Deerhoof
Issue #31
Our Sounds editor checks in with her favorite band of all time. After 10 albums, they’re all about connecting with fans, keeping it real, and making friend opportunities along the way.
By Kristina Francisco
Published: March 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
It is mid-November 2006 when I talk with Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier and vocalist-bassist-guitarist Satomi Matsuzaki. They are on speakerphone from their San Francisco home, having just returned from Europe, where the two, along with guitarist John Dieterich, played a second round of dates with the Flaming Lips. Although I’ve interviewed the members of Deerhoof before, this is the first time we talk on the phone, and we have an hour-and-a-half conversation about a small number of things: their growing popularity and the role the Internet has played in it; the rewards of self-recording their music; their soundtrack to Dedication, actor Justin Theroux’s (Mulholland Drive, Six Feet Under) directorial debut; and, of course, their new album, Friend Opportunity.
In some published interviews, the members of Deerhoof come off as aloof, evasive, or maybe just shy, but during my conversation with Saunier and Matsuzaki, the two are gregarious, friendly, and insightful. Saunier is especially talkative. When we end our conversation, I’ll come to understand Deerhoof as a band that constantly aspires to write songs that come from the imagination, songs that they might not even know how to play. They are people not only grateful but often astonished at the success they’ve achieved, and thankful that Kill Rock Stars, their longtime label, still wants to put their music out. They are musicians searching for new ways to connect with their listeners and are still concerned and anxious about what fans will think of them.
The first time I saw Deerhoof live was at a small brewery in Milwaukee when I was a senior in college. This was a few years back, when Apple O’, their seventh full-length, had just been released, and a few friends and I drove up from Chicago to see the band. That seems like ages ago, when Deerhoof still felt like my secret band, before they were written up in big publications like the New York Times, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and Spin. “Basically it’s been very, very gradual,” says Saunier. “We’ve gotten a little bit more popular, very, very slowly, over a really long period of time — a much more longer period of time than most bands stay together.”
My love for the band is rooted in an appreciation for music I’d never heard before. The first time I put on 2002’s Reveille, I felt like a kid who didn’t know what music was supposed to sound like. Listening to Deerhoof albums is still like discovering something new every time. Quite simply, Deerhoof makes me happy — happy that I can sing along to the songs without having to know how to sing, happy that I can dance around to the beat without having to know the moves. They’re also kinda weird, which makes me feel OK about being kinda weird too.
“We’re definitely doing music to try to share something that comes from the back of our imagination, almost like an experiment to see if it would connect in some way with what’s going on in the back of someone else’s imagination,” says Saunier. “And we’ve found that sometimes it does and actually much more than we’d ever would have dreamed. That there’s thousands of people out there listening to our music or coming to our shows and we feel bonded by whatever the music is … that’s kind of a pretty incredible feeling, I think for everybody.”
The Deerhoof that formed in 1994 — that noisy duo of Saunier and co-founder Rob Fisk, who left the band in 1999 — is much different from the Deerhoof of today: the fierce but precious Deerhoof featuring the interplay of convulsive percussion, virtuoso guitar, and Hello Kitty vocals. You can’t mistake a Deerhoof song for anything else, though Saunier says the band consciously reinvents itself with every album. For Friend Opportunity, Matsuzaki wanted to sound “up close,” similar to the sound of albums by Flaming Lips, a band she was listening to at the time. On this, Deerhoof’s 10th album, the band bring it with masterpieces like the propulsive “The Perfect Me,” melancholic “Whither the Invisible,” and the classic Deerhoof sound of “Kidz are so Small.”
“I feel like what our job becomes is to keep refreshing the band or recreate the band from scratch. [With every album], we start with a blank slate,” muses Saunier. “I don’t think we could keep our sound if we wanted to. I don’t even know how we made that sound [in certain songs]. For us, it comes out really natural and it comes from mostly our imagination. If someone really liked our incredible hit, “Holy Night Fever” [from Reveille], and I said to myself, ‘Well, we should make another song like “Holy Night Fever,”’ I wouldn’t even know how because it came to me like a lightning flash. You couldn’t plan to do that again and put it on your to-do list: write holy-night-fever song. Satomi’s over here mumbling, ‘Nobody wants to hear another “Holy Night Fever” song anyway.’
“We try to do songs that are beyond our ability to do and try to see if our ability can catch up to it. Particularly when you’ve got three people all with imaginations, the ideas can go really far out and we like that — that challenge of trying to reach for something that we don’t really know how to do yet.”
When I interviewed Deerhoof, Friend Opportunity was still unreleased, though a number of tracks from the album were posted on blogs nearly three months before the album’s official release date. At the time, Saunier was having a self-described “total freakout,” not because he feared a loss in sales but because he was anxious of what Deerhoof fans thought of the album.
