All tightly interlocking parts and automotive bustle, Wild Flag ring out loud and clear on their self-titled debut. But while the Portland quartet is quite new, the players aren’t: singer/guitarist Carrie Brownstein and drummer Janet Weiss were two-thirds of fierce ’90s mainstays Sleater-Kinney, while keyboardist Rebecca Cole spent years in the ’60s-informed The Minders and singer/guitarist Mary Timony fronted the mercurial alt-rock trio Helium and has released four albums under her own name. Weiss also drums for Quasi and until recently for Stephen Malkmus, and Brownstein has proved an influential music blogger.
Formed just last year without a bassist (like Sleater-Kinney), Wild Flag have put the emphasis squarely on grappling guitar play, splashy melodies and hard-charging drums. There’s a post-punk edge to opener Romance, some Cars and Go-Go’s in Endless Talk and both girl-group harmonies and psych guitar in Glass Tambourine. Whether it’s Brownstein’s trembling bark or Timony’s witchy deadpan leading the way, the 10 songs are high-impact feats of songwriting.
In the warm interview below, Cole discusses the fledgling band and its debut, as well as the unlikely “supergroup” tag, plans for an Australian tour next year and embracing polyester and tequila in a very fun-sounding side project.
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First I want to talk about the album’s production, which is interesting right from the start. How did you decide where to record it and who with?
Well, I think our idea behind the album was to make a document of what we were doing live. So it was important to do the basic tracks live [with] minimal overdubs. And we stayed true to that. First we found an engineer in Sacramento, Chris Woodhouse, who had done some cool stuff [The A-Frames, The Hospitals]. We listened to some of his stuff and approached him. He only makes a couple of records a year, but luckily he was free in our window of time. He chose the studio: The Hangar in Sacramento. John Botch owns that studio, and we knew him through our friend Larry Crane from Tape Op magazine.
Even though it was recorded live except for the vocals, it has this gleaming, colourful dynamic. It’s not some barebones thing.
Oh, thank you. I think a lot of that had to do with Chris’s production style and the room at The Hangar. It’s a giant room, so we were able to get a lot of cool room sounds. And we worked really hard before we went into the studio, crafting the songs to try and make sure our parts were full and the songs had everything they needed so we weren’t making a lot of last-minute studio decisions.
Wild Flag - 'Future Crimes'
live @ SXSW
I want to talk about the friendship you all have and how that started. I saw Helium on tour with Sleater-Kinney in the ’90s, and I know The Minders often played with Sleater-Kinney too….
Well, as friendships, I know Carrie and Janet had known Mary since that Helium tour and had stayed in touch and stayed friends. And Mary and Carrie had done some work together [in The Spells] after that as well. And yeah, The Minders played with Sleater-Kinney and also with Quasi, another one of Janet’s band. And Janet and I play in a cover band called The Shadow Mortons. So I guess it just came from years of doing music. (Laughs) We just keep running into each other.
Is that partly the nature of Portland, being a smaller city?
Yeah, Portland is a pretty small city with a pretty large music scene. There are a lot of musicians, and I think a lot of us know each other and see each other quite a bit.
Whatever happened to The Minders?
Well, I stopped playing with The Minders a few years ago. [Frontman] Martyn [Leaper] and I were married, and then we weren’t married. It became increasingly difficult to do the band together for a while. And he took a break from music for a couple years, but actually he’s reformed The Minders. They’ve played a couple of shows here in Portland recently, with some new dudes.
How did the Wild Flag songs come together in terms of who would sing lead?
We don’t really have one way, and I really love that about this band. Some of the songs would come in half-formed by Mary or Carrie: they’d have a riff or an idea for a vocal melody. Maybe even a chorus and a verse. And sometimes we’d all hammer out the song together that way. Sometimes it’d just be us in the room and someone would have an idea, just something to jam on. There were certain songs, of course, that Carrie had ideas for and she knew she’d sing, and that Mary had ideas for, and other songs we just had bits and pieces.
The record is less indie rock than I expected, and more post-punk or New Wave. Were you surprised by the direction the songs took?
Well, yeah. I wasn’t sure. I’d never heard my band before. (Laughs) So there was that sense of the unknown going into it, even in the songwriting process. We all have so many influences, and I feel like there’s a freedom in this band to let that out. If there’s something that feels a little more New Wave or dance-y, that’s okay. And then something is gonna feel super rocking, and that’s okay. Some things can feel a little sweeter, and that’s okay too. There’s room for all of that.
And everyone works out their own parts?
Yeah. There’s a little crossover too. Nothing’s too precious when we’re writing. Maybe Janet will have a suggestion for the guitar riff, or I’ll have a suggestion for a harmony. It’s really fluid that way. We do write our own stuff, but there is also that sense of what needs to happen for the song.
It sounds very friendly and low-pressure.
Yeah, we’re all friends. It’s not always the easiest thing to be in a room writing a song, but we’re definitely figuring it out. Figuring out how to work together and bring out the best in ourselves and each other.
It must be tricky with Mary living in Washington D.C. and the rest of you in Portland.
Yeah, I mean, that’s what we have to work with and we make it work. She’s out here quite a bit, actually. It seems like every six or eight weeks she’s out here for a while, working. It makes her time here precious. I’m sure if we had time to practise four days a week and everyone lived in the same town, we could do that, but as it is, it comes in these packets. These little packets of energy. We’ll have a week, and we’ll go in and do everything we can in that week.
Is there a story behind the band name?
Well, Carrie had seen it as an E.B. White book title [the essay collection The Wild Flag]. We had a long list: we spent weeks brainstorming band names. I think we all turned in dozens and dozens of names. (Laughs) I actually found it on my computer a few months ago. It’s pretty funny. Hopefully some of those won’t ever [surface].
I was going to ask what some of them were…
I can’t remember anything specific, or I’d share it. They weren’t all bad. A lot of them were taken. But we liked the way the words sounded together. It’s easy to say. It has the word “wild” in the name, which I really like. So we went with that. It was our best one.
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