What's Up! Magazine

By: Hunter Motto

The Lonely Forest’s history is littered with stories that we don’t typically hear from a band having just signed to a major label. What you usually hear today is about bands that move to LA, meet the right people, and wind up playing the Tacoma Dome in space-age costumes with professional dancers. You guys haven’t made the normal dash to Hollywood, have you?

We really love where we live in Anacortes and we actually like the small town feel. We want to remember where we come from and we want to stay there. If there’s a healthy growth in popularity—and that’s not a bad thing—we’re not going to complain. But at the same time we want to maintain artistic integrity and a local attitude because a lot of the music that influences us is local music. Our goal is to be down to earth. We’re sitting in this really amazing venue in Cincinnati right now and one of our biggest things is just trying to be nice to everybody. The sound guy and the other bands. A lot of that has to do with where we come from and not wanting to be the typical douche bag rock band.

You write about two major music meccas, L.A. and Nashville, less than fondly in “Live Here.” Are there any experiences that inform this attitude?

I don’t have a big love for L.A., though I’ve had some good times there. I think what really hit me the first time I went there to play music and get involved with the music industry is just the money. It seems like it’s all about money. And selling something. That just rubbed me the wrong way.

I actually really like Nashville as a city. But one of the things I have a hard time [with] is when bands and artists, especially in Nashville, they are really going vertical and their goal is to be huge. They want celebrity status. They want to sell a million records. All of this. You can tell. It’s almost like they’re trying too hard. They’re thinking too much about what they sound like and what people are going to like. One of the things we love about the Northwest is that it seems like people play whatever they want to play. Both in Nashville and L.A., I’ve just had a couple bad experiences with the music industry. I wanted to show the NW some love. So I felt appropriate to compare and contrast the different cities and the different vibes you get.

Are you planning on staying in Anacortes?

Our band definitely plans on staying in Anacortes. I’m the only one in the band that might consider moving. I want Canadian citizenship, so there is a big part of me that might move to Canada someday. That might have to wait awhile because it gets really difficult trying to be in a band and having to commute. But we, as the Lonely Forest, want to stay an Anacortes band.

There is a certain Death Cabian feel to your song-writing that seems to be compelled by the ever present wet and gray state of the Northwest. Do you feel like you’re writing Northwest music?

I think there is a bit of that in our music but that’s kind of by default because that’s where we live. We don’t really have a target audience. I wouldn’t say that we have this niche and our niche is the Northwest. I just think that we fit in that world well, because we sing about where we live and there is definitely a sound that we’ve pulled from other Northwest bands. We just played Columbus, Ohio last night and I think people in Columbus liked our music irregardless of the fact that they live in Ohio and we live in Seattle.

It seems that you can’t avoid the comparison, what with Chris Walla giving the band a big national spotlight, signing you to Trans, and helping produce the new record. Are you hoping to escape this comparison?

Well you know it’s interesting. We never really got Death Cab comparisons until Chris started working with us. I don’t think it’s a comparison we want to escape because we really like Death Cab for Cutie. We think they are a really amazing band. They set a really good example as far as a career for a band. It wasn’t like it happened instantly for them; they put a lot of hard work into their music. And it really happened over time. It was a groundswell, grassroots thing almost. Being compared to Death Cab is a good thing for us. Although I think, as far as our sound is concerned, [while] there are a couple of things about our band that might seem similar, we get more comparisons to Nirvana and the Thermals and R.E.M. than we do to Death Cab on the road. It’s funny because the other night, there was some kid that drove from Detroit to hear us play. They were like “we heard you on your MySpace and you kind of had an R.E.M., Death Cab thing. Then we saw you live and you sounded like The Thermals or Ted Leo.” I think we’re a lot louder live than we are on the record. So I don’t know, we’ll wait and see if the Death Cab comparison sticks or not. I think we are a louder band than Death Cab is. It usually changes peoples’ minds when they see us live.

The band really strikes me as having an R.E.M. / Michael Stipe sound in your intonation and attack?

R.E.M. is probably one of my favorite bands. Top 5. That is a band that we definitely emulate. I think they’re one of the best bands of the last 25 or 30 years.

What musicians inspire you? What’s in your CD player?

I’ve been listening to a lot of louder music. There’s this band called Chavez; they’ve got two records from the 90s I’ve been listening to a bit. I’ve been listening to Slint lately. There’s this band called Jesu that I really like. There was a local band from Anacortes called The Oregon Donor that just turned me on to post-rock and heavier stuff that I really enjoy. And local music to be honest. There are a handful of local bands that have been really doing it for me lately. It’s really exciting to hear because they are all really young and they are doing great stuff already. It’s cool to think that they might stick around and in five year be putting out really great records that people around the world will be listening to.

Do you think these bands are cursed by their location? Do they have to move to a major market?

I’d say in most cases it’s good for bands to move to a major market. Honestly, I really like Bellingham, but I feel like, it could be that I don’t live there so I’m not witnessing younger bands or newer bands playing, but it seems like the Bellingham bands I like are not there anymore. But there are some really great bands from the Skagit Valley area and bands that are just north of Seattle. I’m very excited still. It’s true, there are a lot of really great local bands that for one reason or another are breaking up and never going anywhere. I still think there’s going to be a resurgence of local music in the next ten years.

What was the first step that propelled you from local indie-pop darlings to garnering attention from Rolling Stone Magazine and CNN? Was it the EMP Soundoff? Regular touring? Smoozing and good looks? All of the above?

