The Loom Looks Forward

At a communal dinner gathering in a spacious Williamsburg loft, a band sets up their equipment as guests digest a hearty, home-cooked meal with the aid of artisan cocktails and beer. On the second floor of this roomy, open-space apartment, the six musicians assemble an array of electric, acoustic, and percussive devices. While the group prepares to perform, cheerful chatter and consumption continues. But as The Loom launches into its first song, what had begun as dinner and drinks turns into a full-blown loft party. When the ukulele and French horn the audience had pondered during the band’s setup are combined with electric guitar and drums, the result is a wonderfully entertaining concoction of folk, Americana, and straight up rock. Never a dull moment, The Loom churns through an intoxicating set of festive folk-rock as the crowd sways and dances, drinks in hand. The band’s colorful melodies and intriguing lyrics – sung almost entirely in two-part male/female unison – are potent party favors. The morning after, The Loom’s MySpace page is a destination for those wishing to continue the good times, or to hear one of many memorable hooks once more.

A year and a half later, The Loom has performed numerous shows at NYC’s finest small-sized venues, and continues to regularly win new fans with their rock energy and folk charm. After auditioning potential new members at their Gowanus practice space, JezebelMusic.com met with John Fanning (vocals, guitar, piano, and ukulele), Lis Rubard (trumpet and French horn), Jon Alvarez (drums and vocals), and Dan Desloover (bass and vocals) and discussed The Loom, past, present, and future.

JM.com: So you guys had auditions today? What’s going on? Who’s the new person?

John Fanning: The new person is going to be the lead guitarist. But they’ll also hopefully play banjo, mandolin and lap steel, or some sort of conglomeration of those instruments. We don’t really do solos or anything…

Lis Rubard: Like a multi guitar position, more than a lead guitar.

JF: I play rhythm but sometimes it switches back and forth. This person will probably be doing some of the ambient stuff, and sometimes I’ll do some lead stuff, and vice-versa. Yeah, multi-instrumentalist.

JM.com: Alright, let’s get down to it. How did you all meet? How did The Loom start?

JF: Jon and I went to school together and we first met when he actually caught my former bandmates and I attempting to “borrow” his band’s practice space, with somewhat dubious prior permission. [laughter] But yeah, both of us played in bands there but not together and so we knew each other and also knew that we played music, and so when we both moved here in 2003 we were already sort of friends, and we started playing around together, and it just kind of grew from there. Jon and Dan met through work I believe, and then Lis was from the lovely world of Craigslist. And Sydney was a recommendation from a friend of Lis’.

JM.com: When was your first show?

JF: Our first show as The Loom was in 2006 at the Living Room.

JM.com: Nice way to kick it off. How many people were in the band at that time?

LR: Five at that point, but the most we’ve ever had is six.

JF: Yeah, we’ve come to figure out over the last while that it works best at six. We’ve been playing shows for the last bit sometimes as five and it’s fine, but ideally I think the way we all really want it to sound involves six people.

JM.com: What’s the element that pushes it over the edge?

JF: It’s mostly someone who can do the kind of like lead slash ambient guitar stuff that I’m not really good at.

JM.com: Well it’s hard to do while you sing.

JF: Right, so someone who has several different setups, and switches back and forth, because some songs might start with lap steel and the latter half of the song will be mandolin or something like that. It still works functionally without that sixth person but it doesn’t sound as good as we want it to.

LR: For me it’s helpful to have that other person because I can do a lot more interesting lines, and there’s another instrumental color to work with. Sometimes we do things separately, but then sometimes we play together, come up with a particular lick that’s coordinated so it gives, not an orchestral effect, but more of a horn section effect, especially with lap steel, and it just has a lot more impact than me doing it by myself.

JM.com: Do you all come up with your own parts for the songs? What’s the songwriting process like?

JF: Usually I’ll write the song on a guitar or a piano at home and then bring it to the space. We usually do marathon rehearsals on Sunday and that’s kind of what those days end up being. The song usually changes quite a bit from that original sketch as everyone builds their parts in and some parts get changed or removed and new parts get added. It’s a very collaborative process.

JM.com: Do you write down notes?

LR: We don’t, but we do have parts. Once we sufficiently work something through to get to a place where we feel this is the ideal thing for each of us to be doing in each part of the song, it often then involves taking stuff out, because there are a lot of us and it can get to be too much.

JF: One of our newer songs is called “With Legs,” and I think that’s a really great example of how it works, because I had this guitar part that I liked but there was a lot to it, there were a lot of notes, so I was basically crowding out Lis and other people, and by the end of it I was not really playing guitar for half of the song, but it works much better that way.

