{"id":147860,"date":"2013-06-12T05:00:13","date_gmt":"2013-06-12T05:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/socancom100stg.wpenginepowered.com\/japandroids-share-the-wealth-and-the-work\/"},"modified":"2013-06-12T05:00:13","modified_gmt":"2013-06-12T05:00:13","slug":"japandroids-share-the-wealth-and-the-work-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/japandroids-share-the-wealth-and-the-work-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Japandroids share the wealth \u2013 and the work"},"content":{"rendered":"

Les traductions pour les articles avant l\u2019automne 2013 ne sont pas disponibles pour le moment.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Indie rockers Japandroids have more of a reason to keep the peace in their band, and make sure everybody\u2019s happy, than the vast majority of acts. \u201cEverybody\u201d is just guitarist\/vocalist Brian King and drummer\/vocalist David Prowse, and when your band is a two-piece, accommodation and communication can mean the difference between here today and gone tomorrow. For them, that means splitting the songwriting credits 50-50.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe just say all songs written by Japandroids,\u201d says King over the phone from Oslo, Norway. \u201cIt\u2019s what we\u2019ve always done since the beginning. We\u2019re a two-person band, and those clich\u00e9 things \u2013 where somebody doesn\u2019t feel like they\u2019re getting the right credit, so you end up replacing them \u2013 can\u2019t happen. Five-person bands can have these disagreements, and all of a sudden there\u2019s a different guy in the band. We don\u2019t have the luxury of being able to have those kinds of fights.
\n\u201cYou\u2019re doing it as a band for your fans,\u201d King continues, \u201cso people who give a shit about their own personal credit, I don\u2019t have time for that. Dave and I tour a lot together. We spend 90 percent of our lives, 24-7, together. It\u2019s just really important for both of us to preserve that relationship so we can keep playing in a band together.\u00a0

\u201cDave and I tour a lot together. We spend 90 percent of our lives, 24-7, together. It\u2019s just really important for both of us to preserve that relationship.\u201d \u2013 Brian King<\/div>\n

\u201cI write the lyrics, but Dave comes up with a lot of the stuff on drums. I don\u2019t know how to play drums, so who\u2019s to say what\u2019s more important or what\u2019s not? So no matter who plays what, we just always say, \u2018It\u2019s by Japandroids.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Japandroids formed in Vancouver in 2006 and released its first two EPs, All Lies, in 2007, and Lullaby Death Jams in 2008 (now available together as 2010\u2019s No Singles). It\u2019s likely you never heard about Japandroids during that time, but in April of 2009, Canada\u2019s Unfamiliar Records released the album Post-Nothing on vinyl, and influential music site Pitchfork praised the song \u201cYoung Hearts Spark Fire,\u201d essentially validating Japandroids\u2019 years of hard work, and the quality of their writing.<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, maybe validation is the right word,\u201d says King. \u201cWe were just doing the same thing we\u2019d always done for so long\u2026 No one seemed to give a shit the day before that happened, and then the day after that happened we couldn\u2019t even get through all our e-mail\u00a0accounts. It was like, \u2018You have 10,000 new e-mails.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

This was all the more remarkable because Japandroids broke up for a few months at the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009 out of frustration, working for three years and \u201cgetting absolutely zero attention.\u201d
\nThe Post-Nothing album, which was then licensed by Polyvinyl Record Co. for release in June 2009, landed on year-end lists of NME, Spin, Pitchfork, Exclaim and others. It earned Japandroids a place on the 2009 Polaris Music Prize long-list and a 2010 Juno nomination for Alternative Album of the Year.<\/p>\n

They dropped Celebration Rock last May in Canada and June internationally, earning a 9\/10 rating from Spin and appearing on Rolling Stone\u2019s Top 50 Albums of 2012. The single \u201cThe House That Heaven Built\u201d gained lots of attention worldwide, eventually being voted as the new entrance theme for the Vancouver Canucks.<\/p>\n

This year, Japandroids toured the U.K. and Europe in late March and early April, before heading to the U.S. to play the Coachella and Sasquatch festivals, and more dates into June. They plan on returning to the U.K. and Europe throughout July, and in August they\u2019re slated to play Russia, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Australia and New Zealand.<\/p>\n

