Conceivably you could experience all three versions of the Freelance Whales today–the recording, the busking and the staging–in San Francisco.

Their record Weathervanes has been out since April and it’s available on their site, where you can also indulge by downloading their single free. Busking (in their case, “freelance” busking?) in New York subways has allowed them to bare down the sound to acoustics and try out new songs on charmed strangers. They’ll be doing a free live set at Amoeba Records on Haight Street at 7 p.m. Finally, they will stage an opening act (in support of The Shout Out Louds) in full plugged-in splendor with synths, harmoniums, drum kits and waterphones on the gilded stage of the Great American Music Hall at 8:30 p.m.

For Chuck Criss, one of the many multi-instrumentalists in the Freelance Whales, the GAMH show is another homecoming (just two months after their Bottom of the Hill gig). He was raised in San Francisco, attending St. Ignatius Prep in the Sunset before taking his banjo-playing chops to East Coast schools, Great Lakes territories and finally to Queens, New York where the wonder of (irony, O, irony) San Francisco-founded craigslist.com put him in contact with the Freelance Whales.

Here Chuck Criss tells the story himself and talks about long bus rides, cold toes, musical friends, vinyl comebacks and, when pushed, gardening.

Chuck Criss: When I moved to New York I was looking for like-minded people. I think I typed in, like, “banjo” on craigslist and then it kind of went from there.

Perry Shirley of MuseZu: It’s that simple, huh, to find band members?

Yeah! [laugh] Well, yeah, in retrospect, it’s that simple. It was a long process. There was a lot of hit-and-miss. I was actually the last member to join the Freelance Whales. They were kind of recycling and going through a lot of members that didn’t exactly fit right so it was pretty serendipitous. We hit it off really well. They were looking for a banjo player and multi-instrumentalist and Judah [Dadone] had put some demos up online that were just great. It was just like, “I have to be part of this. It’s going to be a really great record.” Even from hearing the demo I could tell.

There’s also a visual side. There’s these videos of you guys playing in this strange place on Staten Island…

It’s like an abandoned farm colony slash hospital. It was our photographer friend Kendall [Mills] who had taken some shots there. That was really early when we first got together. We wanted to get some video content so we rearranged some of the songs acoustically, went out there. Took the ferry over there and then like another bus. Got to the middle of the island where it is and just filmed us playing song acoustic and put it online and stuff. But I mean the coolest part of our experience was it kind of encouraged us to arrange more of the songs in an acoustic kind of format and really start going on the streets and more like busking on subways which is a great way of meeting people–which is tough to do in New York

So the setting directly influenced the sound of your band… that you kind of kept with

You’re talking about the performance?

Yeah.

Yeah it defintely did and it really encouraged a group vocal energy which kind of translated to our live set we have now.

You’re going to be going on tour with the Shout Out Louds. First of all how did that come about? Is it your label that paired you guys together?

Yeah, our booking agent put us together. It was a band that I’ve definitely listened to before and admired. We played a show with them at the Music Hall in Williamsburg and met those guys, played with them and kind of of hit it off. We wanted to stay busy ’cause our record came out pretty recently, like April 13th, so we were trying to find something where we could go and tour that record a little bit.

And along the way there you get to play a few shows, like the May 25th UC San Diego show at The Loft, where it’s just your band headlining.

Once we get to California after those two shows in L.A. we are going to break off and do our own thing just to do some more shows in California ’cause we have Sasquatch coming up on the West Coast at the end of May so we’re going to go up there and do the Sasquatch [Music Festival] thing which we’re real excited about that, to get some to play a really huge festival like that.

You recently did SXSW also.

Yeah, that was really great. It was really busy; we played 12 shows in four or five days so it was pretty chaotic. It will be nice to go to Sasquatch and just be able to play one show and actually get to go around and camp out and watch all the other great bands on that that show.

Soak it in a little bit yourselves…

Yeah Pavement’s playing the night that we are playing.

You’re telling me! I’m the biggest Pavement fan [complete loss of professionalism]

Yeah, me too. I was really excited for that too especially since they are only playing big festivals. They’re not really touring properly.

They did the Coachella show; they exorcised their demons, after getting mud slinged on them the last time. But talk about that what have you been listening to. What would you say are some of the band’s influences as far as other bands go?

We have a pretty diverse taste in music but I guess you could say as far influences that plugged their way in the record: Broken Social Scene, Stars, Sufjan Stevens, bands like that. One of the influences is this band, you know “Le Loup?”

Le Loup. Yeah, uh huh…

They’re great. Judah’s kind of good friends with them. That’s probably one of the biggest influences on the record, I’d say.

The viral videos of you guys playing in subways in New York remind me a lot of this girl, Lykke Li.

Oh really?! [genuinely excited]

You know what I’m talking about?

I’m not familiar with her viral videos. I know her music and it’s great.

They do a lot of these outdoor performances where it’s a lot of her with musicians playing just sparingly.

Thanks, man it’s fun to do stuff like that. Keeps the songs interesting. Well, thanks that’s a compliment to be compared to Lykke Li.

So between the bigger stages when you’re playing with the Shout Out Louds and the smaller stages you get to play later, what’s the ideal setting for someone to hear your music?

The band’s kind of got three different sounds going for it. The acoustic thing to do on the streets and stuff and then how we sound on the actual recording and then our live set. I think they’re all great experiences and good ways to try to listen to and understand and enjoy the band and what we are doing. All three of them. It’s just a matter of preference, I mean. What we are doing more than anything is playing live, full, proper shows with all the instrumentations and full kit and a more brash setup than it is on the recording. I’d say to come to the live show, on a proper stage I guess. It’s good clean fun.

And you bring all these instruments with you on tour?

Yeah. Us, the banjos, the harmonium, the guitars and the synthesizers, it all manages to fit in our 15-passenger van. It gets there. We definitely carry a lot of fragile things with us.

Yeah have you ever had any trouble with that? If something breaks down are you going to have to bring it to some old repair place in town?

Yeah, things break. We broke the banjo but we were in Nashville so there was a shop practically on every block. That was a very fortunate place to have to restock on gear If we broke a synth that would be a bummer just ’cause we have a lot of presets on there. If we ever broke a harmonium that would be really tough too because Judah ordered that I think from India. But I think we can find them around. We would make do. We know how to play a lot of instruments so could cover it up but it would be a bummer yeah .

You know, you mentioned bands like Broken Social Scene and Stars of course there’s a girl singer and a guy singer in those bands. and you have that in you theres a chase or love story going

It was kind of based off… Judah had doing some dream-logging for about a year just writing about his dreams and we kind of pieced together this love story between a ghost and someone living in a house and we just kind of ran with it. There’s definitely some romantic elements. There’s a lot of life and death stuff. The whole albums goes into different elements of energy transference whether it’s body heat or electricity or passing from life to death. It’s all in there. All the lyrics are based off a dream kind of scape.

And in the video for Generator 2nd Floor, you guys kind of recharge this body…

Yeah, that was a fun video to shoot. It was probably one of the coldest days of the year and no one could feel their toes. It was like in Pennsylvania somewhere at the video director’s. Near his house. His dad had some farmland. It was freezing. Luckily, we were somewhat warm but the girl in the video, Alicia, she’s in it pretty briefly but she’s in nightgown and had to lie down on the snow. It’s only like 20 seconds of video but she was probably there for about an hour. So she took one for the team but she did a good job.

So, does the director kind of come up with the idea and you go “Meh, well okay that fits” or do you get to say “Here’s what we were going for…”

In this case we had to do that really quick. We had gotten back from a short tour just around the Northeast and we had a couple days off before we went out on the road again with Cymbal Eat Guitar and Bear in Heaven. So in that case, I mean… Eventually we’d like to get to the point where we kind of mock-up our own ideas for the videos. In this case, it was like we really want to have a video to coincide with the album release and the director had kind of sketched out some ideas for what he wanted to do and we just kind of showed up, praying it would be good and it turns out well. And that’s how it is most of the time. Normally you can give a little direction but there’s the directors and the artists. But yeah that was a fun first video to do

Okay so arguably one of your more popular songs is the next to last song on your album. I feel like other bands would be tempted to put it right there at the top of the tracklist, just say, “Screw it, we’ll give the people what they want.” Did you feel firmly about the story-telling process?

The way the album is track is very intentional. That’s the order we want and that’s what we intended to have. It woudn’t have really made sense to come after one because Generator 1st Floor opens the album and it’s about revving up a house and waking up. The end of the album is a little darker. Generator 2nd Floor is very funeral like, about putting a body into the ground. So there’s a whole story in between.

I get frustrated by how many people just want to hear singles.

Yeah. I mean most people just listen to their iPod Nanos or whatever and maybe listen to one song. We all love listening to an album in its entirety. I think it’s coming back. A lot of people are getting into vinyl. [Even the founder of Amoeba records said so]. Sales are up and listening to vinyl you can’t skip songs. It’s an experience. You have to listen to it and flip it over. A lot of time people will find the single and hopefully they will gravitate towards the album and listen to it order, the way it’s supposed to be. It’s out of our control, you know?

Yeah I was doing some gardening this weekend and i played your album through a couple of time. It works really well for that.

Nice. “Music For Gardening” that will be the name of our next album.

What’s the weirdest story you’ve heard about the band?

Rumors spread in weird ways. A lot of people think that we were kind of busking to make money which isn’t true. It was just a way to meet people it wasn’t like we were professional buskers. A lot of people think that we were all street musicians that all met up and happen to be in a band.

Do people in the subway ever join in on your playing?