“It’s this sort of feeling that it’s completely out of our hands,” he says. “The existence of our music is really independent of us at this point. Anytime you play a song to somebody’s ears, it becomes completely independent of you, and that other person is already starting to collaborate with you on what the song is. It’s very exciting when you realize that music you participated in making is just sort of taking off — it has a life of its own — and total strangers you’ve never met before in your life, halfway across the world, are incorporating those songs into their own lives, into their own existence, and not because they’re music reviewers and it’s their job, but because they’re some high-schooler who’s excited about this song and they really want to listen to it and tell their friends about it. It’s wild.”
Deerhoof has never had overnight success or a big hit and they know that the Internet is a major reason they enjoy the fan base they have now. “Almost every single time that we go to a new city or country where we’ve never played before,” says Saunier, “I swear to you, almost every time, somebody comes up to the merch table and I’d be sitting there and they’ll say, ‘You know, there are no record stores around here that have your CDs and the only way I heard your music was on the Internet. I downloaded some songs from the Kill Rock Stars or the Deerhoof Web site or some blog and that’s the way that I decided to come see you.’ I’ve always thought that the Internet helps us so much.
“The irony is that I would think that we’ve always been generous with new music. Just on our Web site, you can download close to an hour of free songs off our CDs and the KRS site or WFMU or go to YouTube and watch our show from yesterday. A lot of times, our EPs are only ever released on our Web site, but when this leaking thing happened, [the label] writes to them to pull our song, and people are like, ‘Screw Deerhoof. They’re the new Coldplay.’ And I thought that we were doing pretty well. People on the Internet really want things three months ahead, not two months.”
For Friend Opportunity, the band holed up in Dieterich’s bedroom in Oakland (Saunier playing electronic drums to keep quiet for the neighbors), and once again recorded themselves, as they’ve done with practically every album they’ve released. It’s a process that allows them to invest as much of themselves as they can into every note, chord, or aspect of the album. “Even now, where people offer to bring us into their recording studio, I still feel like there is so much to try within the band,” explains Saunier. “It’s fun, you know, to just wake up and say, ‘Oh, I have an idea of how I think that guitar should sound’ and you go to your computer and you try it. There’s something valuable about putting that much time into it.”
“It’s very hard when a stranger comes in when we’re creating something and, you know, we are intense, but at the same time we want to be nice or not be awkward with other people,” adds Matsuzaki, who finds it difficult to be creative in the studio. “When it comes to recording, we are very guarded and [self-recording] just works out great.”
Deerhoof’s fan base has grown considerably the last few years. Kill Rock Stars will only say that each Deerhoof album has sold more than its predecessor. For the band, as long as there’s one person out there, one high-schooler, who accepts what Deerhoof imagines music can be, excited about the next Deerhoof album, the members of Deerhoof are happy.
“When people are singing along [at shows], that’s more than just accepting [our music],” says Saunier. “They actually took it into themselves and started to make the song their own song too. They turned it into a song that they want to perform too and it totally amazes me. When you can feel that someone is really engaged or locked in to the music you’re playing, that feels like what you always wanted to happen. As long as that keeps happening with somebody, I feel like that’s going to be a good year for us.”
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GETTING FRIENDLY WITH DEERHOOF
Deerhoof was nearly done with Friend Opportunity and still lacked an album title and concept. “What usually happens is that we’re making an album, going along and along, and we’re getting close to the finish line. We’re supposed to finish it soon and send it off, and we look at what we’ve done and we say, ‘This is not an album at all,’” explains Saunier. “Then, someone will hit on something, and in this case, Satomi was talking about a friend of a friend who just moved to San Francisco and [how] it could be someone she could meet and this could be a friend opportunity. And then suddenly, I was like, ‘Wait, what did you just say?’” With a few more lyrics to songs still unwritten, an album was shaped. Here, Saunier and Matsuzaki tell us what friends are to them.
GREG SAUNIER: Friends, in a way, are like music. I don’t think there’s any one thing that should be expected from a friend nor is there any one thing that should be expected from music. I think that you can fall into a kind of boring idea of what defines a friend or what defines music when you say, “Music has to be something that I sing along with,” and anytime you hear music that isn’t something you sing along with, then you say, “That’s not music,” and you cut out the possibility of that meaning something to you.
They are different kinds of friends. We travel a lot and meet a lot of people and I have as many different kinds of friends as I have friends. I feel like I have hundreds of friends of every description. One is a friend I’ve talked to for 60 seconds at the merch table — we have a certain type of relationship from that interaction — and another is somebody I whine and complain to and tell them all my troubles. Different people can bring out different sides of you.
SATOMI MATSUZAKI: I’m from Japan, but I moved [to San Francisco] and making friends in English was hard but it wasn’t difficult at all once I joined Deerhoof. I could make lots of friends by playing music. Music doesn’t need language and people can connect to how I feel by listening. I think it’s great — music or arts or whatever — that friends can be made through music and music can be a friend. We all need to be friends.
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