As published in RUKUS magazine:
http://www.rukusmag.com/2012/0212/interview_allen_elpey.html?utm_source=RUKUS+MAGAZINE&utm_campaign=4484df1bd2-RUKUS_February_20122_17_2012&utm_medium=email
Allen Epley interview, in full:
February 2, 2012
Guitarist and frontman Allen Epley is no stranger to the music scene, having spent over ten years in the Kansas City-based indie band Shiner. In 2003, Epley formed The Life and Times with bassist Eric Abert and Chris Metcalf, and they've since gone on to release 3 EPs, and 3 full albums…including their brand new release, NO ONE LOVES YOU LIKE I DO. I caught up with Allen Epley during a break on the band's 2012 world tour.
RUKUS: The Life and Times"…where does that name come from?
Allen Epley: "The Life and Times." I was always kind of perplexed by that phrase growing up. I don't know why. Not only was it just the life of someone, but the times…always felt that to be a little redundant or something. Although its not, necessarily…you hear the life and times of whomever you're hearing about. I liked the ring of it. I liked the fact that it was kind of open-ended. We weren't called "Flower Factory." We also weren't called "Scar Factory." We wanted it to be open. We didn't want it to define us in just the name alone. So that was the reason, we liked the ring of it, we liked the imagery you could put along with it.
RUKUS: Let’s talk about how The Life and Times began. You’re originally from Louisville, Kentucky, correct?
Allen Epley: Yeah, great town.
RUKUS: What brought you to Kansas City, Missouri?
Allen Epley: Oh, college. I got a free ride at this college where my Dad was teaching. It’s called William Jewel College, just north of KC. It was an offer too good to turn down. I took it; we had tuition-free school. That was my ticket to Kansas City.
RUKUS: …and Kanas City is what brought you to Shiner.
Allen Epley: Indeed, yeah.
RUKUS: Was Shiner formed at school?
Allen Epley: It wasn’t. It was right after school, with a buddy of mine whom I had been in a band with, and who now directs all of our videos…and does all that stuff. His name is Clayton Brown. He and I had a band called The Industry in college. After that broke up, we started playing with another guy, and started Shiner. Then that morphed into several different things, different line-ups and stuff…until about 2003. So it was about basically 92-93 to 2003 for Shiner.
RUKUS: What brought about the end of the band?
Allen Epley: I think we felt like we were creatively…not feeling it. There was some internal stuff, but nothing more than any other band. It wasn’t something crazy. There wasn’t fistfights or rampant drug use, or that kind of stuff. I think we were not really stoked about each other at that moment…and needed a break, honestly. It just was time.
RUKUS: How did you meet up with Eric Abert and Chris Metcalf?
Allen Epley: Eric had a band called Ring, Cicada from St. Louis., that were a really great instrumental band. We had played some shows together. They were just a band that we had toured with here and there. Chris I had known from his band in town called The Stella Link, and he was just a really talented guy. Honestly, we had tried out so many drummers for like six months. It was kind of comical. We went through ten guys trying to find…it was like "this isn't that hard." This shouldn't be this difficult. Anybody I could out-drum is not allowed in the band. I needed somebody who could inspire me. Chris is just an amazing drummer. We just feel lucky to have him.
RUKUS: The interesting thing about Chris is that his drumming is almost purposely evocative of Zeppelin's John Bonham…using a 26 inch bass drum, and the incredible 16th-note patterns he's playing on it. This makes me feel that your sound feels like a great combination of Radiohead and Coldplay mixed with the heaviness of Led Zeppelin, particularly on the rhythm…on the bottom.
Allen Epley: That was a really great compliment; I will take that! That is really cool, and wouldn't you want to to be in that band too? (LAUGHS). That sounds awesome. Chris is influenced by so many radical different areas, but Bonham obviously is a big one. He's obviously a big Stewart Copeland fan, and is a student of everyone. He's seriously the best musician I've ever played with. He's a really talented guitarist. Chris is a bass player in another band that he has called Simple Lines. He is just so musical, it never turns off. He fits in so well. He takes suggestions so openly. It's just amazing.
RUKUS: You certainly favor Chris in the mix, particularly on the new record. You can really hear that kick drum. There's a real natural resonance to it.
Allen Epley: That was definitely intentional. We wanted to get the best sound possible. Our friend Casey D'Orio helped record us at Matt Talbot's studio. Matt is the singer in the band, Hum. He has a studio in Champaign (Illinois). It's just awesome. I've worked there several times and I've recorded other bands there but…Casey just got great sounds. We wanted very realistic, hyper-realistic sounds. We wanted to hear the paper on the drums, you actually want to hear the actual…see the stick marks on the drum kit., and really feel that. It's important. Same with the sound of the bass guitar. I want to hear the strings kind of grind against the wooden neck.. You can almost picture his wooden neck. Same with the voice. You want to be very present, and almost hyper-realistic. I don't want to say Rick Rubin kind of sounds, but kind of, you know what I mean…kind of like…way up there, everything very present. When we do use a reverb, and delay…use it very deliberately, not just as kind of a bass makeup thing, but just kind of like as a very obvious kind of…splash of purple on the canvas.
