{"id":2620,"date":"2012-06-14T11:30:06","date_gmt":"2012-06-14T15:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/wpblog\/?p=2620"},"modified":"2012-07-30T15:12:50","modified_gmt":"2012-07-30T19:12:50","slug":"abstraction-and-pop-music-an-interview-with-tanlines-by-matt-conover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/abstraction-and-pop-music-an-interview-with-tanlines-by-matt-conover\/","title":{"rendered":"Abstraction and Pop Music: An Interview with Tanlines"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Jesse Cohen and Eric Emm sat relaxed in leather couch in the back of DC9 as they waited for showtime to roll around after their soundcheck. Both members of Tanlines wore jeans with a denim shirts and denim jackets, which they quickly pointed out and mocked themselves for. I had forgotten my notebook of questions in my rush to get through DC traffic and parking in time, and thusly the interview opened up with a back and forth about denim and boots, which I will spare you. After that though, Cohen and Emm deftly handled my open-ended questions with humor and acuity.<\/p>\n

With your album, I really wanted to find out what it was about, what your main goals were for it. I know that’s a horrendously broad question\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

COHEN: Then we\u2019ll give you a horrendously broad answer. [laughs]There\u2019s not a simple answer. To me, we sat down to write this album, and I just sort of hear that time of our lives. This album came at a crossroads in both our personal lives and also in our careers as musicians. It was sort of about figuring out what is the meaning of adulthood and what kind of life we want\u2014that was the shit that was going on in my head as were working on it. Someone said it was a great \u201cmid-mid-life crisis album,\u201d and that\u2019s about right. But it isn\u2019t like, \u201coh, all these songs are about my ex.\u201d There isn\u2019t a story like that. We paint with broader strokes when it comes to meaning, in that way. It\u2019s emotionally abstract. The songs aren\u2019t stories for the most part\u2014though maybe a couple are inspired by more specific things.<\/p>\n

EMM: Some of them are. There are these broad, basic life-experience songs that you can plug your own experience into a little bit. But there\u2019s no specific theme, like an ex-girlfriend or a death in the family or something like that. It\u2019s just life.<\/p>\n

COHEN: I think I like \u201cemotionally abstract,\u201d that\u2019s a thing I hadn\u2019t said before\u2026<\/p>\n

EMM: It\u2019s emotionally abstract, existential pop.<\/p>\n

COHEN: Yeah. There\u2019s definitely a lot of emotion in it but\u2026<\/p>\n

EMM: Without being emo.<\/p>\n

Or too open.<\/strong><\/p>\n

EMM: I\u2019ve heard some people refer to the lyrics as cryptic.<\/p>\n

COHEN: Or vague.<\/p>\n

EMM: And I\u2019ll take that as the abstract side of it. I see the lyrics as fairly plain. I don\u2019t think they\u2019re dressed up too poetically. They\u2019re not attempts to be clever or something like that. But the broader theme would probably be a mid-mid-life crisis.<\/p>\n

COHEN: Growing pains.<\/p>\n

EMM: Thirty-something growing pains.<\/p>\n

Where does the name Tanlines come from?<\/strong><\/p>\n

COHEN: It\u2019s not a good story. We needed a name to put the thing on the internet. A lot of times we\u2019ll write songs and then at the end of the night Eric will drop me off at home and we\u2019ll talk about stuff, figure stuff out, and it was one of those nights. We wanted to put something out and we needed a name for it, and we saw it written on the back of truck and decided that it would be fine, and now we\u2019re stuck with it.<\/p>\n

EMM: It had more meaning than that. It wasn\u2019t just like let\u2019s pick a random word that sounds cool.<\/p>\n

COHEN: It worked because we\u2019re two white guys sitting in-doors most of the time, working in a studio, and it\u2019s nice outside and the music we make sounds \u201cwarm,\u201d or has some warmness to it. It\u2019s sort of a reflection of that. And it\u2019s musical\u2014like a bass line, a keyboard line, a striped shirt, a nautical striped shirt. [laughs] There\u2019s all that stuff in it.<\/p>\n

EMM: It\u2019s like naming a child or a dog or a pet. So you like it, and you think it\u2019s great for a while, and then you know\u2026<\/p>\n

COHEN: Hopefully by the time you get sick of it, you have defined the word more than it has defined you.<\/p>\n

EMM: In a lot of ways the name is a stamp of something I\u2019d rather not be stamped with, but there\u2019s nothing you can do.<\/p>\n

