How far north can you go, anyway?
Minneapolis band Fitzgerald sat down with Music (For Robots) at a local coffee shop for an interview, and they discussed made-up words, Tom Waits, and why they just might be the next Raffi.
Here's a taste of what they sound like:
Read the interview after the jump.
Minneapolis-based Fitzgerald consists of husband-and-wife team Nathan and Mandy Tensen-Woolery. Their 2024 Records debut, Light A Match And Burn It Slowly was centered largely around the acoustic guitar, and their new record, Raised By Wolves, is a more epic affair.
They enlisted the production help of Darren Jackson and Erik Appelwick, both members of 2024 labelmates The Hopefuls; and local drummer extraordinaire Martin Dosh. The result is a mesmerizing record, and its songs are equally great live.
Nathan and Mandy sat down with Music For Robots in a coffee shop in the Seward neighborhood of Minneapolis.
Music For Robots: Was the more fleshed-out sound on Raised By Wolves a conscious decision?
Nathan: We went into it having a very clear idea of the sound we wanted. On the first album, we were going from recording on a 4-track everything we’d ever done before to working in a home studio with someone. And I think the recording process in a studio was fairly new – on one hand, I think it was a little bit conscous we kept it more sparse, and on the other hand, it’s just sort of the way it happened because that’s just the way we knew to work.
After recording and learning a little bit more how a studio works, we knew that the next album we did, we wanted to have a lot larger sound.
MFR: How did that come about in writing?
Mandy: I remember, even when the songs were brand new, you saying things like, “Just picture in the background, you’re gonna hear a cello doing this”… Initially we wanted a horn section, but we couldn’t find one, so we got Mike to do trombone.
N: We really had planned out how we were gonna do it because we have friends who were gonna do this and this and this, and we were going to tap them for their resources, and besides the fact that we were both able to play a lot of instruments, we kind of knew going into it that we were going to want that larger sound.
M: There’s a lot of little things, like a lot of little bells…
N: A lot of that came from the production, with both Erik [Appelwick] and Darren [Jackson, both from Minneapolis band The Hopefuls, among other bands] having a really good idea of how we wanted it to sound, and having really similar tastes in that respect. If we didn’t know how to flesh it out, they had really great ideas. A lot of times, especially with Erik we’d come back the next day and he would have done some percussion stuff. It worked really well.
MFR: Did you find it challenging, after doing the first one?
N: The experience was a lot more enjoyable because it was fun to really know what we were doing, to see that sound we were hearing take shape. I thought it was really fun.
MFR: My favorite track is probably "Bloody Stumps". A lot of your songs have dark lyrics, but sweet melodies.
N: It happens. Not all the time, but I think the fact that the music is the way it is and the lyrics are dark, it’s a little jolting. I like that play. That’s nothing new by any means for somebody to do it, but I kind of like the effect it has, so we seem to play with that quite a bit.
MFR: What do you like about it?
N: I like that it is jolting, and all the music I like tends to do stuff like that. It seems a little bit more honest. I think I heard Tom Waits say once, describing his songs, he likes “beautiful music about horrible things”. I thought that was interesting. I don’t know if I’d quite agree to such an extreme for every song I write, but it happens. We tend to play with that. But I don’t want to get into that’s the only type of stuff we write, but this album, definitely, that happened.
MFR: Who are your influences? Is Tom Waits one of them?
N: Songwriting-wise, yeah. Even though our music isn’t so Tom Waits-esque when you listen to it, the largeness – but he can go from really large to really sparse. I like the way he can sound really aggressive, but still sound very acoustic at the same time.
M: What I’ve always liked about Tom Waits is the diversity. One song can be beautiful, the next one is him whispering about some guy building creepy things in his garage. There’s always Tom Waits on every good mix tape. No matter what it is, there’s always a fitting Tom Waits song.
N: Bands like His Name Is Alive I really like for the same reason. So much stuff. I try to dip into anything, anywhere from what you’d expect, from the indie scene to punk rock and hardcore. Even if it doesn’t come across in the music, I think it’s helpful to listen to really different things and see what you can take from it. In some ways it will, and sometimes it does influence you in a way that you can’t trace back to that sound, but it’ll make you think of music in a way that maybe you’re not used to.
MFR: Do you have a set writing procedure?
N: It depends. Sometimes it’s very much like, I need to write, so I’m gonna start writing because I haven’t done it in a while. In that respect it’s like work, to a degree. Other times, I’ll seek things out for influence or I’ll remember something, like this song or this band that was pretty inspiring, I want to hear that again. But really a lot of times, it’s just sort of, if I’m gonna keep playing music I need to keep writing songs, so I need to sit down and do it any way that it works. A lot of times it’s just sitting down and writing, and getting rid of what’s bad and working on what’s good, I guess. From there, it’s writing, and bringing it to Mandy, and then there’s a whole process to it.
