Kings of Rock 'N Roll: An Interview With Louis XIV
By: Brett Hickman |
Thursday April 05, 2007 |
 |
Louis XIV members Jason Hill and Brian Karscig sit down during their recent tour. The following is an edited transcription of their conversation. |
| Brett Hickman: Me and Brian were just talking about the tour, that it just started but you guys had been running around for awhile, right? Brian Karsicg: We did a lot of one-off dates. Jason Hill: And then we released the EP (Illegal Tender) to sort of tide people over until we released the record. So we set out to write some B-sides. We hadn't ever really thought about writing things like B-sides. It didn't make any sense to us. You write a good song or... BK: Or you don't. JH: You just try to write all A-Sides. We literally went into the studio that night to record a B-side song. By the end of the night we had "Illegal Tender" and it was too good to leave as something that wasn't going to be on the new record. BK: It was a fluke... JH: It was very quick. We hadn't written the vocals until right after. I produce and engineer the stuff, so I was in there getting bass tones, while Brian was out there playing the bass. He was just noodling around on a riff. It sounded so cool. So I walked out and started playing guitar and Mark (Maiggard) started playing, too. Within a couple of minutes we had the groove to the song. BK: It was crazy. JH: That was the first or second take...I think we used one of the earlier takes. BK: It's usually one of the earlier, freshest takes. JH: Then all three of us crowded around the microphone... BK: Drunk JH: Yeah, we were a bit off on red wine and what not. We just went in and adlibbed vocals...like (sings gibberish to mimic the vocal style on "Illegal Tender"), that sort of thing. The chorus was all made up on the spot. Those were all actual first takes that were totally off the cuff and actually stuck in the song.  JH: I come in with "Two in the pocket is better than three," and Brian chimes in with... BK: "Three in the pocket is better than four!" JH: And in the end when he says... BK: "Put 'em together..." JH: After "five in the pocket is better than six, put 'em together and pick up the sticks," I... BK: He just lost it. JH: I was dying...I couldn't do anything more. What were the events surrounding your signing to Atlantic? JH: All the West Coast stations were playing us before we signed, and then right after we signed, before the record company had a chance to do anything, all these other stations starting picking up "Finding Out True Love Is Blind." It sort of kicked everything in the ass. The song's actually started to play here on radio in Chicago. BK: They been playin' us? I've heard "Finding Out True Love Is Blind" several times, yes. BK: Oh wow! Cool. The song really spoke to me right away. It was something that you wouldn't expect to hear on radio. BK: We didn't think so, either. JH: Some stuff that we do you know is okay, its not like everything we do is fantastic. But some of the things you know are really great, and some other things are just okay. That we knew was great. But we didn't think it would necessarily translate to radio. BK: There's a formula of what is on the radio and that just didn't fit the mold. JH: Its mixed by us. Its produced by us. Everything's done by us. Most things on the radio have the same sort of sound. The same producers are doing the same thing, the same guys are mixing it. Our is definitely different from that.  How does that come about? How do you walk into Atlantic and say "We're doing it all ourselves"? BK: We turned them down at first. JH: Atlantic has been fantastic all the way through. I mean we have nudity on our cover coming out. All of the top people had no problem with it. We had a bit of leverage going into the deal, because we had all of these radio stations playing it without them doing anything. To everybody's credit at that company, at least that we've dealt with, they've believed in what we were doing right off the bat and said we don't want to screw it up and they didn't want to change it. I think that a lot of bands might get signed, go to a record company and go, "Here we are. Do something with us." We were exactly the opposite. BK: And I will say too that we would have never gone with a record company unless...you can feel if someone's passionate and believes about what you're doing. Because we had bigger money offers from bigger companies that we're getting involved, because they're like, "Oh, if everybody wants them, let's just do this," and we probably would have failed miserably. JH: Other people might give you lip service, "Well yeah, of course you can do this and of course you can do that." We sort of felt that, if we signed to another company, four-five months later, they're going to say, "No, no, no. We need so and so to produce this record." No, I want to produce the record. I'm going to produce the record.  That's the key to all of this right now. If you guys hit it big, then there'll be 20 other bands that sound like you. BK: Oh, you know it. Then you gotta keep evolving. You said that you did a video for "Finding Out True Love Is Blind"? BK: In Bristol, England with Chris Hopewell, the guy that did that Radiohead "There There" video. Where he's walking through the forest. JH: I don't think MTV playing us will make or break us. It'd be great if they did, because we want more people to hear us, obviously. But its not going to change anything about us. We've got eight months of touring already booked. BK: (knocks hard on the wood table) JH: We brought some equipment to track an album in hotel rooms and release it through Pineapple, our own label. And then maybe some of those songs will make it to the next record. You have the ability in your contract with Atlantic to release music on your own label? JH: Yeah, they're into it. We'd love to be in Japan or in England or something and have a track that was written and recorded that evening. Maybe some guest people on it and release it. That sounds like a great time to me. For me, I need to record. Because it drives me nuts. I start to feel that I'm no good at anything, unless I'm writing or recording a song. Usually they're one and the same. Like "Illegal Tender" is the last song that we officially wrote. We've both written things in the meantime, that was the last song. That was December that we wrote that. To suddenly now be on the road and to not be able to do that its kind of hard. |
