how I regained my faith in music: an interview with robert schneider of apples in stereo
Back in October, shortly after their set at the Wall in Taipei and despite losing his voice, Robert Schneider, the singer, guitarist, main songwriter and producer of the Apples in stereo was nice enough to talk to me and answer some of my questions.
When I heard that the Apples were coming to Taipei, I was basically blown away; American bands just didn’t come to Taiwan much. When I heard back from their manager that an interview was possible, my mind started racing. After all, this is one of the first indie pop bands I ever liked. My first exploration into the Elephant 6 collective after In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was Science Fair. Tone Soul Evolution came shortly afterwards and still sits among my favorite indie pop albums of all time.
[If you want the condensed version of the interview, jump down to the question about the band’s transitional period.]
the Apples in stereo - the Silvery Light of a Dream, Pt. 2 (mp3, from Tone Soul Evolution)
–
Adrian of IPMN: I love that you do the “hello” and “thank you”s [during your show] in Chinese.
Robert Schneider: I studied Chinese in college but I’ve totally forgotten it now. But it turns out having traveled, I know the most basic shit in a few languages, but that really gets you by. Because most of your interactions with average people is–you have to know how to say “hey”, “please”, “thank you”, “I’m sorry”. “I’m sorry” is a good one. Whenever I go to a new country I learn “I’m sorry” first because it really keeps you out of trouble.
[We’re walking and Dan, the band’s manager, approaches to discuss some logistical details. After that, as we’re leaving we need to pass a local.]
R: Dui bu qi [I’m sorry].
A: See! So useful.
R: I know how to say “sorry” in multiple languages. It really gets you by. If you want to be chatty with someone it won’t get you by, but it gets you in average interactions.
…
A: How do you like playing for the Taiwan crowds?
R: It’s been amazing. We’ve had really good shows. Our show at the Megaport Festival was awesome.
We were playing against the water and there were gigantic fucking ships behind us–huge industrial ships. It was incredible, you know. It was really cool. We had to bring up the volume to meet the [volume of the] gigantic ships and the shipyards. We stayed in the–what’s it called–the Skytower. It’s the 14th tallest building in the world. [Ed: Now’s it’s the 16th tallest, but at the time of the interview it was the 14th.] A huge hotel–
A: Is this in Kaohsiung?
R: Yeah, this was in Gaoxiong, or Kaohsiung or however you say it. It was awesome. It was amazing.
…
A: So Megaport brought you over? How’s that work? They just called up your people and said, hey, can you do this…?
R: Yeah. They only brought over three international bands: two Japanese bands and then us. So I guess they didn’t do it with a lot of people but that’s what they did. They just called us and said, we’ll pay for this whole trip. We have hotels and everything taken care of, every single thing. Plane tickets and everything. I got to bring my wife and child over. It totally rocked. We had an amazing time. We had a translator/ guide and she took care of everything. She was amazing. It’s been pretty awesome. They were great.
A: So the last few years seem like a bit of a transitional period for the band. Is that fair to say?
R: Yeah, I’d say so. I mean, our whole career has been a transitional period in a sense because we’re always changing and doing different things. Also, making records and stuff has always been tied up in learning how to record. We usually home recorded and stuff. It’s been this whole journey of learning how to have a studio, record, and make productions, write songs and play together. We could barely play our instruments when we started our band. So [the] whole [time we’ve been a] band has been a transitional period, but the last few years has been much more transitional.
A: Was it a purposeful break that you took between, uh, sorry, uh, Velocity of Sound and New Magnetic Wonder?
R: No, it wasn’t purposeful but we were working on having a new sound and stuff. We were trying to work on new things and we had kind of a high goal for we wanted to achieve. So we just took time–also there was other stuff that happened. We toured in that time.
Many of us have other bands. Our drummer Hillary Sydney quit about a year and a half ago, after we recorded New Magnetic Wonder. About a year ago, actually. She was our drummer from our first–from the beginning of our band.
