A short talk with Poorly Drawn House on Spartanburg, South Carolina, how to capture an authentic atmosphere, and the concept of "home".
Diogo: I got to know your band, Poorly Drawn House, through Sprain. They mentioned you in an interview for Art Laundry. It's interesting to think that it is still possible to find out about music circles or independent artists via word of mouth in the digital era. Some habits are just timeless, I guess.
Poorly Drawn House: I like to think we were Sprain’s first fans and Sprain was our first fans. Throughout my life, no other musician has believed in me. I’ve gone through most of my artistic journey alone without anyone really caring and I was okay with that. They were the first to say “hey this is really cool!” and I greatly appreciate their support.
Diogo: How's life in Spartanburg, South Carolina? Do you find it to be a pleasant city to live in and to create art? How did you end up meeting each other and start playing as a band?
Poorly Drawn House: Spartanburg is a very simple, small, country town. Not much really happens here. Nobody is really from South Carolina, and nobody leaves South Carolina. We grew up mostly hating this town, determined to leave once we got older. There really isn't much diversity here at all. It’s the same trendy rehashed punk rock shit over and over. Not to undervalue those bands but if you are not into punk, country, or don’t have a rich dad, you're out of luck down here. So, we accepted that nobody is going to care about our art, nobody is going to believe in Poorly Drawn House, nobody is going to listen.
As I’ve gotten older my philosophy has changed. We want to leave a mark here. Even if nobody cares now, we want to be a band kids from 20 years later can look up to. We still want to put in the work like we will change the world with our music. We have a weird relationship with our home but we’ve grown to accept our origins. We are not from California, Washington, or New York. We are from South Carolina and that's okay. We are nobodies here and probably will go down as nobodies but that's okay. We’ll create if there are thousands of people listening or just for ourselves. Me and David are brothers and we have always loved music. Our dad raised us on Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Tom Waits, and a lot of Delta Blues. I met Chrisitian coming out of highschool even though I'd known of him since elementary school. Down in Spartanburg everyone knows everyone and by luck things just come together. I found out Christian played drums and before you know it, I was geeking about this band Duster and Hood in his room and we just started playing together.
Diogo: Where do you think the tendency for slowcore and emo artists to bring up Aesthetics based on pictures of houses comes from? What sort of feelings do images of homes in the middle of shit-knows-where evoke in you? Sometimes I like to see it as a metaphor for the coming-of-age stage of life: you feel the urge to take a glimpse at the windows; you can barely see the inside of the houses, but you're sure there's something hoping to be discovered. Maybe you'll find out along the way that the portrait doesn't stand by itself. It's just a visual representation of the sound. This "sound" generates images that originate from our own memory. I ended up rambling, didn't I?
Poorly Drawn House: The idea of home is an interesting thing to me. It’s vivid but simultaneously vague. It's something that only exists as it's fading away. I feel as if these genres use this imagery so much because, like their music, they have a longing for somewhere they belong, somewhere that makes sense. It’s so easy to feel uncomfortable and alien in this cruel, complex and absurd world. But home is the total foil of all those things. I never really got the inspiration of using a house as an album cover from any other musicians but actually a photographer named “Todd Hido”.
I used to take walks around in my neighborhood during the autumn and summer nights when I was growing up and saw these houses like the one shown on our newest record cover. They have evoked many different kinds of feelings. Initially I felt alienated by the size of the world. Every house belongs to a reality I’d never be part of. Every light hidden behind a window was a story. I was on the outside looking in at these candid scenes. I’d write their stories in my head and wondered if they’d ever think someone was thinking about their lives. What would they think of me? These scenes poured into me. The distant cars, the dog barking, the light in the window, the wind in the trees, the crickets, it all meant so much to me. It calmed me, it made me content with everything. I am now 20 and I can't remember what I found so interesting about it. It has become an abstract ideal of nostalgia. I want to feel the way I felt when I was a preteen. I see the houses at night simply as houses. It is hard to explain but there is no longer an abstract, imagery-rich feeling. I simply don’t care anymore. I hear the distant train, I hear the crickets, I see the houses but I don't feel as if I'm truly immersed in the scene. Now, I truly am on the outside. I don't go on walks anymore. I just don't feel anything from it anymore, it doesn't interest me. I don't want to let it go though, because I know it was a beautiful thing, I know that feeling was real and genuine. A lot of Poorly Drawn House music is me recreating those scenes. Trying to spark that feeling of calmness I once had and maybe other people can understand. I continue to crave that extremely specific feeling of a calm dissociation. I guess I ended up rambling too haha.
Diogo: Sometimes I'm able to hear glimpses of Codeine in your sonority. You do understand silence and you've got the know-how to build an atmosphere out of certain details. Patience certainly is a virtue.
Poorly Drawn House: A lot of people say we sound like Codeine’s dynamics but it really wasn't a conscious decision. The quiet and loud came from us trying to be aggressive like Unwound but also quiet, eerie and calm like the For Carnation. We do all our recording ourselves so I experimented with details in production and atmosphere for as long as I wanted. I laid it back a little bit though because our last record Compilation was overwhelmed with detail. I wanted to capture a real atmosphere that matched the theme of the record so I went outside recording 20 minutes of the night ambience with my field recorder and we made tracks over them.
Diogo: Coming back to a previous question... after reading the title of your most recent album, Home Doesn't Have Four Walls, I'm able to create a correlation between the concept of "home" and the Spirit of the human-being. The walls could represent mindset barriers. In order to escape your Alienated self, you've got to take down these obstacles.
Poorly Drawn House: I like that interpretation a lot, I've never thought of it like that. I think that is why the title was chosen. It could be a metaphor for many things. The idea was home isn't a place, it is wherever you feel comfortable, feel like yourself and where you're happy. Home is where there is love.
Diogo: Have you taken inspiration from any literary piece of work?
Poorly Drawn House: Lyrics are inspired a lot by the poet Richard Siken. His work really touched me. It is super imaginative and I feel like I'm “there” in his poems. Despite all of us being readers, I don't think there are many literary inspirations.
Diogo: This is something that we've been trying to develop during our latest set of interviews: please select a picture taken from the Internet and explain the reasons behind your choice.
Poorly Drawn House: An amazing photo by Daido Moriyama. It captures something, I'm not sure what though. Maybe in a dream I was in that scene, or a different lifetime. I have this familiarity with it. He caught a beautiful moment but I could never explain how or why.
Commenti