Yeah that’s happen a few time–a kid with a harmonica will jump in. The subway is pretty rife with crazy stories. We’ll play and then some crazy homeless guy just likes stands in front and start yelling nonsense. It’s like a free for for all. It’s definitely a much more eclectic audience then playing at, like, the Great American Music Hall.

Are you going to have to give that up at some point if you start headlining more shows?

You know, it’s not about giving it up. It’s a good place to try out new material. It’s more just [about the] time. We don’t have a lot of time, which is great. It’s good to be busy. The time off between tour is much-craved time off where we tend to go home and sleep and water our plants.

“Water our plants”? I guess the Freelance Whales really is good for gardening. [Pay no mind: this is only the lame joke send-off I should have made but didn't think off at the time]

DO play mind, however, to the Freelance Whales. They released this album essentially on their own and, if it’s a sign of things to come, they’ve reached the right balance of talent, they should be lauded for sticking to their guns with running themes (a la Decemberist’s The Hazards of Love or The Antlers’ Hospice) and should be nothing but bigger their next time around on your radar.

Share on Facebook

Check out MuseZu for more of the same…

Share on Facebook

Conceivably you could experience all three versions of the Freelance Whales today–the recording, the busking and the staging–in San Francisco.

Their record Weathervanes has been out since April and it’s available on their site, where you can also indulge by downloading their single free. Busking (in their case, “freelance” busking?) in New York subways has allowed them to bare down the sound to acoustics and try out new songs on charmed strangers. They’ll be doing a free live set at Amoeba Records on Haight Street at 7 p.m. Finally, they will stage an opening act (in support of The Shout Out Louds) in full plugged-in splendor with synths, harmoniums, drum kits and waterphones on the gilded stage of the Great American Music Hall at 8:30 p.m.

For Chuck Criss, one of the many multi-instrumentalists in the Freelance Whales, the GAMH show is another homecoming (just two months after their Bottom of the Hill gig). He was raised in San Francisco, attending St. Ignatius Prep in the Sunset before taking his banjo-playing chops to East Coast schools, Great Lakes territories and finally to Queens, New York where the wonder of (irony, O, irony) San Francisco-founded craigslist.com put him in contact with the Freelance Whales.

Here Chuck Criss tells the story himself and talks about long bus rides, cold toes, musical friends, vinyl comebacks and, when pushed, gardening.

Chuck Criss: When I moved to New York I was looking for like-minded people. I think I typed in, like, “banjo” on craigslist and then it kind of went from there.

Perry Shirley of MuseZu: It’s that simple, huh, to find band members?

Yeah! [laugh] Well, yeah, in retrospect, it’s that simple. It was a long process. There was a lot of hit-and-miss. I was actually the last member to join the Freelance Whales. They were kind of recycling and going through a lot of members that didn’t exactly fit right so it was pretty serendipitous. We hit it off really well. They were looking for a banjo player and multi-instrumentalist and Judah [Dadone] had put some demos up online that were just great. It was just like, “I have to be part of this. It’s going to be a really great record.” Even from hearing the demo I could tell.

There’s also a visual side. There’s these videos of you guys playing in this strange place on Staten Island…

It’s like an abandoned farm colony slash hospital. It was our photographer friend Kendall [Mills] who had taken some shots there. That was really early when we first got together. We wanted to get some video content so we rearranged some of the songs acoustically, went out there. Took the ferry over there and then like another bus. Got to the middle of the island where it is and just filmed us playing song acoustic and put it online and stuff. But I mean the coolest part of our experience was it kind of encouraged us to arrange more of the songs in an acoustic kind of format and really start going on the streets and more like busking on subways which is a great way of meeting people–which is tough to do in New York

So the setting directly influenced the sound of your band… that you kind of kept with

You’re talking about the performance?

Yeah.

Yeah it defintely did and it really encouraged a group vocal energy which kind of translated to our live set we have now.

You’re going to be going on tour with the Shout Out Louds. First of all how did that come about? Is it your label that paired you guys together?

Yeah, our booking agent put us together. It was a band that I’ve definitely listened to before and admired. We played a show with them at the Music Hall in Williamsburg and met those guys, played with them and kind of of hit it off. We wanted to stay busy ’cause our record came out pretty recently, like April 13th, so we were trying to find something where we could go and tour that record a little bit.

And along the way there you get to play a few shows, like the May 25th UC San Diego show at The Loft, where it’s just your band headlining.

Once we get to California after those two shows in L.A. we are going to break off and do our own thing just to do some more shows in California ’cause we have Sasquatch coming up on the West Coast at the end of May so we’re going to go up there and do the Sasquatch [Music Festival] thing which we’re real excited about that, to get some to play a really huge festival like that.

You recently did SXSW also.

Yeah, that was really great. It was really busy; we played 12 shows in four or five days so it was pretty chaotic. It will be nice to go to Sasquatch and just be able to play one show and actually get to go around and camp out and watch all the other great bands on that that show.

Soak it in a little bit yourselves…

Yeah Pavement’s playing the night that we are playing.

You’re telling me! I’m the biggest Pavement fan [complete loss of professionalism]

Yeah, me too. I was really excited for that too especially since they are only playing big festivals. They’re not really touring properly.

They did the Coachella show; they exorcised their demons, after getting mud slinged on them the last time. But talk about that what have you been listening to. What would you say are some of the band’s influences as far as other bands go?

We have a pretty diverse taste in music but I guess you could say as far influences that plugged their way in the record: Broken Social Scene, Stars, Sufjan Stevens, bands like that. One of the influences is this band, you know “Le Loup?”

Le Loup. Yeah, uh huh…

They’re great. Judah’s kind of good friends with them. That’s probably one of the biggest influences on the record, I’d say.

The viral videos of you guys playing in subways in New York remind me a lot of this girl, Lykke Li.

Oh really?! [genuinely excited]

You know what I’m talking about?

I’m not familiar with her viral videos. I know her music and it’s great.

They do a lot of these outdoor performances where it’s a lot of her with musicians playing just sparingly.

Thanks, man it’s fun to do stuff like that. Keeps the songs interesting. Well, thanks that’s a compliment to be compared to Lykke Li.

So between the bigger stages when you’re playing with the Shout Out Louds and the smaller stages you get to play later, what’s the ideal setting for someone to hear your music?

The band’s kind of got three different sounds going for it. The acoustic thing to do on the streets and stuff and then how we sound on the actual recording and then our live set. I think they’re all great experiences and good ways to try to listen to and understand and enjoy the band and what we are doing. All three of them. It’s just a matter of preference, I mean. What we are doing more than anything is playing live, full, proper shows with all the instrumentations and full kit and a more brash setup than it is on the recording. I’d say to come to the live show, on a proper stage I guess. It’s good clean fun.

And you bring all these instruments with you on tour?

Yeah. Us, the banjos, the harmonium, the guitars and the synthesizers, it all manages to fit in our 15-passenger van. It gets there. We definitely carry a lot of fragile things with us.

Yeah have you ever had any trouble with that? If something breaks down are you going to have to bring it to some old repair place in town?

Yeah, things break. We broke the banjo but we were in Nashville so there was a shop practically on every block. That was a very fortunate place to have to restock on gear If we broke a synth that would be a bummer just ’cause we have a lot of presets on there. If we ever broke a harmonium that would be really tough too because Judah ordered that I think from India. But I think we can find them around. We would make do. We know how to play a lot of instruments so could cover it up but it would be a bummer yeah .

You know, you mentioned bands like Broken Social Scene and Stars of course there’s a girl singer and a guy singer in those bands. and you have that in you theres a chase or love story going

It was kind of based off… Judah had doing some dream-logging for about a year just writing about his dreams and we kind of pieced together this love story between a ghost and someone living in a house and we just kind of ran with it. There’s definitely some romantic elements. There’s a lot of life and death stuff. The whole albums goes into different elements of energy transference whether it’s body heat or electricity or passing from life to death. It’s all in there. All the lyrics are based off a dream kind of scape.

And in the video for Generator 2nd Floor, you guys kind of recharge this body…

Yeah, that was a fun video to shoot. It was probably one of the coldest days of the year and no one could feel their toes. It was like in Pennsylvania somewhere at the video director’s. Near his house. His dad had some farmland. It was freezing. Luckily, we were somewhat warm but the girl in the video, Alicia, she’s in it pretty briefly but she’s in nightgown and had to lie down on the snow. It’s only like 20 seconds of video but she was probably there for about an hour. So she took one for the team but she did a good job.

So, does the director kind of come up with the idea and you go “Meh, well okay that fits” or do you get to say “Here’s what we were going for…”

In this case we had to do that really quick. We had gotten back from a short tour just around the Northeast and we had a couple days off before we went out on the road again with Cymbal Eat Guitar and Bear in Heaven. So in that case, I mean… Eventually we’d like to get to the point where we kind of mock-up our own ideas for the videos. In this case, it was like we really want to have a video to coincide with the album release and the director had kind of sketched out some ideas for what he wanted to do and we just kind of showed up, praying it would be good and it turns out well. And that’s how it is most of the time. Normally you can give a little direction but there’s the directors and the artists. But yeah that was a fun first video to do

Okay so arguably one of your more popular songs is the next to last song on your album. I feel like other bands would be tempted to put it right there at the top of the tracklist, just say, “Screw it, we’ll give the people what they want.” Did you feel firmly about the story-telling process?

The way the album is track is very intentional. That’s the order we want and that’s what we intended to have. It woudn’t have really made sense to come after one because Generator 1st Floor opens the album and it’s about revving up a house and waking up. The end of the album is a little darker. Generator 2nd Floor is very funeral like, about putting a body into the ground. So there’s a whole story in between.