What is that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

EMM: The implications are, when your name is Tanlines, people come see you with ideas like, \u201cOh, what if we took a photo of you guys, like, with sunburned faces.\u201d And it becomes that, a lot. It\u2019s like this literal thing\u201d \u201coh your music is sooo sunny,\u201d or \u201cI get tan lines just listening to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

COHEN: If we were like a thrash band or noise band called Tanlines that would be cool. Because it would be a contrast, though I still think of it as a contrast\u2014the name and who we are as people. But I think the music we make, it fits in with it, it\u2019s congruous in a way.<\/p>\n

EMM: [grudgingly] Yeah. I guess we can only blame ourselves for that.<\/p>\n

COHEN: It\u2019s not a big problem. Like I said, I think the name Animal Collective is a terrible name. If you saw an Animal Collective sticker on a wall of band stickers in the back of some club and you didn\u2019t know they were some amazing, amazing band, you\u2019d be like \u201coh that\u2019s a crappy name.\u201d But they define it, and that\u2019s what you want to be able to do.<\/p>\n

Are there any artists who had a big influence on this album, or just your music generally?<\/strong><\/p>\n

EMM: When I think of this album, I think of all music, the act of making music, as having a dream. It\u2019s all the things you\u2019ve ever taken in, filtered out. The easy, simple answer: it\u2019s everything I\u2019ve ever listened to and nothing at the same time. Because all those things equal this other thing, and that\u2019s the album.<\/p>\n

COHEN: Again a broad, horribly broad answer, but that\u2019s exactly what I would have said too.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Your music makes you want to ask broad questions.<\/strong><\/p>\n

EMM: Because it calls into question life.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s that existential pop.<\/strong><\/p>\n

EMM: The existential pop music dilemma. I don\u2019t know if it answers the questions.<\/p>\n

COHEN: If it answers the questions, it answers the questions with a question.<\/p>\n

EMM: As vaguely as they were asked.<\/p>\n

What would that final question be?<\/strong><\/p>\n

COHEN: Where did you get those boots?<\/p>\n

EMM: Do you dry-clean those APC jeans? [laughs]<\/p>\n

COHEN: You ever read the Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy? What\u2019s the answer to everything? Forty-two? [laughs]<\/p>\n

Was it a conscious decision to make the album emotionally abstract? Or was that just how it came out?<\/strong><\/p>\n

COHEN: You\u2019d have to ask Eric about how he writes songs. I think a lot of that comes from the lyrics.<\/p>\n

I think the music is that way too. It doesn\u2019t really push you. It leaves some space\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

COHEN: It doesn\u2019t direct you exactly where to go.<\/p>\n

GADFLY: No, not quite.<\/strong><\/p>\n

COHEN: Maybe so, I have to listen to the listener.<\/p>\n

EMM: It\u2019s so hard to know, being so close to it. You think a lot of things about these songs that other people will never think. You find out you\u2019re wrong. I think I expect too much that people are on my same wavelength. That might come through in the music.<\/p>\n

COHEN: From my perspective, not about the lyrics, one of the worst vibes you can project as an artist is, \u201cwhy aren\u2019t you guys dancing?\u201d \u201cCome up closer, to the front guys!\u201d That\u2019s one of the worst vibes you can project. I think your job is just to do the thing that you want to do. I think there are dance music producers that are like, \u201cI\u2019m gonna write a song to make people dance. I\u2019m gonna make an epic break. I\u2019m gonna make an epic climb, and then a thing, and then a this.\u201d And we don\u2019t think that way at all. We don\u2019t think of ourselves as dance anything. If the name of the music is an action, I just\u2026 then I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

There is a danceability to your music.<\/strong><\/p>\n

COHEN: Absolutely, absolutely. But it\u2019s not in the genre.<\/p>\n

EMM: We hear people say all the time, \u201cOh I\u2019m at work, sitting in my chair dancing to Tanlines.\u201d<\/p>\n

COHEN: That in itself is a little abstract.<\/p>\n

EMM: I think you\u2019ve uncovered something that maybe we haven\u2019t yet. We\u2019re fucking abstract-experimental.<\/p>\n

Abstract expressionist, existentialist pop.<\/strong><\/p>\n

EMM: We\u2019re abstract expressionist.<\/p>\n

COHEN: But just in the vaguest sense.<\/p>\n

This interview originally appeared atPretty Much Amazing<\/a>, a music site we think is pretty alright.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jesse Cohen and Eric Emm sat relaxed in leather couch in the back of DC9 as they waited for showtime to roll around after their soundcheck. Both members of Tanlines wore jeans with a denim shirts and denim jackets, which they quickly pointed out and mocked themselves for. I had forgotten my notebook of questions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,213],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2620"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2620"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3613,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2620\/revisions\/3613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}