain moments and be soft and go all over the place.  We all like the theatrical sense of music.  It seems to come out in the arrangements of songs a lot.

DOA:  That kinda ties into my next question, because you don’t tend to stick to one style per se for your songs, like you have certain songs that are more in the classic 70s hard rock sense, like the band Heart, at least I think, like the song “Hard To Believe” and “I Can’t Add You to My List”, but then you also have the alt-country or alt-folk sound where it’s softer and acoustic guitars, like on “I Wanna Tell You Something” and “Don’t Take This Away from Me”, and then you also have the 80s rock sound –

(laughter)

DOA:   …like on “In Between”, on the chorus where it blasts away and it’s like a power ballad, in a good way, but then overall you have another sound which you were describing as the more bluesy, old-school, soulful sound, and I’m wondering where that influence comes from because it does seem to be the base of your songs, but you didn’t grow up in that era, so is it from hearing your parents’ records that you got into it or something that you picked up later on your own?

Keith:  Connecticut radio.

Meredith:  When you live in Connecticut you definitely only hear music that’s pre-1980 on the radio, but Keith has very much a classic rock and jazz sensibility, and is coming from that, and I grew up listening more to Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and into Linda Ronstadt and modern pop vocals, and then I think everybody loves the blues.  You learn that and get exposed to it as you get into any type of music because that’s obviously where everything’s coming from.  All the standard progressions and the rhythms and the arrangements are all coming from that.  I mean, you have to love it and it will always factor because it’s best type of entertainment-based music.

DOA: Not like the disposable pop song.  Well, some of them can be good too.

Meredith:  Yeah, sure.  Pop is good too.  Everything’s good.  There are good examples of all types of music.

DOA:  Speaking of that, you mentioned rapping.  Are the rap songs just for fun?  I think you posted some of them online, but I don’t think any of that has appeared on your recordings.

Meredith:  I did a project briefly where I was the voice of a rapper called Chunky Pam on MTV.  When Keith and I met, Keith was in a rap band and I was a singer in it, so I was really into hip-hop in the late 80s and early 90s and I have a side project that Keith produces where I rap with one of our former band members called the Shoot Your Wads.  The band that we were in before this band, we tried to integrate rap together with rock and we were female and nobody was ready for it.  Which is probably good…

DOA:  Ahead of your time.

Meredith:  Well, maybe just representative of something that shouldn’t ever happen, you know, it was not peanut butter and chocolate.  It was more like mayonnaise, peanut butter, and jelly.

(laughter)

Meredith:  But I can rap pretty well.  I like to, but I don’t think any rap will come into Saint Bernadette.  Maybe on our bonus record that we’re gonna do later, next year.  We’ll have some rap.  Keith can rap too, actually.

Keith:  I used to rap a fair amount later in high school.  I don’t know if I’d say I can, but I did.

DOA:  I’m gonna switch gears here for a minute.  I just wanted to mention your videos.  I’ve seen two online.

Keith:  We have four official music videos and then a lot of live footage and miscellaneous stuff.

DOA: I saw the video for “Side Step”, which is the two of you, Keith and Meredith, driving in the car, and it has a tragic ending, which I do not want to give away, but it’s not a car crash.  I was wondering who thought up the scenario for the video and who shot it?

Keith:  That video was the concept of director Tim Spellman and it was his idea to put us in the car in these mysterious circumstances and he played around a little bit with the timeline and the shots to give a somewhat convoluted, mysterious look to the song which has a spooky, ambient feel to it.

DOA:  Do you plan on shooting any more videos?

Meredith:  We’re doing one this weekend.

Keith:  Yeah, we’re working on the first video for our first single on the Cover Thy Neighbor album called “Play To Win” and we’re gonna be working on another video for the second single off of that album, so yeah, we love doing videos for our songs.  We think they’re very important and one of the most fun parts of making music.  Videos are important.

DOA:  And that’s what’s interesting, that there are so many aspects to being in a band.  It’s not just playing music.  It’s the whole image –

Meredith:  It is.

Keith:  We create the aesthetic.

Meredith:  It’s sort of a world.  We want to create an entire scope of different elements that all surround the music, so that there’s a reason to be listening to it.  Not just while you’re vacuuming.

(laughter)

Keith:  And music videos have been important in music since the beginning of MTV in the 80s and I think they’ve only become more important.  I mean, people will go to YouTube first to find a band that they heard about and see what the band is and try to make a larger, more all-encompassing vision of what the band is about.

DOA:  It’s also because MTV pretty much doesn’t play music videos anymore… I want to ask about future plans because you did mention putting out an album of bonus material.

Keith:  We’ve got two more albums kicking around in our brains at the moment.  The next record will be another full-length of original music and the next record after that will be a concept album.  There’ll be original material as well, but it’ll be more a sort of odds ‘n’ ends production.

DOA: Any timeframe for working on those?

Keith:  We’re gonna put out both of these albums in 2010.

DOA:  Wow, that’s quick.  You just released –

Keith:  Yeah, we did two albums in 2009 and we’ve got two more that we’re working on, so we –

Meredith:  We like to work.

Keith: Yeah.  We can’t be accused of sitting around, not being prolific.

DOA:  And what about touring?

Keith:  We’ve got some plans.  We’re planning on going out to Texas in the spring and going down to Ashville, North Carolina again and we’re working on putting together a package with us and another band and maybe doing some touring with another Connecticut band.

DOA:  Sounds wonderful.  I think I’m going to wrap it up here then.  Thank you for doing this interview with me.

Meredith:  Thank you.

Keith:  My pleasure.