MFR: Mandy, do you have veto power?
M: Yes. I have to have something [laughing].
N: I’ll usually play you a song and you’ll tell me, "that sounds just like this song", or "no, you can’t do that part," or "no, this doesn’t work," or "you need to change this."
M: So I’m the filter.
N: Yeah, you’re very much so the filter. Then there’s the whole musical end of it too, like working it out parts, like vocal parts and that sort of thing.
M: I also have to correct his English. He has poor grammar. Although on this album there is a song with a secret, made-up word, but I won’t tell you what it is. We didn’t realize after it was recorded, and Darren’s like, “What the heck…?” I want to know if anyone notices it. I think it’s hysterical. I did a bad editing job, I don’t know how that happened.
MFR: Did both of you start out wanting to do music?
N: Yeah, I think for the most part. We both went to college for something completely different, we both have jobs not related right now.
M: But who doesn’t?
N: But I think we had always wanted to pursue it.
M: Luckily.
MFR: Your bio calls you "indie-folk." Is that still accurate?
N: I think it’s easy just to call it indie, because that’s a nice, vague term right now…
M I think we were trying to shake the folk for a long time, we tried to shake the folk. Not that folk is bad, but wasn’t really the direction we wanted to head. We couldn’t shake it.
N: I think there’s always been an acoustic element that’s always gonna be there.
M: And some people, whenever they hear an acoustic instrument, always hear folk. I can think of any number of people that wouldn’t be folk …
N: I think sometimes, that’s the way peolple identify it, so that’s what sticks. So what can you do about it? Obvisouly, with descriptions of your own music, it’s like pulling teeth from whoever the artist is, but everybody else seems to be pretty quick to tell you what you sound like, and if that’s what they say you sound like, that’s what you sound like. I think indie folk is more apt a description for Light a Match than Raised By Wolves.
MFR: How did working with Darren Jackson and Dosh come up?
N: Originally, Darren was going to record it, and then Erik Appelwick popped up too so they engineered and produced it. We were looking for someone to play drums on the album. So they said, Dosh should play drums, we said sure, and he agreed, and it worked out… Everyone who could play on the album just played because a person just knows a person, or else they were just friends with us already. Really Dosh was the only one, Erik too playing bass, but everyone else was just friends of ours. Dosh came in because he was friends of Erik and Darren and probably one of the best drummers in the city, so that was lucky. But they just kind of pitched it to him, and he liked it.
MFR: Did that involve showing him the songs far in advance?
N: Not really, he was amazing. He had heard the songs we recorded and he basically showed up … I came into the studio, they set up his drums and were getting it all miked. We basically played a song, he listened to it, played along with it a little bit, I’d tell him this is sort of what I was thinking, he’d play maybe one or two more times. And we’d say, "yeah, I like where that snare’s falling" or "that thing you did at this spot was great," or "when you flipped the beat here," and he’d do it in one or two takes. It was pretty slick. He basically just came in for a day and laid it all down. That guy is a real professional.
But then again, for what he does, this was probably nothing, just to come in and play these rhythmically fairly simple songs, that was probably just a piece of cake for him.
MFR: Is there cohesiveness in the Twin Cities music scene?
N: Yeah, I think so. I feel it a lot more now too. Maybe it’s just because we’re a little bit more out there now, or maybe it’s just because things have changed, but … like Dosh playing on our album. Otherwise he’s sort of avant hip-hop kind of stuff, and for him to just go and play on an indie pop album - it’s pretty cool that people seem to be open. People are into what other people are doing.
MFR: Has anything surprised you, in terms of response to the record?
N: I’ve been glad that people like it.
M: I was surprised that people are picking out "Bloody Stumps" as their favorite. That was kind of a smaller song … I didn’t think that would be the one.
N: It’s just kind of laid-out a little weird.
M: And it’s just a weird song.
N: Not so much as far as radio goes, but just people at shows, people talking to us … Yeah, that surprised me…. I’ve had several people tell me their children like it.
M: Our friend has a three-year-old, and he loves that song. One day she was cutting parmesan with a knife and sliced off the tip of her thumb, and it was just her and the little girl who were home, and our friend was trying to keep her calm, and so she was freaking out. Driving to the ER … [her daughter] says, “Mom, now you have a bloody stump!”
N: Somebody else just e-mailed me a few weeks saying that their seven-year-old always sings it in the back of the car.
M: Maybe we should do a kids’ album. We’ll be up there with Raffi.
Pick up Fitzgerald's excellent new record Raised By Wolves from 2024 Records.
Photo this and main page copyright Darin Back, 2005.
This interview appeared in a different form in Issue 9 of Rift Magazine.