TAS In Session: Plants and Animals

Montreal's woozy rockers Plants and Animals, who'll play Seattle's Bumbershoot Festival this Saturday, September 4, made a splash back in 2008 with their eccentric, dreamy debut, Parc Avenue, which nabbed the trio their first Polaris Prize nomination (Canada's answer to the Mercury Prize) and a pair of Juno Award nominations, including best new band.

In April, the bilingual trio of guitarist/singer Warren Spicer, guitarist/bassist Nicolas Basque and drummer Matthew "Woody" Woodley released their sophomore album La La Land on Secret City Records, recording songs in both Montreal and the leafy suburbs of Paris, in a studio situated by the Seine.  After wrapping a European tour this September, they'll hook up with Frightened Rabbit this October for a North American trek, arriving at New York's Terminal 5 on October 30.

Spicer, Basque and Woodley visited The Alternate Side not long ago and revealed why a tent was necessary during the mixing process, reminisced about their charmed, wine-and-baguette life in a Parisian studio and also played three tracks from La La Land.

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmFhlVrnzbA]

Alisa Ali: You have a bigger sound on your new album, La La Land. More guitars, keyboards. Is that reflective of your live shows?

Warren Spicer: Probably, yeah. We did our first record without really touring very much. We were living in Montreal doing our thing and not playing in a band full time. We were working jobs and crap. Not regrettable, but not remarkable things. Things that musicians do to get by. Restaurants, teaching.

Alisa: Teaching is not a regular thing that musicians do!

Matthew “Woody” Woodley: Well, if it’s teaching music ....

Alisa: Touche! What were you teaching? Music?

Warren: Yeah, I taught in a place kind of like [Fordham]. A university. It was a weird stage in my life because I’d taken that class and then I taught it. Kind of felt like an imposter the whole time. I was glad when it was over. That was the one time in my life that I really felt like I was faking it. I might have even done a good job, but I couldn’t tell.

Alisa: You studied music for a while?

Warren: Well, we all had. Me and Woody both grew up on the East coast of Canada, in Nova Scotia, and then we met there, made a band and started touring. And to get back to your original question, once we began touring more, we began working on our sound. We spent a lot more time thinking about it and working on it so when it came time to go in and record new songs, it just followed us into the studio. It made more sense.

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXn097XJsBw]

Alisa: I heard that you recorded this second album in a couple of places, one being your hometown of Montreal, in The Treatment Room.

Warren: Yeah, that’s our friend’s studio and kind of our home base. We went back and did the first sessions for the new record there. Maybe about two weeks. After that we had a bunch of stuff done. And then, we were going to go to France anyway, but the label knew some other artists who had worked at this studio outside of Paris, called La Frette. A big mansion with a studio in it.

Woody: It was manor, not a mansion so much. I think a mansion has to be bigger. It was a three floor house with a studio set up in the basement. The other floors you live on, cook your food there, and if you want, record. So we did a lot of setup in the living room, the secondary living room. You could do things in the stairwell if you wanted. At one point we put a microphone in the bathroom to capture some ambient, reverberant sounds. If you listen real closely, there’s a kid crying and some birds chirping.

Alisa: Who was the kid crying? A ghost of kid like in “The Shining?”

Woody: A real ghost.

Nicolas Basque: Yes, a haunted house. A dead kid crying.

Woody: It was our manager’s son.

Alisa: Who is very much alive.

Warren: Yes, and hungry at the time.

Alisa: What was the difference between recording in Paris or your hometown? Do things float differently?

Warren: It’s just beer and wine, that’s how we described it. Montreal is very much a beer experience, literally as well. France was a delight. We’d have a glass of wine, record for a while, go for a walk by the river. Outrageous compared to Montreal which is the typical industrial neighborhood with a lot of traffic. You just get dirtier. Which brings out a certain kind of creativity. Just because a studio is really good looking doesn’t mean you’re going to perform well. You wouldn’t want to judge a studio by what it looks like on a website. The people involved with the studio in France were so good. The guy who owns it is the coolest guy. We were really welcome there and things were so relaxed and focused. We never left.

