The Apples In Stereo: Realize It's Not Bad To Sound Big

02/26/07 4:00pm

by Elizabeth Chorney-Booth (CHARTattack)

The Apples In Stereo and other members of their Elephant Six Collective (most notably Neutral Milk Hotel and The Olivia Tremor Control) ruled the campus airwaves In the mid-'90s. It's been five years since the Apples' last album, The Velocity Of Sound and in the interim the members focused on other projects (specifically Ulysses and The Marbles for frontman Robert Schneider, The High Water Marks for drummer Hilarie Sidney and Dressy Bessy for guitarist John Hill).

Schneider and Sidney, who spent most of their time in The Apples as a married couple, also divorced. But now, with the release of their sixth full-length album, New Magnetic Wonder, the band are back and as exuberant as ever. ChartAttack recently talked to Robert Schneider about the gap between albums, his musical meltdown and his undying love of Sloan.

ChartAttack: It's been five years since your last record. At any point did you think that the Apples were over since everyone else was focusing on other projects?
Robert Schneider: No, we toured about once a year since our last record. Even in the downtime it was rumoured that the band broke up because Hilarie and I had got divorced. But we kept playing. We had a band before we had a relationship and we continued afterwards. Although she did quit last August, right after we finished our album. She's not in the band now. There was no real great rift or anything, she just wanted to focus on The High Water Marks. Also, she had a new baby. She's remarried, too. So, she wanted to focus on family life, which I understand because I love playing shows and rocking out and stuff, but I also like being at home with my son.

The new record is so production-heavy. Was the recording process really long?
It was probably the biggest production job I've ever done and I went into it expecting that it would be. I went through sort of a personal musical crisis where I completely lost faith in the sort of baroque psychedelic production style that's always been my holy grail. I went through a period of a few years where I was listening heavily to old R&B records and also The Velvet Underground and The Ramones. I just became, not just disinterested, but actually offended by the big bells and whistles production that I had always pursued. I thought it was really superficial and lacked substance.

So during this crisis, I recorded the record with my other band Ulysses with just one microphone in the middle of my garage and I did all the vocals on just one take. I finished the record after recording for, like, four hours total. And it's a really good sounding record, so at that point I felt like I'd accomplished the goal of stripping away all of the ornamentation. So then I turned back in the other direction and decided that the big production wasn't really the problem, but I realized how important a strong vocal take is and how much that means. If you can have a record with just acoustic guitar and vocals that's really powerful, you could take out the acoustic guitar and substitute it with a full orchestra. I came to realize that given that you can have a song that's a full substantive recording with just guitar and vocals, if you take out the acoustic guitar and keep the vocals prominent in the same place, it doesn't matter what's there, be it acoustic guitar or piano or 100 pianos.

How do you think New Magnetic Wonder stacks up against the rest of the Apples' catalogue?
I feel like, of all the songs on our records, we have a really high level of quality control. I think all of our songs stand up as individual songs and are really strong, but on all of our records there are songs that jump out more and stand out as hits. They sound more meaningful or more sad or more ecstatic or whatever. I always felt like we were the kind of band that if you were going to recommend us to someone else you'd probably make a mixed tape as opposed to recommending any given album. So, I really wanted to make a record that from now on if somebody were to ask you to recommend an Apples record you'd say, "New Magnetic Wonder." I wanted to make that record. I wanted to put as many hits on as possible. I wanted one record that would contain more hits than all our other records combined. I had a pretty good feeling about what was special about the Apples.

This is your first record for the Yep Roc label. Why did you decide to go with them?
They put out a ton of stuff. The new Robyn Hitchcock record they just put out is really good. They put out Sloan! Sloan are one of my most favourite bands in the universe, they're just incredible. They're one of the best bands of our generation. They put out such good songs on every record. They're one of the only bands where every record is strong. They change from record to record and stay interesting. I'm really proud that we're on the same label as them. I can't emphasize how much I love Sloan. That alone would have been enough for us to sign to Yep Roc probably. Well, that plus them being an awesome label made us sign.