I get frustrated by how many people just want to hear singles.

Yeah. I mean most people just listen to their iPod Nanos or whatever and maybe listen to one song. We all love listening to an album in its entirety. I think it’s coming back. A lot of people are getting into vinyl. [Even the founder of Amoeba records said so]. Sales are up and listening to vinyl you can’t skip songs. It’s an experience. You have to listen to it and flip it over. A lot of time people will find the single and hopefully they will gravitate towards the album and listen to it order, the way it’s supposed to be. It’s out of our control, you know?

Yeah I was doing some gardening this weekend and i played your album through a couple of time. It works really well for that.

Nice. “Music For Gardening” that will be the name of our next album.

What’s the weirdest story you’ve heard about the band?

Rumors spread in weird ways. A lot of people think that we were kind of busking to make money which isn’t true. It was just a way to meet people it wasn’t like we were professional buskers. A lot of people think that we were all street musicians that all met up and happen to be in a band.

Do people in the subway ever join in on your playing?

Yeah that’s happen a few time–a kid with a harmonica will jump in. The subway is pretty rife with crazy stories. We’ll play and then some crazy homeless guy just likes stands in front and start yelling nonsense. It’s like a free for for all. It’s definitely a much more eclectic audience then playing at, like, the Great American Music Hall.

Are you going to have to give that up at some point if you start headlining more shows?

You know, it’s not about giving it up. It’s a good place to try out new material. It’s more just [about the] time. We don’t have a lot of time, which is great. It’s good to be busy. The time off between tour is much-craved time off where we tend to go home and sleep and water our plants.

“Water our plants”? I guess the Freelance Whales really is good for gardening. [Pay no mind: this is only the lame joke send-off I should have made but didn't think off at the time]

DO play mind, however, to the Freelance Whales. They released this album essentially on their own and, if it’s a sign of things to come, they’ve reached the right balance of talent, they should be lauded for sticking to their guns with running themes (a la Decemberist’s The Hazards of Love or The Antlers’ Hospice) and should be nothing but bigger their next time around on your radar.

Share on Facebook

Check out MuseZu for more of the same…

Share on Facebook

Conceivably you could experience all three versions of the Freelance Whales today–the recording, the busking and the staging–in San Francisco.

Their record Weathervanes has been out since April and it’s available on their site, where you can also indulge by downloading their single free. Busking (in their case, “freelance” busking?) in New York subways has allowed them to bare down the sound to acoustics and try out new songs on charmed strangers. They’ll be doing a free live set at Amoeba Records on Haight Street at 7 p.m. Finally, they will stage an opening act (in support of The Shout Out Louds) in full plugged-in splendor with synths, harmoniums, drum kits and waterphones on the gilded stage of the Great American Music Hall at 8:30 p.m.

For Chuck Criss, one of the many multi-instrumentalists in the Freelance Whales, the GAMH show is another homecoming (just two months after their Bottom of the Hill gig). He was raised in San Francisco, attending St. Ignatius Prep in the Sunset before taking his banjo-playing chops to East Coast schools, Great Lakes territories and finally to Queens, New York where the wonder of (irony, O, irony) San Francisco-founded craigslist.com put him in contact with the Freelance Whales.

Here Chuck Criss tells the story himself and talks about long bus rides, cold toes, musical friends, vinyl comebacks and, when pushed, gardening.

Chuck Criss: When I moved to New York I was looking for like-minded people. I think I typed in, like, “banjo” on craigslist and then it kind of went from there.

Perry Shirley of MuseZu: It’s that simple, huh, to find band members?

Yeah! [laugh] Well, yeah, in retrospect, it’s that simple. It was a long process. There was a lot of hit-and-miss. I was actually the last member to join the Freelance Whales. They were kind of recycling and going through a lot of members that didn’t exactly fit right so it was pretty serendipitous. We hit it off really well. They were looking for a banjo player and multi-instrumentalist and Judah [Dadone] had put some demos up online that were just great. It was just like, “I have to be part of this. It’s going to be a really great record.” Even from hearing the demo I could tell.

There’s also a visual side. There’s these videos of you guys playing in this strange place on Staten Island…

It’s like an abandoned farm colony slash hospital. It was our photographer friend Kendall [Mills] who had taken some shots there. That was really early when we first got together. We wanted to get some video content so we rearranged some of the songs acoustically, went out there. Took the ferry over there and then like another bus. Got to the middle of the island where it is and just filmed us playing song acoustic and put it online and stuff. But I mean the coolest part of our experience was it kind of encouraged us to arrange more of the songs in an acoustic kind of format and really start going on the streets and more like busking on subways which is a great way of meeting people–which is tough to do in New York

So the setting directly influenced the sound of your band… that you kind of kept with

You’re talking about the performance?

Yeah.

Yeah it defintely did and it really encouraged a group vocal energy which kind of translated to our live set we have now.

You’re going to be going on tour with the Shout Out Louds. First of all how did that come about? Is it your label that paired you guys together?

Yeah, our booking agent put us together. It was a band that I’ve definitely listened to before and admired. We played a show with them at the Music Hall in Williamsburg and met those guys, played with them and kind of of hit it off. We wanted to stay busy ’cause our record came out pretty recently, like April 13th, so we were trying to find something where we could go and tour that record a little bit.

And along the way there you get to play a few shows, like the May 25th UC San Diego show at The Loft, where it’s just your band headlining.

Once we get to California after those two shows in L.A. we are going to break off and do our own thing just to do some more shows in California ’cause we have Sasquatch coming up on the West Coast at the end of May so we’re going to go up there and do the Sasquatch [Music Festival] thing which we’re real excited about that, to get some to play a really huge festival like that.

You recently did SXSW also.

Yeah, that was really great. It was really busy; we played 12 shows in four or five days so it was pretty chaotic. It will be nice to go to Sasquatch and just be able to play one show and actually get to go around and camp out and watch all the other great bands on that that show.

Soak it in a little bit yourselves…

Yeah Pavement’s playing the night that we are playing.

You’re telling me! I’m the biggest Pavement fan [complete loss of professionalism]

Yeah, me too. I was really excited for that too especially since they are only playing big festivals. They’re not really touring properly.

They did the Coachella show; they exorcised their demons, after getting mud slinged on them the last time. But talk about that what have you been listening to. What would you say are some of the band’s influences as far as other bands go?

We have a pretty diverse taste in music but I guess you could say as far influences that plugged their way in the record: Broken Social Scene, Stars, Sufjan Stevens, bands like that. One of the influences is this band, you know “Le Loup?”

Le Loup. Yeah, uh huh…

They’re great. Judah’s kind of good friends with them. That’s probably one of the biggest influences on the record, I’d say.

The viral videos of you guys playing in subways in New York remind me a lot of this girl, Lykke Li.

Oh really?! [genuinely excited]

You know what I’m talking about?

I’m not familiar with her viral videos. I know her music and it’s great.

They do a lot of these outdoor performances where it’s a lot of her with musicians playing just sparingly.

Thanks, man it’s fun to do stuff like that. Keeps the songs interesting. Well, thanks that’s a compliment to be compared to Lykke Li.

So between the bigger stages when you’re playing with the Shout Out Louds and the smaller stages you get to play later, what’s the ideal setting for someone to hear your music?

The band’s kind of got three different sounds going for it. The acoustic thing to do on the streets and stuff and then how we sound on the actual recording and then our live set. I think they’re all great experiences and good ways to try to listen to and understand and enjoy the band and what we are doing. All three of them. It’s just a matter of preference, I mean. What we are doing more than anything is playing live, full, proper shows with all the instrumentations and full kit and a more brash setup than it is on the recording. I’d say to come to the live show, on a proper stage I guess. It’s good clean fun.

And you bring all these instruments with you on tour?

Yeah. Us, the banjos, the harmonium, the guitars and the synthesizers, it all manages to fit in our 15-passenger van. It gets there. We definitely carry a lot of fragile things with us.

Yeah have you ever had any trouble with that? If something breaks down are you going to have to bring it to some old repair place in town?

Yeah, things break. We broke the banjo but we were in Nashville so there was a shop practically on every block. That was a very fortunate place to have to restock on gear If we broke a synth that would be a bummer just ’cause we have a lot of presets on there. If we ever broke a harmonium that would be really tough too because Judah ordered that I think from India. But I think we can find them around. We would make do. We know how to play a lot of instruments so could cover it up but it would be a bummer yeah .

You know, you mentioned bands like Broken Social Scene and Stars of course there’s a girl singer and a guy singer in those bands. and you have that in you theres a chase or love story going

It was kind of based off… Judah had doing some dream-logging for about a year just writing about his dreams and we kind of pieced together this love story between a ghost and someone living in a house and we just kind of ran with it. There’s definitely some romantic elements. There’s a lot of life and death stuff. The whole albums goes into different elements of energy transference whether it’s body heat or electricity or passing from life to death. It’s all in there. All the lyrics are based off a dream kind of scape.

And in the video for Generator 2nd Floor, you guys kind of recharge this body…

Yeah, that was a fun video to shoot. It was probably one of the coldest days of the year and no one could feel their toes. It was like in Pennsylvania somewhere at the video director’s. Near his house. His dad had some farmland. It was freezing. Luckily, we were somewhat warm but the girl in the video, Alicia, she’s in it pretty briefly but she’s in nightgown and had to lie down on the snow. It’s only like 20 seconds of video but she was probably there for about an hour. So she took one for the team but she did a good job.