JM.com: Okay… I have to ask about the name: The Loom. Is there any story behind it?

JF: It’s hard to answer this question without sounding like an idiot. [laughter] No, it’s fine. Originally, we all sort of have this folk and Americana-ish music as a common touch point for all of us, so when the band started we were looking for something that evoked that kind of feel. We all sat down one night at our friend’s apartment and were throwing out all these different terms and stuff, and I think eventually we settled on The Loom because we like the fact that it has a sort of double meaning because there’s the object that’s sort of a bucolic remnant from some older time, so it has that kind of folky vibe to it. But then the verb is slightly more ominous sounding, and not that our music is really dark, but something we purposefully try to do in our music is not have it be overly positive or negative. We like to have a bit of a darker element to it. The songs can be pretty but for whatever reason we like to have that darker edge. The things that are really positive and fist pumping, we’ve had songs like that but usually those are the ones that sort of fall out of the set list pretty quickly, and kind of ring false. But then at the same time the songs that are really dark don’t fit us either because we’re not really that way as people. Things that sort of have both of those elements I think feel truer to life to us collectively and I guess having a name that has both of those elements in it feels like a good representation.

JM.com: That’s actually a great answer. [laughter] What kind of things do you write about? What are you trying to say?

JF: Man, I thought the last question was gonna make me sound like an asshole. [laughter] I feel like I end up writing a lot about, it sounds hokey, but trying to follow your passions, trying to lead a life that you find inspiring, and how to navigate that kind of life despite the various obstacles that would try to push you in a different direction, whether it’s your job, or societal pressures, or your upbringing. Trying to remain true to what inspires you despite the fact that life can be really difficult and frustrating, and a lot of things can seem like they’re conspiring to push you in less meaningful directions. I almost never write love songs, or lack of love songs. I’ve been in a happy relationship for a while so… [laughter], I haven’t had my heart broken too recently.

Jon Alvarez: And I feel like, not to toot your horn or whatever, but there’s a lot of music that is just inspiring and only positive, and there’s a lot of music that’s really caught up in the dark stuff, the difficulties, but there’s not a lot that necessarily bridges the gap between the two. I feel like your words and the songwriting tend to bridge the gap between the difficulty and the inspiration.

JF: I think we’re all drawn to that kind of thing as people. I was listening to an interview with Sam Beam once and someone asked him what kind of songs he wrote and he said he thinks he writes “tone poems.” I thought that was a really good way to put it. I used to sit down and write a whole batch of lyrics all in one sitting, and I don’t really do that anymore. A lot of times I’ll collect lyrics in my phone, if I’m on the train or riding my bike, or listening to music, and drinking a lot of coffee, and something comes to me and then after a while I’ll build up sort of a stockpile of lyrics and then usually I’ll have also a guitar part or two I’m working with, and I’ll kind of end up going back and compiling the ones that there’s some sort of thread through. So they’re less strict narrative and more things that are generally evocative of a certain feel or certain idea.

LR: I think that’s more and more true now. The older songs are more strongly narrative, and the newer songs are more evocative.

JF: I don’t really like when things are ambiguous to the extent that you have nothing to grasp onto, but if it’s a little bit less clear then it kind of opens up the idea that people can interpret things differently. It might mean one thing to me and something else to somebody else, rather than me singing about my own personal heartache or something like that.

JM.com: So who and what are your influences? What’s had an influence on the band?

LR: There’s a few things that are shared, but we all personally have different influences.

JM.com: What do you all share?

JA: Some of us are going to see Wilco tomorrow, so we probably share that. And orchestral things, like Calexico.

JM.com: What’s something that someone likes and someone else dislikes?

JF: I know. [laughter] My favorite band right now is Sunset Rubdown. And nobody else will listen to them.

LR: I don’t want to say I hate it…

JF: I keep trying to push it on everyone without any real success.

JA: And also all of us really like The National.

JF: Yeah. See? I tried to push that on you.

LR: And it worked. [laughter]

JF: We all like things that are sort of folky, but I always say that we’re a rock band first. We’re more a rock band that’s influenced by folk and Americana music rather than the other way around. We all really like that sort of joyous element of rock and roll, the kind of collective euphoria that can happen at a rock and roll show. None of us really relate too strongly to the more obnoxious elements, like the swagger, or the arrogance, but we like crafting songs that have hooks and have a little bit of a slightly sinister element.

LR: There’s a range of stuff for personal listening. I really like a lot of folkier, indie rock and alt country stuff, but to be honest my background is much more jazz, and I trained in classical. But when I’m approaching to play here, there aren’t too many people to take influence from – there are more now – but there’s no model for playing French horn in this kind of band, not a lot of templates. And trumpet there’s a bit more but you kind of draw from whatever you’re accustomed to or whatever you listen to.

