Dinosaur Jr. Talk About Farm Life

06/08/09 2:21pm

by Ian Gormely (CHARTattack)

Dinosaur Jr. will release their ninth album, Farm, on June 23.

Single-named drummer Murph spoke to CHARTattack from a tour stop in North Carolina about the new record, the band's famous (lack of) communication and why a good band should never stop pushing forward.

CHARTattack: So where are you guys right now?
Murph: We are in Charlotte, North Carolina. We were just in Chapel Hill. We've got, like, four shows left on this tour, so we're slowly heading back. The last show is in Baltimore and then we head home.

Are you going back on tour this summer?
Oh, yeah. We break in June, the album comes out mid-June and then the end of June we have a few New York shows and then we head to the west coast to L.A. to do some shows. Or vice versa. I'm not really sure. Whenever you put out an album, you have to support it.

So how did the recording process for the new record work?
It was a lot different than Beyond. With Beyond, it took about seven months to make while we were touring on and off. It was a lot more relaxed.

Whereas with this record, it was more go into the studio and bang it out. I was literally learning drum parts in the morning and tracking them in the afternoon. It was just, like, boom, boom, boom over a three month period. Just under the gun, under a lot of pressure both from management and self-induced, just to crank it out.

It was actually a completely different process from Beyond. Like the exact opposite.

Do you prefer one approach over the other?
I like having everything done all at once, but I don't like having a deadline. I like someone saying, "Yeah, you got to do the drums and you have a month, but if you need an extra week or whatever, that's OK, too." That, I like.

But when they're just like, "No, we've paid for 15 days and that's what we've paid for and you've got to get it done in 15 days," I don't like that at all. To me it's like cramming for a test or taking the SATs. It's just a drag. It's not as much fun. Although this record was fun.

And you have to realize this is just personally me speaking. J and Lou, I think, do a little better under that kind of pressure. They're people, especially J, that like that kind of pressure. That makes him rise to the occasion a little faster. So everyone's a little different. I mean, I deal with it. I've done both kinds of work. But I'm personally a fan of a little more free flow, relaxed studio atmosphere; whereas these guys, they hammer down.

Was there any particular reason for the pressure from your new label, Jagjaguwar? Was it the cost of studio time?
That, and the label wants cover art, they want demos, they want stuff done. You create a certain momentum and you're afraid if you give yourself too much time you loose that momentum. It forces you to kind of focus.

You mentioned the cover art, which is pretty out there. Whose idea was that?
I think Brian, our management, had this guy he knew that did art and he did a few sketches and submitted them to J and Brian and they were really into it. They were like, "Yeah, it seems like a good direction. Go with it." And then when he came up with the cover everybody was like, "Yeah, that looks pretty cool."

Was the resemblance to the Ents from Lord of The Rings intentional?
Not for us, no. Maybe the artist is really into it. Maybe he's really into Dungeons And Dragons. I don't know, I don't know him. I know we didn't say anything like, "make it look mystical." It was just free flow, like, do what you want to do.

Where did the album title come from?
Uh, J. He just pulls stuff out of a hat. I think part of it has to do with growing up in Amherst [Massachusetts]. It's a farm town. There's a lot of farms, there's a lot of cows. That's why we've had a lot of cow themes. It's where we live. It's what we see driving around a lot. It just makes an impression. I'm sure, subliminally, that had something to do with it as well.

Why did you want to push forward and make new records? You could have just toured indefinitely if you wanted to.
Well, not really. People kind of get sick of hearing the same songs over and over. You can kind of tell when people are like, "OK, we've seen you like three times playing the first three albums. What's next?"

Also, as a band you get kind of bored. You need to inspire yourself and keep things moving. It's a natural progression to create a new body of work, especially if everything's working the way we are. Everything's fine so there was no reason to stop.

A lot has been made about the communications problems in the band. Have those issues been dealt with?
Well, it's totally different now. We've grown up and we can actually communicate and talk to each other. There's still little things here and there, but overall... if issues had carried over from our twenties, I don't think we'd be able to do this. We had to drop a lot of the issues.

I ask because when the Pixies got back together, it was in the studio where things seemed to fall apart for them.
Well, every band's different; every band has its own dynamic. It's not really like these bands are reunion bands. It's really exclusive to, like, some people do it for the money, some people do it because they just really want to, some people do it because of pressure... It's all different, every band's different. You can't really generalize.

After you left the band in 1993, you played with The Lemonheads for a while. What were you doing in the interim years between then and the Dinosaur Jr. reunion?
I did [The Lemonheads' album] Car Button Cloth and two years of touring and then through Evan [Dando] I met Paul Simon's son, Harper. We had a thing going for about a year or year and a half.

I did a lot of session work, and I had another side project called Swish that was on Caroline for a while. We're actually talking about trying to do another single when I go out to L.A. because they live out in L.A. now.

That took me up into 2000 and I kind of just wanted to get away from it all. I got kind of burned out on the rat race of New York City, and I moved up to Maine and I just got really into my drumming and practicing, just kind of living in the country. And it's interesting because about that time I got the call for the reunion.

Were you surprised with both the critical and commercial success of Beyond? I think it debuted at #69 on the Billboard chart.
I was a bit because it was made over such a long period [that] it was hard to kind of know what it was going to be. We didn't really have a sense on what the record was going to sum up to be. And then when it was all put together I was kind of pleasantly surprised. I

'm not trying to sound conceited, but also with the certain amount of success we've had I don't really get surprised because we put a lot into this band. We're not lazy. We're not slackers. We don't slack on shows. If we're going to do a record we really try to put everything we've got into it. And you would hope that some people would recognize that. That would be kind of sad.

It just kind of makes sense that if you put enough energy into something, you would hope it would make some kind of a statement. I'm not saying it's great, but we did the best work that we can and we've kind of been lucky because we've always kind of had a core following of fans. They seem to be really interested in what we do and what's the progression of the band.