Actually, musically it was transitional. I went through a period, around Velocity of Sound and before that where I lost faith in the principles I always believed in as far as music goes. I always had this faith when I was growing up, when I was a teenager and when I was going into the Apples, going into my 20s and being a part of Elephant 6, which was this collective I was a part of and stuff–I’d always had this–it was my religion. It’s not overstating it to say it was my religion. My religion was big production, pop music, harmonies, psychedelia. When I say it, it doesn’t really mean enough–it really was my religion. I breathed it. It was the universe to me, you know? Brian Wilson and John Lennon and Paul McCartney and the Zombies and the Kinks. These guys were like my deities, you know. And my only deities.
I kind of went through a period where I lost faith in it. I came to feel like–not the songwriting–but the production and the drum sounds and the horn parts and the harmonies and the sound effects and stuff that’s all very important, it seemed very empty to me. I started to feel like–I can’t describe it. I went through a period where I started to feel that stuff was kind of superficial. What was real–you can listen to a record, like a Robert Johnson record or an old Dylan record. It’s just a guy and an acoustic guitar. You hear the voice and you hear the guitar. The voice is most of it and the guitar is equivalent to the whole big production. How important is that? You hear a guy singing some songs and you hear something else, some chords. Is it an orchestra, is an acoustic guitar or a piano? It doesn’t matter. And I started to lose faith because it’s like, if it can just be an acoustic guitar, why do I need this whole orchestra?
I can’t describe it, because now I don’t feel it anymore, but I went through a period where I felt like the orchestrations and production stuff were kind of empty. And so when we did Velocity of Sound, I was trying to reach for more of what our band sounded like live. We’ve always been fuzzy and raw live. We spend a lot of time on our recordings but when we play live, at that moment, you’re playing and you’re fucking up all over the place.
A: Yeah.
R: There’s no second take. And we’ve never been very polished as a band, so I decided that I wanted to try to capture that on the record. It was real. I started this other band, Ulysses, with a friend of mine John Fergusson, who’s now the [Apples in stereo’s] keyboard player in the space suit, and we recorded a record live, in mono with one microphone and it sounded awesome.
[Sean Scanlan, journalist with Taipei Times, who we’d both met earlier, approaches.]
Sean: Do you want to try a betel nut?
[We do try a betel nut. A funny diversion follows, which appears below[1].]
A: Personally I’m really glad that you have this faith in production, because I really like your production. I always have.
R: Thank you. Another thing was that every Apples record, I never felt like I achieved the thing that I worshiped. I felt like it was something that Brian Wilson, the Beatles had a monopoly on. So that was kind of discouraging. So it was sort of mixed up–it wasn’t just that I thought it was empty, it was that I thought it was unattainable. It was kind of a mix between the two. So I kind of lost faith in it.
Also, our guitar player, John Hill, has a band called Dressy Bessy. They put out an album and were touring. Our drummer–our ex-drummer–has a band called High Water Mark. They put an album and were touring. I put out an album Ulysses with my band. Then I put out a solo record called Marbles and I toured for that. And I would do karaoke in a silver spacesuit.
A: The silver spacesuit’s been around for a while?
R: Yeah, it’s a theme. It’s a recurring theme in our little musical world.
A: Awesome.
R: Then Smile came out. Brian Wilson finished Smile. Smile had always been the–that was the holy grail for me. It was the thing that I really believed in. More than anything else, I believe in this promise of this concept record that had never been done. So that was discouraging too. When I said it was unattainable and it was empty, Smile was like the symbol for that. It was the metaphor for the emptiness and the unattainability of it, because if Brian Wilson couldn’t do it and it ended up falling apart and ruining his life, then who am I to think I could do something?
A: Yeah.
R: And then he finished it! And he’s this old dude and they got back together after all these years and they took this music that they’d done when they were young and made this finished thing. Have you heard it?
A: Yeah.
