Why Keeping Creativity Out Of The Studio Is The Best Thing For Everyone

Young Vancouver trio The Courtneys play a brand of sunny, slacker-tinged garage pop that just oozes fun and goodtime sensibilities. In their few years together they’ve been compared to everyone from Sonic Youth, Pavement and The Clean to The B-52s and Dinosaur Jr, but none of these evaluations really do justice to their idiosyncratic vibe, which while not groundbreaking exists within its own sphere of influence. It’s upbeat and frivolous but also considered and well-crafted, a combination which seems due to the three friends and bandmates having forged a super-tight creative bond, despite having different musical backgrounds and predilections.

“We’ve almost hit five years as this band, which is crazy,” bassist Sydney Koke muses. “Jen [Twynn Payne – vocals/drums] and I were in a different band before this – we’ve been in a few bands actually – but we’ve probably been friends since 2007 or so, a long time. We had the same friends and were playing in lots of bands in our hometown, and then I was trying to start a new band and Jen happened to be my roommate, and she was learning drums in the basement, and I heard her playing drums and thought she was doing pretty well so I tried to jam with her, and that’s how we started our first band – that was a pretty long time ago.

“I think we probably had some ideas [about how we wanted The Courtneys to sound as a band at the outset], but I know from previous bands that if you say you want to sound like something it’s kind of good in a way because you’ll never usually sound like that other thing – you won’t achieve that.

"It’s not something to worry about, it’s just cool to have a motivating factor – in this band we often have a particular song in mind that one person is interested in, and that person will get really obsessed with the song and play it for the others and talk about what it is about the song that she really likes, and then we’ll try to sort of capture the feeling of the song. But we’re pretty comfortable knowing that even if we say that we’re going to write a song that’s just like a different song, it’s never going to sound that similar so it’s just a good creative force, I guess. We get really inspired by other music.”

And whilst a lot of bands profess to have eclectic tastes, the combined palette of The Courtneys is something to behold indeed.

One thing we all love is music from New Zealand and Australia, especially Flying Nun and more contemporary bands like Eddy Current Suppression Ring.

“We all have really different tastes, which I think is a good thing in a band,” Koke continues. “My background is punk and experimental music – my other band is a noise-rock/punk band – and I really like post-punk and no wave from the ‘80s, that’s probably one of my favourite genres. Jen likes a lot of noise too, and she has really eclectic music taste. One thing we all love is music from New Zealand and Australia, especially Flying Nun and more contemporary bands like Eddy Current Suppression Ring – Jen and I are massive Eddy Current fans, and we both have a tattoo which is sort of associated with them. But then Jen also loves Beyonce and is really into pop singers right now, because there’s so many cool ones, and she also loves new country – which is not something that I share at all – and she loves classic rock too, so some of her favourite music is stuff that you hear in like an old-guy auto mechanic’s garage or something; that’s some of her favourite stuff.

"And Courtney [Loove – guitar] really loves music from the ‘80s, but more like Tears For Fears and ‘80s electro-pop stuff, and she’s also into Enya and really weird new-age spiritual music that’s all instrumental.

“We cross all countries and borders, but where we all meet in the middle is we all love ‘90s grunge stuff – like we all like Sonic Youth and Pavement and that kinda zone, and we also love ‘90s mainstream music like Sheryl Crow and Sinead O’Connor and things we would have heard growing up. And there’s also some really cool contemporary lo-fi stuff coming out that we love – we’re all really into our friend Mac DeMarco, he’s making a lot of good music lately and people seem to be taking notice. Jen used to be in his old band [Makeout Videotape] and we’ve all known him for a super-long time, but he hasn’t really compromised his way of being an artist at all, which is why I think people respect him so much – he’s just the same total joker, doing totally ridiculous covers like Taking Care Of Business and just messing around non-stop. He hasn’t changed his style or compromised for the attention he’s getting at all, and I think people can tell that he’s being really honest and respect that from him a lot.”

Given that they’re on their first jaunt down this way, it must be cool for The Courtneys having that Australasian connection amongst their list of influential bands and scenes.

“Yeah, we’re really excited that [legendary indie label] Flying Nun is doing the New Zealand leg of the tour,” Koke enthuses. “For us to do even anything affiliated with Flying Nun is amazing. Bands like The Clean blow us away – Jen and I used to cover one of their songs in one of our old bands. We also love Courtney Barnett, but I don’t think we’ll get to see her while we’re down. I can’t believe how well she’s doing and she doesn’t even have an album yet – I can’t wait to hear her new one. It would be really funny to tour with her; Courtney Barnett and The Courtneys. It would be great.”

The Music explains that these days Barnett bills herself and her band as Courtney Barnett & The Courtney Barnetts, which would make the marquee of their proposed dream bill read Courtney Barnett & The Courtney Barnetts and The Courtneys.

“Ha ha, that is so funny!” Koke guffaws. “We have the same booking agent so we asked if we could do a tour with her, but I don’t think it worked out.”

The Courtneys have just the one album to their name so far – 2013’s self-titled debut – but there is some new music in the ether, including their brand new single Mars Attacks.

