Here’s the second installment with Straylight Run’s drummer, Will Noon. In this part we talk about the band’s new EP, a member’s departure and literature. If you missed the first installment, check it out here.
Bethany, PopWreckoning: OK, so let’s talk about your EP, Un Mas Dos. What’s your songwriting process? Does John [Nolan] do lyrics first and then you lay down the beats or do you and Shaun [Cooper] contribute to the lyrics at all?
Will Noon, Straylight Run: Well, we definitely do the lyrics as 100% John. How we’ve done it in the past is if John was doing a song, he wrote the lyrics. If Michelle [DaRosa] was doing a song, she was writing the lyrics. I think they might help each other out a little bit because they grew up so close and were brother and sister in a band, but for the most part whoever is singing the song, we want them to have the most direct connection with the song to try to convey that to a group of people or an audience through a recording.
As far as the songwriting process, it was pretty similar to what we’ve done in the past where John will have an idea and put it together. That general idea may sound pretty dissimilar to what the final product is, but he’ll show it to us and try to explain to us kind of the idea of the choralical music. Then Shaun and I will try to contribute more on a rhythmic level. We’ll work out tempos and keys and instances like that to kind of help shape the song.
John’s a great songwriter, so there isn’t much that we’ll be able to do to improve the lyrics and the melody. So there’s a core of the song that Shaun and I help develop into more of a what you would consider a proper song. Then we go into a studio and spend a few days just writing the songs and fleshing them out. Actually our producer, Matt Squire, had a lot of great input as far as intros and things like that. He brought that outside perspective. I mean we had been writing these songs and working on them and getting really into it, but he kind of stood back from afar and said, “Hey. I know you guys have these details here and there and it’s all awesome, but maybe it needs something like this.â€
He’d say, “You might need a bridge to break up that last chorus.†We’d be too close to it to really assess that, so that’s where we’ll really start experimenting, taking a song apart and rewriting it a little bit. We’d restructure it and realize there were things that could be done. He had a really great impact on those songs in the final stages.
PW: You guys also have some really great artwork for the EP. Who came up with the idea for the photo-collage-type thing.
WN: Originally, it was my idea. I sort of wanted to a photo project type thing. It was originally supposed to be sort of the thing where people do the three fingers up, I was going to do it all in sort of that brown sepia tone image. It was sort of cool because the point was to have the hand as the focus because everyone that puts up their three fingers has a very similar looking hand and I wanted to get people from all walks of life, skin colors, ages and blah, blah, blah to do it. Then there’d be a dissimilarity between all the different people and backgrounds, but then there’d be the unifying force in their hands being in the foreground, so there’d be that unifying factor.
It sort of grew from there because collectively we felt it might be a little stale or dry as far as how it wouldn’t be that interesting if it was all one color and all the same sort of image. So we started to expand on that theory and started to look through pictures that were completely unrelated and started to pull out the image with the three theme built into it. Then we started taking pictures along the way. When you start thinking about something, it’s funny because it seems like you start finding it everywhere. So as soon as we started thinking about pictures with threes in them, we’d see three of something and be like let’s grab a picture of that. So, that’s sort of how the idea evolved for the artwork.
PW: But the photography was all your own?
WN: Yeah, it was John, Shaun and myself taking a bunch of pictures. John’s wife took a bunch of pictures as well. A friend of theirs and some of our friends who were photographers or people who were with us at the time would help us out taking pictures.
PW: Aside from great album art, you’ve also had some really cool videos. Are there any other videos in the works right now?
WN: Yeah, actually, our director Travis Kopach, he did the last videos for us: the “Big Shot†video where we were in a tank of water and the “Soon, We’ll Be Living in the Future†video where we all sort of packing everything into suitcases. We approached him and said we were releasing the EP on our own, but wanted to do a video for it for an online sort of thing. We weren’t really too interested in MTV or Fuse being that we were just releasing this EP ourselves, so it’s a smaller scale. He was really excited about it. He actually wanted to try and do a video for all three songs and he actually came out on the road of us. We were just filming in odd locations, putting together whatever we could.
