The Polyphonic Spree - Interview
The Polyphonic Spree are nothing short of a phenomenon. The brainchild of former Tripping Daisy front man Tim De Laughter – who founded the group after the tragic death of Tripping Daisy bass player Wes Berggren – the 24-piece symphonic rock throng has become one of the more remarkable sights in modern music.
Bedecked in flowing robes and, more recently, black fatigues, they’ve projected a striking, almost cult-like visage. Even more enthralling is the fact that the gigantic ensemble has managed to record three meaningful and creatively cohesive records.
In 2003’s The Beginning Stages Of…, 2004’s Together We’re Heavy and 2007’s brilliant The Fragile Army, the Dallas, Texas group have created some of the most remarkable gospel-flecked rock of recent decades.
We chatted group dynamics and communal spirit with Tim De Laughter on the eve of the band’s Australian tour.
I’d love to hear a little about the group’s communal spirit. So many people find it hard enough to keep a quartet together, let alone keeping 20-plus people on the same page…
I guess it's about keeping the music interesting enough to keep the people interested to be involved, which takes a lot of tenacity. But you know, I don’t really know what the key to it is. We’ve been doing it for eight years after everyone thought we were going to be done after the first record. We’re working on the fourth one now and we’re still going strong.
People often talk about you guys in terms of ritual, of music and its ritual function…
It’s such a weird thing, you know. There’s definitely an element of the group where there’s a synergy that we all reflect, especially on the live stage. We just can’t wait to get back together again. Every time we’re apart, everyone’s emailing, saying ‘Okay, we’ve got to get back together again!’
I don’t know if it’s a ritual or just the addiction of the personalities that are in the group. It’s pretty phenomenal how well this many people get along. I had a band before this – a four-piece band that eventually became a six-piece band – that was much more difficult to operate than this band.
I think I’ve been super lucky to have the palette of musicianship mixed with the personality. I mean, we’ve become really great friends along this journey and almost everyone of them I’d never known before then. It’s just been a pretty fascinating experience.
Was your initial idea for the band a musical one that ended up requiring a lot of people, or was it a kind of communal idea that actually informed the music?
Well, I actually started thinking about this group while I was still in Tripping Daisy. It wasn’t really a group; it was just an idea of mixing symphonic instruments with rock instruments, and instead of having one person singing, having ten people singing as one. That was the idea and it was just an experiment, and before I knew it, the experiment turned into reality and the group became something much bigger than I had ever even thought about.
When you’re thinking about sounds and what things might sound like, you don’t really think about the dynamics of personality – you don’t think about what each individual is going to bring to the table. You’re totally in your own head thinking, ‘Well, I can hear strings here’. But they’re just strings – no human being has touched it – because it’s just a sonic equation you’re trying to put together.
So doing the Polyphonic Spree was a cool idea, but once I got human beings involved, then it turned into something beautiful that’d I’d never even thought of. It was much more than just the music. It became like this happening where we’d get together and the spirit would transcend the mere creation of the music.
Because you’re so visible, does it ever worry you that people may know who you are but may not have ever engaged with you on a deeper creative level?
Yeah it does, because it’s just the opposite. There’s so much care and thought that goes into what we do and creatively, musically, and it’s just astounding to be a part of something like that. I think a lot of people are quite reductive about what we do. I think we’re just as urgent as any rock band. It's just that we're not part of the formulated musical environment – we're our own thing – and when you do something like that it can be difficult all the way around. It's just sad that sometimes people don't take us seriously because we don't fit into a certain bracket.
In the live setting it’s one of the most high-energy rock bands out there right now. It kind of always has been.
For most artists, creative process is entwined with the notion of solitude. Is there ever room for solitude within the Polyphonic Spree?
You kind of have the solitude where we’re writing at the beginning before anything gets on there. It’s a real personal experience because the songs are created simply as a skeleton, either on an acoustic guitar or a piano. It’s a completely different world – it’s a singer-songwriter situation – then all of a sudden we open it up to everybody else, where everyone else can put their own individual touch on it.
The band seemed to come out of a turbulent time for you – with the death of Wes and the birth of your daughter – do you think these sort of life-changing events had an effect on the kind of decisions you made at the time?
Like I said, it was something I was thinking about before, back in my other band, and I knew it was something I wanted to do. I guess with the demise and the death of my friend Wes, of Tripping Daisy, it was a very bad time for us. I didn’t play music for a long time. He was a very dear and close friend of ours and it was a very tough time for everyone around. But as time passed and I had my second child, I started thinking about wanting to play music again and just thought, ‘Hey, if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do something that I’ve always wanted to do’.
The Fragile Army seemed more than just a title, but a series of ideas based around human fragility. Do you feel that it was a really redefining idea for you guys?
Yeah, it was, because we’d been so burdened with this American military crusade, which has put us all on the front for quite some time, and this was another element of that. It was kind of a cry for help in a way. We were the fragile army, kind of like poking fun at that situation. I think that it’s also the most political record we’ve put out, and it’s kind of hard to be an American and not be affected by what’s going on.
And then the attire is another evolution of that particular record, you know. I’m not going to say that we’re always going to be wearing the black fatigues from now on (laughs), but it does represent this record.
Do people always make the assumption that you’re going to be a bunch of perpetually bubbly, happy people?
Kind of, yeah. For me, I do aspire to live in that world as much as possible, and the things I sing about are generally optimistic, but that’s for myself – call it therapy or mantras or wishful thinking or whatever.
But is that the world I live in? No it’s not – it’s quite the opposite. I think there’s a lot of heaviness that’s involved in my life, as with everyone else in the group, but somehow the song writing and the music zeal that we’re able to portray comes off as hopeful or optimistic. Call it a fluke or another one of those happy accidents, but it’s pretty awesome that we’ve been able to sustain that and stay in that kind of happy world.
Dan Rule
The Polyphonic Spree play Sydney’s Metro Theature on July 29, Melbourne’s Hifi Bar on July 30, Brisbane’s Tivoli Theatre on July 31, and Splendour in the Grass on August 2 and 3.