R: It just blew my mind. It was pretty close, too, to the production of the original bootlegs. But the vision they had: the melodies and the lyrics and all this shit. These old guys are so inspiring. These old guys got back together–they were in their twenties and then they got back together in their 60s and finished the most psychedelic fucking record. Guys in their 60s did the most psychedelic record! That’s like nuts, dude.
A: Have you seen him?
R: Yeah, I’ve seen him like three times. Have you seen him?
A: Yeah, last summer. It was kind of weird, actually. He was reading off of his teleprompter for his lyrics.
R Van Dyke Parks wrote that shit. If you read those lyrics, it’s some obtuse shit.
Yeah, yeah. I saw him play twice in London and he was great. [Good] pitch, good singing. I saw him play once in Atlanta and his pitch was off. His stuff was still great but he was Brian Wilson and he finished Smile–you’ve got to add that in.
A: I mean, years of severe depression or whatever will take it on a person’s mind basically.
R: To think that guy, his brain was basically completely melted down and he pulled through that. He came back to finish–I mean, that’s pretty miraculous.
A: It is. Completely.
R: Most people don’t do that. They sit around and vegetate for the rest of their lives. And this dude is physically damaged. His brain is actually damaged, as if he had a car accident or something… And he fought through that and rehabilitated himself and finished this record. That’s nuts, you know. That was inspiring to me and I realized there was a long way to go. If Brian Wilson did finish it in his circumstances, what could I do while I was still young and still psychedelic, you know? I haven’t done it yet, but it made me feel like it wasn’t empty after all.
I think the lesson–that thing I said about how the song and the vocals were most of it. It’s a strong lesson–it could just be an acoustic guitar or a piano, but it could be the most psychedelic fucking backing track you ever heard, [if you] make it really good. It wasn’t just that Robert Johnson was a great vocalist, it was that his guitar was fucking great, man. You know, you hear a lot of guitar players that sound like shit. Every asshole plays acoustic guitar and sings and it’s just like–that’s not true. It’s not every asshole; there are some very good assholes. [laughs] Like Syd Barrett or something. But the point is that, what I failed to think about is that when I’m listening to Robert Johnson or Bob Dylan, those motherfuckers are playing the guitar. So your backing track, it’s not that it’s just a backing track, it’s good. So that made me feel some confidence about the whole thing.
A: Yeah, I was thinking about it. You hear Jeff Mangum and you hear his solo bootlegs, you know, or Live at Jittery Joe’s and that stuff is good and you hear the album and that stuff is good. It’s good in its own way.
R: It’s two different things.
A: Your production definitely adds a lot to that.
R: Thank you. Thank you. Well it’s different, too. Jeff’s one of my best friends in the whole world. I’ve known him since my childhood and I love him. And he really worries about wanting it to sound good. And I want it to sound good for him. Well, thank you very much.
He’s a great acoustic performer, though. And his songs that he recorded alone on a four-track. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard any of his earlier recordings.
A: Yeah, some…
R: They were really good. He was really inspiring to me. It made me start my band.
A: So you started Apples in stereo and Bill and Will started OTC and …
R: Actually what happened was Will and Jeff had a band called Cranberry Lifecycle. The most fucking amazing shit. Oh my god, man. So I went down to Athens, Georgia for a couple weeks one summer. That was so inspiring. I was busy four-tracking at the time. I was recording stuff at the time that I had–it later came out as Marbles on that record Pyramid Landing.
Oh man, that fucking betel thing was disgusting…
Anyway, so what happened was that Will and Jeff started the Cranberry Lifecycle. My friend Bill Doss was also–you know–did you meet Bill [who now plays keyboards with the Apples].
A: Yeah, I met Bill.
R: He had also moved to Athens and was recording solo stuff and he joined the Cranberry Lifecycle on bass. And then they changed their name to Olivia Tremor Control. Anyway, during that same summer I went to Athens for a few weeks and I decided I was going to start a band called the Apples. I was driving around with Will and we were listening to CDs–err, cassettes, tapes–in his car…
So it’s early in the morning and the Pink Floyd song “Apples and Oranges” comes on and it’s the most psychedelic song. And I was listening for band names at the time because I wanted to start a band. I wanted a name for my recordings anyway, so when the song “Apples and Oranges” came on, I was like “The Apples”, “The Oranges”. When you’re trying to think of a band name, everything–someone could come up to you and say “Where’s the bathroom?”
