Hopscotch Interviews: Braids

Montreal-based art rock band BRAIDS have been making a splash since their debut album, Native Speaker.  The band toured with Toro Y Moi this year and impressed audiences with their electronic music of avant-garde vocals, fluttering melodies, and blunt lyrics.  I spoke with drummer Austin Tufts about making the album, playing in a mixed-gender band, and how dropping out of college was the greatest decision he ever made.

New Raleigh: What is Montreal like and how did BRAIDS form there?

Austin Tufts: Montreal is a magical place.  It’s a little island on the Saint Lawrence Seaway and it is very very dense with tons of people, but everyone here, for the most part, is very culturally aware and they love music and they love the weather.  It’s just a great place.  Everyone is always just having a good time and there’s tons of festivals here in the summer.  Literally every weekend there is a new kind of music festival or theater festival or some sort of massive art exhibit.  It’s just a wonderful place to be and a wonderful place to be creating music. 

When we first moved here it was scary because we didn’t know anybody.  And we were kind of stuck in the middle of this really nasty rehearsal warehouse and surrounded by a much of metal bands.  But then we started getting involved with our kind of music.  There was this epic loft scene a couple of years ago with tons of artist lofts putting on great, cool, DIY shows and it was a really important time that fostered a lot of bands that are now doing very well.

I’ve noticed here that everyone is really into being friends with every other musician.  You’ll just be walking down the street and be like, “Oh!  There’s the guy from Wolf Parade,” and it’s just a really fantastic experience to be with those people and to talk with them, get their real life experiences, and be able to share your own.  So it’s a really nice community.  Even though it’s a large community it doesn’t feel like you’re lost in it or anything like that. 

The band formed in Calgary, Alberta, actually, home of the band Women. Do you know that band?

NR: I’m still just trying to visualize where Calgary is on the map.

AT:  Well, Alberta is above Montana.

NR:  I think I get it confused with Edmonton.

AT:  Yeah, Calgary is right below Edmonton.  It’s just south of it.  So yeah, we were born and raised in Calgary, Alberta and we started playing there as a band called The Neighborhood Council and it was a very different experience.  I’m a year younger than all of the other people, so they took a year off after high school and waited around for me to graduate.  And we just rehearsed 30 hours a week for that year, and really got our “being a band” chop together, and learned how to work together and developed our own sense of communal writing – which I think is something that sets us apart from a lot of other bands.  There’s a strong sense of togetherness in our band and in our writing and in our friendships and the way we do everything.  That was really fostered over that first year of being together, and it’s been something that has stuck with us the entire time of being a band. 

After that one year, we all moved out to Montreal – some of us to go to university and some of us to just be in the scene. I was studying music and Taylor [Smith] was studying philosophy and Katie [Lee] was studying architecture. Raphaelle [Standell-Preston] was just playing music and starting up solo projects and really sort of acting as the ambassador for our band and went to tons of loft shows and parties and got us into the scene, which was a fantastic thing. 

We did that for about two years and then when we were in the middle of recording we had to make the decision that we weren’t going to go back to school this year, and that we were going to finish our record and find people that we were going to be excited about putting it out with, and just release it, and actually be able to tour because we weren't going to be tied down with school.  So that was a really big step for us to make a decision to be full-time musicians.  It was the best decision we ever made because at that point we sort of hit the ground running and haven’t stopped. 

NR:  That sounds like a scary leap of faith.

AT:  Oh totally.  I think three of us were really ready to make that leap of faith a long time ago.  Katie [Lee], the keyboardist, had a lot of pressure from her parents to stay in school, not to just chase after this music dream or whatever.  So when one day she was like, “Guys, I think we need to go out for coffee; I think we need to talk,” we were like, “Okay.”  So we went out for coffee and she said, “You guys, I think we should drop out of university,” and we were like, “What do you mean?” and she’s like, “I mean, think about it, we’ve got this record that we want to release and I think we should just do it in a legitimate way,” and that was just after we got our publicist, and now manager, Kip, and he really instilled a lot of confidence in us.  He really helped us make that decision and realize that this was something that was a legitimate option for us to pursue and that making a living was possible as a musician. 

NR:  So the moral of the story is to drop out of college and invest in the scene.

AT:  [Laughs] The moral of the story is to follow the dreams and aspirations of your friends, and yourself of course.  But it really helped having that good friendship because that would be a really scary decision to make on my own.  If I were a solo beat producer or something and in university, chugging along, and I had to make that decision by myself, I don’t know if I could do it, but I could definitely do it with my friends. 

NR: It’s hard to classify your album, Native Speaker, into a single genre.  What were some of your influences when you were making this record?

AT:  The record sort of charts a period of time that is about a year and a half long.  It took about that long to write all of the songs, and then about another 9 months to record it.  So the creative process was really stretched out over two years. 