Nicolas: You live in the mansion. You record there and sleep there so you get right into the music because you don’t have your regular life going on there. For creativity, it really nourishing and inspiring.

Warren: Montreal is more about getting a little crazy. Longer nights and rough mornings. We were rocking in both studios, but there was more typical rock and roll behavior in Montreal. There was rock and behavior in France.

Nicolas: A big mountain of wine bottles.

Warren: And lots of baguettes.

Alisa: You guys all speak French. Is it different speaking French in Paris?

Nicolas: It’s like going to England for you. It’s a different accent.

Woody: Sometimes the accent is so thick that the people in France will answer Warren and me, with our Anglophone accents, in French and they’ll answer Nicolas in English because they think it’s so foreign, even though he’s a native French speaker and he doesn’t make all of the grammatical mistakes that we make. Just because the accent is so different.

Warren: Recording in France was different. Recording with a French engineer was different. Sometimes he’d have a word for something in the studio and we did not know what he meant. The first time we were miking a drum kit, they were talking about the “charly” - which is the high hat. We were like, what is he talking about? Charlie?

Woody: It’s my dog’s name, so that was really confusing.

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVUAqdRHyNM]

Alisa: I heard that there was a situation with the mixing of this album where you handed it off to someone else, but you weren’t happy with it and you ended up doing it yourselves?

Warren: Not entirely. We went back to France to La Frette to mix it with Lionel [Darenne], the guy who tracked it. We had taken it all home to Montreal and then had done more work on it and when we had it all done we went back to France to mix it and it seemed like a great idea. But then we began bringing up the faders. I mixed our last record and have mixed other people’s records, and when we got [to La Frette], Lionel was patching stuff in and I was like, “what’s going on?” So we had a little pow-wow and his understanding that we were going to work together and mix it together and I was like, “Okay, fine, I’ve never done that before.” As we got rolling, things started to go in various directions. I kept trying to reassure myself that it was good to take a left turn and go in a different direction and try to someone else’s perspective on the music. I think ultimately it did help a lot because when we got back and realized we didn’t get what we wanted - we had a really good reference point of where we were going to go. We used one mix from France which was “Future From the 80s” which was fine; it sounded good. So we came home and I remixed it two weeks before we delivered it.

Alisa: Was that stressful because you were under some time constraints?

Warren: Yep. Got a bit stressful and a little crazy. I slept there a few times at the studio.

Alisa: You brought a tent.

Warren: Yes, we brought a tent and tried to take photos of it for the cover of the album. But it just looked like a tent in the studio (laughs).

Woody: It was a bad idea.

Warren: Well, good idea, bad image.

Plants and Animals Tour Dates with Frightened Rabbit

Oct 7 – Seattle, Wash. @ Showbox at the Market

Oct 9 – Portland, Ore. @ Wonder Ballroom

Oct 10 – San Francisco, Calif. @ The Fillmore

Oct 13 – Los Angeles, Calif. @ Mayan Theatre

Oct 14 – San Diego, Calif. @ House of Blues

Oct 15 – Anaheim, Calif. @ House of Blues

Oct 16 – Las Vegas, Nev. @ Beauty Bar

Oct 17 – Tempe, Ariz. @ The Clubhouse

Oct 19 – Dallas, Texas @ Palladium Ballroom

Oct 20 – Austin, Texas @ Stubb’s

Oct 21 – Houston, Texas @ Walter’s

Oct 23 – Gainesville, Fla. @ Common Grounds

Oct 26 – Athens, Ga. @ 40 Watt Club

Oct 28 – Philadelphia, Penn. @ Starlight Ballroom

Oct 29 – Boston, Mass. @ Paradise

Oct 30 – New York, N.Y. @ Terminal 5

Nov 1 – Washington, D.C. @ 9:30 Club

Nov 2 – Pittsburgh, Penn. @ Diesel

Nov 3 – Detroit, Mich. @ Magic Stick