A: Boom. Awesome. Done.
R: You’d be thinking, is that a band name? No, the bathroom’s over there…
So everything you hear, you filter as a band name. Anyway, “The Oranges”, “The Apples” and Will said, “The Apples: that’s a band name.” So, I went back to Denver, where I had just moved. I had just met this guy Chris Parfitt. So I started the Apples with my friends. Most of my friends couldn’t play their instruments but they owned instruments, so we started a band.
So that’s beside the point. So Jeff and Will had the Cranberry Lifecycle and then Bill joined the band and they changed their name to Olivia Tremor Control. It’s the same band. Jeff came up with their name, I think. Maybe Will did. I’m pretty sure Jeff did. Pretty soon Jeff left the band because he wanted to travel. He wanted to move around and live on people’s couches. He had a girlfriend in Seattle. He lived there for a while. And the grunge thing was happening so he moved away from there. While he was there, the grunge thing was so big. He was really disgusted by it and at the same time sort of stimulated in a bad way. So he recorded a record on his 4-track called Hype City Soundtracks. Hype City was Seattle because of the grunge thing. [It was] fucking awesome, man. Holy shit. I heard that shit. I was living in Denver. It blew my mind.
So he quit the Olivia Tremor Control. He didn’t even quit; he just wanted to do his travel and stuff. And they wanted to have a band in Athens. So then it was just Bill and Will as the Olivia Tremor Control. The first Olivia Tremor Control EP which we put out on Elephant 6 was Jeff, Bill and Will and you hear that, you know. It was basically the Cranberry Lifecycle with Bill, so it had a poppier, Beatlesy element, lots of harmonies. It was fucking amazing.
So that was how the Olivia Tremor Control got started. So Jeff quit the band. He was the drummer. They became a bigger band with their other friends in Athens and kind of–
Eh, I don’t know. That’s enough of the story.
A: So all of these bands started approximately the same time but the Apples in stereo is the core band of the Elephant 6 that is still around. What do you attribute that to? What–do you have anything to say about that?
R: The one thing about the Apples that was different was that we didn’t live in Athens and our band wasn’t–most of the Elephant 6 bands were switching around members. They weren’t switching around members, it was just every member of every band was also the leader of his own band. Everybody was a producer and everyone was a songwriter. And the Apples were a band. We had band practices. We were a garage band. We learned to play together. We were a band. We weren’t just people from other bands playing together in different formations. That’s really cool. I love that about Elephant 6. I was part of the playing together in different formations because I was the producer. I was playing on everybody’s records. But the Apples were not part of that. We had [our own] members, so we were a pure band. We were on our own little tangent. It was different. Because of that, our fate, our creativity, the ups and downs of the Apples were separate from the individual members because they weren’t all doing their own things. We were a band.
So I guess when Elephant 6 started to dissolve–it wasn’t really dissolving. Actually, it dissolved because a couple of us, including me, said, we’re out of it. To be really experimental and really fucking psychedelic became stale, like [how I was saying] about me losing my faith in production. It became stale to me.
So I quit Elephant 6. All of us, all of the original members, at the same time were having similar feelings about being in different places. It became a burden to always be lumped in with everybody else, you know? What if you’re better? Or what if you think you’re better?
A: Yeah.
R: I don’t mean me. I mean in general. Everybody, when you’re writing a song, you think it’s the best song. You think you’re the best. And everyone’s just lumped together and it’s like you’re in one band, but it’s like what about my song? It’s like everyone’s the George Harrison of Elephant 6; nobody was the John Lennon or Paul McCartney. And you always feel like you’re the Paul McCartney or John Lennon, you know?
Yeah, I lost track there.
