Our Skype connection is swirling and echoing a like 60’s psychedelic record. “That’s my style! I’m a very avant-garde interviewee…” giggles lead vocalist Samantha Urbani. “A lot of times I read interviews after I do them and its all inaccurate anyway so you might as well make up that I said a bunch of cool shit.”
Friends are a band with an almost comical level of zeitgeist-y cool, birthed in the fervent indie hotbed of Bushwick, Brooklyn, quoting all the right influences (ESG, Tom Tom Club, Jackson 5) and making the kind of limb-loosening, good-time pop that’s resistant to even the most cynical, hipster-baiting misanthrope.
TD: It’s horrible to try to describe your own music, so apologies. No rules?
SU: We never had a particular vision when we started the band, I just made some demos that we based the first stuff off. They were all really minimal and rhythm based and vocal melody-driven. But since then, we’ve added more instruments. We’ve made songs that sound really post-punk, songs that sound like really smooth yacht-rock, 60’s girl-band sounding songs. We’re not going for one aesthetic necessarily, we all have a vibrant taste in music.
I’ve read Neil Young say something similar about his writing.
Yeah, I also heard Michael Jackson say that! I don’t think that my songs compare to theirs in quality but I guess in technique. But I do definitely believe that there’s a source for everything that is beyond our comprehension. Y’know everything already exists and everything always will exist and what never existed will never exist at the same time. I think all the songs that I write, I just happen to be a middle man.
What’s your technique for being a “middle man”?
When I was a teenager, I had a four-track cassette recorder and a couple of [guitar] pedals and microphones, guitar and whatever percussion. It’s way more sentimental I think, the tactility of a cassette, it feels so much more personable but I lose everything, I’m bad at holding on to physical objects I’d be afraid to lose it! Now I just keep it in Garageband if I’m going to make a demo. As soon as a melody comes in my mind I have to decide if will potentially be a song or if I should just appreciate it in the moment and have it be like a temporary soundtrack to my day. And if I want to make it into a song, I usually just sing it into my phone. Right now I have probably 150 little songs in my phone that I hope I’ll have time to mould into something but for now they’re just like little memories.
So with all these different songs with a wide variety of sounds – is the album all finished and ready to go?
Yeah we finished it. It’s gonna come out in June I think. It’s hard for me to listen to because I really over-analysed it and it makes me want to do the next thing as soon as possible. Everybody’s telling me “Oh, it’s normal!” so I’m like, shit, I want to like it. It’s weird, I don’t think of the recordings on the album as our songs, I think of them as representations of the songs. I don’t know if they’re perfect representations but they’re something that we’re going to put out there and see if people like it.
Who are you making the album with? Who was producing it?
To claim being a producer is kind of a funny thing because we didn’t have anybody producing or giving us suggestions. We had an engineer who was doing all the mechanical work for us and we were trying to tell him what we wanted. So technically, we self-produced it but I don’t know anything about being a producer yet, though I really look forward to learning. The guy who engineered it for us is my ex-boyfriend. We were together for two years and some of the songs are about him which was quite funny and kind of awkward at times.
Friends’ new album Manifest is due very soon.
Words: Ian Lamont
