BRAIDS – Lemonade

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BRAIDS is a four-piece band from Montreal with one of the strongest debuts of 2011. Its full-length album Native Speaker clocks in at a little over 40 minutes, but the resulting effort is so expansive and dream-like, listening to it feels as if you’ve embarked on a day trip through the senses. There are albums which, when listened to as a whole, seem to take on a kind of biological life. The songs breathe and ripple as if an entire ecosystem is taking place within the record. Animal Collective’s Feels once accomplished this by layering varied sounds and melodies to construct a day-glo wilderness. Native Speaker borrows from the latter’s sense of atmospherics and creates its own sort of creature.

There’s a meticulous architecture at play between ricocheting synth lines and vertiginous melodies, all delivered with enough percussive force to preserve the album’s forward momentum. Performed live, the songs don’t contain pauses to break up the record and instead demonstrate the seamless cooperation of the band’s members, who position themselves on stage in a half-circle as to emphasize the equal importance of each section. Just a week before the band begins its North American tour, I spoke with drummer Austin Tufts about the band’s evolving songwriting process and group chemistry. In this interview, he also discusses the touring life and his appreciation for home-cooked food.

What have you been doing since you finished your last tour?

Well, it’s been an elongated process of actually never being off touring. We’ve been doing shows all around Canada, which is really, really fun. We went to Europe a couple times and did one-and-a-half-week trips to do some festivals. That was also an incredible experience for us. We did have three weeks off to just buckle down and finish two more songs that are completely brand-new for the tour that’s starting in a week.

You’ve mentioned in past interviews that the band will be writing the next album on the computer rather than in a rehearsal setting. How did this change the songwriting process? Did it have any effect on the sound and structure of your new songs?

Actually, it was interesting because it gave us the ability to distill all of our ideas. So far, we were only able to complete one song entirely like that, but it was a really difficult process. It was the first time ever as a band that we had a song completely composed on the computer. We had to learn how to record it and then learn how to play it. All the drums were very electronic, and there were watery kinds of sounds that none of us knew how to make. We were very hesitant to get it ready for this tour.

We were sitting there one day, and I said, “Well, what happens if we just fit a contact mic on the drums, on a practice pad, and run it through three different effects?” So I went out and bought a new effects pedal and contact microphone and actually tried that. Lo and behold, it sounded exactly like what we were going for. Once we jumped through that first hurdle, we hit the ground running and finished the song in about six or seven days. It’s the shortest song we’ve ever written. I think it’s only coming in at about three-and-a-half minutes, which is a feat for us.

Did you have any concerns that this alternate way of writing songs would change the chemistry of the music? In other words, did you ever worry that the songs would sound less organic and more clinical?

No, because the way in which we handled the recording on the computer—we all hung out in our rooms with a nice pair of monitors, just tinkering away in the same way we’d do in the rehearsal studio. Because we were all present, having fun together, it was still a very organic process. We also started it before we left on our last tour with Baths and Toro Y Moi, so it was almost completely done. Taylor [Smith], the multi-instrumentalist of the band, brought some of the mixing boards on tour and tinkered with it whenever he had a spare moment, getting it to the point where we were happy with it. So when we had some time to rehearse it, we were ready.

Native Speaker took nine months to record. Now that your first album is out, do you feel the band can let go of its perfectionist edge or is that something that’s integral to the band?

[Laughs] It’s very much still part of the band. We’re definitely a lot more confident. We can go into shows without having to work out every millisecond of the music, just because we’ve grown so much as musicians over the course of the year. We’re a lot more prepared to handle the task of structuring the music by letting our musical intuitions take over a bit more, which is a really nice place to be at with this music. Because it’s so highly composed, it’s nice to introduce a sense of improvisation and breadth.

Reading past interviews, I get the sense that the band is a very tight unit. You guys seem to trust each other to the point where you can not only share ideas with each other but also criticize them in service of a larger project. Did you guys connect on this level immediately or was it something you had to work toward over the years?

