A Conversation with The Hundred In The Hands’ Jason Friedman and Eleanore Everdell – HuffPost 10.15.10
Mike Ragogna: Jason and Eleanore, what the story behind your group’s name?
Jason Friedman: It’s the name of a battle that Crazy Horse fought in, a Lakota battle. The legend behind the battle is that the night before it, a shaman rode in and out of the Lakota camp saying. “I’ve got too many in the hands. I’ve got a hundred in the hands.” Then, the next day they killed nearly one-hundred U.S. soldiers, so it’s The Battle of The Hundred in the Hands.
Eleanore Everdell: It was a victory for the Native Americans.
MR: Yeah, score one for them, and what, a gillion for the other guys.
EE: Exactly. That’s part of why we liked it–the whole tragedy and romance of the story.
MR: Is there any kind of social issue out there or is there anything in the paper that has your attention?
EE: I would say we try to stay away from being political with the music that we make. Sure, we’ve got opinions about the state of things.
JF: There are a lot of things that sort of feed in historically to where we can kind of make comparisons, but it’s more the politics of the every day than any kind of over-arching theme.
MR: How did the two of you meet?
EE: Jason had another band before this one called The Boggs, and he was releasing his third record with that band and needed to put a live line-up together, so I joined just for a tour.
JF: Yeah, we met and were on the road together about a month later. Then, we were on the road for two months, and that’s how we got to know each other. We were just driving around listening to music, and we realized we had a lot of common interests. So, when we got back from that tour we were given a couple days in the studio, and we banged out what ended up being our first song, “Dressed In Dresden.” That’s how it started.
MR: Did you find yourselves writing material together as you toured?
EE: Writing on the road is…I’m always impressed when people can do that. I think it’s the hardest thing ever because you don’t really have that much privacy, and when you do, you kind of just want to zone out. It was more that we were on input mode. So just listening to a lot of music and talking a lot about ideas, that led to a creative period when we got back from touring.
JF: The way we write is, we both kind of write on our own in short bursts. We both write lyric sketches and music sketches, then we get together and start recording and writing at the same time. So, the songs slowly come together as kind of a combination of us.
MR: Who are your influences?
JF: It’s a really long and ridiculous list. It kind of feels a little bit silly because a lot of it doesn’t necessarily sound like us; but we were listening to a lot of different things, like a lot of early ska and dub, and a lot of house music. Post punk is just kind of in the blood, so that comes out all the time.
MR: Do I also hear a little bit of Eurodance and Siouxsie And The Banshees?
EE: You know, people say that all the time. That’s not necessarily what we listen to, it’s just that maybe we’re coming to some of the same conclusions as they did by listening to similar music. I don’t know, we don’t listen to Siouxsie that much, but I do love her voice, and I think she’s amazing.
MR: This is an album that you recorded at home, right?
JF: Most of it.
EE: Half and half, kind of.
JF: Maybe like seventy percent or above was at home. We would record and write together, and we ended up with a whole stack of what we were calling demos, then we split that up and decided to make an EP and an album. We went and worked with some really amazing producers to kind of take our tracks the rest of the way. So, they used what we had recorded as the basis, and then we replaced those things that needed replacing.
MR: You worked with Jacque Renault, and Richard X, of course. How did you hook up with these guys?
JF: Well, Jacque is just an old friend of mine, and we’ve always been talking about working together, So, when Eleanore and I started this band, it just seemed like a really great opportunity. For a while, we were going over to his home studio almost on a weekly basis, just trying out tracks. That’s how “Young Aren’t Young” slowly came together–it started off as a kind of afro-beat Young Marble Giants, and with Jacque, it became more house-y.
MR: It does have that layer on there, and it really is a nice amalgam of many things.
EE: Then there’s Richard X who we worked with, and he was more someone that we got in touch with through our label and our manager because he’s quite sought after and he does really crazy things with English pop music. It was really fun for us to work with him because he had a lot of tools that we were interested in trying to apply to our crazy, weirdo songs that we’d written.