JF: I’ve always loved Neutral Milk Hotel, and Leonard Cohen. I always really enjoyed singers that couldn’t necessarily sing very well, in the traditional sense, because I never had great confidence in my abilities as a singer. I’m still growing into that. In certain cases I think it might have forced them to focus more on what they’re saying. If you have a beautiful voice, you could sing just about anything and it will sound amazing. I was an English major in college, so I don’t know if it’s more a literature thing or something, but I was always drawn more towards singers where the emphasis was on what they were saying, not the beauty of their singing voice or something… Also, I think there’s a stereotype of folk music being kind of sedated, but we like to take a more traditional folk instrument like a banjo and have it sound really badass, and to derive the quote unquote rock and roll element from that. [laughter] That song, “With Legs,” there was a riff and I was playing the riff on the guitar and it just sounded way too swaggery. It was too showy. So we ended up playing it on the banjo and it sounded so much better. I think it actually sounded more badass than playing loud guitar, in your face kind of thing.

JM.com: Cool. Switching gears… Recordings. You have an EP out with five songs?

LR: That’s from about a year ago. It feels like an even longer time than that. But we’re getting ready to record a full length in the fall. We did that one in our studio by ourselves. We had to do everything totally separately and add it back together. One thing we learned from that process was there are some advantages to that but, functionally, it loses something with what you could find with the live show, and people who know us and have seen us play really like the recording, but they’ve said there’s something it just doesn’t have. So going forward with the full length we’re going to do it in a studio and we’re really looking forward to at least a few of us playing together at a time.

JM.com: Where are you recording it?

LR: We have a producer we’re working with, Allen Farmelo. He’s gonna do the whole project with us. He’s come to a lot of shows and has been really supportive. He has a good idea of what we sound like and how we want to translate that to a record, so we’re pretty excited to get to work with him because he has the know how to take the sounds that we like in the live setting, but also the sounds we like on other recordings, and translate that in the studio.

JM.com: When is that happening?

LR: We’re gonna record it in the fall.

Dan Desloover: Get it under every tree by Christmas. [laughter]

LR: We’re trying to figure out how we want to release it.

JM.com: You mean perhaps only digitally as a lot of bands are doing?

JF: We’d love to release it with a label. I think the idea of having somebody representing us and putting it out in the world for us, someone who can get it to a broader audience is definitely appealing.

JM.com: So you’re shopping around for that?

JF: Yeah. Over the last while we’ve had little interactions with people here and there, a lot of which has been really positive and encouraging, and it’s really about waiting until we have something that someone can release. And our live show is not fully formed yet.

LR: It’s been changing over this period. Sydney is relatively new, so in terms of inviting labels or managers out to see us, we want to reflect what we would be going forward, make sure that’s accurate. We held back a little on that until we had something in hand, a recording for them, and a real lineup and everybody ready to go so that were there an opportunity to take it further and be more active, we could do that.

JF: The upside of this is that we’ve all worked hard and arrived at a collective idea about what we’re doing, with our plan logistically, but also musically. A couple of years ago it was much less coherent in terms of what we were doing and the kind of music we were trying to play. Now I feel like we have a much stronger collective sense of that. So I think the record that we’ll make will be much better for it.

JA: If we had released the record six months ago, it would have a been a much different album, and it would have been okay, but I’m secretly happy that our investment of time has definitely paid off. More song crafting, and a more honed sense of where we can take our sound. I think more creativity too.

LR: I think the album as a whole is going to be a lot more cohesive too, from song to song. A lot of the new songs have a similar sensibility in a way where the songs are individually listenable but they also hang together.

JA: We’re talking about – and this is only over the last couple of months – some new genres. Like there was the phrase Appalachian Jazz [laughter] that somebody tossed out there to describe some of our newer songs.

JF: I feel like over the last year especially we’ve really grown into ourselves as musicians, and we’ve all really talked a lot about our hopes and our plans for this, so it’s really great to know where everyone stands on that. And it’s also been exciting and empowering almost to really kind of throw yourself into it rather than: “This is something I do on the side when I’m not at my job.” I mean, it’s certainly not paying anyone’s bills, but to really treat it with that level of seriousness… The great thing about having six people is that there’s so many things to work with. Like Dan has an amazing voice, so I think very soon Dan’s going to be singing a lot more and Lisa’s thinking about experimenting with looping some of her horns. John, you’re talking about experimenting with new drum set-ups.

JA: I’ve been really inspired by marching bands. I like the big band sound, like the rolling toms and big bass drums and large mallets. Both in the sense of the almost tribal percussive nature on one end, and then also on the other end the reverbyness of a few sparse notes hit here and there as well.

