The Morning Benders Interview

It isn’t easy being a musician today. In fact, over the last decade, if you were to ask most anybody whether they thought it a good idea to pursue a career in music, they’d probably laugh. It’s practically common knowledge now that the music industry is in a shambles, trying to restructure, and for many artists, the process has been a drawn out and bitter one. Fortunately, some bands have been able to use it to their advantage and have come out stronger as a result.

Chris Chu started taking his music seriously in the midst of the storm, about 6 years ago, when he entered the prestigious UC Berkeley as a freshman. While dedicating his daytime hours to advanced courses in music theory, he was staying up late at night in his dorm writing and recording music through an external mic plugged into his clunky, outdated Dell desktop. It didn’t start with much more than a cheap Fender acoustic guitar and his voice, but after some positive feedback, Chris decided to seek out a band with which he could flesh out and grow his songs.

It wasn’t long before he stumbled on his first band members. As he recalls, “There weren’t any try outs. I had just moved to Berkeley and basically the first kids I met that were musicians ended up being the first incarnation of the band.” Those kids (which included Van Pierszlowski, now of the popular indie-folk group, Port O’brien) spent a good amount of time rehearsing together where and when they could, but Chris was determined to get out and play for an audience.

He started booking shows at small clubs and house parties around Berkeley and Oakland. “We just played every show that was offered to us,” Chu explains. “We didn’t have much of an option, so we played shitty bars and house shows and that kind of stuff.” The plan was to conquer the city across the bridge, but before taking to San Francisco, Chris understood the importance of building a local fan-base. Before long, demos they had recorded during rehearsals and at home started leaking around town, and it didn’t take long for The Morning Benders to become one of the Bay Area’s most buzzing bands.

Chris acknowledged quickly the importance of DIY, viral marketing. “We basically did everything ourselves. I recorded all the stuff myself, we put it out ourselves, our friend did the art.” Like most contemporary bands at the time, they spent a lot of time friend-requesting strangers on Myspace, sending emails to local bloggers, befriending club promoters and staying out late after shows to put a face to the music. Stagnancy was no option for Chris; if you were in the Bay Area, you were going to know about The Morning Benders, like it or not.

It only took about 6 months for the band to outgrow the small clubs that had spurred their early growth. Devoted local fans were eating up their cheery, singable pop melodies, and Chris was taking a methodical approach to the band’s development, which assisted him in seeking out a label. After several different offers from local independent labels, Chris decided to go with +1, who had been courting them for a while prior.

Their time on +1 was successful. They put out an EP entitled ‘Loose Change’ along with their debut full-length, ‘Talking Through Tin Cans,’ both to positive reviews. They regularly appeared on all the relevant music blogs, and they toured for two years in support of larger bands like The Kooks and Death Cab for Cutie.

Since then, The Morning Benders have grown up. They’ve moved to Brooklyn, band members have come and gone, their ‘so-cal 60s pop’ sound that people came to expect has gradually faded, and they’ve signed to Rough Trade Records. We recently got to sit down with Chris to talk about all the exciting new things they’ve been up to over the past year and a half.
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You guys have been under the radar until just recently — what’ve you been up to?

We released [Talking Through Tin Cans] about a year and a half ago and we toured pretty heavily on that, almost 4 or 5 times around the states. We were kind of burnt out on playing the material over and over, as it gets, so we went into the studio to do our next album and we’re getting ready to release that on March 9.

Talk a little bit about what it was like recording the new album.

We recorded it in the beginning of this year and we booked some time at this Sacramento studio called ‘The Hangar’ in this warehouse district in the middle of nowhere. It was this huge room that used to be a skatepark at one time so there were all these ramps everywhere. But there was also all this recording equipment and crazy toys around so we holed up there for like a week. We ended up recording the whole album in like 10 or 11 days — just tracking it, which was cool.

Surprisingly, the first album took a little longer for us to do. On this one, the songs we were trying to record were a lot more dense, so I thought it’d take longer than the first album, but the way we did it, combined with living at the space for a week and recording all the time, it just kind of came out and worked.

Did you see your sound changing during the recording process or had it been happening for a while prior to it?

It was kind of a combination. I had definitely been listening to a lot of different kinds of music and the songs I was writing were quite different from the first album, and when you’re writing different songs they obviously need different kinds of arrangements and different textures and sounds to go along with them. So we kind of knew that going into it, but what I really love about my favorite recordings is that they’re really a product of their environments, so when we went in to do that, we knew we wanted the studio to be part of the sound. We really put to use all the little toys in there like vintage amps and guitars, this old organ, percussion things, pianos… The room is huge, different reverbs and sounds… there’s just so many different combinations of things to do in that space and we just wanted to take advantage of it as much as possible.

What happened after you tracked the album?

Well, we finished recording and felt that we had a fair amount of what we wanted, so we needed to whiddle everything down and make the arrangements. I started mixing the record on my own — just some rough mixes and heavy editing, and I was thinking that that would be a few days or a week, but I had been dealing with this guy Chris Taylor [Grizzly Bear] who’s a great producer and recording engineer. He was a positive dude and had a really great vibe and just talking to him, I knew he was what we were looking for in a collaborative partner. So I sent him a couple tracks, just as a fan who was into his production and stuff, and I wanted to know what he thought of it. He wrote back a couple days later, very supportive and being really into what we were doing, and he really liked the direction we were heading in. We got him to mix the record, and it ended up being a big process; more, in fact, than you would normally think of when mixing a record.

Was Grizzly Bear one of those bands you were listening to at the time that was helping shape your new sound?

