You guys use Twitter quite frequently, can you tell me about your experience as a band using Twitter:
Chris: It is nice to have the photo option, it’s the best, the fact that you can just take a picture and put it out there. It’s so immediate.

Brian: It’s also, at one point we had a journal on our website and it became daunting, we were all daunted by it cause we thought we had to write these masterful paragraphs. But the Twitter thing, it’s like cliff notes. It makes it really easy.

Chris: Cos the twitter thing we can just put one line.

Brian: “hey we’re in Amsterdam.”

What was your motivation for using Twitter?
Chris: I checked it out to see what it was about and if anyone I knew was on it. And then I noticed our booker was on it, so then I kind of followed him and I was like “oh your on this?”. I didn’t touch it for 3 months, then one of our label guys found me on Twitter and was like, “lets have a meeting about this, you should do this more often for the band”, and I was like OK I’ll give it a try. And so we eventually got onto it.

Do you also maintain a Facebook accounts?
Nikki: Chris and I do

Chris: It’s definitely not a personal thing anymore. It’s like we understand people are going to come in and they know who you are through your band and so they add you as a friend. And then all of a sudden they accept you as a friend.

What was really nice about it was, on my birthday about a month ago all these people were saying happy birthday to me. I made sure to say “Thank You” to everyone and people were surprised like, “OMG my friends don’t even write on my wall.”

That was going to be my next question, it seems like it must be difficult to stay in touch with fans this way?
Brian: It does get a little overwhelming. Also, privacy is important too.

Joe: The band is an entity to itself. You have to work hard to keep it separate from your personal life.

Brian: Nikki and I were just talking about this. You’ll be waiting for a movie in line, and you really just want to see this movie and the guy in front of you in line will turn around and be like, “Hey man”. It’s cool at first, but then after an hour it’s like, ”…well, so you going to see this? Cool man cool. Expensive huh?” Yeah…… and it’s like “……awkward”

Do you feel that you are forced to be friends with people that your not friends with?
Brian: NO….we always try to meet people as much as possible. You just kind of notice it getting more intense, which is fair enough. But it gets hard.

Nikki: You meet so many people every day, it’s hard to remember.

Brian: I’ve started to just feign recognition. In LA. Someone just looks at me in a coffee shop and I’ll be like, “HEY!” and they’ll look back all confused thinking, “What??” It’s hard I almost feel like there is a little friend quota in your brain.

Yeah actually there is, it’s 150 friends.
Brian: Really? Yeah that makes sense though. In context, like at a radio station or in the same kind of room where we first met it is easier. I’ll see “Ed” and I’ll be like, ok, “radio station Ed.”

How much money do bands make these days? Or to rephrase that, what does it take to be a successful band?
Brian: We really thought we were successful before we had records out, like when the band started to feed itself. When we actually didn’t have to put any of our personal money into it – we were like, “This is it!”.

Joe: If you can go on tour and come back and not have to look at your empty bank account then it is good.

Brian: I think it’s a world of blue-collar rock stars now, which is totally fine, really. If you can get by and play music.

Nikki: We feel successful that we don’t have to get another job.

Joe: Yeah, the fact that we can do this for a living is pretty much as awesome as we could have hoped it would be.

Brian: At this point we’re living larger than we’ve ever have before, we have three or four cars each, and our own blimp…and so we’re broke.

Nikki: (laughs) Yes the blimps are expensive to upkeep.

Brian: As long as you can travel around and play and make records. Than that is pretty much fantastic

So you guys don’t have jobs anymore?
Brian: No…
Nikki: …we would be fired

So you aren’t all going back to work at Disneyland?
Brian: Hehe, yeah that was a funny one.

Joe: But yeah, I think the blue collar thing. It is possible to make a living and do this without that sort of extravagance of rock bands in the past. You don’t have to be The Who to make a living and travel. You can do it economically and smartly – we can all make a living and pay our rent back home.

Brian: I mean, there are still going to be the Kayne Wests and Lady Gagas, but the middle ground is much bigger. It’s amazing. People are really hip on what bands need. For example, now a days if people hear your song in a commercial they don’t get up in arms and say you’re a sell-out . They say “Great now they’ll be able to play my town.”

Joe: Yeah the way bands support themselves now…People are pretty knowledgeable about how bands get paid, it is more transparent.