We stopped on this little island in Maryland where we had to take a little ferry out because there were no vehicles, cars or trucks on this island. There were about 50 families that lived there. It’s called Smith Island. We did some filming there in broken down piers and abandoned houses. It was really cool. We traveled south from there to Savannah, Georgia, which is gorgeous. We filmed some stuff on a farm down there. Then we were in New Orleans and some random places along the way. So there will be videos, but we’re just working on them.
I think that either November or December, we’ll have our first video out. Then late December or January we’ll have the second one out.
PW: Which song did you do the travel thing for?
WN: We actually have the videos in the work for all three songs. Yeah, the plan was to do all three, but we only had a limited amount of time. We basically got everything we needed, but we don’t want to short change any one of the songs. There might be more work to be done on the third track. I think that by early next year, January or February, we’ll probably have all three videos up and ready to go.
PW: That will be cool.
WN: Yeah, we tried to do that on our last full-length, but we weren’t able to it because the label situation got out of hand and like I said we didn’t feel like we were being supported and we didn’t feel comfortable in that relationship, so it kind of impeded our process. Something we’d like to try and do is have a visual representation of each song.
PW: I have noticed that you guys do a lot for your fans whether it be more material or more access to what’s going on your lives, why do you find it important to reach out to fans? Are fans pretty receptive to the different things you’ve tried?
WN: I think in general it is pretty important to try and keep that relationship open and direct. Especially nowadays, I think that things move really fast, which is why we have this goal of releasing multiple EPs throughout the course of the year so that we can musically have a direct sort of connection with our fans.
It’s one thing to do a meet and greet at shows or have an email list or messages through myspace, email or websites. We actually recently got a phone number that people can call us and leave us messages, which is pretty cool, but all those things are sort of secondary to the relationship that we’d like to have with them through music. So by releasing multiple EPs throughout the year, we’re hoping to sort of close the gap to where we’re excited about music and they’re excited about music.
It usually takes a long time for us to write songs and record a full-length record and for it to come out. By the time people hear it and get to know those songs and come see us live, it might be a year or two years later. So, with these EPs, we’re able to write songs, record them and release them very quickly so that by the time we get on tour, it is only a few months and we’re still really excited to play these songs, while they are fresh and new for us. We’re hoping that the energy for us is translated and felt and that there’s that connection between us and our fans. This way we’re all excited about the same thing, at the same time.
PW: Have you ever had a crazy fan encounter?
WN: Not really. Honestly, most of our fans are pretty intelligent and respectful. I don’t know. They’re all pretty normal.
PW: That’s good.
WN: Yeah, they do cool things. Sometimes we’ll get cookies or a book and then we’ll talk politics or books or religion or something. I think it’s very mature. I think we have a mature audience.
PW: Very good. Have they been pretty receptive to just the three of you guys without Michelle?
WN: There’s always people or people that have told us that they miss Michelle and well, we do, too. That’s really the only response that we can come up with, but for the most part, everyone’s been great. More often than not, I hear people that are surprised. We had a security guy the other day in Denver that was like, “Man, I haven’t seen you guys in awhile, but I can’t believe how great it sounded and there’s only three of you. I felt like there should have been six people on that stage with how much sound.†So, little things like that are awesome.
Like I said, we’re getting really great feedback about the energy level that we’re able to achieve. The most common thing is like the fullness of sound.
PW: Is it overwhelming to divide up Michelle’s parts between you guys?
WN: It is only a little bit for John because we tried to rework some of the songs and focus to try to strip them down, which is something that we’ve always had to do. Our first few records, even when we had four and sometimes even five on stage, we could never really play all the parts that we had recorded. When we go into the studio we like to flesh out a song and fill it in with whatever instrumentation we may see necessary at the time, which isn’t always possible to recreate live, so we just continue to do that with the three of us.