RUKUS: When you started The Life and Times, was there a deliberate effort to make it sound different than the kind of music you made with Shiner? Shiner was really straight-ahead raw rock and roll, while The Life and Times has a more orchestral, bigger sound…yet still with that heaviness to it.
Allen Epley: Yes, I think that's pretty accurate. I certainly didn't want to try to compete with what Shiner did. It wouldn't have made sense; the fans didn't want to hear it.. At that moment it was definitely time for a palette-cleanser, and so we went for something prettier, like bigger, exactly like you're saying…more orchestral, more maybe symphonic…but also still with this kind of…blown-out, distorted, beautiful sound on it. It's like the sound of a piano going on forever. Bands like Flaming Lips and My Bloody Valentine were definitely what we had in our minds. (Also) Swervedriver, even U2…their sense of efficiency and economics as far as the bass. Adam Clayton, his part is the bottom end, is the melody. The Edge is the Edge part, and the drums are there. They're three separate entities. We really wanted to hold down our own thing, and not overdub rhythm guitar. We wanted three separate parts that held their own without a lot of overdubbing. Although we do overdub, but it's not for a traditional thickening sort of thing like "I feel like the bass part's too thin. I'm going to lay down a rhythm guitar track, and power cords that's playing the bass part." I wouldn't do that. I don't want to hear that. It sounds like something that I don't want to hear. Instead, I would rather just turn the bass up, put a little distortion on it, and make that its own part…and have the guitar represent its own part, play some high notes on top…and have the drums carry their own weight, which they do beautifully. I think that was the initial intention, but we also wanted this grandness, this sense of really pretty orchestral blown-out…kind of distortion.
RUKUS: You can really hear that on "Shift Your Gaze," one of my favorite tracks from the first Life and Times record, SUBURBAN HYMS. That feels like a mini-masterpiece of sorts. It really reaches out and grabs you, even from the first couple of notes.
Allen Epley: Thank you so much. That was written at the very end of Shiner, when Shiner was still a band. Ostensibly, it could've been a Shiner tune. I just listened to SUBURBAN HYMS the other day for the first time in years, and I was struck by that tune.
RUKUS: Your new album just came out in January. It's called NO ONE LOVES YOU LIKE I DO…a very provocative title. The curious thing is that the song titles are listed as days, and numbers. The opening track is called "Day 6," the closing track is "Day 8," they're not in any sequential order per say. Is it true that you recorded the album as a project? You wrote a song a day for twelve days?
Allen Epley: Yes, but I should note that the twelve days were spread over…maybe a year. So, it wasn't twelve days in a row. We would hook up, and write for like three or four days before a tour. As we would write and record, we figured we had to get something done since we all live in different cities. Eric was living in New York, I was in Chicago, Chris was in Kansas City, and we figured we had to use the most of our time, get the best out of it. So we had mikes set up every time we rehearsed, and just actually record everything we ever played. So by the end of the day, we figured we'd whittle it down…and at least if we didn't have one fucking song or idea at the end of the day, then what are we doing here? "Day 1" was the first idea that we had, and that was what the album was built off of. The reason its not in sequential order is that we felt like the album had better flow this way. We could have named the album each of the song's titles. "Day 5" could have been the title track "No One Loves You Like I Do"…"Day 9" could have been "Needle and Thread" or whatever you want to call it. We felt like it had a certain a certain sense of poignancy as far as the lyrics.. We liked the way it read.
RUKUS: So you recorded the entire album at Matt Talbot's studio?
Allen Epley: We ended up doing most it, the great bulk of it, down in Champaign at Matt's. We recorded it there, then we would do overdubs back at our home studio here in Chicago. It's called Electronical. It's a tiny little studio in the shadows of Steve Albini's Electrical studio. Only by proximity do we call it "Electronical." So we finished it all there, and then we mixed it…sent it to Jason Livermore, who's an old friend. He's worked with Shiner. He mixed our last record, TRAGIC BOOGIE. He works with all kinds of bands., and he mixed out at the Blasting Room, in Fort Collins, Colorado.
RUKUS: You have an album that deals with a lot of really deep, personal, romantic pain…more than joy. There's a pleading kind of feel to it. Yet the songs themselves, there's almost a detachment with the songs, because of the titles. You have one song pleading "I can't get you out of my head," but the name of the song is "Day 12." Was that a conscious decision?
Allen Epley: I think that may have been an unconscious decision. I like the way even though it was "Day 12," it kind of forced us to listen to the lyrics about what it was about, if that makes sense, without laying on a pre-conceived notion about what the song might be about; you tend to really make up your own mind about what the title of the song might be. I'm down with that idea, because it does create some sort of independent thought on that. There's a lot of themes of obsession, and desperation of this unrequited love, but also just, true love…deep down. There is a sense of snapped detachment that's happened. It's almost as though this person has kind of, snapped.
RUKUS: The dark side of obsessive love.
