The Lisps

LOCAL SPOTLIGHT NYC
Brooklyn’s The Lisps express an invaluable sense of camaraderie. Members César Alvarez, Sammy Tunis, Jeremy Hoevenaar, and Eric Farber were full of playful sarcasm, laughter, and affection before a recent rehearsal at Farber’s Fort Greene apartment, where they described to JM.com their band’s development. Originally a group with an old timey sound, their years together have brought them unexpected creative projects, including an indie rock musical and a drum set adorned with found objects.

JM.com: I read that your lineup has changed a bit over the years. How did the four of you here now get together, and how did you start out?

Sammy: César and I met about eleven years ago in college. After we graduated, we dated for a long time, and then we started a band together.

Eric: I met César in, like, 1996 or 1997. My first memory of him is I threw a party at my parents’ house. It was a pool party. They went away for the weekend, and César didn’t bring a bathing suit, but he went naked, which was cool. But then we had this jam session in our basement, and my friend had left the room and had dropped his bass off on the ground. And César was like, “Oh cool, the bass! I’ll play the bass.” And he was playing the bass naked, and my buddy walked back in the room and he got really upset. That’s my earliest memory of César.

César: I met Jeremy at grad school. We were both at Bard doing our MFA, and I said, “Have you ever played bass?” And he said, “No.” And I said, “Well, would you like to be in our band anyway?” And he was into it.

JM.com: You guys studied poetry, right?

Jeremy: I did, he was in the sound department.

César: Yeah, We were doing our MFA at Bard, which is like an interdisciplinary program of writers, photographers, filmmakers, music makers, painters, sculptors…

Sammy: Video people…

Eric: Dreamers of the dream.

César: [Laughs] Yeah. But for the majority of the life of the band, this has been the lineup. So we had a drummer before Eric and a bass player before Jeremy, but that was kind of in the formative period.

JM.com: The reason I asked if you studied poetry is that I noticed that your songs are very lyrically developed. How important is lyric writing for you?

César: That’s all I care about. I hate music. [Laughs] I like to write lots of words, and then a lot of times that’s where the focus goes on my songwriting. When I bring it to these folks, a lot of times they add a lot of all the genius music stuff to it. A lot of my songs are just, like, two chords and a bunch of words. I don’t know why, I’m just into that. Also I’m not much of a guitar player, so I kind of rely heavily on what I can do, I guess. [Laughs] I don’t know, what you do you guys want to say about that?

Eric: It’s a very rare occasion that I take any issue with César’s lyric writing. He’s written all the words.

Sammy: Every once in a while everyone’s like, “Yeah, you gotta change that.”

JM.com: What kind of stuff is it?

Sammy: Like, “yoga mat”…

Eric: Yeah, one of his lyrics was “yoga mat,” and it rhymed with something else that rhymed with that.

César: It rhymed with “talking cat.”

Eric: “Talking cat.” And the “talking cat” thing’s fine, but the “yoga mat” was just a little too evocative of New Age culture. So Jeremy and I came up with “Laundromat”…

Sammy: Also, another example was this other line, [sings] “Sandwiches and some chamomile…” [Laughs]…that everybody hated so much.

Eric: Sometimes César’s just way into this New Age culture that I just don’t understand.

César: I like to say stuff in my songs that you don’t normally hear in songs. I like to write songs that just sound like people talking sometimes, I think. And because of that, a lot of times, I’ll put things in songs that really do sound really bad. So I’ll write us something and bring it in and gauge people’s discontent with it, and then I’ll go back and usually change lots of different things. But we’ve been trying other things, too. Sammy really collaborated on her songs with this new album that we’re working on, where she brought in an idea and a melody and a lot of words and then we worked together, sitting there with the lyrics. That was totally different than how we’ve normally done it, which was really cool.

JM.com: So how does that work instrumentally, the collaboration process?

Eric: Well, for a while I was getting frustrated, because César would bring in a song, and I’d be like, “I don’t really know what the drum beat ought to be for that.” And he’d be like, [makes drum set noises with his mouth]…and I’d be like, “Well I don’t really have any of those sounds on my drum set.”

Sammy: But now you do!

Eric: Yeah, but now I do. That’s what kind of started the sort of junkyard search for crap, and this whole area of my house houses most of the crap that I’ve acquired.

JM.com: Like, found object sounds?

Eric: Yeah, I have a lot of weird things. The Lisps’ drum set is kind of a pared down version of the drum set that I put together for our musical, called Futurity, for which I got a lot of weird shit together. [Motions to objects in room] I put that fan thing on top of that kettledrum, and it makes a reverb chamber in there, and then I put all sorts of things on top of the fan thing.

Sammy: Rakes, and [film] reels.

Eric: For the standard Lisps’ set at this point, I have a film reel suspended by a rusted chain, an old metal rake head, and another film reel that’s come apart that I mounted sideways, so if you hit it they just sort of ricochet off each other. And you can spin it and make different sounds and stuff. That was sort of my response to César’s strange sounds that he was looking for. I guess it’s sort of a continual process of trying to find the right sounds for the right songs.

JM.com: How did your musical come into play? How did you start writing it?

