A little while back we had the chance to talk with Matthew Kelly, the lead singer of indie-rocker outfit The Autumns. He tells about the group’s early foray into space-rock, his favorite “under-the-radar” artists, and Stuff White People Like.

The Autumns – Killer in Drag

Tell about the band’s formation.
One of the guitar players, Frankie Koroshec and I, started playing music together in high school. And then when we got into college we put the band together and started demoing things, etc. Then we put our first record out, The Angel Pool, in 1997, and from that point forward we’ve been making records and occasionally touring; that kind of thing.

So The Autumns developed before the whole explosion of the internet/MySpace in music?
Yeah, that’s right.

Were you able to do still do your music full-time then, even without the internet resources that are now available?
Well, it’s never really been full-time. We’ve had periods, especially early on, around that time, actually… 1997 to about 2000, where we tried to stay on the road as much as possible. And so in that way, I guess, there would be long stretches where we wouldn’t work normal jobs. I mean, since that time we’ve all had, you know, other things going on in our lives. So we continue to… the bands continue to be a priority and we’ve continued to make records and it’s an important part of our lives. But it’s not a full-time gig in the sense that we don’t have other things that we do for money. But what was the question regarding the internet?

I’m just wondering if since you came before that, if when it did come did it give The Autumns a huge boost, or was it difficult to suddenly adjust to this huge change in the music industry? How did it benefit you, how did it possibly not benefit you?
Well, I think there was no sudden shift into the internet age. Even if you think outside of the context of a band, in your own life, if somebody asks you “what happened when the interview happened?” It wouldn’t have really happened, it just sort of slowly crept into your life.

And it was the same thing in the band. I don’t know. I think online sales definitely became a source of revenue for the band, and actually the band more or less exists off of online sales. I mean, that’s how we get the money to make our records and that’s how the band is sort of sustained. So that is definitely important. I mean, that’s money that goes to the band that normally wouldn’t have because, you know, normally, pre-internet, it would be, you know… a band never gets money from record sales, especially if they’re working with a label, unless they, you know, sell enough records to pay everything back… but that’s unusual. So in that sense it’s been positive and generally I would say the internet’s positive for any band like us because… the whole ethos of people paying more attention to what their friends tell them, in terms of music recommendations, and facilitating the ability to just hand music off to people all over the world in just a matter of seconds with an e-mail. All of that makes it easier for a band like us to find its way into all kinds of different nooks and crannies that normally we would have needed a major label or, you know, experts… ”cultural experts” [laughs] to help us out. So, in that way, it’s great.

I think it’s great in general. It’s hard for me to stand back and know to what exact extent it has benefited us. I just think that, overall, it’s been a good thing and overall I think anything that undermines centralized, hierarchical, monopolistic entities that are dominating some realm of culture, like music, anything that undermines that is definitely a good thing.

Now, during the time when The Autumns first began to develop, how successful do you think you were in building a loyal following of people. In getting people to come to your shows and listening to music.
Well, pretty early on, certainly around the time of the release of the first album, we had developed a pretty loyal following of people. And that’s never really gone away. I mean, it’s like a cell or something… there’s always this loyal following of people that, today, if you looked at it you’d probably find that it consists of 100% different people, pretty much, than it did in 1997. It’s always there, but it’s like there’s people moving in and out of there; it’s pretty strange, and I don’t know how to explain that, actually. But, early on, we were helped out because among the people that got into the band was a prominent club promoter named Piper Ferguson, who ran a club out here that was around for about a decade called Café Bleu… it was like a Mod-themed club.

What location would this have been?
It was held at the Temple Bar on Santa Monica Boulevard once a week. It briefly moved, actually, to The Probe on Highland but that was short lived. Anyways, it was a great scene; it was a real scene, you know, which is always kind of nice. And so we got caught up in that and we would play at that club a lot, and that put us in front of tons of people on a pretty regular basis. And then at the same time there was a club out here that was a gothic club, called Coven 13. And that was also… I think it was either weekly or maybe it was monthly… but we had these friends based on the east coast called Mors Syphilitica [Death by Syphilis], who were a much more gothic-sounding band than we were. And they encouraged us to play Coven 13. We were kind of afraid to do that because we thought, “Well, we’re not gothic-sounding… these guys are gonna run us out of town,” you know?

