Interview: Japandroids

To everybody that doesn’t know who you are can you introduce yourselves as a band and where you got your sound?

Brian: Ok, I’m Brian, and I play guitar.
Dave: I’m Dave and I play drums, in Japandroids
B: Oh yeah, in Japandroids, I didn’t mention that part. Japandroids are from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
How we got our sound? [Pause]
D: We started playing as a local band, Brian and I went to university together-
B: Uni!Have to aid understanding…
D: Oh yeah, you guys call it uni over here don’t you. Yeah we went to uni in Victoria before leaving to go to Vancouver and Brian followed and we started playing together in Vancouver and we played locally for a real long time, a couple years. Did a little bit of Mini tours to Calgary, Seattle, Victoria etc. and then we recorded an album called “Post Nothing” a few years ago and that album got quite a bit of buzz and from there we just got in a van and just lived in a van for about a year and a half and finished a new album “Celebration Rock” that’s about to come out now.

I was reading on the internet earlier that you guys exemplify a DIY attitude. When in Vancouver you used to put on all the shows yourselves, get all the venues yourselves and used to go out and flyer and everything off your own back. Do you think it’s good as a band to get out there and do all this yourself, without looking for a manager, a label and everything? Do you think it aided your knowledge of the industry?

B: I think it’s weird that doing it that way is considered so weird. Does that make sense? I mean if you’re a local band and you want to play shows and you want to be, not successful in ‘Rockstar’ terms but you want to get out of your garage and go and play shows and you want to get out, I think it’s weird that doing it all by yourself is considered not normal. That’s a weird thing.

We always get asked about that, it’s a common question, and I think it’s funny that we get asked about it, not that it’s a stupid question, but I think it’s weird that it’s question-worthy, like that it’s out of the norm.

D: I think in Vancouver especially that’s just how you do it. I think if you’re living in London or New York then you can just broker a record label. Have you heard of Brooklyn? It’s this magical place in America where everyone plays in a band.

And everyone expects to be put on?

D: yeah totally. I actually like Brooklyn but in Vancouver it was normal. Most of the bands in Vancouver are small – I mean there are some bands there that have gone out and toured a whole bunch like Black Mountain, Destroyer, New Pornographers etc. but a lot of the bands in Vancouver they come from where we came from, and I think all those bands come from where we come – just doing your thing because you wanted to make music and just doing your thing in that city and doing everything yourself. I think it helps us be a little bit, hopefully, more appreciative of all the people that help us now, it’s pretty awesome to have a booking agent that books tours for you and it’s pretty awesome to have a record label to make records and send them out to all these far flung places and push your music all over the world. I think for us a lot has changed from that band that was postering shows up and down Main St. but in some ways not that much has changed.

You mentioned how bands just expect and it feels strange being asked that question, but over here people expect to be booked

B: The difference between starting a band and achieving success in the UK is night and day compared to doing it in North America, with possibly the exception to the New York area. I think it’s just a different culture, it’s a different industry. I can’t actually think of one band from the whole fucking country that exemplifies the attitude or are role models to a band like us, that inspired us to do what we did. Every band I can think of are pretty much all from North America, and, I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, it’s just that cultural difference of thinking if you want to do it – fuck it if no one wants to help you. To be fair that isn’t necessarily a modern attitude, because when we started the band and we tried to make things happen, you’re looking to bands that are decades behind you. When I think of bands that did things themselves and didn’t wait for anyone to help them I think of bands that actually existed and did those things are far behind our band. I think of bands from the 90’s, from the 80’s. I think the internet world has changed a lot of that stuff, I think it’s a total clusterfuck now, every band for themselves.

I still think there’s that UK bubble where everyone’s doing these things for themselves but I think there’s a different bubble where we’re from.

They’re all doing things for themselves but they all got a leg up from somewhere, someone was giving them a boost in the right direction. For example, at Great Escape there were great bands about that had only formed a few months ago playing these massive shows – they wouldn’t have been playing or getting exposure if they did everything for themselves.

D: It’s still very hard for us to get our head around.
B: In all fairness there’s no denying that there are some bands that don’t have to work on their own in a “DIY way” or have to take a couple of years for them to get where they are. I wouldn’t say it’s a better or worse. It’s just different. There’s countless bands from the UK that play 10 shows then are suddenly all over NME and play all these huge venues in London. There are bands bigger than us in London that have played 5 shows so go figure.
D: We wouldn’t have shunned that away though. If we’d have met people eager to help our band and help us earlier it’s not like we would have said no. Well we might have done, depending on circumstances.

