Lunch of Champions

The Annuals and The Never | Live at the Varsity Theater, Friday Nov. 7, 2007 | Review & Interview

Last week, amidst a sea of disaster and turmoil related to crashing PCs, exciting business transactions, and various musical craziness, I found myself walking into the Varsity Theater and interviewing two of the three bands playing that night. Those bands were The Never, and Annuals, two North Carolina acts who have been playing together for some time and were touring with Manchester Orchestra. It was the first time they’d ever played Minneapolis, so I tried to go easy on them.

I got to the Varsity early. It’s such a great theater. You walk into the auditorium and it just feels so welcoming. After calling the two band managers, I was greeted by Adam from Annuals.

Above: Adam of Annuals

Lunch of Champions: How has the tour been going so far?

Adam: The tour’s been absolutely amazing. We’re touring with our closest friends and every night there’s been a lot of people coming out who are really passionate about the music. It’s really fun.

LOC: Have any shows stood out as particularly good or difficult?

Adam: Well there was one that was just really fun. We played the Bowery in New York on Halloween. It was really fun because we got to dress up and shit, and we all got really fucked up after the show. So it was great.

Then the one in Chicago last night was really cool. That one mostly because it was just full out packed and the sound was really good, better than I’d heard us sound before.

LOC: Your website describes you as something of a musical commune with interchangeable roles within the group. With that dynamic do you feel the audience has a stronger effect on your performance than it might other artists?

Adam: Umm, you know that’s hard to tell because I can’t get off the stage and watch us. But I would hope so, definitely. We all care so much about what we’re playing. We’re putting 110% into it. And every little fuck up, I can guarantee you we’re going back to the hotel and thinking about it all night. But I certainly feel completely electric whenever I get up there, almost shaking with enthusiasm, and I hope some of that gets to people in the crowd. I think it does. As long as they’re having fun, that’s all that matters.

LOC: You’re all fairly young musicians, what are your hopes for the group in the future?

Adam: The most immediate hope for the future is that we can afford an apartment. Right now I’m living in Mike, our bass player’s basement, you know, his mom’s basement, with him. Everyone else is certainly extremely broke.

We’re just hoping we can tour and do what we love so much and be able to make a standard living the same as anyone else our age. I was working at Banana Republic and I was making a lot more money. But still, it’s way worth it. There’s nothing better than being able to see the world and play music and then call it a living.

LOC:What contemporary artists do you listen to?

Adam: Does it have to be contemporary?

LOC: Well, you can go back a ways too.

Adam: Well my very favorite of all time, right now (there’s always a different “of all time”), is Roy Orbison. I think he’s one of the best song writers who’s ever been born. Paul Simon, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Sr..

But contemporary artists? I really like Grisly Bear. That’s a really good band that’s come out recently. The Never, the band that’s opening tonight, they certainly don’t get as much attention as they should. They’re so outside of the box. That’s such a cheesy way to put it, but they think about song writing in such a different way. It’s so fresh and nice. Instead of people just going up there and playing what’s popular at the moment and doing how other artists are doing it just so they can get that crowd, they just do it their own way. And it works, it just works.

LOC: Is there any place that you’d like to perform that you haven’t had a chance yet?

Adam: Oh yeah. I mean, I look at it more in the sense of places I’d like to be. Really, a city is a city wherever you go, so it’s less about the cities, but more the places you get to see in between. I really want to play somewhere in Africa. Africa and Australia. There are just places like that, places that I haven’t gotten to see in my life yet. I’m so lucky to have seen what I’ve seen so far. But of course I’d like for my luck to hold out.

LOC: How does touring compare to the scene at home?

Adam: Specifically our scene back at home in North Carolina? Well touring is completely different, obviously. It’s almost like a blur because every night you’re playing these songs over and over again and eventually it just turns into your own little scene. And the scene ends up being all the bands you’ve played with and are close to on tour.

It’s certainly different from our scene back at home because we get to play with a lot of bands that are really different. The bands back at home in North Carolina, sometimes they focus too much on one kind of music. That’s not really true, come to think of it. Some bands, like the Never who are opening for us, are definitely taking it in new directions and those are the ones that certainly deserve a listen. Anyone can pick up a guitar and start recording these days with things like Garage Band and Fruity Loops, anything like that. So many people are just oversaturating the market with just passionless music.

