TSRE Wonders: Exclusive Interview with The Loom

On the cusp of last winter, a song could be heard ringing on a nearly nightly basis at TSRE headquarters, a tune that seemed to capture the essence of bleak but hopeful woods rock. That song? “Song for the Winter Sun” from The Loom. It was an introduction to the six piece band that set us off in pursuit of their debut EP, and eventually led us to the opportunity to interview lead singer John Fanning. Last week I spoke with John about The Loom – how they got here and where they’re headed next. Keep your ears open and your eyes peeled for these guys, they know how to hold a good tune.

So give me an introduction to The Loom – how did you guys form, when did you form, how long have you been around?

Sure. The drummer and I went to college together and we both played in bands in college. But then we moved to New York in 2003 and he and I started playing together around then, and our bass player Dan got involved shortly after that. But we didn’t really become a real band that actually played out and had a full line-up, in this name anyway, until 2006. Since 2006 we’ve had a line-up of sometimes 5 but usually 6 people. It’s fluctuated a bit, but we’ve been playing out fairly regularly since then, and just developing our sound. So 2006 is a good start date, but some of us have been playing together for longer than that.

And one thing that’s unique about you guys is that you are a six piece (and occasionally a five piece) band. Do you feel that having that many people in the band changes your sound? Has that affected the way you write songs?

Yeah, it’s awesome. It’s so nice to have – well, it’s musically awesome and logistically horrible, especially because I’m the one who books all of the shows and does everything like that. So it’s definitely a little complicated, but over the years we’ve learned ways. We have the same practice schedule every week and we have a band Google calendar. We’ve learned ways to get around the logistical stuff for the most part.

Musically, it’s just so nice because we have a drummer, a bass player, and I’m kind of the rhythm guitarist and I play the piano and ukulele on one track. And then we have a female vocalist who also plays piano, and she plays a floor tom live so it’s almost like two percussionists. And we have a horn player, Lis, who plays French horn and trumpet, and Alex plays – he’s kind of like the lead guitar guy, so he plays lead guitar and banjo and that sort of stuff.

It just gives you so much to work with, especially because so many people in the band play more than one instrument. Instead of me always having to be the rhythm guitar guy playing the chords, I can sometimes be more of a lead guitarist than Alex. Because we have that many people, if I stop playing rhythm guitar that element doesn’t have to disappear. It just frees us up. So on some songs I play piano and Sydney (our female vocalist) plays guitar. It just gives you so many different sounds to work with.

And I think that shows through in your music, where you have this rich sonic canvas that you work with.

Thanks, yeah. It’s funny because we’ve been recording pretty much for the last three solid months – we actually just got sent the masters yesterday. We got the masters pretty much three months to the day from when we started recording. Well, we weren’t tracking for that long, but recording and then mixing and that stuff. But we have a lot of layers, and a big part of that process was figuring out which ones not to use, I guess. It’s really nice.

And everyone is super talented. Lis, our horn player, went to Oberlin. Sydney was at the New School for Jazz. So they have more of a classical, more of a trained background, so it’s really cool because we think about things differently.

So I’ll write the song and the lyrics and the basic structure, but then Lis’s super helpful when we’re structuring things.  She has an expertise that I just don’t have. There are a lot of different skills and influences that contribute, which is really nice.

So it’s collective songwriting? You start out with the basic backbone of the song and the rest of the group adds on to that?

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Yeah, that’s pretty much how it goes. I’ll write the song on guitar or sometimes piano – or in the case of “Song for the Winter Sun” from the EP, on ukulele – but I write all the lyrics and stuff. So it kind of starts with me, but it always gets fleshed out. Sometimes it changes significantly and sometimes it doesn’t, it kind of just depends on the song. For this song called “With Legs,” which is the first song on our new record, I had this intricate guitar part, but by the end of working the song out with the band I wasn’t even playing guitar anymore because everyone else took over with their different parts. So it can really change and it’s really cool to see how it can take shape as everyone gets involved.

And to answer your earlier question, it’s actually really nice when I’m writing – I can imagine drum parts and things like that, and then they can actually happen. It’s like “Oh, the drums can be like that and then the horns could be like that,” (well, the drummer and the horn player pretty much write their own parts). But it’s nice to know that if I have an idea, it can actually come to life.

And nice to play with people that can play those parts as you write them.

Yeah, and it gives me a lot to imagine, too, which is really nice.

So does the new album have a name yet?

It does. It’s called Teeth.

I haven’t actually explained this yet, so you’ll have to forgive me for stumbling. When we were recording the record, we were talking a lot about the word joy – I feel like a lot of the songs are about how we all collectively feel that there’s a lot of joy in life to experience, but that there are also a lot of things in life that pull at you and prevent you from experiencing that. And we like to have both of those elements in our music. We try not to do things that are overly, super positive, but we don’t necessarily do things that are dwelling in the negative. Because I guess neither of those things feels really true to life to us.

So we were trying to come up with something that captured that interplay to an extent. I had originally proposed that we name the album Tethers, sort of about the things that pull at you, but that was collectively voted down for various reasons. Teeth kind of came out of left field at the last second. We have this awesome artwork that’s on the MySpace page, I think – it’s just a little image [here]. But it’s done by this guy DM Stith – he’s actually a musician too, he’s really great and on Asthmatic Kitty – but he’s really awesome and we loved his artwork, so we reached out to him and he agreed to do the artwork for the record. So we kind of had the cover image and we were getting together and talking about album titles, and our bass player Dan just said that he kept thinking the word “teeth” when he looked at the cover image. And then we started to think about it and we realized – and I hadn’t really thought about this before – teeth kind of show up a lot on the record. There are like three or four songs on the record and I think one or two on the EP that have teeth in the lyrics. And when I started to think about it, I realized that I tend to lyrically use that as a symbol for – I don’t know, maybe vulnerability? Your teeth are one of the hardest parts of your body and you do your most savage acts with them, like eating. But also in a way they’re very vulnerable, for instance I’ve broken both of my front teeth at multiple points in my life.