So, does the director kind of come up with the idea and you go “Meh, well okay that fits” or do you get to say “Here’s what we were going for…”

In this case we had to do that really quick. We had gotten back from a short tour just around the Northeast and we had a couple days off before we went out on the road again with Cymbal Eat Guitar and Bear in Heaven. So in that case, I mean… Eventually we’d like to get to the point where we kind of mock-up our own ideas for the videos. In this case, it was like we really want to have a video to coincide with the album release and the director had kind of sketched out some ideas for what he wanted to do and we just kind of showed up, praying it would be good and it turns out well. And that’s how it is most of the time. Normally you can give a little direction but there’s the directors and the artists. But yeah that was a fun first video to do

Okay so arguably one of your more popular songs is the next to last song on your album. I feel like other bands would be tempted to put it right there at the top of the tracklist, just say, “Screw it, we’ll give the people what they want.” Did you feel firmly about the story-telling process?

The way the album is track is very intentional. That’s the order we want and that’s what we intended to have. It woudn’t have really made sense to come after one because Generator 1st Floor opens the album and it’s about revving up a house and waking up. The end of the album is a little darker. Generator 2nd Floor is very funeral like, about putting a body into the ground. So there’s a whole story in between.

I get frustrated by how many people just want to hear singles.

Yeah. I mean most people just listen to their iPod Nanos or whatever and maybe listen to one song. We all love listening to an album in its entirety. I think it’s coming back. A lot of people are getting into vinyl. [Even the founder of Amoeba records said so]. Sales are up and listening to vinyl you can’t skip songs. It’s an experience. You have to listen to it and flip it over. A lot of time people will find the single and hopefully they will gravitate towards the album and listen to it order, the way it’s supposed to be. It’s out of our control, you know?

Yeah I was doing some gardening this weekend and i played your album through a couple of time. It works really well for that.

Nice. “Music For Gardening” that will be the name of our next album.

What’s the weirdest story you’ve heard about the band?

Rumors spread in weird ways. A lot of people think that we were kind of busking to make money which isn’t true. It was just a way to meet people it wasn’t like we were professional buskers. A lot of people think that we were all street musicians that all met up and happen to be in a band.

Do people in the subway ever join in on your playing?

Yeah that’s happen a few time–a kid with a harmonica will jump in. The subway is pretty rife with crazy stories. We’ll play and then some crazy homeless guy just likes stands in front and start yelling nonsense. It’s like a free for for all. It’s definitely a much more eclectic audience then playing at, like, the Great American Music Hall.

Are you going to have to give that up at some point if you start headlining more shows?

You know, it’s not about giving it up. It’s a good place to try out new material. It’s more just [about the] time. We don’t have a lot of time, which is great. It’s good to be busy. The time off between tour is much-craved time off where we tend to go home and sleep and water our plants.

“Water our plants”? I guess the Freelance Whales really is good for gardening. [Pay no mind: this is only the lame joke send-off I should have made but didn't think off at the time]

DO play mind, however, to the Freelance Whales. They released this album essentially on their own and, if it’s a sign of things to come, they’ve reached the right balance of talent, they should be lauded for sticking to their guns with running themes (a la Decemberist’s The Hazards of Love or The Antlers’ Hospice) and should be nothing but bigger their next time around on your radar.

Share on Facebook

Check out MuseZu for more of the same…

Share on Facebook

Conceivably you could experience all three versions of the Freelance Whales today–the recording, the busking and the staging–in San Francisco.

Their record Weathervanes has been out since April and it’s available on their site, where you can also indulge by downloading their single free. Busking (in their case, “freelance” busking?) in New York subways has allowed them to bare down the sound to acoustics and try out new songs on charmed strangers. They’ll be doing a free live set at Amoeba Records on Haight Street at 7 p.m. Finally, they will stage an opening act (in support of The Shout Out Louds) in full plugged-in splendor with synths, harmoniums, drum kits and waterphones on the gilded stage of the Great American Music Hall at 8:30 p.m.

For Chuck Criss, one of the many multi-instrumentalists in the Freelance Whales, the GAMH show is another homecoming (just two months after their Bottom of the Hill gig). He was raised in San Francisco, attending St. Ignatius Prep in the Sunset before taking his banjo-playing chops to East Coast schools, Great Lakes territories and finally to Queens, New York where the wonder of (irony, O, irony) San Francisco-founded craigslist.com put him in contact with the Freelance Whales.

Here Chuck Criss tells the story himself and talks about long bus rides, cold toes, musical friends, vinyl comebacks and, when pushed, gardening.

Chuck Criss: When I moved to New York I was looking for like-minded people. I think I typed in, like, “banjo” on craigslist and then it kind of went from there.

Perry Shirley of MuseZu: It’s that simple, huh, to find band members?

Yeah! [laugh] Well, yeah, in retrospect, it’s that simple. It was a long process. There was a lot of hit-and-miss. I was actually the last member to join the Freelance Whales. They were kind of recycling and going through a lot of members that didn’t exactly fit right so it was pretty serendipitous. We hit it off really well. They were looking for a banjo player and multi-instrumentalist and Judah [Dadone] had put some demos up online that were just great. It was just like, “I have to be part of this. It’s going to be a really great record.” Even from hearing the demo I could tell.

There’s also a visual side. There’s these videos of you guys playing in this strange place on Staten Island…

It’s like an abandoned farm colony slash hospital. It was our photographer friend Kendall [Mills] who had taken some shots there. That was really early when we first got together. We wanted to get some video content so we rearranged some of the songs acoustically, went out there. Took the ferry over there and then like another bus. Got to the middle of the island where it is and just filmed us playing song acoustic and put it online and stuff. But I mean the coolest part of our experience was it kind of encouraged us to arrange more of the songs in an acoustic kind of format and really start going on the streets and more like busking on subways which is a great way of meeting people–which is tough to do in New York

So the setting directly influenced the sound of your band… that you kind of kept with

You’re talking about the performance?

Yeah.

Yeah it defintely did and it really encouraged a group vocal energy which kind of translated to our live set we have now.

You’re going to be going on tour with the Shout Out Louds. First of all how did that come about? Is it your label that paired you guys together?

Yeah, our booking agent put us together. It was a band that I’ve definitely listened to before and admired. We played a show with them at the Music Hall in Williamsburg and met those guys, played with them and kind of of hit it off. We wanted to stay busy ’cause our record came out pretty recently, like April 13th, so we were trying to find something where we could go and tour that record a little bit.

And along the way there you get to play a few shows, like the May 25th UC San Diego show at The Loft, where it’s just your band headlining.

Once we get to California after those two shows in L.A. we are going to break off and do our own thing just to do some more shows in California ’cause we have Sasquatch coming up on the West Coast at the end of May so we’re going to go up there and do the Sasquatch [Music Festival] thing which we’re real excited about that, to get some to play a really huge festival like that.

You recently did SXSW also.

Yeah, that was really great. It was really busy; we played 12 shows in four or five days so it was pretty chaotic. It will be nice to go to Sasquatch and just be able to play one show and actually get to go around and camp out and watch all the other great bands on that that show.

Soak it in a little bit yourselves…

Yeah Pavement’s playing the night that we are playing.

You’re telling me! I’m the biggest Pavement fan [complete loss of professionalism]

Yeah, me too. I was really excited for that too especially since they are only playing big festivals. They’re not really touring properly.

They did the Coachella show; they exorcised their demons, after getting mud slinged on them the last time. But talk about that what have you been listening to. What would you say are some of the band’s influences as far as other bands go?

We have a pretty diverse taste in music but I guess you could say as far influences that plugged their way in the record: Broken Social Scene, Stars, Sufjan Stevens, bands like that. One of the influences is this band, you know “Le Loup?”

Le Loup. Yeah, uh huh…

They’re great. Judah’s kind of good friends with them. That’s probably one of the biggest influences on the record, I’d say.

The viral videos of you guys playing in subways in New York remind me a lot of this girl, Lykke Li.

Oh really?! [genuinely excited]

You know what I’m talking about?

I’m not familiar with her viral videos. I know her music and it’s great.

They do a lot of these outdoor performances where it’s a lot of her with musicians playing just sparingly.

Thanks, man it’s fun to do stuff like that. Keeps the songs interesting. Well, thanks that’s a compliment to be compared to Lykke Li.

So between the bigger stages when you’re playing with the Shout Out Louds and the smaller stages you get to play later, what’s the ideal setting for someone to hear your music?

The band’s kind of got three different sounds going for it. The acoustic thing to do on the streets and stuff and then how we sound on the actual recording and then our live set. I think they’re all great experiences and good ways to try to listen to and understand and enjoy the band and what we are doing. All three of them. It’s just a matter of preference, I mean. What we are doing more than anything is playing live, full, proper shows with all the instrumentations and full kit and a more brash setup than it is on the recording. I’d say to come to the live show, on a proper stage I guess. It’s good clean fun.

And you bring all these instruments with you on tour?

Yeah. Us, the banjos, the harmonium, the guitars and the synthesizers, it all manages to fit in our 15-passenger van. It gets there. We definitely carry a lot of fragile things with us.

Yeah have you ever had any trouble with that? If something breaks down are you going to have to bring it to some old repair place in town?

Yeah, things break. We broke the banjo but we were in Nashville so there was a shop practically on every block. That was a very fortunate place to have to restock on gear If we broke a synth that would be a bummer just ’cause we have a lot of presets on there. If we ever broke a harmonium that would be really tough too because Judah ordered that I think from India. But I think we can find them around. We would make do. We know how to play a lot of instruments so could cover it up but it would be a bummer yeah .

