A Conversation with Dry the River’s Peter Liddle – HuffPost 8.27.14
Mike Ragogna: The title to your new album Alarms In The Heart sounds pretty heavy. So? What’s so alarming? And what’s with all these Ouija shenanigans and faux tarot cards going on with your album cover artwork?
Peter Liddle: Alarms in the Heart is a partial quote from The World According to Garp by John Irving…
“Late-night phone calls–those burglar alarms in the heart–would frighten Garp all his life. Who is it that I love? Garp’s heart would cry, at the first ring–who’s been blasted by a truck, who’s drowned in the beer or lies sideswiped by an elephant in the terrible darkness?”
It’s not really a grand, deep theme, like some of the theological or broader human stuff I was trying to respond to on the first record. It’s about small, personal crises, and overcoming them. I was struck by the way a late night phone call can lift the veil of easy normalcy. A business misfortune, an unexpected test result, sometimes just a news story – a personal happening can, in an instant, remind us that everything is a little bit more fragile than it seems. As I get older, I find those are the moments I tend to write about: not macroscopic world events, nor the miniature habitual routines of my life, but these little “alarms in the heart,” that don’t have to be great in magnitude but are just enough to make me double take. Those are kind of the fault lines that teach us something about ourselves I guess.
Regarding the artwork, we knew we wanted to get away from the painterly medium of the first campaign. This record felt more personal and more human–I wanted to find something photographic, grainy, documentary-like.
I found this photograph online somewhere – it’s by a really talented guy from Hawaii called Jake Casapao [https://www.flickr.com/photos/wolfskin/]. The record is about the uncertainty of the future, where Shallow Bed was about the past. I felt as though the art reflected that, but didn’t put too fine a point on it. For me the heavy, atmospheric feel of the picture is counteracted by the hammy, theatrical presentation. It kind of walks a line between the themes of the record and showing that there’s a playful element to the exploration too. We don’t take ourselves all that seriously, music for us is meaningful but also enjoyable. What really sealed the deal was the Magician tarot card. The character is depicted as a kind of mad quack doctor. I figured that’s sort of what I am–the unofficial tour doctor with my half-finished medical degree. More than anything else the image seemed to sit right with the record. There’s room for interpretation–the listener can relate it to the music in whichever way works for them.
MR: What was the creative process like, especially on songs like your single “Gethsemane”?
PL: “Gethsemane” is actually the exception to the rule in some ways. I think of it as the bridge between Shallow Bed and Alarms. I wrote it on New Year’s Day 2013. We’d just come off three years of relentless touring and I decided to spend New Year’s Eve at my family home in Newbury, Berkshire. I watched Jools Holland with my mum and went to bed at quarter past midnight, then woke up for no reason at 4am and “Gethsemane” kind of arrived fully formed. I think I sat quietly in the garage and wrote it in about an hour. Of all the songs on the record, it’s the most in keeping with the earlier output. More than half of Shallow Bed was written when I was 16 or 17, and it feels to me as though Gethsemane is the song I was trying to write then. It sort of lays to rest that period of my songwriting I think.
The rest of the record was a lot more collaborative. Most of the Shallow Bed songs were partly or fully formed before we started the band. I did demos with sampled drums and stuff, and everyone used that as a starting point. This time, I would sing a few bars of melody and chords into my phone, send it to Matt [guitarist] and he’d play around with it, make some adjustments, and we’d meet up a few days later and start turning it into a song. In most cases, we didn’t even bother with drums and bass on the demos. We just got into a room with Jon and Scott and wrote stuff together. It was much more creative, much more fruitful and I think Alarms is more coherent as a result.
MR: The Delgados’ Emma Pollock guests on “Roman Candle.” How did that come together?
PL: We worked with three different producers on the record, one of whom was Emma’s husband, Paul Savage [King Creosote, Mogwai, Arab Strap]. While Matt and I were up in Glasgow working on some mixes with him, we went to see Emma play at a festival in Paisley and she was just amazing. We’d been talking about a female vocal on “Roman Candle” for a while, and plucked up the courage to ask Emma if she’d do it. The next day, she came up to the studio and did a couple of takes and it worked straight away–it was one of those rare studio moments where Matt and I looked at each other in disbelief. Paul and Emma brought a whole new dimension to the song and that in turn made us think about the album in a different way.
MR: Catch us up on what’s happened with the band since the last album?
PL: There have been a lot of significant changes both behind and in front of the curtain. We have a new label, new crew members etc.. Everybody’s circumstances have changed too. We don’t live in the same house any more, some of the team have been investing their energies in different things–all the healthy business of sorting our lives out after three years of relentless touring. The biggest change is that our violinist Will left to pursue his own projects. We’ve been really lucky to find a great session player, Pat, to play keys and violin for the foreseeable future. In general, everyone is rejuvenated, more comfortable and has their best foot forward for the upcoming campaign.
MR: How has the band’s mission statement changed since the start?
PL: For as long as any of us can remember, we’ve wanted to play music for a living, which is probably the case for most musicians, but I don’t think any of us dream of arenas. It’s not a lack of ambition, it’s just that it’s miraculous that we can be full-time musicians, at any level. We’re keenly aware of that and very appreciative of it. It feels ungrateful to shift our focus to commercial concerns or a lofty ethos. We have a label and a management team who work tirelessly with respect to our development as a business, but I think our mission statement as a band is to continue to love what we do, and to try and do it as well as we can. I think that should be and probably is the case for most bands.
MR: Are you finding that as the band grows, the material’s topics and music is evolving in certain ways that you didn’t see coming?
