Interview: High Places, swapping complex percussion for, eh, guitars

In Wayne's World, when Wayne and Garth stumble out of an Alice Cooper concert and onto Frankie Sharp from Sharp Records limousine, a cameoing Chris Farley proceeds to give them a ludicrously detailed run through Mr. Sharp's very busy travel arrangements. When Ragged Words catches up with High Places' Rob Barber and Mary Pearson as they pass a phone back and forth on the long drive from Denver to Omaha, Nebraska, the description of their first week on tour sounds just as ridiculous. They've left home in LA - after playing a gig, obviously - headed down to Central Mexico, back up to San Francisco, onto Potland and Seattle and then across to Salt Lake City and further still to Denver. You can almost see Farley vigorously pointing out the directions. And while the reason we're ringing the pair though is that their second album, High Places Vs Mankind, has just been released, how has that hectic week's touring gone so far? 

Rob: So far, so good. We've been playing with some cool bands that we didn't really know beforehand. We really like playing the US even though it's harder than playing most places because the dates are so far apart and there isn't a lot of money going around the States as far as touring goes, but we can romanticize touring across the US a bit. 

You're on the road from now pretty much until the end of May - is that the longest you've been consistently on the road, and is it something you generally enjoy? Or are there big drawbacks? 

Rob: I'll answer real quick: it is actually the longest direct stint to date. We toured a lot before, but we would always come home because New York was always in the middle of touring the States and flying to Europe.

We really like to tour, but then there's always logistical things like cats, and relationships, and trying to sublet my house to not waste money. That kind of stuff. Generally, we make sure we see as much as we can to keep ourselves sane... Here's Mary! 

Mary: Just to continue what Rob was saying, it does get a little harder the more tours you do; I think you just realise what you like about domestic life, but we try our best to recreate some kind of routine. With it just being the two of us, that's a little easier too. We're kind of like old people when we tour. We take lots of vitamins, eat healthy food and stay as fit as we can. 

We obviously want to talk to you about the new album, High Places Vs. Mankind, which is great. The debut was quite understated, it revealed itself over time, but when I first heard 'On Giving Up' it sounded much more immediate, a slightly bigger, more beat-based sound. Was it intentional to put that out first, as a way of saying to people that this is going to be a different-sounding record? 

Mary: Well, actually Rob was a little reluctant to release that as the first single. He just didn't think of it as 'the single' - he thought 'The Longest Shadow' or 'When It Comes' were the singles - so he was really surprised everyone thought "No, that's the song that's really accessible." I always had a soft spot for that song - I felt it was showcasing something we wanted to do, and something we'd been talking about doing for the past year or so. I'm happy with the new direction, I feel like it's as much a conscious decision as it is just the result of us making music for almost four years now, and learning to record ourselves a little bit better. It's just a natural next step. 

Just on that – listening to this album, the complex percussion-led sound of before seems to have dimished somewhat; for example, 'The Most Beautiful Name' and ‘When It Comes’ are, initially at least, more reliant on guitars. There are some Cocteau Twins moments in there to my ears... 

Mary: Oh, cool! 

...You've said, obviously, that it was a natural change, but was there anything in-between albums that informed that change? 

Mary: I guess the biggest influence we had was just changing the way we thought about guitar a little bit. In the past, we've used it as a canvas for making samples. We'd just record a melody on guitar, and do a bunch of things to tweak it and make it not sound like a guitar.

With this album we've been listening to a lot more guitar-based music; well, not necessarily listening, but playing with bands like Awesome Color, who are just a really great rock band, and we just thought “Man, we should just play our guitars live”. In order to do that we made recordings that sounded like guitars, so that was a big change. 

Rob: Instead of feeling like we're doing a remix live of what we've already done at home in the studio, I think this gives it more playability live, more nuances and more of a dynamic. I thought about whether I should play more real percussion live, and I realised I've been playing guitar longer than I've been playing drums, so we thought it'd be cool to have that interplay of two guitars on stage. 

I suppose one of the biggest differences on this record was that you'd moved from Brooklyn to L.A. What made you guys make the move? 

Rob: It's really simple. We had talked about it since the first time we went on tour - and we literally went immediately on tour once we started the band. Mary had never been to Los Angeles before then, and she liked it too. We had a lot of friends there who we'd play with anytime we were in town, and it just felt very natural socially and culturally. The big reason was weather; we'd be on tour so much, and then come home to a dreary New York, whereas we wanted to be excited to be coming home. We're pretty outdoorsy people too. When people think of Los Angeles, they think of Hollywood and the entertainment industry, but there's parts of it that, for a city, are really wild. 

