Explain what the members were doing musically leading up to Pygmy Lush’s formation. Chris Taylor: Johnny and I were playing in Malady, Mike Taylor, Mike Widman and I were playing in Mannequin, and David was playing with Coaxial out of Long Beach, CA. All of those bands except for Malady and Coaxial are on a indefinite hiatus. Mike Taylor also had brief stints in Majority Rule, and Haram before Pygmy Lush had formed. During Malady’s final drunken days, Mike T, Johnny and I formed a punk band called Teenage Noise, that was the foundation for Pygmy Lush. In fact, Pygmy Lush’s first songs were originally Teenage Noise songs. When Malady broke up, we consolidated members and formed Pygmy Lush. How did the songwriting process work when the band first got together? How was Bitter River put together? Teenage Noise was going to be an outlet for all the fast stuff that was unfit at the time for Malady, Majority Rule, Haram, and Mannequin. It was a seamless flow of fast material, heavy and visceral, and above all simple. Mike Johnny and I have been playing together for years, in pg99 and the fast material was second nature. All those songs were finished after a single practice, and somewhere along the way we started fleshing out these little nothings of songs on four track in our spare time. The idea of putting out a record that was more in the mold of a mix tape than an actual cohesive piece, began to take shape. We played with the idea of putting several versions of our songs on the same record, with multiple recording mediums to give the whole record more depth, in attempt to break from the monotone, flat line that most albums we’ve done inherit. We got it close, but the end result was, (as usual) a far cry from achieving exactly that, but such is the case with music. In my experience you almost never come close to your ambitions in music, the best thing to do, is write and forget.
Given the members’ history in more aggressive bands, do you find yourselves spending a lot of time explaining the sound of Mount Hope to a lot of people? How do you usually explain it? Well, sort of. I field a lot of pg99 and Malady questions when we go on tour, and I try to be very accommodating to folks that want to know why we chose to do this very subdued music, But to be honest, most people aren’t very interested in that stuff, they just want to clear up that we also play the “hard” music that they heard on MySpace. I spent very little time justifying it, we never want to alienate our audience, and realize that not every pg99 fan is going to dig this shit. But I am not going to apologize for playing the music I want to play, I tell people to get a bag of weed and wait for your girlfriend to dump you.
What does everyone do outside of the band? What are your plans, now that the record is out? We teach preschool, we walk dogs, we are carpenters, berry pickers, and delivery drivers. I occasionally do artwork for bands, our plans are really simple; stay together, write more songs, play more shows.
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Kurt Ballou’s best-known work is mostly similar to your old bands. Why did you choose him to record Mount Hope? Did he vary his process a lot for you guys? Kurt is a great guy, he knows us well and we feel comfortable listening to him when he says that something can’t be done. He has usually gone out of his way trying to make it possible first. His process seems to vary with every recording, I get the impression that he is a fly-by-the-seat, improvisational engineer. Very adaptable, but very pro.
Mount Hope is obviously much clearer and more consistent musically than Bitter River. How did your thinking and songwriting changed between the two? Just a natural progression, winter settled in, we wrote in the comfort of our own rooms, rather than the spring and summertime shed that allowed the loud stuff to progress. The dive into Mount Hope was just stuff we couldn’t finish in time for Bitter River, we usually just put out a record when we have written about twelve songs, no matter the content. Than as recording draws near we hash out concepts and things we want the record to represent. Ultimately though, we obey our songs as they come out and it just so happens we were feeling a bit low while we wrote Mount Hope.
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