Allen Epley:: Absolutely, that's true. There's a couple I know. I realized that I wrote from…afterward I kind of found myself writing from the girl's point of view in this relationship. There's a guy and girl I know; all of these songs apply very deliberately to their relationship, especially from her point of view. The guy just could not get free, and she just was not hearing it. She didn't understand that the guy wasn't getting' it. She was like "I'm the one. You don't even understand. I'm the only one." It was a very strange scenario.
RUKUS: This a real couple that you knew?
Allen Epley: Yeah, and I know them now.
RUKUS: Have they listened to NO ONE LOVES YOU LIKE I DO?
Allen Epley: Yes, although this hasn't been discussed among everybody. Surely it hits home. The guys knows, but the girl does not know.
RUKUS: The name of the album is NO ONE LOVES YOU LIKE I DO, which is very commanding, yet the cover of the album is, what looks like, two aliens shaking hands.
Allen Epley: Exactly. The title of that piece from the artist is "The Embrace/The Grip/The Proposal." So as I saw that piece, this artist William Test, from here in Chicago, it struck me as perfectly appropriate. It's difficult for me to tell from the two robots, the two aliens, whether its a proposal, or it's actually the grip…like he's got him on his knees…or it's actually a loving embrace, or maybe its all of those things. I found it perfectly appropriate for the music.
RUKUS: Where did you find the piece?
Allen Epley: I was aware of his work from a friend of mine, who has a band called Sweet Cobra. He turned me on to William Test., and I was able to look through some of his work and I was like "That's it." We liked the idea of it not being "perfect." It's kind of scrawled, kind of one line drawing, but its also really purposeful and highly artistic. There's a lot detail to it, intentional detail that we were really drawn to, that was really iconic.
RUKUS: I noticed the songs are best experienced when you listen to the album as a whole., because it's really one musical piece, as the songs flow into each other. The best example are my two favorites: "Day 2" going right into "Day 12." Was that a conscious decision as well?
Allen Epley: Yes, it absolutely was. I'm a fan of kind of getting on with it. I certainly wasn't worried that people would get bored by any means, you don't get bored in a three second pause between songs. I liked this idea of just constantly moving forward, and this sense of contiguousness between the songs. I think its just really interesting. I liked the way songs lay together, the bass parts between "Day 6" into "Day 9" into "Day 1"…and "Day 5 is kind of an echo of "Day 1," and then it bleeds over into "Day 3" between the two. It just seemed to work very well. So I took the opportunity to take advantage of that. It kind of spoke to us, and we just literally listen to whatever speaks to us. There's no other larger guiding force, honestly. If we like it, we generally just use that as our guiding muse.
RUKUS: On the new album, it's just you, Eric and Chris…no fourth member of the band. Yet there used to be, right?
Allen Epley: There was for a year. In about maybe July of 2010, we were playing with a lot of loops. We had been writing, and we were coming to the point where we wanted to play these live, and we started to wonder how we were going to do this? A lot of the times, the loop that I was playing on a piano or something.; it requires a larger thing. We either have to like, get us all on a click-track where we're wearing in-ears, this necessitates this larger operation that I wasn't sure we were really willing to get into. We had known Rob Smith, who's a great drummer in a band called Riddle of Steele, and he has his own band Train Dodge. We've known them for a long time. He's also a real talented keyboardist, and guitarist. So we asked him to come and make noise with us, ostensibly to join the band. We did do that. About a year into it, we'd just kind of changed our minds. Through no fault of his own, we really were missing the three-piece vibe. We had kind of figured out how to do some of the the key parts, and they had settled into some of the songs in different ways. We in fact did end up using a click-track, and we used some backing tracks on a couple of different things. We were just really, honestly what it comes down is we truly enjoyed being a three-piece, and that sense of economy…and streamlined songwriting, streamlined everything. Sitting in the van together, eating dinner together, hotels and the whole deal; we just truly enjoyed the three-piece vibe. Rob was a prince of a man, and certainly there's no complaints on any side other than the fact that we didn't necessarily need anybody after a while. I know he was disappointed, but he's also a super talented guy and has a lot of other irons in the fire.
RUKUS: How has the tour gone so far?
Allen Epley: The whole tour was amazing. Historically it’s probably our best tour. We’ve had a chance to kind of build up our crowd, and it’s kind of paying off. We laid a lot of groundwork from our last record, but I think we’re seeing the payoff more now, honestly so…I thought the show in L.A. was pretty well attended...and that was pretty representative for the rest of the tour. So, it’s good.
RUKUS: How are the new songs coming together in concert?
Allen Epley: Very well. There's a live sense of vibe that we go for. We never try to emulate everything on the record. We want the live experience to be its own organic thing, where if you record it, you get a cool live version of it, not just a really stripped-down version, but something that's really interesting on its own right. It is a little more stripped-down, but there are some embellishments and things that we do live that are not on the record, that give its own weight and worth. Its really fun, the show, we're doing I think 7 or 8 songs from the new record every night. That's a lot to ask for an audience to sit through, but everyone has been very, like I said the tour's been crazy…everyone was very receptive, already had the record. Many people were already singing words at us already. That was nice.
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