Fujiya & Miyagi member Matt Hainsby

Not until I had interviewed him via email did I discover that bassist Matt Hainsby, perhaps better known as "the ampersand" (according to Wikipedia) of English band Fujiya & Miyagi, is a bit of a taciturn fellow. He answers my questions succinctly and pithily and not-much-else-ily... which, in hindsight, is not all that surprising, considering the nature of Fujiya & Miyagi's music. Enjoy the interview.

Let’s start at the beginning and all that: how did you guys start making music together?
My invitation to join the band came after a game of football. Every Monday night David, Steve and I would play 5-Aside football, and my memory of that night is maybe a little rosy as I recall we won the game, went top of the league and then David and Steve popped the question. Our team name was possibly the best/worst team name in the history of modern football - ' Dude where's my car FC'. Please note that David named the team.

Whence did you derive your band name?
David really had a knack for naming things.

You’ve reported influences as disparate as The Karate Kid and Lolita. What's your relationship with pop versus high culture?
If you are looking for it you can take inspiration from anything, it’s like seeing faces in garish wallpaper or in wood grain.

Your videos feature such things as Legos and childlike drawings. How does the idea of childhood influence you?
Just for the record the "Ankle Injuries" video directed by Wade Shotter is made entirely out of dice and not Lego. David’s lyrical net is cast wide and childhood things are just one aspect he writes about. Video directors obviously pick up on the childhood references, which might say more about them than us.

What’s your reaction to having mostly gained your notoriety in recent years, given that you’ve been around for the entire decade?
I'd rather things built up slowly than explode and fizzle out.

What’s your opinion of Pitchfork?
It is one of many internet sites that I visit regularly to read reviews of new music, there I've said it…. that's quite a bombshell I've dropped.

They’ve actually described the sound of your song “Dishwasher” as “Serge Gainsbourg making love to a kitchen appliance”—how do you feel about that description?
He would be flirting with the toaster whilst making eyes at the kettle.

What do you consider your major musical influences?
Synthesizers, drums and guitars.

Tell me a story—any story.
My friend lives by the sea and harbours the dream of being a pirate. At home he occasionally dresses like a pirate, but on leaving the house he sadly puts his pirate things away and looks like a regular person, the only concession he makes to being a pirate on the streets is to carry a telescope in his satchel, this comes in useful for helping to tell old ladies at bus stops what number bus is coming from a distance.

Check out their music on their MySpace.
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Freelance Whales singer Judah Dadone

If you haven't heard of Freelance Whales yet, I'd suggest you get on that. And if you have, well, you're not alone: this band has been burning up the U.S. touring circuit for the past year with the heartfelt songs off their first album, which collectively tell the story of a young boy who falls in love with the ghost haunting his family home. I had the opportunity recently to speak with the lead singer, Judah, and it was a ball; read on to hear what he's got to say on everything from songwriting to Superman.

Hi, is this Judah? How are you?
Yes, this is. I’m good, thank you; how are you?

Are you guys in Chicago right now?
Yeah, we are. We’ve got a show a couple hours away.

How’s your tour going?
It’s going great. I guess we’re about a month into it, and we’ve already done pretty much the whole… I guess we’re in the last third right now. We’re touring with Miniature Tigers, who are incredible. They’re just excellent, excellent people to hang out with. Yeah, it’s been really lovely.

So is this your first time touring the US?
This is actually our sixth time this year touring the US.

Wow.
Yeah. This time last year, we were on our very, very first tour. Ever. We had never even left New York City. Since then we’ve done six, you know, along the full perimeter of the US with brief little forays into Canada. We’re figuring it out!

If this is your sixth, it sounds like you’ve been spending more time on the road than in one place.
I think that’s absolutely right. I think if you add it all up this year we’ll probably have been on the road for, I guess, eight or nine months of the last year.

Jesus. You guys are from Queens, right?
Yeah, the band is from Queens. Doris was actually born and raised in Queens, and we all live in different parts of the city, but the band got together in Queens and actually started rehearsing here in the basement of this bakery. You know, we’ve kind of upgraded out of there since then. But we’re all from different parts of New York and, originally, different parts of the country, at least in terms of where we were born and raised.

Any Brooklynites?
Yeah, there are a few of us. Chuck and I live in Carroll Gardens, and Kevin lives in Bed-Stuy, and Jacob lives in the Lower East Side. Doris lives in Astoria, Queens.

Awesome. I’m in Los Angeles, but I miss Brooklyn so much.
Oh, cool! How’s LA treating you out there?