It was a very immediate connection, but trust was something we worked over the first two years as a band. The rehearsal studio is such an emotional environment that you have to be really careful about when and how you bring up things. Because we’ve been so close over these last four years, we really know each other and how to do it. That’s what’s kept us so sane and close on tour too. When there’s an argument, we have hundreds of thousands of hours to defuse the situation correctly. We’re now at the point where we can freely criticize, but we’re all very conscious of the manner in which we do it.

The lyrics and themes in Native Speaker have a lot to do with growing up and breaking into your sexuality. Among other things, it’s about love and sensuality between two people, but there are a lot of ambiguities expressed in the lyrics. Can you describe how these emotions and themes might change as the band works on its next record?

I know that lyrically [vocalist] Raphaelle [Standell-Preston] is moving away from such ambiguities and becoming a lot more conclusive. She knows exactly what she wants to say and is able to express it more beautifully now. She’s continuing on from all the experiences she had during the recording and writing of Native Speaker, and they are finally being concluded in her life and all of our different lives. A lot of our new songs are about that closure.

I read somewhere that it took up to three months to track the drums on the album. As far as rhythm and timing go, what did you want to achieve most for the record? At what point did you and the other members feel satisfied with the results?

Honestly, it wasn’t so much issues with timing and rhythm that took it three months. It was learning how to capture the sound, learning how to treat the space, learning how to play and process the drums under microphones. That’s what took three months. Looking back upon it, man, we were crazy. We were really striving for this organic unit, but we multi-tracked everything on its own. Because of that, we had to be so rhythmically precise, so careful, and instill groove into something that was not recorded at the same time.

After listening to the album several times now, I think there’s a bit of sparkle missing in the rhythmic feel as compared to our current live performances. There’s more energy and fire in what we’re doing now. It’s just hard to listen to something you recorded that long ago and feel really good about it.

As working musicians, it seems like you and the other members have handled the pressures of recording and touring pretty well. I heard it took you several months to find the right labels to handle the first album. How did you learn to be patient with the business side of your music?

We’re all pretty patient people when it comes to our music, because, let’s face it, we don’t write pop tunes. I mean, they’re inherently pop music, but they’re not three-minute, straightforward pop tunes, so we can’t expect our music to explode or even come across that way. It grows with several listenings, so we had to treat the business side of our music in a very similar manner.

We had to find people who were confident and loved our music as much as we did. After finding a group of enthusiastic people that we felt good about, we finally decided to say, “Let’s do this.” We like to keep an active role in what we do, so we’re dealing with these people several times a day. It’s got to be something you feel good about, and I think we’ll continue to make decisions that way.

You have a brutal touring schedule coming up in the fall. Did you learn anything from your last tour that will help you prepare for the next one?

Yeah, a lot about health and tour sanity. [Laughs] We’re going to be staying in hotels this time, which will be a saving grace for us. We like to compact our tours and not take too many days off, so just to be able to have a place to decompress and get a good night’s sleep is very important. Also, we’ve learned a lot about how to eat well, how to deal with promoters and how to keep the stress low.

After our last European tour, which was a total logistical nightmare—like having to catch two flights a day, organizing runners to and from festivals and trying to negotiate your way in ten different languages—we feel a lot more relaxed about this one.

Speaking of eating well, I heard that you enjoy cooking. Can you tell me a little about that?

Yeah, I love cooking. I’m actually sitting in a café right now, watching the Food Network. Music is something that people can come together on, and food is at that same level. One thing that I’ve started doing with my friend is a fantastic way to cook zucchinis. It’s super simple. You marinate them for about half an hour in salt and pepper, and then you sauté them in olive oil and garlic. Chop up a bunch of fresh mints. Transfer the browned zucchini slices into a bowl and you pour red wine vinegar, coat it and mix it up with fresh mints. It’s to die for. Also there’s some nice barbecued corn we just tried the other day with a Mexican spice rub. I like to cook new things, so I don’t really have a favorite dish.

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BRAIDS begins its North American tour at the Mercury Lounge in New York on September 6, 2011. They will be releasing a 7″ split single with fellow Montreal band Purity Ring, available on both bands’ tours. Native Speaker is available now on CD/LP/iTunes. For information on tour dates or merchandise, visit http://braidsmusic.com/.