I haven't heard of too many bands actively moving away from what seems to be such a fertile and creative place as Brooklyn. Were people surprised you left, or is the whole Brooklyn thing a bit overstated? 

Rob: Brooklyn's great because the people that are working there have to work very hard - and the same can be said for Los Angeles, London or any expensive city where you have to work really hard just to make your rent. Traditionally, back in the ‘60s or whatever, people moved to the cities because they were becoming blighted, were cheap and it was very conducive for making art or music. Now it's like the other way around. We might as well be living in Beverly Hills with the rent people are paying in San Francisco or London or New York. People working in Brooklyn have to overcome all that, and I think that is a big factor in the music that's being made there. That being said, I do feel that it gets mystified by the outside world. The worst thing I felt about New York was that people in New York were so New York-centric. They didn't tour as much as other bands because they felt they didn't have to, and that bothered me a little bit. 

I think the people that wondered how we could leave New York for Los Angeles are people that haven't spent a lot of time in Los Angeles and seen how the art and music scene works there. It's actually pretty vibrant; if you really go through a lot of the great American bands right now, a lot of them are from Los Angeles, almost as much as New York. When you bring in the natural elements like the desert and the ocean, moving definitely wasn't a step down. And stepping down's not always bad. I'd like to move to a small town some time and see what it's like to make music from. I think we both always want to shake up our surroundings. It's good for creative energy. 

You mentioned working hard just to make rent, and you really did work the last album. Did the fact that you established yourselves somewhat after that album allow you more freedom this time around, or better resources for recording? 

Rob: Not really. Our label are very practical when it comes to money, and we're also borderline cheapskates when it comes to our finances.

Not to say we want to do things on the cheap, but we've always shied away from being in a position where people are throwing money at you, because at the end of the day they always have to recoup. So with this new record, we just worked at home again. Not much changed with our process, we just maybe got more hands-on with it. I don't think we really stepped up much. I mean, Mary bought Pro Tools because she wanted to learn it - but that's only a couple of hundred dollars - and I finally bought an amp that was decent - one that, for the first time in my life, I didn't have to worry about breaking! 

You said last time we spoke that, for financial reasons as much as anything, you had to find sounds wherever you could - using mixing bowls on the last album for example. Did you discover any fascinating new ways of creating sounds this time? 

Rob: We actually used our mouths a lot on this album. I know that sounds kind of weird, but just making little sounds with our mouths and using EQs on GarageBand or something to really tweak those sounds and make something percussive. For me at least, my favourite trick is just an EQ where I can push and pull the sounds in really drastic ways. 

Lyrically, nature features heavily again this time, but there are bigger subjects like addiction (‘On Giving Up’) and death (‘When It Comes’). Were you more confident lyrically this time around to tackle those subjects? 

Rob: That's definitely one for Mary!

Mary: I was just interested in the idea of writing stories. Maybe a little bit of that has to do with being in L.A. My lyrics when we lived in New York were a lot about dreaming of somewhere outside the city, or just thinking beyond the city into more universal realms. Being in L.A., I found myself being really happy and, for a brief moment, I was like “What do I write about when I'm happy? This is going to make for some really bad songs!...” And then I figured it would be really great to try my hand at stories of experiences I could have had, or other people could have had. I guess I got to thinking about how I used to always want to tackle all these universal themes, but you know, often the songs that really ring true with people are actually very personal accounts. A really personal love song often becomes a love song for so many other people, so instead of being so vague I wanted to zero in on some specific things human beings encounter. 

Am I right in thinking the album title therefore reflects the road the lyrics have taken? 

Mary: Yeah, definitely. It was a bit of a tongue-in-cheek reference to that whole idea. 

Looking ahead briefly to you coming over to the UK and Ireland: can we expect anything different from the live show to make the new songs come to life onstage? 

Mary: Well, we'll have our guitars with us this time! So that's obviously a big change people will notice straight away. We’ve figured out some things about controlling the effects on our vocals live too - just from speaking to a few people about how to do that well - so we've got to the stage where the level of my live vocals reflects the level they’re at on record. We're also using samplers more than drum pads now; there's still some live percussion too, but Rob's obviously playing a lot more guitar as well. Yeah, so things are definitely different. 

And what's the plan once the tour is done in May? More touring I guess? Or will you have time for a breather at some stage? 

Mary: We're touring Japan and Australia. We'll also be touring some more in The States. And I'm sure we'll be going back to Europe not long after this tour. On top of that, we want to make a bunch of videos and are already talking about doing some new songs, so we have a lot of projects to work on over the summer. We definitely won't be granting ourselves a summer vacation!