*Article by Adam Barnett — buzz Music Editor*
Lafayette, LA southern pop-rockers Brass Bed have a lot going for them as a smaller-scale band. Focused around great hooks and prominent guitar-work, Brass Bed has released two full-length LPs and are currently on tour supporting a split EP with their friends, Cajun band Feufollet. I called up frontman Christiaan Mader after his solo set outside Lafayette opening for Mt. Eerie, and this is what he had to say about the weather, the new EP, the upcoming full-length, and touring in the Midwest.
Christiaan Mader: What’s the weather like in Champaign right now?
buzz: It’s probably low 60s.
CM: That’s beautiful.
buzz: What’s it like over there?
CM: It’s nice. I was thinking about it earlier, because it’s usually really hot in Louisiana around September. Whenever everyone else is getting fall, it’s usually still summer here… A friend of mine lives in South Bend and he said that the high was 60 today, so I was kinda saying to myself, “Man, it must be awesome up there right now.” It’s actually pretty pleasant for Louisiana weather as far as September goes. It’s probably 75 right now which is unspeakably cool for Louisiana in September… Right when I answered the phone, I was like, “I should ask this guy what the weather’s like right now.” I’m wondering what it’s gonna be like when we get there, you know?
buzz: Yeah, it’s probably gonna be in the 60s or so.
CM: That’s sounds really pleasant, though. I’m okay with that.
buzz: That’s definitely one thing to be excited about.
CM: I’m certainly excited about the weather, yeah.
buzz: Your tour for the end of this month seems like it’s a lot of Central US/Midwest dates. Is there a particular reason for that?
CM: We did a tour not too long ago with The Poison Control Center from Aimes, IA, and we went for the Midwest, and we just really, really liked it a lot. And we kind of just put it as a priority tour area, like, “let’s go back there as soon as we can.” We just felt that the Midwest was really receptive to what we were doing, maybe more-so than what we found on the coast. It just seems like the folks in the Midwest are still kind of into playing rock n’ roll music… We felt warm and welcome there, so we wanted to go back there as soon as possible and spend a lot of time there…
buzz: Onto your most recent record: With Melt White, people were saying that your sound matured a lot. Do you feel that way?
CM: Absolutely. I mean, I would hope at least when you’re in a band and you guys are trying to produce music as much as you possibly can, part of the fun of it is growing with the people you work with. I think Brass Bed, in contrast to a lot of bands that seem to be coming out today, is a band of people that have been friends for a very long time. And so, growth is very important. Whereas other people might be like, “I want to start a band that sounds like this.” And you go and you start a band, and you give it a name, and you make an EP and you put it out…
At some level, it’s something we need to do, is to continue to mature. And I think Melt White certainly was something that we grew into. Our first record that we put out was similar in approach, at least in terms of trying to indulge ourselves. Melt White was indulgent, but disciplined along the way, and we tried to understand song-craft and stuff like that. It was something that we took a lot more seriously, certainly.
buzz: That came out over a year ago, and I heard that you guys already finished recording your third LP, so how’s that sounding?
CM: The big difference between the two records is Melt White was recorded with five people, and the other was four, basically, when we started touring on it. And this new record that we worked on is a lot more akin to what you would see us do live in terms of dynamics, and overall tone and sound. Melt White is definitely a studio record, where we went in and made choices that you couldn’t necessarily replicate live. And then we had to figure stuff out as we went a long. Where this new record is more of a band live in a studio. That was the big change for this one.
buzz: Was a lot of the songwriting done live, with you guys building on each other, or was ait more of a write-out, play process?
CM: Both. I mean, it really depended on what we were trying to do with a particular song. When it came down to it, sort of the approach that we took was we did all the writing however it took to write it, so if we had to track something out, track by track and write out arrangements that way, we’d do it that way. But at the end of the day, we distilled all those arrangements into something that could be performed live in a studio. So what you hear on record is basically four people in a room as opposed to other records that we’ve done where it’s been, you could probably take six to seven people to a song just to perform it…
buzz: I know that you’re going on tour in support of this new EP, but are you going to play any songs off this upcoming record on your tour?