It’s hard to say. All of those things. Smoozing, that’s a funny word. In our opinion, it just means being friendly to everybody. It doesn’t necessarily mean you kiss ass, it means you talk to kids after shows, and you talk to other bands, you talk to people you meet, and you don’t be a dick. Honestly, I’ve met some bands even locally that are good, but they’re total assholes. You’re not going to get anywhere doing that.

For us it had a lot to do with putting thought—real thought—into our two independent releases. I think because we put a lot of thought into it, it was fairly well received. I think that a lot of bands don’t take the time to release good full-lengths before they sign or before things are really happening for them. Honestly, I think that’s what does it for people. I had a bunch of copies of burnt copies of our last CD and I was giving them to everybody and what happened was people put it in their car and gave it a listen, “I’ve hear their name before”, whatever I’ll see if it’s good. I think because we worked so hard on the record, I think people really enjoyed it.

I’d say, be nice to people and putting out good records, making good music. Practicing is the other thing. I think a lot of local bands don’t have time to practice because they’re working all the time. But if you can find the time to practice and if you show up to a show and nobody knows who you are but you put on a good live show, they’re going to remember you. That’s really important. That’s something we tried to do a lot a couple years ago. Even though nobody gave a shit about us, we still wanted to blow the headliner out of the water. We wanted to be better than the bands playing after us because we’d practiced so much and we knew what we were doing.

Your first few releases were experiments in form, concept albums that follows a hero who escapes into space to avoid the end of the world. How do you see that period in the bands history, now?

I think it had a lot to do with our musical tastes changing very, very quickly. We tried to do something that was different. We didn’t want to just release a ten song record where all of the songs were distant relatives of each other. We wanted it to be a close family of songs and we wanted them to make sense together. You know it’s funny, I look back at those records and I kind of laugh. I think it was almost an existential crisis within our band. We didn’t know what we wanted to sound like or what we wanted to sing about. We didn’t know if we wanted guitar or not. We didn’t really know what we were doing. It was definitely very ambitious. I think people respect ambition. There are sometimes when people are overly ambitious and they trip and fall on their face. But there are other times when you can really tell whoever the artist is—the painter, the writer—was really doing something they believed in and put a lot of thought into it. I look back and laugh. I think, “Well, we were just trying to be different.”

It’s funny because a lot of people hated those records. A lot of people got stomach aches because they were just too depressing.

I’m glad the fans struggled on despite stomach aches.

Me too.

You’ve said those early albums also wrangled with thoughts about faith and lost love. It’s tricky business writing about things so intensely personal and it can be hard to market sentimentality and religion in music. Indie rock is often about being vague and austere and detached. Have the new recordings moved away from those themes? Do you feel this is part of the normal evolution of a band?

I think every band is different. Every songwriter is different. I know a lot of songwriters who write stories that have nothing to do with them. People try to write songs that have nothing to do with themselves, but the reality is that part of them is there somewhere. I think our new record Arrows, that comes out next year, is very personal and I’m still wrestling with the same stuff. You know it’s interesting because I used to wear my heart on my sleeves so much so that people I didn’t know were coming up to me and talking to me about things that were really painful memories for me or really personal shit. The kind of stuff that you wouldn’t normally want to talk to a stranger about. Recently I’ve begun to write lyrics that are less personal on the surface. They’re still very important to me, [but] they are a little more poetic maybe, and less obvious, less clear. I used to in a way that it was so easy to understand what I was writing about and I didn’t have to put any thought into it. I’d like to think our newer music is more poetically concealed. You have to dig deeper to understand what I’m really talking about.

Has your recording process changed since the early days of self-producing and working with Jack Endino?

Everything has changed as far as the actual recording process. The last record we did, we spent two weeks in L.A. and two weeks in San Francisco and they were really nice studios and had a lot of history. We were working with a real producer for the first time. Chris was really easy to work with and he knows what he’s doing. Not that Sam, the last producer, didn’t know what he was doing, he definitely did. But they were self-produced records.

The songwriting process is still the same as it used to be. And we maintain creative control over the sound. It wasn’t like we were working with some producer who told us you have to sound like Green Day or some bullshit band. But, it’s evolving. Who knows how it will change over time. It’s pretty crazy. We recorded this last record where Nirvana did Nevermind, Weezer did Pinkerton, and Tom Petty did Damn the Torpedoes. It’s really crazy to be in that environment and be recording our music. We’re just a garage band from Anacortes. It was very surreal.

You’ve played some legendary bills in Bellingham. I can remember Jeremy Enigk at the Nightlight and Late Tuesday’s last show. Are you looking forward to headlining?

You know. Our whole band is really excited to play to Bellingham. We haven’t played an all-ages show in Bellingham in what seems like forever. We used to do it all the time. Because we started touring and focusing on Seattle and got a booking agent, which totally changes things because we’re not booking our own shows. Honestly, I’m a little nervous because we haven’t played there in a while. I don’t really know how people in Bellingham feel about us; I don’t know how many people will come. It’s kind of a mystery to me as far as what the crowd response will be and who will be there. But I’m still really excited to play and I’m really excited we’re playing with The Mission Orange, they are one of my favorite bands. I’m hoping people will show up. If they don’t it will still be a lot of fun. The last time we played the Viking Union it was with [now-defunct Seattle band] the Divorce. That must’ve been four years ago so it’s been awhile since we played a real show in Bellingham. We’re really excited.