A: So all of these reasons sort of came together…
R: So around the year 2000, I dropped out of Elephant 6. I was sort of spreading myself thin. By producing, I was putting a lot of creativity into other people’s records, which I loved. They’re my friends. At the same time, when I was recording my own records, it wasn’t on the side exactly, but I was recording it amongst a lot of other stuff: touring for the Apples and producing my friends’ records. And I felt like, as an artist, for myself, I should try to condense my energies and focus on my own songs.
I felt like all my records were really good but they all had places they were lacking or that I hadn’t really completed the program. Every record I would go into with a vision and I would come out like 85% and that’s discouraging because you start–what’s ideal is that you complete your vision, you complete your program for a record plus a bunch of other shit come up. So really it’s like 200%, because there’s the stuff you want to do plus the stuff you didn’t expect to happen. That’s a great record. You get what you want to do done plus a bunch of other shit happens that you didn’t expect. That really does make a great record. It’s the stuff that you didn’t expect plus you have to get completion of what you’re into. None of the Apples records got the completion.
So I went through this anti-production phase and I decided when I dropped out of Elephant 6 that should be focusing less on producing and running a label or running a collective of my friends and more on writing my songs, before the songs left me. Because they will at some point, they will leave. Right now I’m kind of at the most productive period for writing and stuff. At some point they won’t be there and you don’t want to miss that, you know?
A: Exactly
R: So that’s why we’re still plugging away. In a sense, we really just hit it after Elephant 6 dissolved. That’s when I really came to understand what I wanted to do. I went through a crisis. I lost faith. I came back to my faith and I wanted to do something really good. I want to do something like Sgt Pepper’s or Smile. You can’t do something good because it’s a different generation. They were coming out of big band and all of this really technical musical shit that they were hearing when they were growing up that we don’t hear. When I was growing up, I hear R.E.M. They’re fucking great, but they’re not big band-era arrangers. You know what I mean? Or like the Four Freshmen or whatever Brian Wilson was listening to, you know?
A: Yeah.
R: So you can’t touch that but you can touch the same sort of stuff. You can reach in a different direction and try to reach as far.
Uh, I don’t know what I was saying but I’m just starting to get there. With our new record, we really took a long time to make it. We tried to do a lot of different shit on it. I tried to get all my friends involved. In that sense it was more Elephant 6-like, so we put the Elephant 6 logo on the record, which hadn’t been on a record in six years, I think. This was an Elephant 6 record in the original sense. Just like our first four track recordings, when we used to trade tapes and shit and put out 7″s and cassettes and we were all playing together and I was working with all my friends. With this record I traveled around, went to all my friends who have studios. I’d go to their studios and record there instead of just having them come to my place. My band traveled around, recorded at different places. It was pretty awesome. We just let those experiences coagulate and accumulate into this big record. And then we trimmed off a few pieces. We tried to make it a more manageable record. It’s pretty cool. It’s good to do once in a while: to try to do something fun and special. It’s like going backpacking in Europe but on an album. Or backpacking here maybe.
A: I had a couple more question if you’re okay with that.
R: Sorry, I didn’t mean to…
A: No, it’s great…
I’ve always about wondered what pedals you use, particularly what–like on “Tidal Wave” that awesome tone you get on that guitar solo–
the Apples in stereo - Tidal Wave (mp3, from Fun Trick Noisemaker)
R: It’s all Big Muff.
A: Big Muff?
R: I’ve always used Big Muff, since–
A: That’s the sustain sound? The sustain solo sound?
R: Yeah, it’s a fat, sustain sound. The Big Muff is awesome. Actually, that sustain is the Big Muff plus you put the guitar on the neck pickup. You don’t want to turn the distortion up too high on a distortion pedal. I don’t mean the volume. The actual fuzz, you want to keep it at the minimum you can and still keep it fuzzy. The more you turn it up, the more it gets trebley and 80s sounding. I can’t describe it. But you also lose volume. You lose body, the more distortion you add into the signal. But the Big Muff with the sustain, they call it, but it’s really the fuzz tone, turned down really low. It’s a great sound.