CM: Absolutely. There’s a lot of new material that we’re itching to play already, so we’re gonna do it. Part of doing what we do is, we kinda do it for ourselves at some level. We’re not afraid to show our cards early.
buzz: Does your record have a title already?
CM: Yeah. That’s the only thing we know about it so far. The name of the record is The Secret Will Keep You.
buzz: The what?
CM: Sorry. The Secret Will Keep You. Yeah, I’m outside, and people are coming out here to pee.
buzz: Oh, that’s always fun.
CM: Yeah, it’s kind of a weird environment for me to have this interview… And you can’t smoke. And the Mt. Eerie show is inside this guy’s house basically. You can’t smoke in there, so people are walking outside to smoke cigarettes, and I guess this guy didn’t want to wait in line for the bathroom, so he just walked by me to go take a leak. One of the weirder locations I’ve done a phone interview.
buzz: That’s always good though. It adds an interesting aspect to the interview.
CM: Totally, man.
buzz: So, This Secret Will Keep You?
CM: No, The Secret Will Keep You.
buzz: Okay, got it. You guys are on tour in support of this split EP with the band Feufollet. Where did the idea for that split come about?
CM: I used to live with the guy that plays bass in Feufollet, our keyboard player Andrew plays keyboards in Feufollet, and we’ve all kinda just hung around. And it seemed novel, like something that nobody had really done yet, which is this idea of being a pop rock band or psychedelic pop – whatever the fuck you wanna call it – and try to take Cajun music, and make it not Cajun music. And so the reverse of that was, what would happen if you took what we do and have a Cajun band do it? And that was the basic nexus of it. It was kind of people just sitting around and having pipe dreams about what they wanna do with the music that they’re making, and the other ways that you could possibly do it.
buzz: I haven’t gotten the EP yet, but do you do any Cajun music yourself on it?
CM: Yeah. The three songs we do on the record are three Cajun songs. We sing them in French.
buzz: Do you know French fluently?
CM: No, I don’t. I know it okay, like I can kind of understand it when people speak it around me. I can’t really speak it very well myself. I sang it in French mostly because I was the one in the band who knew French the best. So I did. But even then, Cajun French is very different from what you get taught in high school, so I had to get it taught to me phonetically. Like, I had to read the lyrics sheet, just like little syllables I had to read to get it right.
buzz: I kind of get this Inglorious Basterds feeling to that whole French-speaking process in this case.
CM: You’re not far off. But I do speak a little French. It wasn’t like I beat anybody out by just a bit or anything. Nobody really spoke it, and I speak a little.
buzz: Are you gonna sing in French on the tour?
CM: Yeah. We usually do one or two songs from the EP. Feufollet has been doing the same kind of thing oversees. Feufollet, because they’re a Cajun band , they do really well overseas. And so they actually went and sold a shitload of these EPs overseas. And they were over there because they were singing songs that Brass Bed wrote, but their own versions. So I think it’s something that we’re gonna keep pushing. But it’s novel for people to hear an indie band or whatever sing in French and not actually be a French band.
buzz: When you come over here for Pygmalion, do you have time to check out any bands?
CM: I hope so… There are definitely shows I wanna see while we’re there. I think the Dodos are playing, I think that’s really rad… Deerhoof is definitely a band that would be high on my list of somebody that I’d wanna see…
buzz: Your press page on the Park the Van website talks about your influence from the Elephant 6 Collective. Who’s your favorite of the group?
CM: That’s tough. I would say Olivia Tremor Control is my personal favorite. I mean, I think if you were to go member to member, everybody would have a different answer…
buzz: A brass bed seems like it’s a bit uncomfortable to sleep on. What type of bed would you prefer sleep on?
CM: A tempurpedic bed. You know, the one where you can drop a bowling ball on one side, and nothing will happen on the other? That’s what I’d get.
Who: Brass Bed, Iron Tigers, Mammoth, That’s No Moon
Where: Cowboy Monkey
When: Saturday, Sept. 24 @ 10:00 p.m. (Brass Bed @ Midnight)
Cost: $5 at the door
Ages: 19+
Brass Bed – Melt White
buzz Magazine: Music 
Posted on September 14, 2011
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