You know, you mentioned bands like Broken Social Scene and Stars of course there’s a girl singer and a guy singer in those bands. and you have that in you theres a chase or love story going

It was kind of based off… Judah had doing some dream-logging for about a year just writing about his dreams and we kind of pieced together this love story between a ghost and someone living in a house and we just kind of ran with it. There’s definitely some romantic elements. There’s a lot of life and death stuff. The whole albums goes into different elements of energy transference whether it’s body heat or electricity or passing from life to death. It’s all in there. All the lyrics are based off a dream kind of scape.

And in the video for Generator 2nd Floor, you guys kind of recharge this body…

Yeah, that was a fun video to shoot. It was probably one of the coldest days of the year and no one could feel their toes. It was like in Pennsylvania somewhere at the video director’s. Near his house. His dad had some farmland. It was freezing. Luckily, we were somewhat warm but the girl in the video, Alicia, she’s in it pretty briefly but she’s in nightgown and had to lie down on the snow. It’s only like 20 seconds of video but she was probably there for about an hour. So she took one for the team but she did a good job.

So, does the director kind of come up with the idea and you go “Meh, well okay that fits” or do you get to say “Here’s what we were going for…”

In this case we had to do that really quick. We had gotten back from a short tour just around the Northeast and we had a couple days off before we went out on the road again with Cymbal Eat Guitar and Bear in Heaven. So in that case, I mean… Eventually we’d like to get to the point where we kind of mock-up our own ideas for the videos. In this case, it was like we really want to have a video to coincide with the album release and the director had kind of sketched out some ideas for what he wanted to do and we just kind of showed up, praying it would be good and it turns out well. And that’s how it is most of the time. Normally you can give a little direction but there’s the directors and the artists. But yeah that was a fun first video to do

Okay so arguably one of your more popular songs is the next to last song on your album. I feel like other bands would be tempted to put it right there at the top of the tracklist, just say, “Screw it, we’ll give the people what they want.” Did you feel firmly about the story-telling process?

The way the album is track is very intentional. That’s the order we want and that’s what we intended to have. It woudn’t have really made sense to come after one because Generator 1st Floor opens the album and it’s about revving up a house and waking up. The end of the album is a little darker. Generator 2nd Floor is very funeral like, about putting a body into the ground. So there’s a whole story in between.

I get frustrated by how many people just want to hear singles.

Yeah. I mean most people just listen to their iPod Nanos or whatever and maybe listen to one song. We all love listening to an album in its entirety. I think it’s coming back. A lot of people are getting into vinyl. [Even the founder of Amoeba records said so]. Sales are up and listening to vinyl you can’t skip songs. It’s an experience. You have to listen to it and flip it over. A lot of time people will find the single and hopefully they will gravitate towards the album and listen to it order, the way it’s supposed to be. It’s out of our control, you know?

Yeah I was doing some gardening this weekend and i played your album through a couple of time. It works really well for that.

Nice. “Music For Gardening” that will be the name of our next album.

What’s the weirdest story you’ve heard about the band?

Rumors spread in weird ways. A lot of people think that we were kind of busking to make money which isn’t true. It was just a way to meet people it wasn’t like we were professional buskers. A lot of people think that we were all street musicians that all met up and happen to be in a band.

Do people in the subway ever join in on your playing?

Yeah that’s happen a few time–a kid with a harmonica will jump in. The subway is pretty rife with crazy stories. We’ll play and then some crazy homeless guy just likes stands in front and start yelling nonsense. It’s like a free for for all. It’s definitely a much more eclectic audience then playing at, like, the Great American Music Hall.

Are you going to have to give that up at some point if you start headlining more shows?

You know, it’s not about giving it up. It’s a good place to try out new material. It’s more just [about the] time. We don’t have a lot of time, which is great. It’s good to be busy. The time off between tour is much-craved time off where we tend to go home and sleep and water our plants.

“Water our plants”? I guess the Freelance Whales really is good for gardening. [Pay no mind: this is only the lame joke send-off I should have made but didn't think off at the time]

DO play mind, however, to the Freelance Whales. They released this album essentially on their own and, if it’s a sign of things to come, they’ve reached the right balance of talent, they should be lauded for sticking to their guns with running themes (a la Decemberist’s The Hazards of Love or The Antlers’ Hospice) and should be nothing but bigger their next time around on your radar.

Share on Facebook

Check out MuseZu for more of the same…

Share on Facebook

Conceivably you could experience all three versions of the Freelance Whales today–the recording, the busking and the staging–in San Francisco.

Their record Weathervanes has been out since April and it’s available on their site, where you can also indulge by downloading their single free. Busking (in their case, “freelance” busking?) in New York subways has allowed them to bare down the sound to acoustics and try out new songs on charmed strangers. They’ll be doing a free live set at Amoeba Records on Haight Street at 7 p.m. Finally, they will stage an opening act (in support of The Shout Out Louds) in full plugged-in splendor with synths, harmoniums, drum kits and waterphones on the gilded stage of the Great American Music Hall at 8:30 p.m.

For Chuck Criss, one of the many multi-instrumentalists in the Freelance Whales, the GAMH show is another homecoming (just two months after their Bottom of the Hill gig). He was raised in San Francisco, attending St. Ignatius Prep in the Sunset before taking his banjo-playing chops to East Coast schools, Great Lakes territories and finally to Queens, New York where the wonder of (irony, O, irony) San Francisco-founded craigslist.com put him in contact with the Freelance Whales.

Here Chuck Criss tells the story himself and talks about long bus rides, cold toes, musical friends, vinyl comebacks and, when pushed, gardening.

Chuck Criss: When I moved to New York I was looking for like-minded people. I think I typed in, like, “banjo” on craigslist and then it kind of went from there.

Perry Shirley of MuseZu: It’s that simple, huh, to find band members?

Yeah! [laugh] Well, yeah, in retrospect, it’s that simple. It was a long process. There was a lot of hit-and-miss. I was actually the last member to join the Freelance Whales. They were kind of recycling and going through a lot of members that didn’t exactly fit right so it was pretty serendipitous. We hit it off really well. They were looking for a banjo player and multi-instrumentalist and Judah [Dadone] had put some demos up online that were just great. It was just like, “I have to be part of this. It’s going to be a really great record.” Even from hearing the demo I could tell.

There’s also a visual side. There’s these videos of you guys playing in this strange place on Staten Island…

It’s like an abandoned farm colony slash hospital. It was our photographer friend Kendall [Mills] who had taken some shots there. That was really early when we first got together. We wanted to get some video content so we rearranged some of the songs acoustically, went out there. Took the ferry over there and then like another bus. Got to the middle of the island where it is and just filmed us playing song acoustic and put it online and stuff. But I mean the coolest part of our experience was it kind of encouraged us to arrange more of the songs in an acoustic kind of format and really start going on the streets and more like busking on subways which is a great way of meeting people–which is tough to do in New York

So the setting directly influenced the sound of your band… that you kind of kept with

You’re talking about the performance?

Yeah.

Yeah it defintely did and it really encouraged a group vocal energy which kind of translated to our live set we have now.

You’re going to be going on tour with the Shout Out Louds. First of all how did that come about? Is it your label that paired you guys together?

Yeah, our booking agent put us together. It was a band that I’ve definitely listened to before and admired. We played a show with them at the Music Hall in Williamsburg and met those guys, played with them and kind of of hit it off. We wanted to stay busy ’cause our record came out pretty recently, like April 13th, so we were trying to find something where we could go and tour that record a little bit.

And along the way there you get to play a few shows, like the May 25th UC San Diego show at The Loft, where it’s just your band headlining.

Once we get to California after those two shows in L.A. we are going to break off and do our own thing just to do some more shows in California ’cause we have Sasquatch coming up on the West Coast at the end of May so we’re going to go up there and do the Sasquatch [Music Festival] thing which we’re real excited about that, to get some to play a really huge festival like that.

You recently did SXSW also.

Yeah, that was really great. It was really busy; we played 12 shows in four or five days so it was pretty chaotic. It will be nice to go to Sasquatch and just be able to play one show and actually get to go around and camp out and watch all the other great bands on that that show.

Soak it in a little bit yourselves…

Yeah Pavement’s playing the night that we are playing.

You’re telling me! I’m the biggest Pavement fan [complete loss of professionalism]

Yeah, me too. I was really excited for that too especially since they are only playing big festivals. They’re not really touring properly.

They did the Coachella show; they exorcised their demons, after getting mud slinged on them the last time. But talk about that what have you been listening to. What would you say are some of the band’s influences as far as other bands go?

We have a pretty diverse taste in music but I guess you could say as far influences that plugged their way in the record: Broken Social Scene, Stars, Sufjan Stevens, bands like that. One of the influences is this band, you know “Le Loup?”

Le Loup. Yeah, uh huh…

They’re great. Judah’s kind of good friends with them. That’s probably one of the biggest influences on the record, I’d say.

The viral videos of you guys playing in subways in New York remind me a lot of this girl, Lykke Li.

Oh really?! [genuinely excited]

You know what I’m talking about?

I’m not familiar with her viral videos. I know her music and it’s great.

They do a lot of these outdoor performances where it’s a lot of her with musicians playing just sparingly.

Thanks, man it’s fun to do stuff like that. Keeps the songs interesting. Well, thanks that’s a compliment to be compared to Lykke Li.

So between the bigger stages when you’re playing with the Shout Out Louds and the smaller stages you get to play later, what’s the ideal setting for someone to hear your music?