At one point you were quoted in saying how you were close to just calling it a day…

B: We weren’t close, we pretty much had, and that seems more extreme given the, for lack of better words, the success of the band now. It seems ridiculous that we could’ve not wanted to do the band and quit or anything given what we’ve got now. You have to realise that that was way before anyone had ever heard of us, long before anyone had ever written abut us on the internet. We were just a local band playing shows, we were the same as any band in Brighton or London or the UK playing shows and doing their best for a few years. It was fun, it was a cool thing to but you’re not going anywhere with that. At some point you’re just spending a lot of time and money and energy and whatever doing something that is basically a hobby, like rock climbing or something. It’s a fun thing you do outside of your job that you do because you like to do it but at some point you find something else or you start a new band. People think of “Japandroids were thinking about calling it quits” like we’re thinking about that now and we’re talking about cancelling shows and not doing more records but then if we called it quits back then the only people that would have noticed were the two of us.

Straying away from straight up interview questions just on yourselves, what are your thoughts on the digital music industry? For example, with Spotify and everything gaining ground and getting approval in America – are your happy with your music being on Spotify and have you found any sort of value from it being on there?

B: [pauses] The only answer I can think to say is I don’t really care. It’s Spotify today and who the fuck knows what it’ll be a year from now. If it’s not Spotify it’s something else. In some regards that has little to nothing to do with bands, it has everything to do with the fans. If that’s the way people that like Japandroids want to listen to them well, OK. We have little to no control over that making our opinions sort of irrelevant. It’s Spotify today, it was something else a year ago, it’ll e something out next year, you’ve just got to kind of roll with it and, I wouldn’t say embrace it, don’t spend any time thinking about it.
D: Not speaking specifically of Spotify but just being a band in the internet era – it’s hard for us to compare what it was like to be in a band before that digital file sharing existed. Certainly music fans benefited greatly from that, because we got exposed to so much music so quickly when things like Napster took off and all the different digital file sharing places took off and we got exposed to so much as music fans and it’s definitely opened a lot of doors for us. I mean obviously I think we’ve probably lost the money in some ways from albums that were downloaded instead of purchased but it’s also allowed us to tour to a lot of really amazing places and its hard to believe we would have gone to those places earlier when it wasn’t as easy to just pass around an album on the internet. We’ve got to play shows in Poland, Russia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Mexico, all over the place, and I don’t really buy that we would have gone to all those places if we were a band in 1995.

Where do you guys want to be in 12 months? With the new album coming out and touring, where do you want to be going with it?

B: It’s a hard question to answer because I think that if it was our first album and you asked us that question I think I would have said touring to as many places as we possibly can.
Which you did
B: Yeah, or we tried to! It’s not that that desire has changed, it more that now the difference is that on the first record you feel like the music that you made – you sort of lucked out. You feel like the music you made on this record made some kind of impact and you just want to take an image like that. I think that now you’ve done a second record you’re beginning to realise that it’s more like a selfish thing to just want to be playing shows – that something for you and what you want to get out of the success of your record. I think this the first time the band can really look at their audience and their “success” and say it’s not luck and it’s not one song or one album it’s the band, it’s the songs that are the important things. In some respects I think if you’re looking ahead for 12 months I would have said just play as many shows as we can and in as many places as we can but not it’s more like, while you want to continue doing that, it’s thinking about the actual music that you’re writing and recording is more important than that, if that makes sense.

People now like our band in the way we like other bands. And as fans of bands I know that we’re often just counting down until the first new thing they do, and I think that’s where the tide is now changing to. It’s a whole different responsibility.

That’s possibly one of the best answers I’ve got to that question, most people go with the whole “we want to tour” thing.

B: Like I say, 2 years ago that would have been me but I think we understand it’s not now a finite thing, we’re not just riding our luck until it burns out. Now, 2 albums down (3 if you count all our singles) you’re becoming the band you like in other bands and there’s the responsibility that comes along with that. There’s countless bands I never saw play but I just have their records – I never saw The Replacements play so I don’t know their connection to playing live and never will, so potentially we’re one of those bands now that get somewhere. Maybe you shouldn’t take 3 years to make another record, for the fans.