Oh, I love it. I really miss Brooklyn, though! When you get back there, enjoy it. [laughs]
Oh, we will! I’m so excited. When we get home, we’re going to have six weeks off—not really off. We’re going to be writing and starting the process of making a new record, which is really exciting. But, yeah, we’re going to have six weeks to kind of recalibrate and decompress. It’s weird, when we come home there’s this—I go through this weird postpartum-y sort of thing where I don’t know what to do with myself and just walk around my neighborhood listlessly, like, without any real kind of destination. But, yeah, it’s so strange because the life of being on tour is so structured, you know? On a day-to-day basis you know where you have to be and at what specific time. And ultimately it’s a good thing, the fact that when you go home there’s so much less structure. It’s nice to have that foil, that contrast, but it’s a weird transition the first couple of days that you get back.

I understand what you’re saying. You said you’ll be working on your new album when you get back?
Yeah. I mean, it’s about time: we put out Weathervanes earlier this year, and we’ve toured on it like six times somehow, and now that we’re on this headlining tour it seems like after this would be an appropriate time to get back into the writing process and try to rediscover what it feels like to be in a solely creative space, where all you’re doing is making sounds and writing words and falling off the map and being disconnected from… I guess from the pressures of daily life.

I don’t know how much you’ve been mulling it over while on the road, but how different is the next album going to be from Weathervanes?
It’s interesting, because we’ve been thinking and there’s a whole different variety of things that could happen, but we actually won’t know until we sit down and figure out what the record really wants to be about. Once we see what the ideas are and where it’s really coming from emotionally, from there that should really dictate the sounds and the different instruments and so on. In my head I could think of a list of like a dozen different ways that it could go. I think we know what our goals are, but I also think that if you plan for these things—sometimes with the creative process it’s more like you’re chasing this beast that’s already out there. You know, you’re just pursuing it and trying to figure out what it is, but you won’t actually know until you bag it. I think there’s only so many conscious decisions you can make, and only some of them are very executable. Like, on Weathervanes the production is very dry and close because of the rooms we recorded in, so we couldn’t get a lot of the beautiful big-room sounds that you can get from a variety of different spaces—where you record one song in one space and you record another song in a different type of space. There’s a lot of artists we know and love that do things like that, and that’s one small example of a little change we’d have on the second record: there would be a variety of different spaces, and hopefully we’d be able to do that in some way that would be more meaningful to the storytelling of the record.

Speaking of storytelling, your website mentions that Weathervanes is a story about a young boy who falls in love with the ghost of a girl who haunts his home. Would that make it sort of a concept album? Did you build the record around that idea or did the idea sort of emerge once you had the songs?
Yeah, it’s kind of strange. That wasn’t the original intention. I always feel like I didn’t really have a universal, completed, whole understanding of what the record was about until we were done fixing it. With Weathervanes, the way it was composed was just a process of composing a ton of the music—just getting the music out of the way and layering bit-by-bit and getting these sonic collages going—and then once the music was done just putting over it a vocal that was kind of like speaking in tongues to get a sense of melody and meter and rhyme. Then once there was some sense of how a vocal might sit on the track we’d try to transpose lyrics onto it. How the lyrics would come out was based on—I guess the idea was trying to rely on the subconscious mind, a little bit, and also on dream-logging. We’d write down our dreams and then take little snippets of them and try to turn them into different parts of songs, rewriting them so they’d fit into the framework of the song. But we’d also listen to the music and pay attention to what your mouth would naturally do in that scenario, if that makes any sense, and it’s strange how when you do that it’s kind of like letting your subconscious mind come to the surface. And when you put the lyrics down, and listen to it, you don’t necessarily know what it means right away, but you’re listening to it in a similar sort of way to how an entirely outside mind would listen to it too. So first listening to the record I was kind of interpreting the record in a way that someone who bought it a few months later might have been interpreting it.

All right, I have a few more abstract questions now.
Okay, cool. Let’s go.

What’s your life philosophy?
My life philosophy is to… create as many things as physically possible and to make as many emotional connections with other people as physically possible.

That’s a great one! Now, who would win in a fight: Will Smith or Superman?
Will Smith and Superman… um, I’m thinking probably ten years ago, in his Ali days, Will Smith would have had him. But Superman is more timeless, and I think Will Smith has sort of been slacking on his weight training recently. So if it were today I would say Superman.

Weathervanes is out now. Check out the band's MySpace to see the dates for the remainder of their latest U.S. tour... if, that is, there are even any tickets left.
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