The band’s kind of got three different sounds going for it. The acoustic thing to do on the streets and stuff and then how we sound on the actual recording and then our live set. I think they’re all great experiences and good ways to try to listen to and understand and enjoy the band and what we are doing. All three of them. It’s just a matter of preference, I mean. What we are doing more than anything is playing live, full, proper shows with all the instrumentations and full kit and a more brash setup than it is on the recording. I’d say to come to the live show, on a proper stage I guess. It’s good clean fun.

And you bring all these instruments with you on tour?

Yeah. Us, the banjos, the harmonium, the guitars and the synthesizers, it all manages to fit in our 15-passenger van. It gets there. We definitely carry a lot of fragile things with us.

Yeah have you ever had any trouble with that? If something breaks down are you going to have to bring it to some old repair place in town?

Yeah, things break. We broke the banjo but we were in Nashville so there was a shop practically on every block. That was a very fortunate place to have to restock on gear If we broke a synth that would be a bummer just ’cause we have a lot of presets on there. If we ever broke a harmonium that would be really tough too because Judah ordered that I think from India. But I think we can find them around. We would make do. We know how to play a lot of instruments so could cover it up but it would be a bummer yeah .

You know, you mentioned bands like Broken Social Scene and Stars of course there’s a girl singer and a guy singer in those bands. and you have that in you theres a chase or love story going

It was kind of based off… Judah had doing some dream-logging for about a year just writing about his dreams and we kind of pieced together this love story between a ghost and someone living in a house and we just kind of ran with it. There’s definitely some romantic elements. There’s a lot of life and death stuff. The whole albums goes into different elements of energy transference whether it’s body heat or electricity or passing from life to death. It’s all in there. All the lyrics are based off a dream kind of scape.

And in the video for Generator 2nd Floor, you guys kind of recharge this body…

Yeah, that was a fun video to shoot. It was probably one of the coldest days of the year and no one could feel their toes. It was like in Pennsylvania somewhere at the video director’s. Near his house. His dad had some farmland. It was freezing. Luckily, we were somewhat warm but the girl in the video, Alicia, she’s in it pretty briefly but she’s in nightgown and had to lie down on the snow. It’s only like 20 seconds of video but she was probably there for about an hour. So she took one for the team but she did a good job.

So, does the director kind of come up with the idea and you go “Meh, well okay that fits” or do you get to say “Here’s what we were going for…”

In this case we had to do that really quick. We had gotten back from a short tour just around the Northeast and we had a couple days off before we went out on the road again with Cymbal Eat Guitar and Bear in Heaven. So in that case, I mean… Eventually we’d like to get to the point where we kind of mock-up our own ideas for the videos. In this case, it was like we really want to have a video to coincide with the album release and the director had kind of sketched out some ideas for what he wanted to do and we just kind of showed up, praying it would be good and it turns out well. And that’s how it is most of the time. Normally you can give a little direction but there’s the directors and the artists. But yeah that was a fun first video to do

Okay so arguably one of your more popular songs is the next to last song on your album. I feel like other bands would be tempted to put it right there at the top of the tracklist, just say, “Screw it, we’ll give the people what they want.” Did you feel firmly about the story-telling process?

The way the album is track is very intentional. That’s the order we want and that’s what we intended to have. It woudn’t have really made sense to come after one because Generator 1st Floor opens the album and it’s about revving up a house and waking up. The end of the album is a little darker. Generator 2nd Floor is very funeral like, about putting a body into the ground. So there’s a whole story in between.

I get frustrated by how many people just want to hear singles.

Yeah. I mean most people just listen to their iPod Nanos or whatever and maybe listen to one song. We all love listening to an album in its entirety. I think it’s coming back. A lot of people are getting into vinyl. [Even the founder of Amoeba records said so]. Sales are up and listening to vinyl you can’t skip songs. It’s an experience. You have to listen to it and flip it over. A lot of time people will find the single and hopefully they will gravitate towards the album and listen to it order, the way it’s supposed to be. It’s out of our control, you know?

Yeah I was doing some gardening this weekend and i played your album through a couple of time. It works really well for that.

Nice. “Music For Gardening” that will be the name of our next album.

What’s the weirdest story you’ve heard about the band?

Rumors spread in weird ways. A lot of people think that we were kind of busking to make money which isn’t true. It was just a way to meet people it wasn’t like we were professional buskers. A lot of people think that we were all street musicians that all met up and happen to be in a band.

Do people in the subway ever join in on your playing?

Yeah that’s happen a few time–a kid with a harmonica will jump in. The subway is pretty rife with crazy stories. We’ll play and then some crazy homeless guy just likes stands in front and start yelling nonsense. It’s like a free for for all. It’s definitely a much more eclectic audience then playing at, like, the Great American Music Hall.

Are you going to have to give that up at some point if you start headlining more shows?

You know, it’s not about giving it up. It’s a good place to try out new material. It’s more just [about the] time. We don’t have a lot of time, which is great. It’s good to be busy. The time off between tour is much-craved time off where we tend to go home and sleep and water our plants.

“Water our plants”? I guess the Freelance Whales really is good for gardening. [Pay no mind: this is only the lame joke send-off I should have made but didn't think off at the time]

DO play mind, however, to the Freelance Whales. They released this album essentially on their own and, if it’s a sign of things to come, they’ve reached the right balance of talent, they should be lauded for sticking to their guns with running themes (a la Decemberist’s The Hazards of Love or The Antlers’ Hospice) and should be nothing but bigger their next time around on your radar.

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Conceivably you could experience all three versions of the Freelance Whales today–the recording, the busking and the staging–in San Francisco.

Their record Weathervanes has been out since April and it’s available on their site, where you can also indulge by downloading their single free. Busking (in their case, “freelance” busking?) in New York subways has allowed them to bare down the sound to acoustics and try out new songs on charmed strangers. They’ll be doing a free live set at Amoeba Records on Haight Street at 7 p.m. Finally, they will stage an opening act (in support of The Shout Out Louds) in full plugged-in splendor with synths, harmoniums, drum kits and waterphones on the gilded stage of the Great American Music Hall at 8:30 p.m.

For Chuck Criss, one of the many multi-instrumentalists in the Freelance Whales, the GAMH show is another homecoming (just two months after their Bottom of the Hill gig). He was raised in San Francisco, attending St. Ignatius Prep in the Sunset before taking his banjo-playing chops to East Coast schools, Great Lakes territories and finally to Queens, New York where the wonder of (irony, O, irony) San Francisco-founded craigslist.com put him in contact with the Freelance Whales.

Here Chuck Criss tells the story himself and talks about long bus rides, cold toes, musical friends, vinyl comebacks and, when pushed, gardening.

Chuck Criss: When I moved to New York I was looking for like-minded people. I think I typed in, like, “banjo” on craigslist and then it kind of went from there.

Perry Shirley of MuseZu: It’s that simple, huh, to find band members?

Yeah! [laugh] Well, yeah, in retrospect, it’s that simple. It was a long process. There was a lot of hit-and-miss. I was actually the last member to join the Freelance Whales. They were kind of recycling and going through a lot of members that didn’t exactly fit right so it was pretty serendipitous. We hit it off really well. They were looking for a banjo player and multi-instrumentalist and Judah [Dadone] had put some demos up online that were just great. It was just like, “I have to be part of this. It’s going to be a really great record.” Even from hearing the demo I could tell.

There’s also a visual side. There’s these videos of you guys playing in this strange place on Staten Island…

It’s like an abandoned farm colony slash hospital. It was our photographer friend Kendall [Mills] who had taken some shots there. That was really early when we first got together. We wanted to get some video content so we rearranged some of the songs acoustically, went out there. Took the ferry over there and then like another bus. Got to the middle of the island where it is and just filmed us playing song acoustic and put it online and stuff. But I mean the coolest part of our experience was it kind of encouraged us to arrange more of the songs in an acoustic kind of format and really start going on the streets and more like busking on subways which is a great way of meeting people–which is tough to do in New York

So the setting directly influenced the sound of your band… that you kind of kept with

You’re talking about the performance?

Yeah.

Yeah it defintely did and it really encouraged a group vocal energy which kind of translated to our live set we have now.

You’re going to be going on tour with the Shout Out Louds. First of all how did that come about? Is it your label that paired you guys together?

Yeah, our booking agent put us together. It was a band that I’ve definitely listened to before and admired. We played a show with them at the Music Hall in Williamsburg and met those guys, played with them and kind of of hit it off. We wanted to stay busy ’cause our record came out pretty recently, like April 13th, so we were trying to find something where we could go and tour that record a little bit.

And along the way there you get to play a few shows, like the May 25th UC San Diego show at The Loft, where it’s just your band headlining.

Once we get to California after those two shows in L.A. we are going to break off and do our own thing just to do some more shows in California ’cause we have Sasquatch coming up on the West Coast at the end of May so we’re going to go up there and do the Sasquatch [Music Festival] thing which we’re real excited about that, to get some to play a really huge festival like that.

You recently did SXSW also.

Yeah, that was really great. It was really busy; we played 12 shows in four or five days so it was pretty chaotic. It will be nice to go to Sasquatch and just be able to play one show and actually get to go around and camp out and watch all the other great bands on that that show.

Soak it in a little bit yourselves…

Yeah Pavement’s playing the night that we are playing.

You’re telling me! I’m the biggest Pavement fan [complete loss of professionalism]

Yeah, me too. I was really excited for that too especially since they are only playing big festivals. They’re not really touring properly.

They did the Coachella show; they exorcised their demons, after getting mud slinged on them the last time. But talk about that what have you been listening to. What would you say are some of the band’s influences as far as other bands go?

