Blitzen Trapper

CMG’s Kate Steele (CMG): Could you tell me a bit about the band, how you got together, and all that?

Blitzen Trapper’s Eric Earley (EE): The majority of us grew up in Salem, Oregon.

CMG: What kind of place is Portland to live as a musician?

EE: It’s great. It’s awesome. It’s a good place to live if you’re an artist because it’s really cheap and people will help you out all the time. You can bike everywhere -- like, I don’t drive. But we grew up in Salem which is about an hour south of here. It’s a small, rural community. We moved to Portland, I don’t know, about five years ago.

CMG: So how many of you are in the band?

EE: There are six of us.

CMG: What does everyone do in the band?

EE: I sing and play guitar. Well, live, I sing and play guitar. Drew does keyboards. Actually, everyone kind of does keyboards -- there’s a bunch of keyboards on stage. Then there’s a drummer and a bass player.

CMG: So, have you had the same line-up since you got started?

EE: Yeah.

CMG: You guys are all friends from when you were younger?

EE: Yeah, we all kind of grew up together.

CMG: Did you go to university in Portland?

EE: Yeah, I went to college here. Actually, I just got my history degree a couple months ago.

CMG: Congratulations.

EE: Well, it’ll make my mom happy, anyway.

CMG: So you guys have just recorded a new album. Is it out yet?

EE: No. It’s, um, being sort of tossed around by different labels right now.

CMG: That’s exciting. So, you released Field Rexx< on your own?

EE: Yeah, we released it here on our own, and it’s being released in the UK by our label over there. The label’s called Good Times Folk.

CMG: You guys used to call yourselves by a different name. What was your old name?

EE: Garmonbozia.

CMG: Why did you decide to change your name?

EE: Uh, I don’t know. There was a lot of stuff happening in my life. I just kind of wanted to
change everything.

CMG: So where does Blitzen Trapper come from? How did you come up with that name?

EE: My grandfather -- his nickname was Trapper. And Blitzen, I don’t know. I just liked it.

CMG: Do you want to stay in Portland?

EE: Not really. I don’t know where we’ll go, but we’re happy here at the moment.

CMG: Do you have a job outside the band?

EE: Yeah, I’m actually a session musician right now. I helped out on China Forbes new record, she just recorded a solo album. She’s the lead singer from Pink Martini.

CMG: What do you play on other people’s records?

EE: I play everything. Like today I was playing piano for two or three hours. Then I play slide, or banjo -- a lot of stuff.

CMG: Do you come from a musical family?

EE: Yeah, my dad was a bluegrass player. He grew up in L.A. and his whole family were musicians. They were all from the Midwest, you know, so they played bluegrass.

CMG: Do you guys play a lot of shows around the west coast?

EE: Seattle, mostly. We did a west coast tour last summer, but it was a real drag.

CMG: Yeah? You don’t enjoy touring?

EE: It was really small, and really, really hot. And there’s six of us, so the heat was kind of overwhelming.

CMG: What’s your favourite part of the process, writing, recording, performing?

EE: Creating music, for sure. Writing, recording, arranging.

CMG: Touring isn’t near the top of your list?

EE: I don’t know. We haven’t really done it a lot. But I know that this year we probably will be, so I guess I’ll find out. We’re still really dirt poor. And there’s six of us, so we can’t afford to tour a lot right now until other things are in place. The record’s coming out in the U.K. in May and we’ll probably tour there in the fall.

CMG: I’ve never lived on the east coast of Canada or America. How do you think the music scenes on the west and east coast of the U.S. differ?

EE: The west coast is really laid back, and the east coast is, well, not. It’s good, really. If you’re really productive on the west coast you can get a lot done and you have an advantage because no one else will do anything. People just don’t get shit done. But when I go to the east coast, the friends I have there are, like, publishing books and magazines and everything. Over here it’s a lot slower.

CMG: How has your sound changed since you started playing together? What are you focusing on more recently?

EE: The sound of the original band we had, Garmonbozia, was really complex. It was almost like, I don’t know, there were a lot of musical movements. Almost like classical, really. There were six of us, so we used all kinds of instruments, like flute and glockenspiel and pianos, guitars. With Blitzen Trapper I just started to simplify everything. We started out being very, well, Field Rexx is very organic -- almost country sounding. It’s a mix of pop and country and roots-ish things. The new record isn’t -- it’s very electronic. It’s like the Cars or something. The new album’s completely different to Field Rexx.