Cast a spell on you…
[Chuckles] Yeah… but we played it anyway, and it went over really, really well. And so what happened was we started playing — we played normal clubs as well-but we started playing Café Bleu pretty regularly, and we started playing Coven 13 pretty regularly. And so we were sort of unusual in that we could play gothic clubs and mod clubs and play in front of these audiences and people really liked it. You know, the music had these elements in it; that really build, in the early stages, the first hard-core kind of following that got into the band. And since then it’s continued, to one extent or another, but that was the beginning.

Now, you mentioned earlier that anything that undermines that sort of hierarchical structure, the monopolization and commodification of music or art or any part of culture, is a good thing. In light of that, has The Autumns faced a lot of opposition from that kind of structure in music? Or was it always something you tried to be aware of and thus be somewhat subversive of? And by subversive I don’t mean putting bombs under the Sony building…
Right. That’s a good question. I mean, to say that we were aware of it is just to say that we were cognizant human beings; you know, conscious. I mean, how can you miss it, right? And especially… I think that because of maybe our age, late 20s early 30s, we remember what the radio sounded like in the 1980s. So we remember The Cure and Echo and the Bunnymen and things like that being — even The Smiths — having a heavy radio presence, having a heavy sort of cultural presence in these mainstream forums, you know, for music. And so you couldn’t miss it [when] by the mid-to-late 90s almost nothing of that quality was in a forum like that anymore.

Everything that was even remotely inventive — I mean, with a couple exceptions — but pretty much anything inventive or cool or new had been driven underground. So we were finding all of our good music out on the road, touring around the country and meeting people face to face. And so you couldn’t miss the fact that the more corporate things got and the more hierarchical things got and the fewer record companies there were and the more vertical integration there was, the more the stuff that ended up in these mainstream forums ended up being these totally commodified, contentless pablum. So, you know, that was something that just was there. It wasn’t like we thought, “We must do something about this… let’s undermine the system” or whatever. It just totally de-legitimized the system. It made wanting to get on a big radio station totally pointless. There was no desire. There was no thought of, “Oh, we have to get a big record deal” or something because we didn’t like any of the bands that big record labels put out… again, with a couple of exceptions. So it just was a background consideration. Our thing was just we want to make the best records we could make and we want the people whose opinions we value to like it. It was just very local like that. We would have loved to have made enough money doing it to make a living. There was nothing against that; we would have loved that. But there was no desire to be, you know, successful in the normal sense…

You weren’t just waiting around for some large label to sign you or for MTV to discover you, or to get constant radio play.
No, no… I mean, I never… by the mid-90s when you saw bands on MTV or heard bands on the radio, it wasn’t something that you envied; you were just indifferent, I guess.

Then it became really bad in the late 90s. I just remember how Sugar Ray was always on the radio, or Creed…
Yeah, I mean, it became like a string of jokes. I really can’t even speak with any authority of about what’s going on in the past decade on MTV and the radio because I honestly haven’t seen MTV in years. I don’t know when the last time I saw MTV was. And the only time I hear the radio is when I walk into a coffee shop or something where it’s playing; and it’s always like nails on a chalkboard. I don’t know what’s on the radio… for all I know it could be better now, but I doubt it [chuckles].

You mentioned several bands from early in your life, for example The Smiths, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Cure, who received a great deal of mainstream airplay. Were you happy about that or did you think that was just another example of good music being commodified. And I’m not just asking this to pit you against The Smiths or something.
No, I didn’t think because… was [Echo and the Bunnymen’s] Ocean Rain ‘88, I think, or was it ‘86.

I think it was earlier than that.
Wait, Ocean Rain was ‘84, wasn’t it. God, it’s amazing to think that that record could have been made in ‘84… I think it was ‘84. No, I mean, we were pretty young. I wouldn’t know what a commodity was or what mainstream was. None of these concepts were even in play for me. It’s just, looking back…

Right, that’s more what I meant.
Even looking back I think, “Well, no.” If you’re gonna have big record companies with more money than they know what to do with in this kind of stuff then, you know, it’s a positive thing if they’re pushing things like those records. Better that than them pushing crap, at least then when people turn on the radio they’re listening to good stuff.