JF: I feel like our music in general has become a lot more percussive than it used to be. A lot of the newer songs have a very percussive element to them. Sydney is singing half of the vocals, but she’s also playing the tom, which sounds like kind of a small thing but it adds a lot to the live show.

LR: Something that’s been a really big change in the last year has been crafting the live sound, because we just had a lot of stuff going on and so there’s a tendency for feedback issues [laughs], and all that stuff that happens to everybody, but when you have six people and 12 instruments… So we really work to have an idea of what we want it to sound like in any given room, but also to be good at adapting to different spaces. We play a really wide variety of spaces, so being able to adapt this group and this setup and our playing sensitivity to each other to any given acoustic situation to make it still sound good and still sound like us is something we’ve worked on a lot.

JF: That’s definitely something we’re the most proud of over the last while. There was a time where it was everything but the kitchen sink. Like we’d have nine microphones on stage. It might as well have been noise rock. [laughter] So much feedback. So we’ve tried to really do as much as each of us can do to limit the number of things that are out of our control.

JM.com: What are some of your favorite places to play?

JF: The Bell House. We love the Bell House. We love Union Hall too. Mercury Lounge. Cake Shop. The sound at the Bell House is immaculate. That space is beautiful. It sounds like how we want it to sound in our heads. We’ve been lucky to be able to play most of the better, smaller venues. We did a Pianos residency. We’ve had an amazing group of people that have come out to see us.

LR: We’ve had really good experiences at the Folk Art Museum too. Sonically, it’s kind of a weird environment, but it’s good because it makes us back off and play in a different way. Plus what’s really fun about it is that it’s people we’d never play for otherwise, because it’s all these random tourists, and little kids and elderly people and we’re a lot more of a rock band than they usually have there. So we’re surprised at how many people, especially older people, don’t leave when we get kind of loud.

JF: Yeah, one of our songs [“All Your Famous Friends”] was played on Good Morning America yesterday, which was totally weird but also kind of exciting. We got an email from the ABC licensing department a month ago, and they wanted the rights to use two of ours songs, and I can’t help but wonder if one of the producers saw us at the Folk Art Museum… But yeah, it’s really great to be able to play to people who otherwise we wouldn’t be able to play to. And it’s nice because I’ve had to learn to turn my amp down, and Jon has learned to play more quietly sometimes, and that’s good. If we had gone to our own band practice four years ago we’d probably want to ring our own necks [laughter], you know, playing as loud as you can, and that’s not fun for anybody except for you most of the time.

JM.com: Any thoughts about the music industry?

DD: We just had the longest conversation about this a couple of weeks ago. John seems to think the music industry is better than ever at this point.

JF: Well, I realized that the big time music industry, big major labels are not doing well. But for a band like us it’s probably a really good time to be in an indie, less radio-friendly sort of band. I feel like there are sort of more opportunities. I think it’s really amazing to see Modest Mouse at the top of the Billboard charts, or Dirty Projectors or Grizzly Bear or Animal Collective or whatever, bands that are definitely not your cookie cutter rock and roll bands, selling a pretty good amount of records, especially compared to more conventional radio rock acts. It’s really encouraging, like there are many more outlets and various ways via the Internet for people to hear your music, and a lot of those outlets kind of cater to music that is less conventional.

LR: I think it’s tricky. It’s a little more freewheeling in that if you know what you’re doing you have a little bit more power or leverage than you did before as an artist. If you’re recording stuff yourself and you can show that you can do it on your own you can get a better contract, in some ways, at least better in the sense of retaining more rights, which we agree is something that makes for a better contract, not giving up all of your masters and all of that business, but at the same time piracy makes it pretty tough, it’s so rampant. There are bands that you think are pretty big that aren’t making that much money, but they should be making it for how much their music is out there. If you’re really smart and you’re really dedicated and you’re a good musician, you can really make a go of it and you can retain a lot more ownership than you did before, but it’s really dicey, you know, but it was always dicey I guess, it’s just dicey in different ways. [laughter] I agree that it’s really exciting. I think it’s very open and there’s access to so many people that you couldn’t have access to before. And even as a musician just hearing all this music that you never would have been able to hear, to have all these influences is very empowering.

JF: Yeah, the prospect of even a meager living playing music feels a little bit more in reach for a band like us than it probably was 10 years ago. I feel like the whole Guns N’ Roses, rock and roll – I mean that never would have been us anyway [laughter] – but I feel like everything’s sort of more moderate. It’s not just like you’re on this huge label, or nothing. The indies have a lot more pull now.

by Dan D’Ippolito