We have a pretty diverse taste in music but I guess you could say as far influences that plugged their way in the record: Broken Social Scene, Stars, Sufjan Stevens, bands like that. One of the influences is this band, you know “Le Loup?”

Le Loup. Yeah, uh huh…

They’re great. Judah’s kind of good friends with them. That’s probably one of the biggest influences on the record, I’d say.

The viral videos of you guys playing in subways in New York remind me a lot of this girl, Lykke Li.

Oh really?! [genuinely excited]

You know what I’m talking about?

I’m not familiar with her viral videos. I know her music and it’s great.

They do a lot of these outdoor performances where it’s a lot of her with musicians playing just sparingly.

Thanks, man it’s fun to do stuff like that. Keeps the songs interesting. Well, thanks that’s a compliment to be compared to Lykke Li.

So between the bigger stages when you’re playing with the Shout Out Louds and the smaller stages you get to play later, what’s the ideal setting for someone to hear your music?

The band’s kind of got three different sounds going for it. The acoustic thing to do on the streets and stuff and then how we sound on the actual recording and then our live set. I think they’re all great experiences and good ways to try to listen to and understand and enjoy the band and what we are doing. All three of them. It’s just a matter of preference, I mean. What we are doing more than anything is playing live, full, proper shows with all the instrumentations and full kit and a more brash setup than it is on the recording. I’d say to come to the live show, on a proper stage I guess. It’s good clean fun.

And you bring all these instruments with you on tour?

Yeah. Us, the banjos, the harmonium, the guitars and the synthesizers, it all manages to fit in our 15-passenger van. It gets there. We definitely carry a lot of fragile things with us.

Yeah have you ever had any trouble with that? If something breaks down are you going to have to bring it to some old repair place in town?

Yeah, things break. We broke the banjo but we were in Nashville so there was a shop practically on every block. That was a very fortunate place to have to restock on gear If we broke a synth that would be a bummer just ’cause we have a lot of presets on there. If we ever broke a harmonium that would be really tough too because Judah ordered that I think from India. But I think we can find them around. We would make do. We know how to play a lot of instruments so could cover it up but it would be a bummer yeah .

You know, you mentioned bands like Broken Social Scene and Stars of course there’s a girl singer and a guy singer in those bands. and you have that in you theres a chase or love story going

It was kind of based off… Judah had doing some dream-logging for about a year just writing about his dreams and we kind of pieced together this love story between a ghost and someone living in a house and we just kind of ran with it. There’s definitely some romantic elements. There’s a lot of life and death stuff. The whole albums goes into different elements of energy transference whether it’s body heat or electricity or passing from life to death. It’s all in there. All the lyrics are based off a dream kind of scape.

And in the video for Generator 2nd Floor, you guys kind of recharge this body…

Yeah, that was a fun video to shoot. It was probably one of the coldest days of the year and no one could feel their toes. It was like in Pennsylvania somewhere at the video director’s. Near his house. His dad had some farmland. It was freezing. Luckily, we were somewhat warm but the girl in the video, Alicia, she’s in it pretty briefly but she’s in nightgown and had to lie down on the snow. It’s only like 20 seconds of video but she was probably there for about an hour. So she took one for the team but she did a good job.

So, does the director kind of come up with the idea and you go “Meh, well okay that fits” or do you get to say “Here’s what we were going for…”

In this case we had to do that really quick. We had gotten back from a short tour just around the Northeast and we had a couple days off before we went out on the road again with Cymbal Eat Guitar and Bear in Heaven. So in that case, I mean… Eventually we’d like to get to the point where we kind of mock-up our own ideas for the videos. In this case, it was like we really want to have a video to coincide with the album release and the director had kind of sketched out some ideas for what he wanted to do and we just kind of showed up, praying it would be good and it turns out well. And that’s how it is most of the time. Normally you can give a little direction but there’s the directors and the artists. But yeah that was a fun first video to do

Okay so arguably one of your more popular songs is the next to last song on your album. I feel like other bands would be tempted to put it right there at the top of the tracklist, just say, “Screw it, we’ll give the people what they want.” Did you feel firmly about the story-telling process?

The way the album is track is very intentional. That’s the order we want and that’s what we intended to have. It woudn’t have really made sense to come after one because Generator 1st Floor opens the album and it’s about revving up a house and waking up. The end of the album is a little darker. Generator 2nd Floor is very funeral like, about putting a body into the ground. So there’s a whole story in between.

I get frustrated by how many people just want to hear singles.

Yeah. I mean most people just listen to their iPod Nanos or whatever and maybe listen to one song. We all love listening to an album in its entirety. I think it’s coming back. A lot of people are getting into vinyl. [Even the founder of Amoeba records said so]. Sales are up and listening to vinyl you can’t skip songs. It’s an experience. You have to listen to it and flip it over. A lot of time people will find the single and hopefully they will gravitate towards the album and listen to it order, the way it’s supposed to be. It’s out of our control, you know?

Yeah I was doing some gardening this weekend and i played your album through a couple of time. It works really well for that.

Nice. “Music For Gardening” that will be the name of our next album.

What’s the weirdest story you’ve heard about the band?

Rumors spread in weird ways. A lot of people think that we were kind of busking to make money which isn’t true. It was just a way to meet people it wasn’t like we were professional buskers. A lot of people think that we were all street musicians that all met up and happen to be in a band.

Do people in the subway ever join in on your playing?

Yeah that’s happen a few time–a kid with a harmonica will jump in. The subway is pretty rife with crazy stories. We’ll play and then some crazy homeless guy just likes stands in front and start yelling nonsense. It’s like a free for for all. It’s definitely a much more eclectic audience then playing at, like, the Great American Music Hall.

Are you going to have to give that up at some point if you start headlining more shows?

You know, it’s not about giving it up. It’s a good place to try out new material. It’s more just [about the] time. We don’t have a lot of time, which is great. It’s good to be busy. The time off between tour is much-craved time off where we tend to go home and sleep and water our plants.

“Water our plants”? I guess the Freelance Whales really is good for gardening. [Pay no mind: this is only the lame joke send-off I should have made but didn't think off at the time]

DO play mind, however, to the Freelance Whales. They released this album essentially on their own and, if it’s a sign of things to come, they’ve reached the right balance of talent, they should be lauded for sticking to their guns with running themes (a la Decemberist’s The Hazards of Love or The Antlers’ Hospice) and should be nothing but bigger their next time around on your radar.

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David Duchovny’s sex-addled auteur drives away in his beat-up Porsche to end an episode of Californication. Show’s over.

But wait… what’s that kick-ass song playing?

Over on Grey’s Anatomy, McDreamy is lovesick over Meredith but paralyzed by his emotions. Voice-over does a play-by-play but you’re tuning out because, in the background, there’s a song you gotta have playing.

Great pop songs have long been TV show mainstays, but mostly it’s been for the opening credits. Sometimes there were annoying but you knew them: think of ”I’ll Be There For You” by The Rembrandts, kicking off Friends for a decade. Or, before that, Gary Portnoy’s charming “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” at the beginning of Cheers. I’ve always been a fan of Malcom in the Middle’s explosive opener “Boss of Me” by They Might Be Giants.

More and more today’s series are stocked full of good (and sometimes really obscure) tunes. Cable TV, in particular, seems to push the creative envelope sonically, even if it is a 15-second sample. On Showtime a recent Weeds episode ended with a cool little cucumber called “Thank You For Making Me Feel Better” by the otherwise unknown Linus of Hollywood.

How did I know that? Because you can look it up.

So, you like your shows, whether it’d be some House or reruns of Six Feet Under (some of the best music in there) or another endless plot twist in Lost. And music that makes you go, “Hey, that’s cool” plays on them. Then, you should probably be aware that a quick little visit to the networks sites for those shows will give you full listings of those cool songs.

For example, on ABC (home of Grey’s Anatomy, Lost and Desperate Housewives) you can even download right then and there any song screened on any episode. Same thing with Showtime (Californication, Nurse Jackie, Dexter). Ditto for Fox (House, Glee, Hell’s Kitchen).

That’s all. I just wanted to let you in on that.

Surf’s up, you got shows to watch and music to discover.

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David Duchovny’s sex-addled auteur drives away in his beat-up Porsche to end an episode of Californication. Show’s over.

But wait… what’s that kick-ass song playing?

Over on Grey’s Anatomy, McDreamy is lovesick over Meredith but paralyzed by his emotions. Voice-over does a play-by-play but you’re tuning out because, in the background, there’s a song you gotta have playing.

Great pop songs have long been TV show mainstays, but mostly it’s been for the opening credits. Sometimes there were annoying but you knew them: think of ”I’ll Be There For You” by The Rembrandts, kicking off Friends for a decade. Or, before that, Gary Portnoy’s charming “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” at the beginning of Cheers. I’ve always been a fan of Malcom in the Middle’s explosive opener “Boss of Me” by They Might Be Giants.

More and more today’s series are stocked full of good (and sometimes really obscure) tunes. Cable TV, in particular, seems to push the creative envelope sonically, even if it is a 15-second sample. On Showtime a recent Weeds episode ended with a cool little cucumber called “Thank You For Making Me Feel Better” by the otherwise unknown Linus of Hollywood.

How did I know that? Because you can look it up.

So, you like your shows, whether it’d be some House or reruns of Six Feet Under (some of the best music in there) or another endless plot twist in Lost. And music that makes you go, “Hey, that’s cool” plays on them. Then, you should probably be aware that a quick little visit to the networks sites for those shows will give you full listings of those cool songs.