At the expense of better bands getting attention.
Yeah… exactly. And, of course, there were other bands. There was Sonic Youth and all kinds of things happening… the SST bands and, you know, Touch and Go and all the middle-sized labels that didn’t have that kind of a presence culturally. And, of course, it would be great if everybody could hear those things, too. But just compared to what happened a decade later, it was better.

You also spoke earlier of the fact that, in lieu of much good music being available in the mainstream media, you had to search underground to find stuff that you enjoyed. As you ventured into that, what were some of those bands that really struck you? The ones that you really had to dig for.
The one that immediately leaps to mind is a band called Lift to Experience. We saw them in Denton in 1998. I had put together a tour-this was our first American tour-and the first two American tours were booked pretty incompetently, and so we realized that we were going to have to book the third one ourselves. And so what we did was we contacted records stores in every town that we played in, on the theory that people who worked in record stores tend to be pretty tapped into the local music scene and know what’s going on. So when I got to Dallas I talked to somebody at a record store there and they said, “Oh, well where you guys need to play is Denton, because Denton is the space-rock capital of America,” which I had never heard before. So that kind of fascinated me, so I was told that I needed to make contact with this mysterious figure in Denton named Wanz Dover… it took me a while to track him down, but I finally tracked him down… he was in a band, I think, called, Mazinga Phazer. Anyway, so I ended up getting in touch with him and he put together this show with Lift to Experience, which he thought would be a good match. And we saw Lift to Experience and I was completely floored. I mean, that was just a revelation. And, actually, really anybody who saw that band live around that time will say the same thing; it was just totally extraordinary. That band couldn’t get a record deal in America. They ended up signing with Bella Union and then they went over to the U.K. and exploded, as much as a band like them could. All their songs were nine minutes long and all about Jesus coming back to earth and going to Texas: the Promised Land. All this kind of prophetic craziness. Fire and brimstone. Piss and vinegar. Apocalyptic prose set to the loudest space-rock you’ve ever heard in your life. It was extraordinary. It’s too bad it didn’t last. Anyways, that was one. And there were other bands in Denton too that really blew my mind. In Denton, you know, I mean nobody in Denton… very few of these bands had any illusion that they were gonna get signed to a big label or anything because Denton was just this kind of run-down suburb out of Dallas. You know, when you went through these great bands kept popping up in this town out in Texas. It was really inspiring to see this, you know. And there was another band called The Danes. The singer of that band went on to join this band that did well in England… The Earlies. They put out a really good record. They were from somewhere in the U.K, I’m not sure which country. But their singer was the singer of The Danes, this band in Denton. There was a band called The Pointy Shoe Factory that was short-lived. These are things, with the exception of Live to Experience, that probably nobody has ever heard of. But these were really inspiring groups, you know. We also learned about things like Modest Mouse in ‘97, when we were touring around before they blew up. It just seemed like everything that was good that we came across we came across because somebody handed it to us in a town that we drove to. Suddenly nothing that we were listening to was coming from anything hierarchical; nothing was being handed down to us, it was always being handed across to us.

Right. That’s a thoroughly different concept, even a different image, than the norm. Do you know anything about how the whole Denton scene was started? I mean, anybody who listens to indie music knows a little bit about how Saddle Creek was started and Asthmatic Kitty, Elephant 6, etc. were started. Those labels that you don’t have to dig too deeply to find out about. Not that those aren’t great labels and scenes, but more people know about them than some of the more obscure ones. Do you know much about how Denton started up?
I don’t. I know that by the time we came through and were sort of blown away by what we had seen… I ended up spending a fair amount of time in Denton over the next year/year and a half because I had a girlfriend who lived there, and I became friends with Josh from Live to Experience… the story was, “Well, you really missed the heyday because the real heyday of space-rock was a couple years earlier.” There were some bands that were kind of legendary to people that lived in Denton. Centromatic was one of them. And there was band called MK Ultra, and a couple of others. The only guy I can think of who has the financial resources to have really taken a prolonged interest in Denton is Simon [Raymonde] from Bella Union. He ended up signing a lot of bands. In fact, there’s a band that’s done quite well, but I can never remember the name of them, but you’ll know them… Midlake. Midlake is a Denton band. I was just talking to those guys at South by Southwest. They had noticed that Simon had signed all these bands out of Texas, a lot of them out of Denton, and that all began with Lift to Experience. He signed Lift to Experience, and he also became a little captivated by the lore of this scene out of Denton. But he is the only one that I know of that has taken a lot of those bands, put their records out, put resources into them. Otherwise, it’s remained, I think, sort of just a regional kind of phenomenon. It never became like an Elephant 6 or these other labels that you mentioned.