The scene at home is probably just like anywhere else, though. Just a whole bunch of music that everyone’s playing, only most of the scene should just be one band, really.

I hope no one at home reads that.
When I interviewed the Never, I spoke mostly with Noah, but a few answers came in as the band hurried around after the show.

Above: The Never

Lunch of Champions: What’s the first step when you write a song?

Noah: It generally comes from a melody first. Often I’m just driving somewhere or doing something and I get a melody idea, and then I use a Dictaphone just to put it down. Then if I think about it later I’ll try to think of a way to back it up on Guitar. It generally comes melody first and then I write a lot of lyrics down. Then I try to kind of puzzle-piece them together until they work out fine. But there’s no particular way, that’s just probably just the most often the way it turns out. Sometimes I’ll just write the words and they’ll sound like a melody to me. But my main instrument is Guitar with a little bit of mandolin, but it’s kind of hard to accompany yourself with a mandolin, so usually the guitar sort of ends up backing me up a little bit.

[laugh]So that’s the first step.

I guess after that, when it’s with the whole band it’s a whole different story, it may be completely unlike that first bit.

LOC: Getting started as a professional musician, Noah, you had a little bit of help from more seasoned musicians. Ken Mosher from the Squirrel Nut Zippers helped a lot. Do you feel that had any major effects, negative or positive.

Noah: It had major effects, all positive, I would say.

Joah: A lot of great stories.

Noah: Yeah, he’s a wild man. I think when I started playing music and me and my friends started putting together it was just a simple thing where we thought it was fun to write and play together. But I don’t think we ever took it seriously. When Ken showed interest and he wanted to record us, it kind of came to us that we could record. We didn’t have a bass player at the time, so he started just started playing bass with us.

Pretty much any professional attitude I have towards music is from him. He started booking shows, started doing press and distribution, and all the things you need to be a professional working band. If we didn’t have his influence, it might have come from somewhere else. But his influence, certainly, is what got us off the couch and out of the garages trying to book shows. I know tons of bands who just practice and practice and never book a show. You just have to make that step, and he was sort of a catalist for us.

He’s also just a great musician in general and a great pruducer.

LOC: I’m sure having a pair of brothers in the band changes the dynamic a bit. What do you think is different for that? Do you see it as a positive, negative, or non-entity?

Noah: It works great for us. In a sense, the brothers are our rhythm section. If there’s anything you want from a rhythm section, it’s that you want them to be honed in with each other, and I think that just happens when two people grow up together. Pretty much if Jonny plays a drum line, Joah can play a bass line that goes with it. You’d be surprised how many great musicians can’t really play together or have to really work to play together well. With them it was just second hand.

And sometimes my brother plays in the band. We’ve definitely toured as the family band before [laughs]. Yeah, it’s great.

Jonny: Yeah, I’ve definitely gotten really sick of Joah before. We got in a fight once. It was over an alarm clock situation that was going on. So I punched him in the stomach while he was putting on a sweater. Then he gave me a black eye.

Noah: I remember that.

Jonny: Yeah, then I had to wear makeup for a few shows.

But yeah, it’s really nice, Joah and I have played together since I was 13 and he was 11. It was kind of weird; we would always listen to the same music, we were always into the same stuff for the most part.

LOC: What are some contemporary bands that you listen to?

Noah: That’s tough, a lot of the music that I listen to is older stuff.

I love Annuals. It’s really a pleasure playing with them night after night. Their album’s good, the have a great live show, they’re definitely one of the bands I listen to.

Jonny: Yeah, it’s actually kind of amazing that we could be on this tour. They’re really good friends of ours and I think we’re equally really big fans of each other’s music.

Noah: I like Rufus Wainwright. He’s just a great singer and great production. That’s kind of cheating because I like him for the reasons I like Harry Nilsson’s music from the ’70s. I think Rufus Wainwright is probably a big fan of Harry Nilsson himself, so it’s sort of cheating since I like him because I like Harry Nilsson. But I think he’s put out some really good albums.

I just like music where there’s a lot of attention paid to the songs and the production is a little more than just typical, in your face, rock production. I like the Feist singles. I don’t have the albums, but what I’ve heard…

Jonny: There’s not a lot of “Rock” bands that I really like. I really like a lot of Feist and Joanna Newsom’s stuff. I can’t listen to a WHOLE lot of Joanna Newsom because of her voice.