I’m kind of just thinking this out loud, because I haven’t talked about this before, but it just seemed like an interesting symbol that, in a convoluted kind of way, spoke to that interplay of joy and trouble that we were getting at. Especially with the connection to the lyrics. And Sydney pointed out that after you die, your teeth are one of the things that remain, which is cool. There are a lot of different threads that came out of our conversation.

I think also we wanted something that was evocative but not overly so. We didn’t want a title that was going to be super determining for people. You know, like if named the record Joy, you’re pushing the listener in a very specific direction. We were much more intrigued by something, not meaningless, but something that had a meaning for us but could leave things open for people who are coming to the record with a different set of experiences than we’ve had.

So not planting an image in the listeners head from the very beginning.

Right, exactly. Because then who knows? There are probably a lot of different things that people will, hopefully, take away from the music that we didn’t necessarily think about.

The word teeth is a little ominous sounding but we, for sort of ambiguous reasons, felt like it worked really well. It wasn’t too specific as to limit peoples’ experiences listening to it.

So how are you planning to release the album? Will you be self-releasing it?

We don’t know yet. We really don’t want to self release it. We self-released the EP, and it’s all well and good, but we really want to start touring for real and really doing this as full-time as we possibly can. Doing it on your own, you just don’t have the infrastructure that you need to do it, as far as a booking agent and a publicist and all of those various things. I mean, we could certainly compile those piecemeal, but the idea of signing to a label, especially one that has other artists that we love – that is extremely appealing to us. Also, just because it would be amazing to be a part of a collected group of musicians that we really love. So it’s definitely our hope to find a label to release it, and I think we’re willing to sit on it for a little while if we need to. I think at a certain point we would probably self release it, but we’re definitely hoping to find a label.

We’ve had some interactions along the way with some pretty great people, but there are no amazing offers on the table at the moment. We have some people that we’ll definitely be sending the record to, and we’re hoping that going to SXSW will help.

That’s kind of our other big project at the moment too – finding a manger and stuff like that, and getting that side of things rolling now that the record is finished. The great unknown kind of starts right now – we’re had everything planned out as far as making the record, and now we just have to start doing everything we can and see what happens and see where it falls.

You’re often characterized as a Brooklyn band – you’re located in Brooklyn and have performed there a fair amount in The Loom’s first few years. Brooklyn is obviously a hotbed of music right now, and there are tons of bands in the area. Do you feel like your biggest challenge is distinguishing yourself from other Brooklyn bands, or is it just getting your music out there? Does the term Brooklyn band mean anything to you?

I don’t think about it that much. It definitely can’t hurt you, in terms of reaching out to people who are from other places – just living in New York is so expensive, that it’s not actually that easy to be a band in Brooklyn. In a way, it’s nice to be from a place like this. It’s inspiring to see so many people doing awesome things.

I think when you’re from Brooklyn – to be cynical about it – I think people might be a little more likely to listen to it if they don’t know your music. In terms of a Brooklyn sound, I don’t really know that there is such a thing as far as I can tell. But even if there were, I don’t know if we’d fall under that umbrella.

Yeah, you guys have such unique instrumentation that you probably don’t fall into many categories.

We’re a little folkier…I don’t know. I guess if you asked me to describe what the quintessential Brooklyn band would be, I wouldn’t describe us. I don’t think it’s a tag that affects us that much, for better or for worse.

So your plans right now are to play a couple shows in New York and then head down to SXSW? Are you hoping to tour the country after that?

Yeah. We have to try to do one piece at a time. I think ideally what would happen if we could plan it all, would be we would go to SXSW and around that time or maybe because of that, we would end up with a label that wants to put out that record. And maybe they’d put it out in the summer and we’d start touring after that. It all kind of depends – we all have full time jobs right now, and we’re all willing to quit and down for leaving those when the time comes, but the reality for us is that it wouldn’t make sense for us to start touring like crazy. We’re hoping to have that kind of infrastructure behind us before we start touring, just because there are six of us and it gets really complicated. If it comes down to it, if things haven’t happened the way we’re hoping, then I think that we’d be into hitting the road on our own. But we’re hoping that we’ll meet some people in the next little while, now that we have a record to give to people.

Sounds like a good plan to me.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed. It’s exciting, but it’s just an interesting process. We made the EP by ourselves, and we’re very proud of it, but this is a much more significant effort on our parts. We recorded it in a real studio and took a long time with it. It’s the culmination of a lot of years of playing together – it feels like an infinitely stronger statement, musically, production-wise, and numerous other ways from the EP. It’s kind of like night and day in terms of how significant we feel this is in terms of our band.

And like you said, this is the first point where the rest is unknown. You’ve known what you were going to be working on and how you were going to do it for a long time, and now it’s more, “We’ve done it and we have this product that we’re really proud of, and now we just have to hope that the other pieces fall in place.”

Hopefully it’ll be the first of many records. I have every intention to keep making music forever.

The Loom - Song For The Winter Sun (YSI) (filesavr)

The Loom - Patience For Books (YSI) (filesavr)