Lily Chapi – HuffPost 10.22.10

[Note: While interviewing Lily Chapin, she gave a description of their creative process that might be inspirational or insightful for artists.]

Mike Ragogna: When you guys record, do you have a clear vision of what you’d like the instruments to be or do you wait until you’re in the studio to make those decisions?

Lily Chapin: Well, I think it really depends on how you set about doing the recording. For Two, our new record, it was a bit more spontaneous, I think, than some other recordings that we’ve done. We did an EP recently where we pretty much recorded live in the studio with the arrangements we’d been playing live with our band, and in that case we knew exactly what the instrumentation was—we had rehearsed the songs and played them live a bunch—and we just went in and imprinted that onto tape. With Two, we were in a limited setting, in the sense that we had brought a certain number of instruments with us and we had a very specific amount of equipment, and that provided a set of limitations as well as specific possibilities. We were also working with new material that we hadn’t necessarily even finished writing—much of it we had finished, but maybe we hadn’t played it live yet. So, in that sense it was very intuitive, and just kind of playful as we just tried things out as we went along.