I think the concept you’ve mentioned of having material actually handed to you by actual human beings, as opposed to having it handed down to you by a some entity that’s constituted by a hierarchical, complex business model that isn’t very relational, is really quite interesting and important to emphasize. As The Autumns have grown and gathered a larger audience and toured more, have you been able to preserve this more grass roots approach to getting your music out and hearing about other music?
Well, I think so. I mean, first of all, long periods pass between our records. And when you work with a label, where there’s, you know, a department of people that are responsible for promoting your record… that goes on for maybe a couple of months. And then there’s a period where nobody in the office is making calls for you. And so in that downtime the only way that people are going to find out about it is from people handing it around. So you kind of hope with that initial push the records will reach a bunch of new people that haven’t heard it before, and then when that push dies down those people, if they get into the record, will start handing off copies to their friends and sending around MP3s and that kind of thing. I mean, I don’t have any scientific way of measuring this because I can’t keep track of all this stuff that goes around. But I’m definitely… I’m still struck by the number of people that get in touch with us and, you know, express to us that the music has had some important impact on their life. That always amazes me. And that always goes on. I mean, that’s been going on for years here. I still get e-mails all the time from people, saying they had just heard about it… and had this or that impact. It’s pretty amazing.

I’m not a science-type guy so if you did have a scientific explanation I probably wouldn’t know what you’re talking about anyways.
[Laughs]

Are there certain bands, contemporary bands, that you’d like people to hear more about? Including some from Denton?
Well, there’s a band out here in LA called Cue the Moon. And they’ve been recording songs, I guess, for about a year now. They have a studio, actually. These are the guys that actually kind of… financed our recent record… in the sense that they let us mix at their studio for free. That would have cost us a lot of money otherwise. But they have this studio, so they’ve been sitting over there recording… just cranking out songs for the past year, and the recent stuff I’ve heard from them is pretty impressive, so I expect really good things to be coming from them. I’m trying to think… this is a good question, and I’m now terrified that I’ll think three hours from now I’m gonna realize that there was a band I needed to tell you about. This [other] band I don’t even need to…this band is totally exploding now: The Dodos. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them. [They’re] really something. I don’t need to say much about that because I think everybody already knows who they are. But they played with us… over a year ago now, about a year ago. And were a lesser known entity at the time, and there was nobody really in the club… The Autumns and The Sugarplastic, another band worth noting — local band — they’ve been around a long time, but they’re incredible. We were pretty much the only ones in the club, a handful of other people, watching these two guys and The Dodos, and our jaws hit the floor because we couldn’t believe how good it was. And I wasn’t the least bit surprised when, the next thing I knew… everybody in the world was talking about them; they were so good. But yeah, Sugarplastic I would mention. That’s a band that’s pretty well known here in LA, but not terribly well known outside of that. Actually, Ben from The Sugarplastic and I are working on a record right now. It’s about half-way done and will be out before the end of the year on a new label… Oh, there’s a band called Evol Intent. It’s gotta seem incestuous that I’m mentioning all these bands because we have direct connections to all of them [laughs]. Evol Intent did a remix for a song I worked on with The Sound of Animals Fighting, and I really didn’t like the original version of the song that I did, and then I heard this Evol Intent remix… they had completely redeemed the song, in my opinion. So I contacted them to do an Autumns remix, which they did-which is like the best thing The Autumns ever didn’t do. These guys got a hold of our song and I just wish they were in our band. They could have made our whole album about ten times better. But that’s a great band… they’re like a drum and bass thing. So yeah, that’s just off the top of my head a couple [groups] I would mention.

Talk a bit more about this side-project that you’re doing. Is there a certain moniker that you’re doing it under?
It’s tentatively titled The Soviet League of the Militant Godless, but I don’t know if that’s gonna stick. I was introduced to Ben Eschbach from The Sugarplastic a couple of years ago. Actually, I was introduced to him by Jennifer Tefft, who is the promoter of Spaceland, which is a pretty well-known club out here in Silver Lake. And she thought we should meet because of intellectual interests that we shared, and she was right-we hit it off and became good friends. And I started listening to his records, and realized that this was a treasure that, you know, once again not many people know about, but that kind of makes it all the more of a treasure.

