Moniclk, Dan
Pretty Girls Make Graves
Issue #28
Front woman Andrea Zollo talks about the ups and downs of recording the band’s latest album, Elan Vital. Fortunately, third time’s a charm.
By Jenny Sabella
Published: June 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
In 2001, punk rock took on a whole new look and sound in the guise of the Seattle five-piece Pretty Girls Make Graves. After two albums, lots of touring, and convincing loads of fans that “Life's complications and frustrations / They disappear when the music starts playing,” the band has earned a place in the hearts of music fans from across the board. Whether it’s their ability to make danceable punk rock or the intoxicating vocals of lead singer Andrea Zollo, Pretty Girls Make Graves are holding their own, and their third album, Elan Vital, proves it.
Hairstylist, vocalist, and self-confessed Stevie Nicks enthusiast Zollo says that her Pretty Girls experience has had its ups and downs but maintains that music is what has driven her for as long as she can remember. “Music has dramatically [affected] my life. Probably more positive of an effect than anything else.”
Now armed with two ladies and three gents (previous guitarist-vocalist Nathan Thelan left the band in 2004), Pretty Girls Make Graves is embarking on a new tour with a new album that strays a bit from the band’s signature sound, but doesn’t neglect it completely. Zollo’s vocals continue to have a strong presence, but some of the band’s rougher edges have been replaced with more mellow, melodic tunes. Longtime fans may be taken aback by the change at first, which Zollo confirmed, but eventually it proves itself to be a Pretty Girls album, they just calmed down a bit.
Why did your record label’s Web site, matadorrecords.com, say your new album was called The Shivering Duck?
Gerard [Cosloy] is one of the owners of Matador, and when keyboardist Leona [Marrs] first joined our band, he posted the news on the site that Lorna had joined our band. So we made all these jokes, like, “Who’s Lorna?” The same day, another Matador band had a release come out — I can’t remember who it was — [but] their album was The Shivering King, and he listed it as The Shivering Wham. He made these two huge mistakes in one day, and we were just like, “What is your deal?” So we posted [an e-mail to] Matador that was like, “Lorna quit, but now she’s been replaced by Leona and our new album, The Shivering Duck, is going to be out.” His way of getting back at us was posting this up online.
Speaking of Leona, was it a big change to have another lady in the band after you were the only one for so long?
[The addition of Leona] was a huge and positive change for everybody, and it didn’t just have to do with recording. Leona joining the band seriously breathed new life into our band. Even though we’ve been making music together for three years, there were still a lot of challenging things on a day-to-day level. [It] changes the dynamic of the band, being the only woman. I was extremely happy. That was sort of a conscious decision. We were all like, “We want there to be another woman in this band.” If we were gonna get a new member, that’s kind of an important thing.
I feel like we’re in a better place with each other than we’ve been in years, since she joined the band. I’m a much happier person. She’s an acupuncturist, so she’s super mellow, and we all have very strong personalities, so she’s very balancing. She’s one of those people who remains calm in stressful situations. In turn, she’s calming toward other people. That’s one of the reasons, besides musically, that she’s so awesome.
You mentioned that things were challenging on a day-to-day level before Leona joined the band. How so?
We’ve always functioned internally oddly. A lot of that has to do with not knowing each other very well before we played music together. I knew Derek [Fudesco, from the Murder City Devils] very well — we played in three bands together before this one. But everyone else was very new to me.
From the beginning, we really tried to be as busy as possible and tour all the time. Having a touring band relationship is kind of like a family of sorts. So we were sort of forced into this family-type dynamic without really knowing each other. It was a really weird thing. I think that’s something to attribute to a lot of the head butting over the years. Every time we went to record a record, it was like, “I can’t believe we did this together.” We all really come from different places, musically even.
It’s kind of like a reality show. Putting people in a van together and forcing them to live together when they don’t know each other and then finding out you’re all very different — it doesn’t cause a smooth situation. Whenever we write a record, I think, “Wow, that’s amazing. We agreed enough to create enough music. It’s so weird but we did it.”
You mentioned that you tour quite a bit. How has this impacted your personal life?
Being in a touring band is not what people think. Financially it’s really, really hard. It sounds stupid and whiney but I’m going through that right now. We just got this great opportunity to go to Australia and the promoter there [bought] all our plane tickets. So they take all the money from the tour and the shows, and they try to recoup all the money they bought the plane tickets with. So we just did a tour for free.
I missed two weeks of work and I actually ended up spending a lot of my own money just trying to live there, because it was really expensive just to eat. So, I lost money by going there. That’s the kind of thing that people don’t know. We do it because it’s what we love to do, but now I’m in this position where it’s like I’m deciding what’s going to get shut off tomorrow. Is it gonna be my phone? Is it gonna be my car insurance? I don’t know. I often feel like I’m too old to be this poor.
I don’t have any more records left to sell. There’s no way I could part with anything else. If you’re gonna end up doing what you love, you’re gonna suffer for your art.
How was the recording process for Elan Vital?
(Laughs) The person who owned [the studio] also lived in it illegally and was really hard to deal with on a daily basis. He was constantly doing these terrible things all the time. It was really hard to try to produce something and be creative in this environment. The neighbors kept trying to shut us down because the music was too loud, so she would accost us when we walked in and out.
It’s funny now to laugh about, but then it was really horrible. We were there about two weeks when we realized we were not happy with the stuff we had written. It wasn’t working. It wasn’t that we thought it was terrible, we just thought we could do a lot better. So we had to figure out what we wanted to do about that — it was one of the hardest decisions we ever had to make.
So you just made an entirely different album?
We [decided] that we were gonna scrap it and call Matador to tell them we spent our whole recording budget trying to live in New York and make a record that we didn’t think was very good and didn’t want to put out. That was horrifying. Derek actually ended up making that call. But they were really supportive of us. We were so fortunate. A lot of labels would have been like, “Tough, that sucks. We’re putting it out,” because they want to recoup some of their money back that they put into it. That’s our worst fear, [having] to put something out that we weren’t happy with. Because once it’s there, it’s there forever.
We decided we were going to go home and start from scratch, writing with Leona as an equal member because that’s what she was. We actually kept five of the songs from that recording session because some of them she could write to. Some of them we reworked, some of them we didn’t. I think it’s some of the best stuff we’ve ever done.
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