Yeah, this will be our first time at Hopscotch. But we've been to North Carolina before though, with a band we used to have in Baton Rogue, The Eames Era.
I heard that y'all played a really fantastic show in DC a few nights ago.
Yeah! It was at that cool place, the one with all the red and black on the inside, um, The Red Palace! The energy at that show was really good, like it was here at the show tonight too. Grant and I like DC a lot from when we spent some time there hanging out while recording our last album with our producer, Dan Black, at his studio up there.
A lot of really young artists seem to be taking the DIY approach and doing their own production these days. What do think the role of the producer is and how do you think they affect the final sound?
Dan just has this encyclopedia of knowledge in his head of records, beyond anything I could ever know, and with the final sound of the record, he was very much creatively involved in shaping that. He also knows us so well and what we've trying to do, and it's hard to even put a price on that. He's a really good friend too, I mean, when we're up there with stay with his family, him and his wife, Faye. For us, it's been a great relationship with everything.
Lately, I've been interested in the concept of something sounding "over produced" and what people really mean by that when they make that criticism, and what it is in the music they are hearing.
I think a lot of it is cheesey production and producers that are just kind of lame. A true producer, if they are really good, is invisible. But they can take a song and know how to make it shine or make it down and dirty. I like both sounds, I like to include the down and dirty lo-fi music as part of my palette as well as the cleaned up stuff that really shines.
I like that idea, having a broad palette.
Well, when I was in high school, we had this cool Latin teacher from Australia who would come to the shows we went to and then in class say to us, "You boys can go down to the punk shows and be grimy and all, but you can also come and learn to read Latin literature and be refined and gentlemanly. You can do both." So, I think it's important to straddle the wall and have both when it comes to the sound in production too.
The Generationals are continuing to tour the country in support of their new album, Actor-Caster. They will also be at Hopscotch Music Festival in Raleigh this September, where I look forward to actually seeing them play a set in it's entirety.
(Full Disclosure: As the former Latin club president of my high school and someone who named their blog "Formosa" as an homage to Catullus 86, I fully support any band or artist with an appreciation for Classics.)
