Search The Line of Best Fit
Search The Line of Best Fit

TLOBF Interview // Salem

07 September 2010, 11:56 | Written by Jen Long
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I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen when I pressed accept on the call from Salem. Sat in my Renault Five in the pouring Cardiff rain, what the voice on the other end would sound like? Where would the interview go? How would it answer my questions? I just couldn’t second-guess.

Usually I have some inkling or pre-conceived idea cobbled together from stage banter, online comment and from reading other people’s work. With Salem it felt like unchartered territory. Firstly, there wasn’t much about. The interviews I found seemed largely abrupt. Short answers, little context. Then there’s the music. Dark and unrelenting, it’s about as far from narrative lead lyricism as you can get whilst still maintaining deep shades of personality.

Add in the artwork, the videos, the general mysticism of the band and they begin to feel closer to cult than group. So I really wasn’t expecting to be thrown into a four-way conference call with them.

While we waited for Jack to call in, I asked John and Heather to give me a little background on the band.

Heather: We started in 2007

John: Me and Heather went to High School together at this art school in Michigan and we just became best friends since then, and I went to Chicago when I was seventeen, eighteen. I met Jack in Chicago and then stayed there. A couple of years later Heather came and we were all making music before we started to combine, but it was just a really natural thing that we were always together and so we were always working on music and then it just sort of happened.

How did you go about recording the new album?

Heather: We do it all at our house, or like, where we were living coz some of the songs are like, older mixed with new ones so they were recorded in all different places that we lived. We made the songs and then, like, I got hooked up with people from IAMSOUND, and then they got Dave Sardy to mix the album for us.

It’s an amazing album. I feel like it’s a quite suffocating listen, it’s quite overwhelming. How did you want people to feel when they listened to it?

John: I think we didn’t really want anyone to feel any specific way. We would like them to feel how they feel. Everyone’s different, everyone’s gonna feel differently, you know?

You’ve been called Drag and you’ve been called Witch House and stuff like that, how would you describe your music? Where do you think you fit?

John: I don’t know if we fit anywhere. We’re just making music just whatever, you know? I don’t know if we think about putting ourselves…

Heather: …No, we don’t like to see ourselves as part of any, like, movement or anything, you know?

I agree, but that’s the way people tend to write and report about you, so I just wondered how you viewed it? Or do you just not pay it much attention?

Heather: It doesn’t bother us. If people always need some way to describe a certain type of music, they always want to put things in a genre, it doesn’t bother me, but it’s not how we see our music.

How do you see your music?

John: We just see it as sort of like, an extension of the three of us together creating something.

Heather: I think it’s like, really personal.

When I listen it feels like I’m eavesdropping on someone’s thoughts, and also in the way you represent yourselves through the videos and artwork. It’s quite dark and almost intimidating. Is that something you’ve done consciously or is it this expression of yourselves?

John: We’re not really conscious of trying to do anything. We’re not trying to do anything besides make the music that we’re making. Some people say it’s dark and intimidating, that’s how they interpret it and I think that’s cool.

Heather: A lot of people say that our music is really dark and I think parts of it are, but it’s also really beautiful. I don’t know. I don’t think it’s all dark.

What about the videos and the artwork? Who has the final say? Do you all come together and collaborate?

Heather: We all work on it together. For some of the videos Jack had an idea for them and started working on them and showed it to us and we really liked it. It doesn’t really matter who makes what, you know what I mean?

John: Yeh, it’s all a collaborative thing and even if one person works on something way more than another person it doesn’t really make a difference.

Jack is here by the way.

There seems to be quite a lot of mystery around you as well. Is that something you’re careful about?

Jack: I think it’s more that our focus isn’t on creating an image. Our focus is on our music and people came to us. We didn’t put ourselves out there, people came to us. We just try and let our music speak for us a lot more than other people who are, like, trying to get attention. Does that make sense?

It’s more about seeing how people react than trying to force them into one place?

Jack: It’s more like we made it for ourselves. Like, we’re making music for ourselves and if other people want to be part of that and listen to our music then fine, but if not then that’s fine too. It’s just about letting people misunderstand us, not like sweating to put ourselves out there and trying to be something that it’s really not that.

I saw you play at SXSW and I really enjoyed it but a lot of the press after that was quite negative of your live performance. How did you react to that?

Jack: That just wasn’t a big deal to me. It was a big deal to other people I guess.

John: We really don’t care either way.

Will you be coming over to the UK anytime soon?

Heather: We’re coming in the fall.

And what can people expect from your live show?

Jack: Expectations are the cause of human suffering.

If only I’d known this twenty minutes earlier.

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