So we became fans of one another’s music and eventually it was sort of natural. We thought that we should make a record together, and then I was approached by this label, who wanted to work with The Autumns but, you know, at the time we were working with Bella Union, so there wasn’t really much we could do with that label. So I told them I was making this record with Ben and started talking to them and then they put up the money to do the record. So we’ve been making that record for the past eight months. And this is a very sort of melody-centered pop project. It has elements of The Beatles and The Beach Boys and lots and lots of other things. I’m really excited about it, I think it’s probably gonna be the best thing I’ve ever been a part of.

Are you recording/producing it on your own?
Yeah, we’re recording and producing it on our own.

Do you have quite a bit of experience in the studio?
No, I’m really just learning how to record in Pro Tools and stuff. I mean, it’s a real shame that this was the case. I could have made so many records if I’d only paid attention. I’d probably know how to make a good record by now. You know, engineer one. But, no. Ben made his last couple of Sugarplastic records in his kitchen, and they sound like a million bucks… just using Pro Tools. He’s really, really good at making records in his kitchen… They do not sound lo-fi at all, they sound like they were made like a major production. So he’s at the helm in terms of the engineering. I’m making little demos at home, and then he’s doing, you know, full-blown productions in his home. And then he’s gonna basically take the demos to the next level.

And as far as the songwriting process for this album goes, is it a collaborative effort? Is it just you doing the lyrics and he’s doing the orchestration? Vice versa?
Well, basically we’re sitting in our respective homes, cranking out songs, and then sending them to one another. In a way it’s similar to The Autumns where somebody comes in with an idea that’s, you know, lyrics, melody, basic chord progressions, and then… from that point forward everybody kind of massages it into something else… Ben is very detail oriented with his stuff, so I think he’ll probably have more of a hand in my songs than I have in his songs. Because by the time you hear one of his songs it’s like, “What am I going to do? There’s five thousand parts here. They’re all laid out in such intricate detail that I don’t know what I could do.”

Is The Autumns being put aside? Obviously you’re not disbanding, but do The Autumns have any upcoming tour plans or will that be put aside as you work on this next project?
There’s no tour plans on the table right now. We’re sort of trying to put something together for the summer. I mean, hopefully we’ll be able to tour in America in the summer. And, depending on how the second single does, Killer in Drag, overseas… we may bounce back over there to the UK and hopefully may land in Europe, do some touring. But it’s all kind of up in the air right now. It depends on, you know, how things do. How the records sells and how the singles do and everything.

Do you have a good following in the UK?
I think we have a decent following in the UK. I mean, we get — again, I measure this from getting e-mails from there — but we certainly have a really good label there, promoting us. But… we’ve been well-received on the whole critically in the UK, and we’ve gotten a decent amount of press coverage and whatever, but it hasn’t blown up or anything.

Ok, now these questions are a bit unrelated to the previous ones, but I always like to ask them of bands. Along with the music, what are some other forms of art that inspire you? And I hate to use the word “inspire” because it’s so cliche, but honestly I’m too lazy to thing of another one right now…
Well, here… everybody has pretty strong opinions on these matters in the band and they all have different, sort of, personal libraries and whatever. I think the most immediate art form that has had the most immediate impact on the music would probably be film, speaking for myself. I really like Angelo Badalamenti’s scores, he scores all of David Lynch’s stuff. That’s been a real influence. Also, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was the inspiration, to use the same cliché, for Clem, which is the third song on the new record. Yeah, that’s all about that movie. Michel Gondry… that guy, you feel like you’re not an artist when you hear about him, because he’ll get an idea in his head and then he’ll go take a month straight to build a house and then take it apart piece by piece because of what he sees and nothing’s gonna stop him from doing it.