JF: We kind of always had this idea that we wanted to work with people who knew the tricks for making bigger tracks, but kind of meeting in some kind of other place. For Richard, I think he was let off the hook–he didn’t have to make a big chart topper. He’s got some pretty weirdo tastes himself, so I think it was a good mix.
MR: You guys are New Yorkers, right?
EE: We are, yeah. I can’t call myself that yet because I’ve only been here for eight years, but Jason, I think…
JF: …yeah, I’ve lived in New York longer than anywhere else.
MR: I’m an ex-New Yorker too. What borough?
JF: We’re in Brooklyn at the moment.
MR: Do you guys frequent the clubs, and do you find any inspiration in what’s going on in the club scene right now?
JF: I think it’s more the stuff that we had been getting really into. This whole last year, we just locked ourselves away and were writing and recording.
EE: It’s interesting because we have a lot of friends that are DJ’s, like Jacque, and I would say that we’re inspired by the music that they make. So, in some sense, we are, but we haven’t, in the past year at least, had the time to go out and just hang out at clubs because we’ve been working so hard. It’s more like listening to stuff in our apartment instead of in clubs.
MR: You have a new single. Can you tell us a little about it?
JF: Yeah, it’s called “Pigeons,” and it kind of went through a lot of different changes. The lyrics are kind of dark–it’s kind of a story about someone who’s not in the right place giving into hedonistic things like having parties on the weekend, but not really being that happy about it. It’s got this payoff chorus that, if you just listen to it, sounds like it’s a party anthem.
MR: In your press release it goes further, framing it in words like “Teenage angst, boredom, heartache.”
EE: (laughs) There you go.
MR: Let’s talk about the instrumentation on the album. Jason, you play guitar, bass, and you program, right?
JF: Yeah, it’s kind of hard to figure out exactly what we each did. But generally, that’s my role, and Eleanore does the singing and plays synths.
MR: When you guys are writing a song now, especially since you have an eye on going to producers to make the tracks a little more polished, do you find yourself aiming at that end result during the creative process?
JF: Yeah, part of the inspiration, and what we were excited about in this band, was looking at a lot of R&B and hip-hop, and really being excited by that production. So, in our heads, we were kind of thinking of it as being in the lineage of avant pop. The music itself is not necessarily breaking the rules–it’s basically verses and choruses. But going back to Phil Spector and all the way through Timbaland, there are really interesting ways in which you’re framing those textures, and that’s always been something we were interested in playing with.
MR: I feel like the vocals seem to be evoking Brill Building girl groups.
EE: Thanks, I love all that stuff. I think that, generally, I like girls who sing where there’s kind of a desperation in the way that they sound. It’s hard for any singer to describe what they’re doing, I think.
JF: The first record that we bonded over was…I gave Eleanore a stack of girl groups recordings.
MR: You can really hear that. It’s like you took the cream of a lot of genres, and claim the amalgam as your own.
EE: Well, thank you.
MR: There’s another single on this album, “Dressed In Dresden.” It’s like a post-punk rave up.
JF: Yeah, it was the first song that we had made as a band. We stuck it up online and that’s what started everything for us. It got us over to Europe to play a handful of shows, and Warp came to one of those shows. Just on that one single, it all happened.
MR: What was the discovery process like? Did they reach out to you?
JF: Yeah. (laughs) It was really funny because they were at the top of our dream wish list of labels we would want to talk to, then three months later, two of the guys that came from Warp were among the seven people who came to see us, but they liked it enough.
MR: Will you be going on tour?
JF: Yeah, it’s a U.S. tour with these bands Temper Trap and Delphic. We’re, unfortunately, not going to be in Iowa, but we’re going to be in Illinois and Wisconsin.
MR: Well, we’ll get you next time. I love that you came to visit Fairfield, Iowa by phone, that counts. Thanks so much for stopping by, and all the best.
EE: Thanks so much for having us.
Transcribed by Ryan Gaffney