I think people are willing to accept that there is a lot of free music out there and there needs to be a way for artists to make some money. For example, I know “Lazy Eye” was included in Guitar hero?
Brian: Yeah that was really just for fun. It was pretty awesome, a lot of kids like that game.

So that’s the coolest way to sell out I guess?
Joe: Well and that’s just another venue to get your music out. Because not only are people hearing your song, but they can play it if they want. Which is even cooler. They can play “Lazy Eye!”

Brian: Yeah and it’s hard! I’m not very good at it.

But you play guitar!
Brian: That’s why I’m bad at it.

Joe: Turning 6 strings into 4 buttons, it actually is kind of complicated.

Brian: We’re trying to work our way into scoring the next Legend of Zelda

Are CD sales important anymore?
Brian: CD sales are important, we still get some money from that.
But most of our money comes from shows, merchandise and licensing. But that’s something you got to be careful about. We get pretty strange stuff. And we turn down a lot of things, like TV shows. We’re just like, “Wow that kills me inside.” But then hopefully you get to the point when you don’t have to do that anymore.

Has the vinyl deluxe package been successful?
Brian: Yeah, actually it has. Vinyl is going up now. Actually there are two new shops in Silverlake, LA…one of our friends has one of them and he was on the news, it was like, “The one shop now making money in this economy…Oragami.” I have no tears for CDs, I’m like fine, just vinyl and digital downloads for vinyl.

It seems like some people want it cheap and quick, but other people want to treat the album like a piece of art. That’s what is interesting about the limited edition set, it’s not just something overproduced on the rack – you can really appreciate it.

*interview by chris castiglione. More research and articles on the relationship between new media & musicians can be found on my blog www.ccastig.com.

In the supporting slot before Dan Deacon, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart came on stage to a packed Paradiso. Having spoken to lead singer Kip earlier in the day about their love of bands like Jesus and the Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine we were expecting to be literally blown away when they picked up their guitars; but that didn’t happen, at least for the first few songs anyway. Either there were some issues with the sound technically or they chose to open with some weak and rather drab numbers. Luckily though it didn’t last, by the fourth number in they found their sound and belted out ‘Don’t Take Me Out’ to a great response and we breathed in a breath of relief.

Every song that followed including ‘Young Adult Friction’ and ‘Hey Paul’  Filled the main hall with sweet sweet distortion like The Pains of Being Pure at Heart mean to do and although there is nothing particularly original in the bands make-up or sound it awoke sugary feelings reminiscent of 80s John Hughes films where everything turns out ok at the end. I wonder if they’ll ever cover ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ by Simple Minds… think that’d be new wave, New York music heaven.

Photos and video from the Dan Deacon / Pains of Being Pure at Heart show at the Paradiso on Monday.

Photo Gallery

Dan Deacon Video

What have been some of the better shows on the European tour?
We had the most insane show up in Manchester at the Chorlton Irish, it was Morrissey’s birthday and everyone was rowdy. It was this tiny little room with no ventilation and people were just crowd surfing and cracking into the stage.

Pains of Being Pure at Heart has a busy tour schedule this summer, are there any bands that you are looking forward to seeing?
I’m really looking forward to our west coast tour with a band called Girls that I really, really like. The album isn’t out quite yet, but it will be soon, and they are amazing.

What have you got planned while you’re in Amsterdam?
We’re definitely excited to check out the city, but we have to leave at 6:30am tomorrow to take a ferry back to Dover. We’re disappointing – I  know.

I had read an article where you said you were cool with people downloading your music: what has stopped you guys from releasing your music for free on the site?
It’s downloadable anywhere else, you can’t physically put it on the site because we have record labels that still actually need to sell stuff. Recently I was looking at something and noticed a torrent for Pains of Being Pure at Heart with 5 million hits.

Honestly, people can find it if they want to find it, so I’m not going to try to stop anyone. But I think that people are conscious of the fact that you have to do something for the band in return. We find that people come to our shows and we’d rather play for people than not play for people. And people are usually honest, they’re like, “Hey, I downloaded your shit. That was cool, I’ll buy the vinyl now or a t-shirt”. So you kind of have to roll with it, and we’re just psyched that people are listening to it.

When you guys are working on new songs how do you come together and share ideas?
I think that democracy is overrated in terms of songwriting. If everyone writes 25% of a song then it sounds like a bit, well you know.