A: Yeah.
R: It sounds like Cream or something. It’s my favorite guitar sound. Strawberry Alarm Clock, Creme, Spirits, or Hendrix. They all have that fat tone. I used to listen to it as a kid–how do you get it? I guess they probably didn’t use the Big Muff, but that’s how I got it.
–
A: You’ve been in this business a long time and I’ve been thinking about this and actually writing a piece for somebody else–so the old model is your record and sell recordings and the live [shows] are to support selling those and make money off of the recordings. And it seems that there’s a shift to where live music being where you make the money and…
R: You know, you’re right about that. For the Apples, it’s not the case because we always toured the minimum that we can. We love to tour but we’re not a work-our-asses kind of band. We generally do a cycle of touring and then get back to recording. Recording is the main thing that we do.
A: Okay.
R: We love to play; don’t get me wrong. I meant to mention that when Hillary quit the band we really tried to jack up the live part. We added singers and sound effects stuff and–
[Dan, the Apples’ manager politely interrupts, and they talk for a few minutes about logistics of getting everything back to the hotel.]
R: I should probably go. Do we have a lot more questions?
A: It was just that one question about live–
R: Go! Ask me again.
A: Basically did you see live music as the shift in the dominant paradigm in how–
R: It definitely is with the internet and stuff, for most bands. I see a lot of bands, like Of Montreal, touring a lot and doing pretty well with that. For us, we would probably do well to capitalize on that more, but we haven’t so far. We tour as much as we need to. We like touring but we really like to record and to be home and, you know, stuff like that. Playing isolated festivals or playing shows like this [the Apples’ Taipei show] is probably the best thing to do for me. It’s not for the money, though, you do it for experience, or to play.
There’s definitely a shift in that way but for us–for me the main shift is the shift in TV commercials and movies and shows using a lot of indie rock. I would say that’s the main shift because as a songwriter and as a producer it enables you to make more money and your [?] get more money, with licensing. So that’s another shift that’s happening that is equivalent. For me, I’ve been, kind of, more interested in that. I feel like I’m writing these pop songs–as an indie rock band we’re shut out from being on top 40 radio, but we can be on fucking, like, NBC or something. They don’t play your video on MTV, which is top 40 in it’s own way, [but a] commercial for Kohl’s. That’s your pop song in everyone’s living room.
It’s not for the money, but as far as the commercial side of [music] I’m more interested in the [licensing] side of it. Writing songs that’ll–not writing songs for licensing purposes, but actually writing songs and allowing them to be licensed for various uses so everyone hears them. And that’s my song. I love everyone hearing it.
I love playing live but it’s not the biggest deal in the world.
–
[1] [Here’s the betel nut diversion mentioned above with Sean, the journalist. I like it.]
S: Want to try a betel nut?
R: Is it vegetarian?
S: Yeah. It gives you like a hot flash. No meat.
R: I’ll try one after this interview.
S [to me]: You’ve tried it, right?
A: I haven’t, actually.
S: Just try it.
R: You swear to god it’s vegetarian?
S: Yeah! It’s what all the taxi drivers–it’s what they eat. It’s just like, uh, chewing tobacco.
R: Is it tobacco?
A: It’s like a nut off of a tree. It slightly…
S: Alright, you take one and you bite off this part with your teeth…and you spit it out.
R: Do I just spit it on the ground?
S: Spit it in the cup.
Then you chew it.
R: What do you do after you chew it?
S: You spit out the juice.
R: How long do you chew it?
S: A couple seconds…
R: It tastes like grass.
S: They’re popular in India.
Okay, spit it in the cup.
You gotta try it while you’re in Taiwan once.
A: Okay, I’m going to get rid of this now…
That stuff’s really weird.
R: That shit’s fucked up, man. Oh my god.
A: So anyhow…
R [laughs] That shit’s fucked up.
[to Sean] Thanks, dude.
