Ain't No Party Like A Bishop Allen Party | Christian Rudder and Justin Roce celebrate the release of Bishop Allen's new CD Grrr...
From its whimsical title () to the colourful block letters spelling out the band’s name to the way the capital G in is drawn to look like a cat, Bishop Allen’s new disc looks like something you’d file in the children’s section of the record store. The songs have an innocent, playful pep that one associates with the Grade 3 classroom — the image I’ve been using to describe the songs to friends is that it sounds like the band members all ate an extra bowl of Frosted Flakes before heading into the studio. Even a slower song like “The Magpie” has the feel of a timeless nursery rhyme: “Call him a thief / Call him a crook / You’ll never get back what the magpie took.”
“There’s definitely something in me that’s drawn to schoolyard melodies and chants,” says singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Justin Rice over the phone from Brooklyn, where the band is taking a break from rehearsing for their upcoming tour. (You can get a very brief taste of their live show in the film Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist — they’re the guys Michael Cera’s band is opening for.) “There were certain places on where we said to each other, ‘It would be great to have a song here that you could double-dutch to.’ I like songs that feel natural.”
Yeah, maybe “natural” is a more accurate word than “childlike.” Kids would probably get a kick out of Bishop Allen’s bright-eyed melodies, full of handclaps and marimbas and mandolins, but it might take an adult to appreciate the craftsmanship of the songs, their sure sense of structure, and the wit of their wordplay. This is a band that doesn’t waste a lot of time goofing around on the monkey bars: they released 12 EPs in 2006 alone, one for each month of the year. It takes a whole lot of practice, a whole lot of effort to make music that sounds this offhand and effortless.
“We knew we wanted the album to have a lot of energy,” Rice says, “but we didn’t want it to feel overwrought. I think we were trying to give the songs the life they deserved, but not to manipulate them until they felt dead to us. If you work on a recording for too long, you can definitely polish away all the humanity. And I like lyrics that are easy to understand. Or at least, I like songs that are structurally complete — where you can understand the logic of the song without needing some kind of decoder ring.”
But ask Rice to name his idea of a perfect song, and he picks something by an artist who it’s hard to imagine ever was a child. “I’ll give you an example of something I was listening to yesterday,” he says, “and that’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ by Leonard Cohen. It has these lines in them with unusual rhymes, but they’re not awkward: ‘The last time I saw you, you looked so much older / Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder.’ I can imagine that being the starting point of the song, and then he works around that rhyme and that image, and it ends up being this amazing song that’s about his brother and his lover. And it also takes the form of a letter, so there’s a certain conceit to it that I like, that he’s writing a letter to a specific person. I like the way that song thinks out loud. And having this image of the famous blue raincoat — there are mysteries to that image, but they don’t leave you scratching your head.
“Of course, Lester Bangs once said, ‘All the best rock ’n’ roll lyrics are vacuous’ and it’s best to make your lyrics bullshit, or just empty air. But then I realize that the songs I really like and that we write in Bishop Allen aren’t really rock songs anyway. We’re not exactly AC/DC.”
(Dead Oceans) is in stores now.
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