AN INTERVIEW WITH PARENTHETICAL GIRLS
Nov 5, 2009 Berlin 3nd July
Posted by
vice
Parenthetical Girls are a band that seems to be interested in: 1) messing up your idea of gender roles, 2) messing up your idea of what pop music is, and 3) messing up your idea of what to expect from a band. Their latest record is really quite something, so we called Zack up and asked him a few questions, which he kindly answered.
You played at SXSW this year with other Tomlab bands and, well, pretty much every other band in the world. Was it a good experience for you?
I feel pretty confident right now that SXSW 2009 will be the last SXSW Parenthetical Girls ever attend. We’ve been warned about it for years before we decided to see it first hand, but I was scarcely prepared to face the reality of that many bands, that many people, and that much free beer. It felt like a state fair. I hesitate to say that it was a waste of time for us, as we definitely had fun at a couple of the five shows we were a part of, but it became evident pretty quickly that we aren’t really the sort of group that’s likely to keep the attention of the sound-soaked masses in Austin; we’re too old and tired. That said, we did get some free sneakers out of the deal, so who am I to complain? I barely had time to see any music while we were there, though I managed to catch our friends Abe Vigoda from L.A., as well as Wild Beasts from the U.K., whom I liked quite a lot.
I think we can say that yours is one of the weirdest versions of pop music ever made. There’s lots of weird influences and arrangements and strange glam vocals… What’s your songwriting process?
Always different, always the same. Each of our records has been a special sort of challenge for us, and we don’t really have a very refined process for the way that we put songs together. The only consistency is that―generally speaking―I’m in charge of the basic sonic concepts, and also the words. Beyond that, I rely rather heavily on a gifted group of collaborators who help to craft and refine the work in a way that would be impossible to manage on my own. Entanglements―our most recent full-length―relied heavily on American pop conventions of the pre- and early-rock era, with a particular focus on the works of arrangers like Jack Nitzsche, Burt Bacharach, Van Dyke Parks, and Wally Stott (who was primarily responsible for the music on Scott Walker’s early records). We also cribbed a great deal from composers like Krzysztof Penderecki and Gavin Bryars. There was a lot of outright theft, frankly.
I had the occasion to see you playing a couple of times. One was on Halloween night, and some of you were masked, but anyway I think that the theatrical dimension, the actorial performance, seems somewhat important for you. Also, looking at the video for A Song For Ellie Greenwich, the dresses you’re wearing on stage and all… Am I wrong? What’s the real importance of this aspect?
People regularly refer to us as “theatrical”, so I guess there must be something to it. I definitely think that we have a particular aesthetic. For us it’s not so much that we have an interest in theater as we do generally in artifice, and how deliberate exaggeration in pop music effects the way it’s received. Theater is probably the most immediate analogue because it combines performance with a contrived representation of reality, but we’re not really “acting”. It’s not as premeditated as all that. God, I sound like an asshole.
