Lovemakers make their own rules
Everybody's talking about the eventual disappearance of the album as a platform for delivering popular music. The Lovemakers, out of Oakland, are doing something about it: They're actually accelerating the album's demise.
Scott Blonde and Lisa Light, along with current band mates Brandon Arnovick and Ken Hard -- who will perform Saturday, July 21, at Bimbo's 365 Club in San Francisco -- have just released the new Lovemakers recording, a five-song/five-video EP called Misery Loves Company. And they intend to follow it up every six or seven months with more short-form collections of new songs rather than conventional long-playing discs.
"It seemed like it would be more fun to put out a record every six months rather than every two years or whatever, just to keep music continuously coming," guitarist/vocalist Blonde said from Oakland in a recent conference-call phone conversation.
"Also, it's kind of annoying when you get a big record and it's like 15 songs, but there's really only one song you want," violinist/bassist/singer Lisa Light chimed in from San Francisco. "People aren't buying those records anymore and listening to all those tracks, so it was like, why don't we just make like the five best tracks ever, and then make five more? Not that I feel we've ever had filler, but it seems you experience that a lot."
Two years ago, the Lovemakers, who evolved out of Blonde's previous band, Applesaucer, were major-label artists, hawking their high-energy dance-rock through Interscope and drawing comparisons to such emblematic '80s bands as Depeche Mode and the Cure. Rather than letting their break with Interscope derail their career, Blonde and Light looked to new frontiers.
"We really want to make our own rules, based on what would be best for us and what we want to do, rather than have a label dictate to us what we should do," Blonde noted. "There's a big, wide-open space right now for the entire industry to change and for the way people receive and listen to music. There's a big opportunity to make the rules over."
"It's almost like it's back to singles again," added Light. "The EP is between the album and the single. People want good songs, so it's like, let's just give them cool songs and do it more often. It's more fun for them, more fun for us."
"That would be the most creative thing we could do," Blonde said, "and we're definitely going to pull it off."
Blonde and Light, who met when Blonde was working at the indie Saturn Records shop in Oakland, were a couple when they recorded the Lovemakers' eponymous 2003 debut. ("I don't think either one of us can even remember that now," Blonde said of the relationship.) They broke up just before recording Times of Romance for Interscope.
Nonetheless, their music-making partnership survived, and their catch-as-catch-can songwriting process has remained pretty much the same since. Of their early influences, Light cites Prince's "Raspberry Beret," Sade and the first albums by Cyndi Lauper and Madonna; Blonde said, "I was all about Prince and Led Zeppelin, Motley Crue and Michael Jackson." Inspirations have morphed into equally eclectic favorites that include (for Blonde) Blonde Redhead, Kayak ("a '70s Dutch prog band that nobody knows about"), ELO and Elvis Costello, and (for Light, who said, "I have to give it up for the hyphy movement") the Presets and Oakland metal band High on Fire.
How such a wide variety of influences find their way into songs that sound fresh and fun rather than ironically postmodern is the key to the Lovemakers' appeal; that, and a willingness to edge steadily forward.
"'Misery Loves Company' and 'Save Me' are the two most important songs for us as a band [on the new EP]," Blonde explained, "just because there's an aggressive quality and an organic quality to them."
"I would differ to say that I think 'Save Me' was a big departure because there are no computers -- it's straight up rock," Light countered.
"But for me personally, 'Naturally Lonely' was a big departure because I wrote this weird piano part that's totally different, and it's a ballad! Whoa!"
The freedom to make exactly the kind of music they want carries over to the Lovemakers' radical interface with their fans. By affiliating with Fuzz, a music startup that launched its Fuzz.com online entity last month (complete with a manifesto about "doing right," empowerment, "partnership not ownership" and the importance of "DIY culture"), Blonde and Light can put their music where their idealism is.
"We really want it to be very collaborative," Blonde said, explaining how the Lovemakers separated out the vocal and bass tracks of their first single, "Whine and Dine," and posted them on their Fuzz Web page so that fans can download them and create original remixes of the songs. "You then own that version and can post it on Fuzz and sell it," he explained. "You get to keep all the money. We're totally giving up the rights to the remi
6 votes