I always anticipated that the band would become more holistic and inclusive. The first demos were kind of a solo studio project with session guys, but very quickly it became apparent that the band worked well together, and everyone was personally invested. The idea of a gang mentality appealed to me, to be sharing our various fortunes and misfortunes. Although the first record is relatively subdued, the live shows have always been more raucous and ragged, and it was pretty obvious early on that once we wrote more collaboratively, things would become a bit more “indie rock,” for want of a better description. By the time Shallow Bed came out, many of the songs on it were five years old or more. I think I’d already grown a little tired of mining the folksy pastoral imagery that is a rite of passage for young singer songwriters. In my head I was already turning to more personal biographical themes. In fact, there’s a song about it on the record, “Hidden Hand.” The chorus lyrics talk about how “the garden’s overgrown…now it’s just a field behind the house where the creepers kinda swallow the light,” which refers to the heavy language of some of the earlier material, which was often so cryptic it obscured the message I was trying to convey. I hope the new record is more relatable.
MR: What’s the band’s favorite track from the project and why?
PL: I’m sure everyone would give a different answer to that question! Personally, I like “Rollerskate” and “Med School.” They’re both more biographical than songs I’ve written in the past, and more direct musically. I think they’re also the most representative of our collaborative approach on this record. I can hear everyone expressing themselves on the recordings and the end result is the sound of a band in a room, which is something Dry the River hasn’t really achieved before.
MR: What was it like working with Charlie Hugall, Paul Savage, Peter Miles and arranger Valgeir Sigurðsson?
PL: All four of those guys are very different from one another. Charlie produced a track I wrote for the film Zaytoun. He’s relentlessly enthusiastic, upbeat, and seemed to become part of our group from the word go. We put him through a lot, I think, by dragging him out to the wilderness of Iceland for six weeks of intense darkness with no breaks, and he dealt with it admirably. The bulk of the arrangement and production work came from him. He really helped us to think about the shape of the songs and how we needn’t throw everything on every song, all the time. When we got back from Iceland and had time to reflect on the recordings, I felt we’d lost perspective a bit. We’d holed ourselves up in the middle of nowhere, and the record sounded a bit disconnected as a result. It was somehow distant and impersonal in a way I couldn’t put my finger on. Matt and I went up to Glasgow to work for a week with Paul Savage. Paul was very calm and reassuring. He was really positive about the record, helped us refine the stuff we found problematic, and also roped in his wife Emma to sing on Roman Candle, which is one of the most successful moments of the record, for me.
Peter Miles is somebody I’ve worked with on and off since I was fifteen or so. We grew up in the same town, and he recorded all the local punk and hardcore bands. He also produced the very early Dry the River EPs. Very late in the album process, we wrote a clutch of new songs that were much more instinctive and immediate, less considered. We felt they’d change the pace of the record for the better, and Pete seemed the obvious choice. We have a shorthand with him at this point, we just headed down to Devon and set to work and it all came together very quickly. I think it reminded us of the early demos and what Dry the River was to begin with. It kind of refocused us on what we were trying to achieve. We ended up booking a few more weeks down there to go through every small aspect of the record we weren’t sure about, and wrap things up once and for all. Pete was instrumental in reminding us to trust in our instincts. He allowed us to be very involved in the production and that made us feel in control.
Valgeir Sigurðsson is responsible for all the beautiful string and brass arrangements on the record. In the past we tended to throw violin and viola on every song without giving much thought to their function. We resolved early on that this record would only have strings in places that cried out for them. We gave Val some rough mixes of the tracks whilst we were working in his studio in Reykjavik, and a few days later he conducted a team of Icelandic session string and brass players through his compositions. It was another head turning moment for Matt and I. The songs really sprang to life. As songwriters, Matt and I can muddle through rudimentary arrangements, but we were suddenly aware of the gulf between that way of working and having an experienced composer like Val on board.
MR: What is your advice to new artists?
PL: We were talking about this in the van the other day, trying to dissect the various factors that allowed us to become a full time band, trying to figure out a formula. Sadly, although hard work and conviction turn the odds in your favor, it ultimately comes down to chance. Anyone who convinces themselves otherwise is misguided, I think. You hear successful musicians saying they always knew they would be successful, that they were born to do it and didn’t stop until they achieved their goals. In hindsight, it might look that way, but there are so many factors that have to coalesce to make any kind of career in music. Dry the River were lucky to be using acoustic guitars, violins and harmonies around the time that labels were looking for the next Mumford & Sons, but we’d been doing a similar thing in other bands for years before that without a single label rep at any of our shows. We’d worked weekend jobs to buy gear and pay for practices, played in pubs and slept on sofas for ten years in school holidays and university breaks, and it could just as easily have amounted to an expensive hobby. Even now, we feel truly grateful to be in the position we’re in, but we have to be very careful with cash flow…we walk a thin line between solvency and insolvency! It’s increasingly rare to find any kind of financial security being in a band.
All that said, I’m not saying don’t do it, and I’m not saying don’t be ambitious. For us, it’s the best profession we can imagine, and none of the effort has been unrewarded. The point is, don’t form a band for the purpose of having a career in music – form a band because you and your band mates love playing songs together, and would want to do it regardless of whether you could make a living from it. That’s without a doubt the best mindset to be in when you start out.
MR: What course will this river be taking in the future?
PL: “Twenty bridges from Tower to Kew —
(Twenty bridges or twenty-two)–
Wanted to know what the River knew,
For they were young and the Thames was old,
And this is the tale that the River told…”