CMG: Are you excited about it?

EE: Yeah, I guess so. I think, as a band, with each album we completely change. And I just finished recording another record that is just acoustic guitars and drums and bass and vocals, that’s it. It’s stripped down -- totally different. Very, like, Like John Wesley Harding kind of thing.

CMG: Is that a solo record?

EE: No, it’s the whole band. I usually do most of the recording.

CMG: How do you usually record. Did you really record Field Rexx on a four track?

EE: Yeah, a four track, and an eight track too, a couple of ‘em. They kept breaking. It was really a pain.

CMG: I think it’s a great sounding record.

EE: That’s good, cause it was a real pain in the ass to make. At one point, in the middle of the album, I remember having the tape deck at my work bench open with everything spread out on the floor. It was like, “I really hope we fix this, cause if we don’t, everything’s gone.” I had, like, duct tape, I was winding the transports. It was really painful.

CMG: How did you record the latest one?

EE: The new one we recorded on tape, we had our own tape machine. Then we were in a pro-style type studio for awhile.

CMG: So it was a bigger budget project?

EE: Well, yeah. Big enough to where now I’m homeless, so…

CMG: Is the U.K. release of Field Rexx going to be the same one you released in the U.S.?

BT: They’re actually taking off four songs and putting on three songs from our previous record, Blitzen Trapper.

CMG: How do you feel about that?

EE: I don’t care. Seriously, it doesn’t matter to me at all. I have no connection with it anymore.

CMG: Really, you’ve moved past it?

EE: I feel like, you know, I wrote all the songs, and they’re all fine. But if people happen to like these more, and want to use these ones then, you know, whatever.

CMG: We were talking earlier about how Field Rexx is quite an organic record. It sounds to me like it was recorded all at once. Was it?

EE: Yeah. We recorded the whole thing in about two months.

CMG: Do you write together?

EE: No. Often we’ll arrange together a lot of the time, but I pretty much write everything myself. Usually we’ll have been performing the songs for months before we record them.

CMG: Do you write all the parts yourself?

EE: Usually I’ll record a version of everything arranged, and we’ll go from that and things will change from there. But live we’re really different. We’ll take songs that are about two minutes long and make them four or five, add different parts. We sort of re-mix our own songs live. I kind of like doing that.

CMG: Who are your main influences?

EE: I’ve gotta say Neil Young is probably my biggest one. I hate telling people, but you know, Bob Dylan. I grew up listening to Sonic Youth a lot, Sonic Youth and Pavement and the old Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, because my dad was a bluegrass musician I grew up listening to all of that.

CMG: What did your dad play?

EE: He was a banjo player. So I learned to play banjo when I was about six. I play banjo on a lot of session stuff just because I’ve been playing it for so long. I played banjo on the new Warhols record.

CMG: What I respond to about Field Rexx is how immediate and playful it is -- it sounds like you guys had a lot of fun recording it. On that album there’s a lot of more playful, upbeat songs, and then, my favourites, I guess, are the more mellow ones like “Forty Stripes,” “Concrete Heaven” and “Country Rain.”

EE: You like “Country Rain?” I recorded that like ten years ago, when I was about nineteen. We put it on Field Rexx, added violin and another vocal to it.

CMG: Is that one of the songs they cut from the U.K. release?

EE: No, they kept that one. They cut “Concrete Heaven” -- too long and slow, right? And then they cut “Leopard” and they cut the very last couple tracks, I can’t think of their names right now.

CMG: Back to that playful comment. There seem to be a lot of indie bands who are really earnest and come across as taking themselves pretty seriously. I was just wondering if you felt any pressure to stick to a certain genre, do something more earnest, or the other way around. What do people seem to want from you?

EE: That’s a really good question. I have no idea, actually. I don’t really know yet. I’ll get back to you in about eight months. When Field Rexx comes out in England, it’s coming out with all kinds of press, like radio, I think we’re doing a video. Then I’ll kind of be able see who likes what and what people want.