César: We had just finished our album Country Doctor Museum, and in the process of doing the press for that we were trying to figure out, what is that album about? Why did we call it that? Going to a museum, we were looking at something old. But there’s something also very contemporary about a museum, and it’s such a reflective place on who’s doing the looking, kind of. So we were thinking about that, and I just thought of this idea of a Civil War soldier that was a science fiction writer.

Sammy: We were also driving to the south a lot.

César: Yeah, I was driving down to North Carolina to do a performance with my sister. I’m from the south and I’ve always been, since I was a kid, obsessed with the Civil War. I just thought of that idea, and it was the perfect idea for The Lisps, I thought, because it was this super contemporary thing with this super old timey thing. My idea was that it would be a concept album for our band. And then I started writing it, and it seemed more outrageous to make it a musical.

Sammy: But also you started writing it for your MFA thesis. You had a deadline.

César: Yeah, I had a venue, and a deadline. And so we did a workshop of it as my thesis presentation at Bard in the summer of 2008, and then it got a little bigger and elaborate each time. We got this residency at the Walker Center in Minneapolis, which will be over the course of the next two years, and it’s starting to turn into, like, maybe we’re going to see a full production of this musical, which is really exciting. But totally weird for us as a band, too, because everybody in the band was like, we didn’t really sign up for doing a musical. It’s a whole organizational thing, and it puts you in this track. Musicals are like these monsters that take over everything, and they take seven years, and it’s just totally weird. And so, we as a band are trying to figure out how that feels, and we’re still kind of playing it by ear, because with a band you don’t think seven years in advance, you think, what are we going to do next week, or in two months, tops. So that’s been really interesting.

Sammy: It also straddles, you know, this, like, weird theatre world, too. I’m an actress also, so it’s not that weird for me, but for you guys, I think it’s kind of a weird scene to get involved in.

JM.com: Do you plan on performing the songs from your musical at your shows, or releasing it as an album?

Sammy: We do want to record it and actually release it as kind of a concept album, but that probably won’t happen for a little while.

César: Yeah, we decided that it’s more important to get our other songs out as a band. It’s been two years since we’ve put out an album, and we have all these songs, and we have really a new voice as a band, because we’ve just changed the way we play a lot, and so we wanted to get to this new album we started recording two weeks ago.

JM.com: So what’s the new sound like?

Eric: It’s hip, man. It’s what all the kids are into these days, you know. It’s like Lady Gaga meets, like, Lady Gaga.

JM.com: Or what does it sound like, instrumentally?

César: You can talk about how our first album is sort of drenched in Americana…

Sammy: I think we fancied ourselves as, kind of, an avant-country…

César: Avant-country, vaudevillian…we were really into this sort of antique American sound put on top of totally contemporary ideas. But then some of the songs just came off as old country songs, and some of them were more weird and quirky. And we embraced that - that was the whole theme of the album. And this isn’t really like that, this is really more taking that sound and we just went elsewhere with it. I think a lot of the songs are just totally different, they’re more sort of esoteric and psychological, I think. The name of this album is Are We at the Movies? And I think it’s a lot about subject-object relationships. It’s about self in relation to the outer world and kind of the misunderstanding of it, I think. I don’t know.

JM.com: Is it existential?

César: No, I mean, I don’t know. [points to Eric]

Eric: Yikes.

JM.com: What was that finger point for?

César: He’s a philosopher, I’m telling you. He really knows what that means, more than us.

Eric: Yeah, but I’m on winter break right now. Give me a call on Monday.

César: I mean, it’s definitely not an alt-country album, by any stretch, whereas the other one, you could’ve kind of called it that.

Eric: And also, I think the Futurity experience kind of helped us out a bit, because we brought that kettledrum along with us when we did some over dubs. It was kind of like we were able to experiment with junkyard sounds without that being the thing… I feel like I’ve seen a few percussion groups that dig through junkyards and find sounds, and that’s sort of their thing.

César: Yeah, it’s not the focus but it’s a really important character in the whole narrative of the album.

JM.com: Finally, for someone who’s never seen you guys perform, what would you tell them to expect?

Jeremy: No wrestling.

Sammy: We don’t really do that anymore.

César: We used to wrestle.

Eric: You used to be able to see a good wrestling bout between me and Jeremy, and you never knew who was going to win, but we’ve retired our wrestling for now.

Sammy: It can be dangerous.

César: What can you expect?

Sammy: A lot of snarky stage banter.

César: A lot of wiggling around. Jeremy keeps real solid and me and Sammy, kind of, not. I think one of the things people are really riveted by is by watching Eric. The show that we played last week, there was a group of, like, five people trying to figure out what he was doing right in front of the stage. Some of my students came to our show - I teach recording - and they just couldn’t believe it, what he was doing. They were like, “He’s doing with one hand what I can’t do with two!” The [drum] set itself is interesting to see.

Sammy: Short dresses. Tight pants. Gingham.

César: Sometimes. Anything else? Melodicas.

Jeremy: File cabinets.

César: Oh yeah, Sammy has a huge file cabinet that she wails on with a big gong mallet. People like that, a lot - the idea of Sammy just hitting this big box with a gong mallet.

Sammy: People really get off on that.

César: They really do. You can feel it.

interview by Raj Mallikarjuna
photos by Jeremy Sachs-Michaels www.jeremysachsmichaels.com