By the way, this is just a side-note… have you heard of this blog called, Stuff White People Like? This friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in a while told me to check out this blog, and I went and looked at it and it’s about 90% accurate. What’s amazing about it is that white people in America…it’s very difficult to pigeon-hole white people, you know, because we’re the majority and we’re, you know, we’re most of the power structure in this country… and so for that reason it’s much easier to stereotype other ethnic groups than it is to stereotype white people. People become too acquainted with the diversity of white people and they’re not acquainted with the diversity of these other groups so they stereotype them. This guy [Christian Lander, creator of www.stuffwhitepeoplelike.com] stereotypes white people very well. I think of this because I mentioned that Michel Gondry DVD. Well, there’s an entry on this blog where it shows a picture of that Michel Gondry video collection, and it says, “All of your white friends will have this DVD.” [laughs] And I’m looking at it and I’m thinking, “Oh my god. I do have that DVD.”

And then he talks about how all white people like Michel Gondry and all this stuff. It’s just entry after entry like this, where he keeps nailing it. I’m like, “This is incredible. I had no idea I was part of any group that could be stereotyped, but this guy is successfully stereotyping me.” It’s not a very good feeling actually.

It makes you glad that blogs do exist though, because you can have such nuanced sites [laughs].
[Laughs] I know, right? But anyway, yeah… all that to say that he’s right and I was personally inspired by that movie Eternal Sunshine… In literature, it’s hard. Everybody reads in the band, but… it’s not unusual to get this question. It’s kind of impossible to talk about what literature inspires you musically without sounding like a complete dick. My focus, in terms of reading, it hasn’t been fiction in a while…but when I was in a big fiction phase the stuff that made the biggest impact on me was the Russians. You know, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy… they may have had some influence on me but how can I possibly say, “I’m informed by Dostoevsky” without sounding like a complete asshole. It is just a rock ‘n’ roll band, after all. I mean, I guess if Joanna Newsom said she was influenced by some author, I wouldn’t find that pretentious because she’s obviously so gifted lyrically that you kind of think, “Well, I would have expected you to be influenced by some of these people…” But I don’t have the same opinion about us.

Yeah, it is hard to write songs that try to work on the intellect of your listeners without it coming off as pretentious. Same thing with a lot of political songs, I find. Many of them just don’t age well. And you could completely agree with the political convictions of the artist, but still just be turned off by their song about them. It’s just that politics very often don’t mesh well with art. It’s too bad, really.
I know. But it’s very true what you’re saying. I think there’s something…on the one hand, I understand why artists feel a social responsibility. It’s like, “People are listening to me, there’s things that are going on in the world that I don’t agree with so maybe I should say something about this stuff.” But there’s sort of two problems with that, and the first one is artists, not to be too general, but artists tend to think they know what’s going on in the world more than they actually do. I mean, how many times have you heard somebody pontificate about X or Y and thought, “You clearly do not know what you are talking about. You know so little that you don’t know what you don’t know, and you are embarrassing yourself and you don’t know it.” But secondly, the thing about it not aging well, I think that is an artifact of condescension. It’s like movies that have strong political themes. It’s very hard to do without insulting your audience.

Right. That’s why I’m always a little cautious when speaking with a lot of socially aware artists. I mean, God bless them for partaking in those causes, such as the environmental ones and such. And I have heard a lot of exciting things about bands using alternative fuel for their tours, or making their t-shirts out of more eco-friendly material. But I do worry that, at times, the quality of the music and the music itself is overshadowed by their causes. So I hope more artists can find a balance that works out for them, their art, and the causes they are advocating for.
Yeah, that’s it. There’s you the artists and you everything else. You the social activist, you the intellectual. Yeah, the things you’ve mentioned… like, we’re gonna make our t-shirts out of this kind of material or anything that’s, like, locally based, totally pragmatic approach. Like, “I’m going to do the following because I know I can make a small difference in this way…,” that is all to the good. It’s that intersection of your political beliefs and your artistic form of expression… that’s where you just have to be very careful. Like, I’ve never sat down and talked with the people from Rage Against the Machine, but I sense that Tom Morello is a pretty literate and pretty well-informed guy. So I sense that there’s some prudence involved. As political as that band is, I think that they’ve been pretty careful… which is sort of an odd thing to say because their so radical. But I think that’s somebody who wouldn’t have too hard a time defending his political beliefs against somebody who was both highly literate and strongly disagreed with him. That’s unusual, though. You know, usually the people who are sounding off on politics in their art you kind of think, “I don’t get the impression that you actually look at this stuff.”

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