Noah: I like Smog too.

Jonny: Smog’s great!

Noah: A band, a rock band now, that I like and I’ve liked before and is still together and I still like, is Nada Surf. I think they’re a great rock band. And that’s impressive to me, because they are three-piece rock band, when you see them live it’s a three-piece rock band, and for the most part on the albums it’s a three-piece rock band. But they really pull it off.

LOC: How do feel about touring? Do you have favorite cities or areas of the country to play?

Jonny: Well, tonight is awesome. We’ve never been to Minneapolis, so it’s been really great. We don’t usually get to see a lot of the cities, but tonight is really nice. There are so few venues that put this much effort into making their space so comfortable and inviting. Intimate I guess is the keyword.

You go into all these other places and it’s a concrete floor and it’s still sticky from last night. Just, you know, that’s not what my house is like! I want people to come in and be comfortable.

Noah: Yeah, this is a great venue, a great city from what I can tell.

The Midwest in general. Chicago. We tour often and we always stop in Chicago. One of the reasons we stop there is because I have friends there, but also because it’s just a fun town. It’s a cool place.

Yeah, I think that we find that on tour we have been best received in the Midwest. The East Coast is tough. Our home town, Chapel Hill [North Carolina] is very hip scenester. You really have to work to get approval from the local scene. It’s a tough town, I think, for any band. For touring bands I’m sure it can be pretty disappointing to go to Chapel Hill, where all this great music has come from, then you get there and find a bunch of people with arms folded.

LOC: What does it feel like to play live as opposed to the studio?

Noah: I think generally we’re a band that enjoys the studio. So much of song composition, to me, relates to texture as well. I come from a visual arts background where it’s art theory and composition in a visual sense. But I apply a lot of that thought to songwriting. In the studio it’s a great opportunity to, like, see what that part sounds on a banjo instead of the guitar. Or instead of having a string swell you have a vocal swell. There’s something very liberating about, when you have the time, really piecing together the song parts through experimentation. I find often after we do that we’ll go live and we’re trying to recreate what we’ve been doing in the studio live, which is often just not the right approach. Live we try to make that up with energy and we try to be creative. We carry all our own lights around with us and just try to have something fun and memorable. I think it’s a different kind of feeling there. With a live set you practice this handful of songs until they’re so second nature that you can sort of have fun with them.

Jonny: Get them to where you can more perform than just play.

Noah: Yeah. I love playing live. Pretty much if the sound is good and there’s people watching, I’m having a good time on stage. Which makes it nice to be on tour and having a good time every night. Really, it’s a good lifestyle when it’s going well. This tour is pretty fantastic. Being able to go out with lots of bands with a little more road experience and a little bigger following so there’s not much pressure on us. We show up and play. There’s people there and we all have a good time.

LOC: So this tour’s been going well?

Noah: Absolutely fantastic. This tours been fun. It’s short enough, two and a half weeks, that we’ve been able to convince some friends to come along.

Jonny: It’s kind of been a party every day. We have a school bus that’s been converted into sort of an RV. We run it on Bio-Fuel.

Noah: It’s like camp on the bus. We get in there and we tell stories…

Jonny: Three office people from our record label are with us. Will, who’s playing guitar, keys, and bass with us tonight, he’s kind of one of the co-presidents of our label. Then our tour manager, Martin, is also a co-president. Then our booking agent is out doing merchendise right now.

Noah: We whole team came on board.

Jonny: Our driver, Dave, has been really great, sort of our spiritual guru. He’s been teaching us a lot because he’s been touring for 18 years. He’s kind of teaching us to appreciate the whole art of touring. To relax and not be freaked out all the time.

Noah: We’ve toured pretty intensively and we’ve had the entire range of experience from good to absolutely abysmal. We’ve broken down countless times and had poor shows because we’re booking ourselves to headline in towns we’ve never been in with no press. So we’ve been there. And this, compared to that, is like walking on clouds.

LOC: Is there anything you’d like to say to everyone who came out to see you play on this tour?

Noah: Well, I think, with us touring with the Annuals and Manchester Orchestra, a lot of people who came out were there to see them. So what I would say is I hope we entertained and I hope they come out to see us again because we’ll definitely be back again.