VENTS INTERVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
November 17, 2015
Interviewer: RJ Frometa
Hi guys, welcome to VENTS! How have you been?
Mark: Thank you! We’ve been great, playing out a lot more this year than normal and getting ready to record our third album, Fancy Hercules. This time with a real piano and just the two of us. It’ll be our first acoustic album…unless we decide to throw drums and bass on it later that is.
Andrea: I have this dream of having all of our indie musician friends playing and singing on it. We’ll see.
Can you tell us more about the story behind your track ¨I Wanna Know What I Don´t Know¨?
Andrea: It’s about making the choices you want to make and not what other people tell you or expect you to do.
I find, like a lot of people, that all my life people have been trying to tell me what to do. People have assumed certain things about me which have nothing to do with who I am. Like, oh, Andrea, I always thought you’d be a lawyer. I don’t know how or why they got that impression especially since I’ve never had a clear so-called career in my head. I didn’t even expect to become a musician. The only thing I always knew I wanted to be was a writer. I knew I had to have jobs that paid the bills, but I never pictured myself in a conventional career. I think a lot of people can relate to not imagining that, being thrust into a path they didn’t choose or a path by default due to going along with what other people want them to do.
So this song is about the role and oddness of being an artist, of being unconventional, of not fitting. To me, the most important lines in the song are –
I know you’re unhappy but I’m glad
Because now I can go down that road
Dreaming of some other kind of gold
The “other kind of gold” is time – spending as much of it with people you love and doing things you love. The day jobs we’ve had have been about that, carving out time. They’re not status jobs, they pay the bills and they allow us time and energy to pursue our dreams even if those dreams don’t turn into financial success. The journey and the creative expression is what’s invaluable to us. On the cusp of recording a new album, we’re especially terrified of how fragile life is. We don’t want to die before we finish this next album because we want to hear it in its final form. I mean if I get hit by a truck, in the seconds before my death, one of the things I’ll be thinking about is damn, I really wanted to get that new album done.
Did any event in particular inspire the song?
Andrea: Really all these aggravating conversations and surprising anger from people (who shall remain unnamed) that we aren’t in the career or life they imagined for us. Because it’s never about what you want your life to be, but what others want it to be. So that’s the “I’m not listening to you” and also the chorus, “You can’t tell me what to do” and “You won’t listen to me”.
The whole song title is also inspired by how I never expected to be in a band, sing, play guitar and write songs. I do like to try things I don’t know how to do, but I used to be the exact opposite.
Also, the verse – “where I go, nobody knows” is a twist on the 1940s film “Portrait of Jennie” that haunted my dad. The haunting song lyric in the film is “Where I came from, nobody knows, and where I am going everyone goes”.
The single comes from your new album Funeral Genius - what´s the story behind the title?
Mark: A Funeral Genius is someone who has a genius for being negative. We can’t name any names, but the album was inspired by someone we know who is truly negative about everything. No matter how good their life is or how much money they have they can’t be happy. Everything is doom and gloom, our generation is going straight to hell, blah blah blah. But the album isn’t just for them, it’s dedicated to all Debbie downers across the universe.
How was the recording and writing process?
Mark: The writing and recording of Funeral Genius took three years, mainly because, like our first album, 99 Cent Dreams, we had to do it when we could and didn’t have all day to record it. But also, because we like to spend a year writing, a year rehearsing/playing live and a year recording. We spent a day getting the drums and bass down on eleven of the 12 songs at Seaside studios out in Park Slope then took it back home to work on the vocals, keys and guitar on our Pro Tools setup. The twelfth song, Devil in a Dream, was recorded in one day out in Mendham NJ on a hand held tape recorder with the lights dimmed low, the spirit of Robert Johnson in the room and his hell hounds on our trail. We’ve actually reconceived Devil in a Dream for our latest album, Fancy Hercules, which we’re really excited about.
Our writing process has been evolving along with our playing and singing. We’re much more confident as musicians and singers now than when we started and our songs sound looser and less structured. We used the pentatonic scale on our song “America Where Are You” on Funeral Genius, which is the scale most often used in movies and country music to lend that expansive feel of the American West. We wanted that pioneer vibe added to America’s lyrics, which are about the search for America’s soul during the dark years of the Bush administration.
There’s a languidness to our writing style on Funeral Genius more so than on 99 Cent Dreams. Andrea and I continue to collaborate on every song and there’s an ease to creating each song that just gets better with time. If Andrea writes something it will trigger ideas from me, which trigger more ideas from her and so forth and so on until a fully formed song has been birthed.
I can hear some Bjork and Bowie in your music – do they play any role in the band´s music?
Mark: Absolutely. Both are inspirations of ours not just musically but as artists who push boundaries and innovate constantly. We recently saw the Bjork exhibit at MoMA and although the curation of her work wasn’t what it should have been, the video portion showed how wide a range of creativity her music possesses. And Bowie, I mean the man is just amazing in every sense of the word and so cool and he never ages! He still looks cooler than anyone. A friend of ours saw him at a little rock club in New York checking out the latest bands staying ahead of the curve as always. But truthfully, I think we can safely say they’re both aliens from a galaxy far far away, and not just because Bowie landed on this planet in The Man Who Fell to Earth or dresses the way he does or sings about Major Tom, but because who on earth is like either of them? And that’s what inspires Makar: singularity, uniqueness and originality.
Any plans to hit the road?
Mark: We may play a festival in Quebec next summer and do a radio show or two over there for CKRL’s Illusions Auditives show hosted by Vincent Delisle and Jacques Dulac and Carol Barrett’s Ruby Slippers show on CIUT. Last summer we did an interview and played a live set on Ruby Slippers and had a blast in Toronto, so we definitely want to get back there and hang with Carol and then on to Quebec to hang with Jacques, who’s trying to get us into the festival. Canada has an amazing indie scene and they seem to dig Makar. We were voted #11 on their college charts.
What else is happening next in Makar´s world?
Mark: Like every band, just doing what we love you know. Making music, playing live and trying to get some decent recordings of it all so when we’re old we can be like, Andrea, you believe that was us doing that, rocking out and such? And Andrea will be like, that’s not us you old fool, and I’ll be like damn tarnation woman, it sure as heckfire is. And she’ll say you shut your mouth when you’re talking to me and don’t cuss and I’ll say nothing cause a happy wife means a happy life! And if you all take one damn thing from this interview that should be it.
Andrea: Mark, did you just misquote Harry Potter? I still dream we’ll get a Grammy someday and I’ll end our speech by saying, “Hey to everyone at work, this serves as my two week notice.”
Sadly our Vents interview is a broken link (we don't know why - it's one of the mysteries of the internet but below is the original webpage as a PDF.