Yeah, that’s one of them for sure. Them, along with a lot of other newer bands that I just hadn’t paid any attention to up until a year ago or whatever. In high school through when we were making the first record, I was really stuck in the 60s and 70s, worshipping the Beach Boys and The Beatles and Neil Young and all of that. Of course I still think they’re amazing, but I started listening to a lot of other contemporary bands like Dirty Projectors and Beach House and that sort of opened up a whole new world for me.

What was it like working with Chris Taylor? Were you a little starstruck when you started?

It was always totally cool. He has a good vibe and it was just really comfortable from the getgo. At the beginning, we didin’t really know to what end he would be involved, and we kind of left it open-ended. I went to New York to mix the record with him and we just got a lot deeper into it than I was used to. He has this great church space where Grizzly Bear has recorded their records and stuff so we did a lot of work in there. We used the reverb and reamped things and reassessed things and just made new sounds on a lot of the stuff too. We’d either sweeten things or in a lot of cases just take them to a completely new place. It was a great experience.

How did it feel to have him fully commit to the project?

When we started working together and I started to realize that he was into it and invested almost as much as me, that was an amazing feeling. It was really awesome to have someone bring a whole new side to things. When you’re mixing your own vocals or your own voice, it’s so insane. Everyone can relate to hearing their voice recorded or on a camcorder and feeling totally weirded out. That process is like tenfold when you’re hearing you and your band recorded, so to have him step in and be like ‘no dude this vocal should be here, you don’t need to bury it,’ it’s a nice feeling. We always respected his opinion, but there were times when we’d have different ideas in mind and we’d meet halfway, but 9 times out of 10 it was super perfect.

Do you see The Morning Benders following a similar career path to Grizzly Bear’s?

I feel like they’re the ideal model for the ‘working class band.’ They’ve pursued their vision without compromising it for anyone or any label, and for some reason it’s sort of a phenomenon that the’ve been so successful. And that’s not to say they don’t deserve it, because I think they deserve it more than anyone, but its kind of amazing that they’ve reached this kind of mainstream level of success without having to dumb down their approach. I think for us, and for any band, it’s just super inspiring to see that it’s possible to make some smart, interesting music — even like a radio single — that people are still digging it and are going and getting the record and going to the shows. So I guess for us, we’re just trying to do the same thing; we’re trying to go after what we think is cool and go after the original vision that we had for our songs. Every piece of that is important to us, and I would never want to dumb it down or try to change anything just to sell records or appeal to a certain kind of person.

How does the new record, content-wise, compare to the first record, Talking Through Tin Cans?

Talking Through Tin Cans was very much a product of a very specific time in my life, what I was going through after a relationship ended, and it was basically all written in a month’s time. Big Echo, on the other hand, while it’s still definitely introspective at times, was inspired by a lot of different things I had going on in my life. The songs were inspired by a much more diverse set of experiences. A lot of the songs I was writing kept coming back to this idea of nostalgia.

Was that nostalgia accompanied by negative or positive feelings?

Well that’s what I think is so fascinating about this feeling we have associated with nostalgia or whatever. It’s inherently positive and negative, you’re looking at something in the past, and longing for it, and while it was worth trying to re-experience and remember, you always have to let it go. For me it inevitably leads to questions about time and mortality, and all that heavy shit.

Do you think personal growth between writing the first and second records triggered that nostalgia?

I don’t really feel like I’ve grown up… I’ve felt nostalgic for things even when I was super young. But It’s weird to me that people describe music as sounding more mature or whatever, like that’s a positive thing; I think our first album was a snapshot of what was going on back then, and our second album is a snapshot of what has happened more recently.

What was it like deciding what to do with the record after it was finished?

The record is coming out March 9 on Rough Trade. We basically were in this place where we’d done a lot of this stuff on our own, and on the one hand, we felt like we could have kept doing that. It’s great to keep it close to home and have a hand in all of it; you never end up in some weird McDonald’s ad or something, which happens with bands like the White Stripes or The Shins or whatever. On the flipside of that, it can be a very limiting approach and you can only get so much done. Working with such a small team, there were times where we would just get so overwhelmed with all the stuff on our plate. We just wanted to get our music to as many people as possible, so after a long debate, we decided to move away from the smaller, independent side of things and go with a label that had a few more resources. That label ended up being Rough Trade.

So you guys have moved from Berkeley to Brooklyn. Tell me about that.

It’s been a mutual decision, but we all made it on a personal level. If we were making decisions based solely on the band, we’d probably have stayed in Berkeley. We had a really ideal situation there: cheap living, lots of good contacts, stuff like that. But what it came down to was just that we’d been living in Berkeley for a long time, and there wasn’t much left to explore. New York is such a diverse place and it has so much to offer, it’s exciting.

What’s it been like so far?

I love it here, but I haven’t written any songs yet. It’s hard for me to write songs when I’m going through a bunch of stuff, or if I’m in a new place. It usually takes some time for me to digest all that, and then I’ll write a bunch of songs at once. But the city itself, it’s amazing and exciting like I thought it would be.

What can we expect in the near future?

Well again, the new record, Big Echo, comes out March 9, and we’ll be heading out on our first nationwide headlining tour with our good friends Miniature Tigers the day after. I can’t wait to put this record out — this year is going to be a lot of fun.

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The Morning Benders — ‘Excuses’ (to download, right click, ‘Download Linked File’)

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The Morning Benders Myspace
The Morning Benders website

Words & Photographs by Matt Jacoby