When Japandroids are touring, King says very little songwriting happens. Days are filled with long commutes \u201cin a van full of people and gear\u201d \u2013 on the day of this interview, for example, they drove all day from Copenhagen to Oslo in time for load-in and sound-check \u2013 which is not the ideal setting to start strumming out song ideas, or concentrating on lyrics.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not like you\u2019re doing nothing,\u201d King clarifies. \u201cYou\u2019re always collecting ideas and in sound-check, you find some good guitar parts. Or if you\u2019ve got a day off and you come up with a good idea for a song or lyric, you start writing that stuff down, but we don\u2019t really finish very many songs on tour. Just the initial spark might happen, but it doesn\u2019t really get finished until you get home and have time to work on it.\u201d
\nWhile they split the songwriting credits, King does handle the lyrics. \u201cI never, ever talk about the lyrics or what they\u2019re specifically about to me,\u201d he says, \u201cmostly because I think part of the power of the song \u2013 at least as far as our audience is concerned \u2013 is their interpretation of the songs. Some of my favourite songs of all time, I have no idea what the song is actually about to the person who wrote it, and I don\u2019t actually care. It\u2019s what I interpret the song to be about and its reflection in my own life.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s where the real power to me lies in it,\u201d he continues. \u201cI think that about our songs as well, which is one of the reasons I never, ever talk about what songs are about \u2013 but I can assure you that they\u2019re all very, very, very personal. I certainly did not rip something from the headlines and then turn it into a song.\u201d\u00a0King says he writes on electric guitar, adding \u201cIf I had more money I might buy an acoustic guitar; it would be convenient to have one.\u201d He says that writing is part of a multi-part process for him and Prowse.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe write songs in order to play them live,\u201d he says categorically. \u201cThere\u2019s no separation for us between writing a song and recording it and then playing it live, [unlike] the way that, say, Radiohead will write a song, go record it, and then they\u2019ll worry about how they\u2019re gonna play it live afterwards. For us, that\u2019s kind of why we play in a band in the first place \u2013 to perform live. \u201cSo writing the songs is always about, from the beginning, how are you going to perform that live at the end of the day? Because our records are essentially live records. They\u2019re [recorded] in a studio, but they\u2019re recorded essentially live.<\/p>\n

\u201cInteraction between Dave and myself, because we\u2019re just a two-piece, is an important part of the process,\u201d King continues. \u201cSo I\u2019ll have the skeleton of a song, but it\u2019s not until I actually bring it into our jam space, and we start going through how we would do it together \u2013 how the drums are going to sound, and how the breaks, and the pauses, and the transitions are going to be \u2013 that it actually starts to take life in the way that Japandroids songs do.\u201d It begins very traditionally, King says, with a verse, chorus, bridge, a melody and a loose idea of the lyrics. This is what he calls \u201cthe kind of standard pop-song or Beatles-song elements of it.\u201d Then comes the Japandroids goal: \u201cHow do we turn that into something that\u2019s really impressive to play together?\u201d

Then comes the Japandroids goal: \u201cHow do we turn that into something that\u2019s really impressive to play together?\u201d<\/div>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s never really done until we literally can\u2019t do anything more impressive to it,\u201d King says. \u201cThen after that\u2019s done, usually the instrumental will have changed because we\u2019ll have put in this new part, or we\u2019ll have changed the beat of this. Then I\u2019ll have to go back, after we\u2019ve got the instrumental as this really impressive thing, and re-write lyrics and sometimes the melody on top of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of Prowse, who wasn\u2019t available for this interview, King is clear that the Japandroids would not be Japandroids without him. \u201cI write all the lyrics to all the songs, and I\u2019m the guitar player so I write all the guitar parts, and David\u2019s the drummer so he plays the drums. But in terms of breaking down those roles to the nitty gritty, we just don\u2019t give a shit about stuff like that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hard-touring duo always split songwriting credits 50-50<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":109958,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-non-categorise"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147860\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uat.socan.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}