Interview by Izel Villarba, find more of his work here. Photos by Lauren Khalfayan, find more of her work here.
Chicago’s rock wunderkind Twin Peaks have been doing the damn music thing for a while now. Last I saw them was at Pitchfork 2016, where I sipped on official “Twin Peaks” beer and witnessed a raucous crowd rally behind their hometown heroes. It was glorious, it was groovy, and most memorably it was some good old fashioned fun. Flash forward a few years and I’ve found myself in an atmosphere far from that Windy City festival energy. They’re here at Rough Trade to do a little in-store performance and signing in preparation for the release of their new album “Lookout Low”.
In one of the listening rooms I meet two of the Twins Peaks dudes, Clay and Jack, who I’ll come to learn are incredibly humble and easy going. They bounce off each other seamlessly in conversation and when I see them play together on stage just a couple of hours later, it’s like I’m seeing their personalities reflected in their performance. That chemistry isn’t just between the two of them. Being in an intimate setting this time around and just a few feet from stage, my eyes could clearly dart back and forth between the five piece outfit. Each member brings their own instincts to the forefront, building off one another while sounding like one brilliant piece of cohesive energy.
I can see how they’ve become such veterans of the tour game; they play with a sort of professionalism that at times could sound as loud as thunder and at others, as light as a hummingbird. Their live music reaches out to 100,000 just as easily as it reaches out to 1. Twin Peaks executes this approach as a group of friends jamming out together, welcoming the audience as a sixth addition. Lookout Low is their first foray into putting that live sound ambience on record.
Looking back to my chat with Clay and Jack, I can safely assume that whatever they say on behalf of the rest of the band is what’s fact. They have that unspoken trust with each other both on and off the stage, a trust that can only stem from the realest of friendships.
You’ll find that conversation below.
Jack: I’m Jack, I play bass.
Clay: I’m Clay and I play guitar.
When was the last time you guys were in New York?
Jack: It’s been a long time.
Clay: Yeah it’s been a minute.
Jack: Probably a couple of years.
You’ve been touring for most of that time?
Jack: We were working on the record this past winter in Wales and since then we’ve just been on a break for a little while.
In a good way?
Jack: Yeah just getting ready to put the album all out there fully.
When you announced “Lookout Low” you said it was a bridge between studio work and a live show, were there aspects from the studio that you felt were missing in the live show and vice versa?
Clay: Yeah we were looking for a little more organic, live, natural sound that we felt was missing on the recordings, which we always do ourselves.
Jack: We’ve never done it like this, it’s the closest thing to a live show we’ve ever done.
Without having it sound like a live album?
Jack: Right. We have done a live album, but it’s the closest thing without it being fully “live”.
How did Ethan Johns help with facilitating that sound? What did he bring in to really tie those two things together?
Clay: That’s his style, that’s how he likes to record. He likes to do live takes as much as he can as the foundation of a track. So we were really just checking it out and trying to ride his wave.
Jack: He definitely took the lead on it just because we were so unfamiliar with that kind of process. And most of that stuff he wanted to use first or second takes of the tracks that we did, so those were the ones that typically made it on this record.
Clay: He was great at choosing which take because there would be a take where I’d mess up but everyone else liked it so if it was up to us it’d be hard to make decisions. There would be cases like that with a lot of the instruments. He’d pick which one was the best and it made it so much easier for us.
Right like he noticed the nuances. Were there albums from other artists you were listening to in order to inspire that sort of approach to recording that kind of sound?
Clay: Around that time I was listening to a lot of Tonight’s the Night, which is a very live style record, a little loose but with intention. I love Nashville Skyline which kind of sounds like that too, to me.
Jack: I feel like a lot of classic rock records are done live and you can feel that when you listen to it. You feel like you’re in the room.
Clay: Yeah a lot of the records back in the day were just done like that. You just play it, cut it like that. I guess we’ve had the ability to do it, but not really. We’ve always just recorded in a way that’s totally the opposite just because a combination of what we’re going for and the means that we had to do it. This was the first time we got to be in a nice, legit studio and have someone just say “roll it”.
Do you think this new type of recording experience will affect the way you perform the new record in front of an audience?
Jack: Usually when we play our music live it sounds very different than it does on the record and now I feel like it’ll sound seamless with the recording.
Clay: A nice thing that people will say to us sometimes but it kind of hurts is “oh you guys sound SO much better than the record”, and we’re like “cool, thanks”. But damn! We want the record to be as good too! So this will be the closest we’ve ever been.
Jack: Yeah closest we’ve ever been to bridging that gap.
Did you work with a specific concept or theme for this album? I know the last release was a compilation, but was there a story to this one?
Jack: Not intentionally.
Clay: We holed up in our rehearsal space in Chicago for the winter and we had around 25 songs. We were writing and playing them all together, recording demos of them and we just chose a batch of 14 that were like “family”, like they all made sense together.
Izel: Like sound wise?
Clay: Sound wise, vibe wise.
Jack: Then we’d do smaller batches of songs that sounded similar and pick the best one. But there was no intentional theme or anything. The process itself was thematic in its own way. There’s more psychedelic, jammy stuff on it than we usually do. Cadien (guitarist) in the last couple of years has gotten really into the Grateful Dead. There’s a lot of stuff that gets slipped in that is very up that alley.
Clay: Yeah a lot of jamming and just being sparse when you need to be. Not like beating a song to death with a million tracks and not being afraid of a lot of space on songs.
The first single you guys dropped off the album, “Dance Through It”, reminded me a lot of Brian Jonestown and like Spiritualized too.