For example, on ABC (home of Grey’s Anatomy, Lost and Desperate Housewives) you can even download right then and there any song screened on any episode. Same thing with Showtime (Californication, Nurse Jackie, Dexter). Ditto for Fox (House, Glee, Hell’s Kitchen).

That’s all. I just wanted to let you in on that.

Surf’s up, you got shows to watch and music to discover.

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We’ve seen the kind of hubub American Idol can create so it’s no surprise that the fame-by-committee format would pop up elsewhere. Even in the world of punk rock and skateboarders. The annual Ernie Ball Battle of the Bands on the Vans Warped Tour has become an internet voting behemoth. As of this writing there were more than 16,000 bands fighting for votes to play at one of the tour stops.

And if you’re a local unsigned band, what’s not to like? It’s free to enter, there’s a site Toolkit any lunkhead can use to make a very decent band page and, if you got the fan-vote power, you got at least a fighting chance to get reviewed by some Old White Guys (read: industry professionals) who decide if you’re going to play when the tour goes by your home town.

It works just like a regular Battle of the Band, only bigger. Of course, hundreds of bands try to get a spot and four for each tour stop make it. The contest is open to all genres from Ska to Hip-Hop and Blues but the Punk/Rock/Metal bands dominate the scene, by far. I guess there’s always Freestyle Rap Battles and summer Bar-B-Qs for the rest.

MuseZu caught up with Matthew “Zippy” Zipkin, guitarist for the Metal/Prog-Rock San Francisco outfit The Illness. The band is vying for a slot on the Vans Warped Tour Ernie Ball Battle of The Band’s stop at The Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View in June. Zippy talks to us about the sudden exposure, the ethical weirdnesses of internet voting and what makes them a band bound for the big stage.

If you want to see what The Illness has to offer before you cast your vote, see them live this Saturday May 8th at Kimo’s Bar & Penthouse Lounge on Polk Street in San Francisco at 9 p.m. for the one-year anniversary of their first ever show. Opening for them are local bands No Captains and The Wasteland Saints.

Perry Shirley of MuseZu.com: Your band, The Illness, is currently 11th out of nearly 500 bands vying for a spot on the Warped Tour show at the Shoreline Amphitheatre on June 26th. Nearly two thousand votes have gone your way. How does that make you feel?

Matthew Zipkin of The Illness: I am excited to the point of jittery about the Battle, and about our upcoming 1-year anniversary show at Kimo’s this Saturday. The Illness is overwhelmingly confident, and the feedback from our fans is incredible. It feels great. It feels like yes, we are awesome, and yes, we will play our music for thousands of people at Shoreline — even if its just some side-stage in the parking lot!

The grand prize of the contest – playing at Shoreline – is exposure the magnitude of which local bands rarely ever score, and we are very grateful to Vans for the opportunity to get really crazy about this game.

The contest is free and open to any unsigned or indie-label band with at least one recorded original song. Is it cool that there’s opportunities for “the little guys” to get on a big stage like that?

The biggest benefit of the Warped Tour “Battle” is, right away, the networking. We’ve already gotten in touch with great bands all across America, and specifically with great bands in our genre and in our own neighborhood. We’ve been able to expose our media to a ton of new fans and new peers. People are hearing our tracks, reading our blogs, and seeing our photos. The Battle has driven traffic to our main website, which in turn drives traffic to our other pages like Facebook. So in that sense, We’ve already won!

….also, does it kind of make you feel like you’re on American Idol: Rock Show?

The contest is a little silly, and a little cheesy. I’ve participated in all kinds of internet-voting contests and there is a sort of underlying fantasy about them, because it’s easy to assume that whoever has the most votes really just has a server somewhere with a clever piece of javascript and there are no real fans, and is that even fair?

The great thing about the Warped Tour Battle is that the voting mechanism is pretty solid and, more importantly, human judges are involved after the initial voting round narrows it down for them.

You’re doing local a Battle of the Bands like the show at Mutiny in Antioch on May 22, just a few weeks before selections for the Warped Tour Battle of The Bands are made. That’s almost like a televised debate between politicians just before the general election. Was that intentional?

Our Antioch show was booked actually a while before we started the Vans Battle – that is really just for fun. THE ILLNESS played out in Antioch this summer and felt the intensity of the metal crowd out there, so we’ve been looking for more opportunities to play out there.

We sound different from the traditional ‘ordinary’ metal bands the real hardcore guys are usually into. We are music nerds, we play jazz chords, intense polyrhythms, and seriously fucked up song structures. We are having a lot of fun writing songs, playing songs, and generating media. I know our fans are feeling all that too, and it all comes down to big fat party. A party with electric guitars and lots of jumping up and down. I just sorta feel bad for Dillinger Escape Plan or whoever is playing the main stage while we are slaughtering the crowd over at the Battle Of The Bands stage.

If you make in the Top 100 vote-getters, comes the hard part: a panel of “industry professionals” who choose the final four bands. It seems as though you have the fan base, what makes The Illness stand up to more corporate scrutiny? In other words, what makes you pro?

So, we are fighting this battle on both fronts: Our fans are getting very very excited for us, we are emailing over 100 people a day reminding them to vote, and they are! We shot a 45-second video of the band playing while Josh (our frontman) addresses the camera with gratitude, asks our voters to keep it up and, of course, plugs our next show. We are trying to keep our Facebook page and Battle page very active, posting new blogs, live MP3s, pictures, and updates all the time. We want to keep our supporters excited (because the band is really excited) and we also want those judges to know The Illness.

That’s the thing – the top 100 bands get judged, but by what? All the judges know about us is our internet presence and so we are cranking our internet presence up to the max! Our songs are professionally recorded and mixed. Our photos are professionally shot and edited. Our live videos our professionally shot in HD and married with professionally recorded audio. We have taken great care – for the whole year this band has been playing – to impress all of the people, all of the time.

Vote for The Illness at the Battle of the Bands website, here.

To hear The Illness, visit their website or MySpace page.

The opening bands at Kimo’s are San Francisco’s prog-rock band No Captains and “western influenced post-apocalyptic rock band The Wasteland Saints (both I might add, groups with very cool band names, although NC is a bit easier to say rapidly repeatedly)

Kimo’s Bar & Penthouse Lounge is at 1351 Polk St (Cross Street is Pine) in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District.

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The great rock documentary It Might Get Loud showed up as streamable content on my Netflix account–and that’s the sort of news that really gets an impecunious bastard like me salivating.

The film manages to bring in one room three generations of electric guitar masters–Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, U2’s The Edge and The White Stripes’ Jack White–to talk about and riff on their craft. But it builds up to it. You see the three in their cars on their way to the sound stage, the helpers setting up their gears, White, ever the sparkplug, suggesting “there might be a fistfight.”

It’s an engaging film too and that’s in no small part thanks to Director and Producer Davis Guggenheim who managed to make a PowerPoint presentation from a politician into the fascinating An Inconvenient Truth. The editing–which helped liven up the doggedly verbose Albert Gore, Jr.–is superb, whirling between the three stars with equal reverence and attention. The filmmakers make good use of archival footage in introducing the heroes while capturing gems themselves. Witness, in the opening sequence, White fashioning a make-shift slide guitar out of a bit of wood, a wire, some nails, a Coca-Cola bottle and a pickup. He plays a few notes, shrugs and says, “Who says you need to buy a guitar?“

This attitude is the polar opposite of The (Technological) Edge’s method. You see him in a little recording studio, tweaking knobs all the time. He strums and stops. Shakes his head, flips another switch or two, just straining to “make the sounds coming out of the speakers match the sound in (his) head.” For the tete-a-tete with White and Page, his guitar tech sets up a pedal board comical in its elaborateness, with 30 or so separate pedals on its palette. Certainly, it makes sense when you think of the painstakingly crafted image of his band U2.

For my money, I’ll side with White on this one, though. “Technology is a big destroyer of emotion and truth,” he says. I remember in 2001, discovering the White Stripes’ White Blood Cells album really before it blew up on the radio the way it did. After spending a lot of time listening to arrangement-heavy groups like Broken Social Scene or Belle & Sebastian and music made by control freaks like Everclear’s Art Alexakis and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, I was jolted awake by the rawness of the White Stripes. The songs, led off by “Dead Leaves and The Dirty Ground” and “Fell In Love With A Girl,” were pure blues-rock nuggets full of feedback and guitar squeals. It was invigorating and a bone rattler that matched my dissatisfaction with the shit-bag known as Senior Year High School.

“By the time I get into my teenage years in the late 80’s,” White says in It Might Get Loud, “I don’t remember that many rock and roll bands that were that popular. Things were changing so much in music and technology was taking over so much. Technology was heavily distracting everybody. I mean people would spend weeks trying to get the perfect snare drum and gated reverbs.“

This is from a guy who is forced to loop riffs and use octave pedals to be able to play live without a bass player or second guitarist, but still. The concert footage is where the three rockers in the documentary diverge. In one grizzled piece of tape, Led Zeppelin’s players feed off each other on an intimate stage. U2’s Bono and The Edge, meanwhile, showboat through the stadium crowds on catwalks, freed of wires by new technologies.

The White Stripes have long been a band apart when it comes to the live fare:

“I always worry about getting satisfied. When you get satisfied, you die,” White said. “It takes me three steps to get to the organ on the stage in the middle of a song. Put it four steps away and then I’ll have to run faster and I’ll push myself harder to get to it. Meg and I don’t even talk about what we’re going to play. We just get up there and do it. Think of something fast ’cause these guys want a show. People know when something’s fake and when something’s rehashed and rehearsed. They know when you’re telling the same joke you told at the show the night before. They can smell it.”

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