“That’s from a new record,” the bassist explains. “We went into a studio maybe eight months ago and just recorded some of the songs that we thought would maybe be the singles off the next record, and that was one of them. We worked on making videos for some of them too, so we have a video for Lost Boys and a video for Mars Attacks. Those are the two singles that have been released already, and there will probably be more videos and more singles as time goes on. That was just one that we were really excited about at the time, and making the video was really fun. It’s a weird song.

I think the first record was a bit more effortless – there was really nothing at stake because we were just this brand new band and we didn’t really have any particular ambitions or anything.

“[The overall vibe of the new material] is pretty similar. It’s been five years and we’re pretty slow with writing, because we’re super-deliberate. We throw away tons of songs, and the ones that we keep we’ll often work on them for years – we’ll have different versions and different arrangements and different lyrics – and we’re all really involved in the composition and arrangement of everything. Because we all have such different tastes we’re always trying to find some space in the middle where we all agree on something, and it can take ages for that to happen.

“I think the first record was a bit more effortless – there was really nothing at stake because we were just this brand new band and we didn’t really have any particular ambitions or anything, so we just did some weird stuff and some of the compositions are really simple and strange. I really like those songs, but now that we have this impression that people may be listening we’re even more deliberate and making more complicated choices. I think the [new] songs are really well-constructed, a lot of them – they’re more complex, but the feeling of the songs is really similar.”

Is this creative process still fun despite being so seemingly painstaking?

“It can be frustrating at times because we’re so different – we’re three of the most different people – so often we’ll arrive at something and two of us will think it’s amazing and one person will hate it!" Koke says. "Or one person will think it’s incredible and the other two will hate it – that happens a lot. But I think we’re really learning our process and I think we’re pretty good at it now – we just know that the thing we really need is time.

"Even if we write something and all three of us love it and think that it’s fabulous, usually within a week or two someone has changed their mind. So we have to give everything a lot of time for everyone to think about it and really process it and make sure that they’re comfortable with it, because I think we just know that because we put so much effort into communication and being such a collaborative songwriting group that if something feels even just a little bit off we have this faith we can make it better. We’re always just trying to make it the most perfect arrangement of whatever idea that it is. It can be frustrating, but it’s also really exciting when you have something and it just keeps getting better and better over time. Most of the songs on this new record are really well thought-out, so it’s really satisfying to look at right now.”

Koke explains that, somewhat unsurprisingly given their obvious close bond as a band, the songwriting process is almost exclusively collaborative.

“We try really hard to do everything – every element of the song, with the exception of lyrics – live in the jam room, because we really like the feeling of improvising with other people and coming up with things as a reflection of the combination of people in a group,” she offers. “If you don’t have that and you’re just working on something alone, then it’s kind of an expression of a feeling or situation that you’re in that’s not the same as the feeling or situation when you’re surrounded by your bandmates and you’re all playing together. So for a band that’s collaborative, it makes sense for the material to really come out of that collaborative setting.

“We haven’t had so much luck with things where someone brings in a really completed idea – we’ve tried before, but usually what works better is if we all work on things on our own and then have some ideas that seem to fit in with something that someone else is making, and then we assemble everything as much as we can when we’re together in a group. The vocals end up being added later, because really only one of us writes the vocals at this point and that’s Jen, the drummer. So we’ll finish all of the instrumentation of the song, and then she’ll go home with it and try a bunch of different ideas, and then she’ll usually send us a bunch of different melodies and vocal arrangements that she’s made – we’re still pretty collaborative about the arrangement with that stuff, but it’s pretty hard to come up with words together when you’re in a jam setting.”

For Jen to be writing songs about a crush that she has or something that she saw on TV or whatever is really true to the original purpose of the band, which is try to make things which are fun and satisfying.

So it’s safe to assume then that Jen is The Courtneys’ resident pop culture fanatic, given their slew of song titles referencing films, actors and TV shows?

“Yes, definitely,” Koke smiles. “I think she’s a great lyricist – her words come across as unpretentious and very genuine, and that’s really important to just the general idea of our band. We’ve always tried really hard not to be too ambitious and not to be too worried about what people think of the sound. When we started there wasn’t too many of these lo-fi, garage, beach-pop bands around – a lot of them were just starting, but there weren’t very many in Vancouver. It was all a bit ‘poppy’ for people at that stage – everyone was doing this really heavy, harsh noise-punk – and there are some amazing bands from Vancouver, but at the time it was a bit weird to be playing in such a poppy band. We were just into making music that’s really satisfying and fun for us to make and we tried not to be subconscious about that, and I think we’ve managed to maintain that environment. So for Jen to be writing songs about a crush that she has or something that she saw on TV or whatever is really true to the original purpose of the band, which is try to make things which are fun and satisfying. It’s amazing how much work fun can be sometimes!”

What about on the life front, can Aussie audiences expect much deviation from the template that’s suited them so well in the studio?

“We considered the first time we were recording whether we should try doing some overdubs or try making different vocal effects and stuff like that,” Koke offers, “and we tried it a bit and then I think we concluded that the recordings are just trying to capture what the song would sound like live in the most ideal version – like if we just played it really, really well that day.

"So we don’t get too creative in the studio, partly because the writing process is already so involved that if we were going to try a lot of things in the studio then it would take us a lot of time to even work out if all agree on the changes that we’re making. It would add a whole new layer of complexity, and the goal of the songs is to make them really perfect and really done before we go into the studio at all.”