Jack: Oh nice.
Yeah especially with the backing vocals. I read that those two singers you have on the album, Macie and Sima (of Ohmme), are on like seven tracks, what made you want to include the singing and harmonies? Are they hopping on tour with you guys?
Clay: Yeah they are! Which is sick. It actually worked out perfectly. They’re a Chicago band, Ohmme, they’re good friends of ours and have sung on shows with us before; at least singing on one track we’ve recorded, “Tossing Tears”. I think we just knew we wanted a lot of backing vocals on this record and they just happened to be touring the UK while we were out there recording. They came and they sang like 10 songs in one day and just killed it! It was amazing to watch.
Jack: They’re great. Ohmme will be opening for us on a bunch of tour dates we’ll be doing for this album so they’ll be doing double duty and singing for us too.
You guys recorded this in Wales, what was that like? Have you ever been to Wales before?
Jack: It was cool. There wasn’t much to do besides hang out and make music. It was solitude out in the middle of nowhere.
Clay: We had everything all written by the time we got there. We were going there to just lay them down and did it in a very short amount of time too so there wasn’t a ton of going on trips and shit but we got to hit the town a few times.
Damn well I guess it’s just nice to hole yourself in and focus on the project.
Clay: The couple that runs the studio house was very nice and made delicious food. We were mostly in the studio the entire time. We recorded all the songs in like two weeks without the weekends.
I was watching the music video for “Dance Through It”, I didn’t know til afterwards that it was Wong Kar Wai inspired but was thinking that the whole time. He’s so sick and the video turned out great. Are you guys fans of his?
Clay: Well the director, Ariel Fisher, sent us a treatment for the music video and we were like “…you like Wong Kar Wai?” and she was like “yeah” and we said “sick, go for it”.
So you just handed it all off to her?
Clay: Oh yeah that’s all her for sure.
Jack: She’s a flame. She really took it, ran with it, and it turned out great.
Are you guys usually more involved with the video process?
Clay: Yeah usually we’re filming ourselves doing dumb shit but this time, because we were so focused on the music, we just wanted to pass it off and have someone make art to it.
Well it’s cool that you could give it to someone that you trust.
Jack: Totally, she did a great job, and for her to be able to do it in Berlin was really coincidental and fortunate.
Were you taking in other art, aside from music, to help you make the album?
Jack: I was reading a lot of biographical stuff. I’m reading a Jeff Tweedy book now but during recording I was reading a lot of Alex Chilton, Tom Petty, and looking at the way they talk about recording. They’ve all done it very similarly, really helped me put it into perspective. Doing it in that “old school” sort of way.
Did you guys all collaborate on the lyrics? I’m curious what the songwriting is like. With the five of you I bet there’s a lot to contribute but also a lot of room for disagreement.
Clay: We’re pretty good with it, it’s pretty easy. Whoever wrote the song and came up with the music will write the lyrics, and we’ll all help with that too. As a band we work more on form and where the song should sit sonically.
Jack: This album is the most collaborative we’ve been as far as ideas go. Switching stuff up, tweaking, all of us being able to compromise on certain things.
Was there intention when it came to thinking about what it will sound like live at a show?
Jack: I think we were just so focused on trying to get it tight for the studio, we were under the impression that every take was going to have to be perfect every time we did one. The bulk of our focus was on that, but once we got to that point we were learning that little screw ups and imperfections was what Ethan wanted at the end of the day. Which was a relief, but you also have to concede a lot of stuff and accept the fact that we’re not going to get it perfect every time, not beat ourselves up about doing takes 20 times.
Clay: Especially with singing because that’s just so in your face. We sang it all while we played our instruments, which we’ve never done. We’d be like 3 takes in and Ethan would be like “you got it” and we’re like “are you sure?”
Jack: Yeah and there’s not as much reverb on the vocals, it’s a lot more dry.
Damn you’re kind of just thrown into it.
Jack: Right and you’re supposed to just accept it as it is.
Clay: You kind of need a confidence that we don’t always have. [laughs]
But I feel like that confidence shows up when you play a live performance! Like to perform in front of a huge ass audience.
Clay: But singing live, it’s like I know it’s fine to fuck up at a show singing, it’s just…. for it to be on recording, oh man. Ya know you just gotta let it go.
Jack: Totally.
Well, like you said with matching up the recording to the live show, I guess those fuck ups kind of add to it. Looking back on your whole musical career, with you guys still being young but absolute tour vets, do you feel like this album already has a place in your history? Or is that more up for the fans to decide?
Jack: I think we’ve worked the hardest on this one for sure. We all believe that this record has some of our best playing and songwriting. So I think inevitably it’s the most important thing we’ve done so far and hopefully people feel the same way.
Clay: Shoot, it’s always up to the fans!
But at least you guys feel good about it?
Clay: Yeah! It’s the best thing we’ve ever done, 100%
What do ya’ll think makes up the Twin Peaks sound? Anything in the future you want to experiment with?
Clay: I don’t know really. I just want to get better at songwriting, to have better and better songs.
Jack: I think that’s always been the goal and everything else will fall into its place when it needs to.
Clay: Yeah because a lot of the songs that everyone was writing on this record, they just strike me as so different and down such a path that we wouldn’t have ever known four years ago. That’s what’s so exciting. You can’t tell what the future holds creatively because like you said, we’re still young and experiencing things that inspire us and motivate us. We kind of just follow what we start to enjoy. It’s not like we’ve seen it all or know it all, we’re still learning.
Lookout Low is out now — follow Twin Peaks on tour, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