There are certain types of music where complete and total collaborative ideas might be worth while, but for us I kind of write the structure and lyrics and the ideas for the song. It’s up to the band to play out those ideas and bring them to life, and offer themselves once the blueprint has kind of been drawn. The songs wouldn’t be good if they stopped with me because everyone contributes there ideas to them.

Kurt is a fantastic drummer and I can’t even program more than one drum beat. So, just from him the song has such a better feel, because I can only do so much. Like on my keyboard drum set! Our first EP sounds like that, it doesn’t have real drums they are all electronic drums.

What do you use to record with when you are playing around at home?
I use Logic. My favorite thing is a snare setting called ‘Big Ballad Snare’ and I LOVE IT, I LOVE IT! It is hard to get a good snare sound. I’m not sure if it maybe sounds like The Jesus and Mary Chain, but it is just so synthetic and huge.

Did you play it for Kurt and were you like, “Hey can you do this?”
Yeah, it’s funny because a lot of the drum sounds aren’t how you play drums, it is just how it is mixed in the record process: reverb, mics, or how it’s tuned. You can record with a really shitty drum set and still make it sound cool by tweaking it a little bit, which is cool because we don’t have fancy stuff.

Like when kids from Indonesia write and they’re like, “What kind of snare sounds do you use on your album?” And Kurt’s like, “Just tell them it’s a shitty snare. They should just turn the EQ a little bit!”

How has the Internet helped you guys?
We didn’t have time off to tour, and the reality of having to work full-time in New York to stay alive is… Well, so the Internet has helped us get out our music without having to establish ourselves everywhere. At the time we couldn’t say, “Let’s just take off two months and play shows”. I know it sounds romantic, but it is really difficult and you still have to work to make it happen.

The Internet is just a sort of introductory thing, but you still have to connect with people and make a lasting impression. I think the old-fashioned ethics of hard work, touring and paying your dues are just as relevant today as they were in the past, if not more so. It’s almost like a political campaign, you can’t just run a campaign based on a few good op-ed pieces, everyone has to go out and shake hands.

How many shows did Pains of Being Pure at Heart play before getting signed to Slumberland?
Quite a lot, but they were all in New York. The signing to Slumberland thing was a vague notion of whenever we had a record they’d put it out. It wasn’t like, “ALRIGHT, we’re going to get signed guys!”. Actually, we never even signed anything.

Do you still have jobs back in New York?
Peggy and Alex do, but I lost my job back in November. But we have to do something to pay our rent. It’s not like our eight day whirlwind tour of the southeast playing to six people a night in 2007 was going to cover our rent in New York City.

So do you have apartments waiting for you in New York?
We all do actually. Peggy was able to sublet her place, which was smart. I should have done that, but that would have required me cleaning out my bedroom and it’s pretty messy.

Maybe you’d get some crazy Pains of Being Pure at Heart fan that would take it and be like, “Oh Kip sleeps right here!! This is Kip’s toilet!!”
[laughs] …yeah, “And Kip passes out in his clothes right here…EVERY NIGHT”. I’d be funny when they get into all the unreleased demos on my computer and tell me, “so I guess your next new single is going to be called ‘shit-faced’?” And I’ll be like, “No! that was a working title!” And they’re like, “Too bad we’re releasing it on the Internet anyway!”.

That’s another thing, we’re more concerned about unreleased things being put online, and people coming to weird conclusions on what things are going to sound like based on my inability to program a drum machine correctly. In that case they’d be like, “It seems like they are working on a concept album where every song has the same drum beat”. Again, the one I love is the “Big Ballad Snare” in Logic. If you get a chance just go in there and hit the lowest C# you can.

We’re going to steal that sound and pretty soon you’ll hear of a band coming out of Amsterdam that they say sounds just like Pains of Being Pure at Heart.
Yeah it’s cool. Actually, it would be really cool if bands got accused of ripping us off for once, that’d be ironic.

We could probably work that out for you.
Haha, yeah people would be like (mockingly), “Man…this sound is totally derivative of Pains of Being Pure at Heart.”

We’ll thanks for sitting with us.
Yeah, thanks. We’re just really excited to be here and it’s not just a thing we say. The chance to come to Europe for the first time in my life and play is amazing. It’s a really cool feeling and we’re grateful that people are coming to the shows. It’s so surprising you can show up at a place so far from home and people know you.