There was a vast amount of influences that went into [the record].  From member to member we have different influences. But I think some of the things that really rang through were the sort of minimalist, classical composers such as Steve Reich and John Cage, and that whole sort of movement of less is more, and phasing a lot of melodic lines and things like that, short little repetitive loops and stuff like that.  I think that was a really important period for us when we first discovered that.  I think when Taylor and I first listened to Music For 18 Musicians by Steve Reich, in my living room, it was mind-blowing to hear that music and think, “Oh my God!  We could do stuff like an electric band!  That would be so cool!” and just really got all of the inspiration from that. 

The albums Feels and Strawberry Jam by Animal Collective really offered a lot of guidance also in terms of forming us as musicians.  It was really a rite of passage I think for us – that there was music that we were hearing in our heads, that we really didn’t know how to tap into, and that we really didn’t know if it was okay to tap into. But then we heard these bands like Animal Collective and thought, “Oh my God, these guys are actually doing well for themselves, and they are playing this music that we love and that’s so akin to what we’ve always been striving for,” and their sort of collectiveness and their friendship exudes in their music and I think that’s something that really translated strongly for us. 

Also just the dense, lush, really textural aspects of Caribou, and Animal Collective, and The Dirty Projectors, stuff like that, really comes through.  Something about having so much going on, and having a central focus point, is a sound for us, and I think we really explored that a lot on Native Speaker.

I think the biggest influence was just what was going on around us and the fact that we were moving out on our own, and learning how to grow up, and learning how to move away from [our] parents, and cook for [ourselves].  Just our lives around us were the biggest influence, and the friendships we carried over from Calgary to Montreal.  More so than the music, I think the influence of friendship on our confidence levels, and the way we composed as we became closer and closer and closer friends and everything changed – I think that’s the biggest inspiration for us. 

NR:  Do you think these friendships create an interesting juxtaposition in your music of playfulness with more complicated themes of adulthood?

AT:  I agree with that.  I think it’s interesting to hear somebody who is as young as Raphaelle talk about those things so honestly.  Her poems are very enigmatic and mythical, yet very blunt and straightforward at the same time.  From a strictly lyrical standpoint, to hear her talk about those things, and in that matter, is kind of refreshing. 

NR:  As a drummer, how do you construct, record, and play along with the looped recordings?

AT:  The record was completely written in a live environment before it was ever tracked, so everything we did on the record could already be played live, so we never had to worry and that.  The biggest thing about Native Speaker is that we really learned how to use our equipment as a compositional tool.  So we had all these ideas and all these textures and all these lines that would normally be impossible for one person to play by themselves, but because we utilized loop pedals we were really able to push ourselves beyond playing single melodic lines per person.  So a lot of our songs are built on loops and stuff like that.  It’s been a really great learning experience for me as a drummer to play along with these perfectly timed things.  It’s also been a struggle each night dealing with technical things and worrying about that, so over the course of the last three years, no matter what the loop comes out as, we know how to work with it and we know how to roll with it in a live environment. 

NR:  A lot of indie music is very male-dominated, including the bands you mentioned as influences.  Does being in a band with a strong female voice give you any specific opinion about feminism in indie music?

AT:  I wouldn’t go so far as to say it has anything to do with feminism, necessarily.  Regardless of whether it’s a man or a woman, I think it’s just an artist trying to say something.  I definitely love the fact that Raphaelle is a very strong woman, and that’s she’s willing to defy a lot of people who are like, “Wow, you’ve got a real trucker’s mouth for a girl,” and she’s like, “No, I’m just talking about real life,” in a sort of “Go fuck yourself,” kind of way.  She’s had to deal with that quite a bit.  She’s a very strong person, and a very strong woman.  But I think at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if she’s a girl or a guy.  I think if you asked a lot of female musicians, they’d say the same thing because they are just people who have something to say. 

With those inherent differences between most women and most men, it creates a very interesting dynamic for us as a group, to have two men and two women in it.  We all bring very different things to the table and it’s often that the girls’ side is bringing something very different than the guys’ side.  I love working in a mixed-gender band.  I think it’s a very different experience than working in an all-male band for sure. 

NR:  What are you most looking forward to about Hopscotch?

AT:  Because the festival is a ways out, and we’ve been spending all of our time recording and rehearsing, I haven’t spent an extensive amount of time searching about the festival.  I know that we’re only there for one night, unfortunately, so we’ll have to limit our experiences to that one day and night.  But I think it’s really cool that Guided By Voices are playing. I’ve never seen them and I’ve heard a lot of really great things about them. I like the Carolinas a lot.  We became really good friends with Toro Y Moi [during our tour together] and everyone down there is just so fantastic.  The people who live there, there’s something about North and South Carolina.  The people are just so hospitable and very, very kind and I’m just excited to be at a festival full of people like that.

BRAIDS played in Raleigh on September 9th as part of Hopscotch Music Festival.

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Music , Other posts by Whitney Ayres Kenerly.

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