Brand New Explain How Their Songs Become Noisy

After several years of avoiding the prying eyes of the music media, particularly here in North America, Long Island, N.Y. emo-heroes Brand New decided to open up about their new record, Daisy, on a brief stop-over in Toronto.

Here's what lead vocalist/guitarist Jesse Lacey and guitarist Vinnie Accardi had to say.

CHARTattack: When you head into the studio do you have an idea of what you want the general vibe of the record to be?
Jesse Lacey: At the beginning, it's us trying to find out what the vibe is going to be. It takes us a little while to feel each other out as far as, "What kind of sounds are you interested in?" Then, as time goes on, a pattern kind of emerges and you can grab onto that and follow it a little bit further and say, "Well alright, let's write a little more like this," or "O.K., we have enough of that. Let's see what other avenue we can experiment with."

But, for the most part we're just kind of like, "How does this fit together at all?" because some of the time some of [the songs] don't even sound like they're from the same people. You look at a song you wrote and one you wrote six months later, not only do they sound different, but they're from such different parts of your brain or from different parts of what was going on in your life. But that's what albums have become for us. They've become weird sections of our lives that all just end up on this one thing.

Vinnie Accardi: There's always like that song or two that's a turning point for everybody. Someone will bring something new into the studio that everybody's either shocked or impressed by, which is a great thing to still be shocked and impressed by your band. And you realize that you might not have been thinking that the record could possibly go there, but now you're so excited by what somebody else did.

JL: Or someone brings a better version of the thing that you did already and you realize that your thing is trash and they succeeded at what you attempted. It's a relief and a failure at the same time. Like, "Oh, I sucked at that but you did it so well. I'm so happy that you're in my band."

Was there a song on the new record like that?
JL: When Vinnie showed me "You Stole," I just thought that was the coolest thing I ever heard. Even some songs that didn't make it on the record, like this song that Brian [Lane, drums] wrote we call "Lazy." When he brought that, at the time I was like, "This has to go on the album." And there's days that I think it should have been there and there's days that I don't think it would have worked the right way. But I just remember hearing it and thinking I never would have though to write that.

Your early records, particularly Your Favourite Weapon, seem much more straightforward sonically than the layered guitar textures on The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me and Daisy. What inspired you to move in that direction?
VA: I have a feeling that even when we were recording and writing Your Favourite Weapon we might have been thinking that we were doing what we're doing now. When people ask me what prompts the change in sound or the production, if I really think about it, I can remember standing in Mike's [Sapone, the group's long-time producer] mom's basement at 17 years old and thinking that I was making something that sounds way more like Daisy. So I guess we've been lucky to work with a lot of great producers and engineers over the last few years.

JL: There's a level of danger to it. If you listen to a song like [Nirvana's] "Come As You Are" and you listen to the chorus on the guitar, it's actually a very extreme chorus. It's very wobbly and under-watery. And when I listened to it as a kid I thought, "Oh, that's a great sound."

But when you go to play something like and you go to set that effect, you have to be brazen to make it that bold. Because in your head you think "it's too much." But it's not too much. And that's how things become homogenized.

Some of our favourite bands growing up didn't care. They did things that were just so absurd with their music that they set a precedent for what is good. If you listen to a band like Sonic Youth or My Bloody Valentine, they didn't even play their guitars. They hit them and bent them and stuff like that.

VA: Mike has an uncanny ability to hear something you're doing and immediately track it to any song in his library that he stores in his brain. He'll go to it, show it to you and tell you that that's what needs to happen. Here's the better version of it. This is what you're trying to do and you don't even realize it.

JL: Some of the bass sounds we just took directly from Jesus Lizard and Husker Du records. You hear the strings rattling so much. We just kind of fell in love with that sound. There's a couple of thing like that that we just went after intentionally and there's other things that we've come up with on our own over the years that we just decided to take that to whatever new level.

I've read that this record was written primarily on acoustic guitar.
JL: Most of our songs are. Vinnie brought that up like two weeks ago. He just thought that was hilarious that he's never written a song on electric guitar. I don't think I really have, either.

VA: We own a storage space where all of our gear stays, but we don't own a practice space. The only way that I play music at home is on a guitar that I got through a special at Sam Ash because I got a trumpet. I'm too lazy to go and set up my gear at home so everything just winds up being written on acoustic guitar. It's funny to hear the song be finished and it's this loud, obnoxious squealing thing and it's like, where did the song go? What happened? Because on my couch in my living room it sounded way nicer and prettier.

So where do these noisy songs come from then?
JL: It's always written on acoustic guitar but it's never thought that it's going to be like that. When I'm playing it I'm thinking, "I can't wait to play this on electric guitar when I get it out of storage."

Imagine a sculpture that sculpted out of crumpled up paper thinking, "I can't wait to get my clay." It's my job. Like, why wouldn't I have my tools with me all the time? But living in the suburbs, there's just not room for some guitar amps and drum kit. The neighbours just aren't going to have that.