We try to strip things down to the core elements that we feel are necessary or important. For John he has to sing and try to play piano as well as guitar on a lot of songs. He’ll switch back and forth over the course of one song and he’ll go back and forth from verse to chorus with piano on the verse and then moving to guitar on the chorus. I think he’s a little stressed out, but he’s doing a really good job.
I think that’s one of the things that has allowed us to make that impression on people. We’re taking the most important parts, sections, of each song and presenting those the best way that we can.
PW: So are you content with just the three, or are there plans to find somebody to pick up Michelle’s parts?
WN: I think that we pretty much don’t have an interest in replacing Michelle. We don’t think that’s a.) possible or b.) something that we’d even want to do.
I think it’s a respect thing. We wouldn’t necessarily think of it as a replacement, but like in the past where we’ve needed to tour with a fifth member to help us play additional keyboard and piano parts, additional guitar or any extra parts, I think we may need a fourth person on some tours to help with that as well. But again, everything has been going really well as a three piece, so there’s a chance that we might keep stripping things down even more into the core elements of the song and that might be the future of the band.
PW: You guys have covered a lot of artists from Bob Dylan to Joanna Newsom, are there any other artists that you plan on covering in the future or that you’d personally like to cover?
WN: I’m sure things will come up. It’s something that we have done and we actually recently, on our last tour and this one as well, with our group size, we’ve been doing a Nirvana cover. It’s one of the bands that all three of us has grown up with and had a pretty big impression on us as musicians and they’ve had a pretty big impact on our lives. The fact that we’re a three piece we thought it’d be fun to pay homage to another great three piece that we all liked.
In the future, I’m not sure who it will be, but things always turn up. Like you said from Bob Dylan to Joanna Newsom and John’s been doing random covers like Radiohead to Neutral Milk Hotel.
PW: On the EP where you did cover Bob Dylan, Prepare to Be Wrong, you guys did show some political concerns. What do you think of the current election and with this being an election year, do you think you’ll be doing anymore political songs?
WN: We released that at a time when it was certainly important and there were a lot of things going on. That was something that was important at that point to us, but unfortunately I don’t think that we can do too much more than that EP’s slightly political tinge as far as life in general.
We just randomly met a soldier who had been to Iraq who told us, well he had actually bought tickets for the show, while he was in Iraq, but he told us about it. It was pretty awesome to talk to him and get his experiences and his take on politics—what directly concerned him and what he had seen and how that made him worry about his own safety. I think we’re pretty far removed so we can say we want to see change and we want to bring our troops back, but to talk to somebody who is living what we talked about was pretty impressive.
PW: My last question for you: you mentioned you like to read a lot and your band name comes from a science fiction novel, what books are you currently reading or what would you recommend?
WN: I actually just reread the book Ismael by Daniel Quinn. It was the second time I had read it and it’s a phenomenal book. I would definitely would recommend it. I started reading that and now I’m reading a new Ayn Rand book colled For the New Intellectual.
I would recommend Ayn Rand, but I don’t know if I’d recommend this book in particular. I think I’d recommend Anthem or The Fountainhead, more so than this book. Those are both great books and this was more of a philosophical sort of doctrine. It’s not objectivism, which is the philosophy that she develops, but it is sort of a journal or persuasive sort of writing rather than a novel, which makes it a little harder and a little dryer. So if anybody were to start reading Ayn Rand, I’d recommend Anthem or The Fountainhead.
PW: Do the other guys read as much as you?
WN: Yeah, we all read a decent amount. I mean, we’re in a van and on tour, so there’s so much time to kill. When I’m at home, I feel like I’m too busy or feel the need to take the time, but in a van it sort of forces you to just sort of open a book and start going.
PW: Very cool. That’s all I have for you. Thanks for talking with me.
WN: You’re welcome.
Straylight Run: website | myspace | show review | interview with: pt. I
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