Interviews

As Tall As Lions

Interview with The Band on Sep 15, 2006 by Archive Bot

I first met As Tall As Lions at a show in the basement of DePaul University’s English building in Chicago. They were on tour with The Static Age and needed a date in Chicago, so I booked a classroom and threw a show. Much to my naïve surprise, no one showed up. But I did get to watch an up-and-coming band play that night and was hooked. That was two-and-a-half years ago and now the boys are releasing their sophomore, self-titled effort on Triple Crown Records. I’ve seen them three times since then and they have become one of my favorite live bands. They came to town on August 27th and in the dingy upstairs “green room” at the Beat Kitchen, I caught up lead singer Dan Nigro and guitarist Saen Fitzgerald.
 
 
You wanna go ahead and introduce your band members and what they do?
 
Dan Nigro: I’m Daniel Nigro. I play guitar and sing in the band. Saen Fitzgerald plays guitar. Cliff Sarcona plays the drums. Julio Taveras plays the bass and vocals and Rob Carr is our touring keyboardist who also does backup vocals.
 
So you guys are on tour right now with YouInSeries and Brazil.
 
D: Just Brazil. YouInSeries dropped off the tour.
 
Really? When did that happen?
 
D: I think on the third day of tour. We were in Michigan and we showed up to the show and YouInSeries wasn’t there. We heard that they had van trouble.
 
So it’s just you and Brazil on the tour?
 
D: Yeah, it’s just us two and a local every night.
 
Is Brazil headlining?
 
D: Brazil’s headlining some of the shows and we’re headlining others. We headlined the Buffalo, New York show and the New York City show. It’s been pretty good actually. The best show was definitely the New York City show. That’s not necessarily our hometown but close enough to our hometown, so we had family and friends and a shitload of other people were at the show and it was a lot of fun.
 
Have you been having a good turnout on this tour?
 
D: It’s been on and off, you know? I think the fact that YouInSeries dropped off definitely turned away some kids and they were actually supposed to be headlining most of the shows. But the ones that we headlined, I thought, were really good. The one in New York City was over three hundred people. The only show that was dead was in Covington, Kentucky and that one had like twenty five people there.
 
The last two tours I’ve seen you guys on, you’ve actually been playing almost exclusively the new stuff. How’s the response been, since you’ve been playing it even before the record was out?
 
D: It’s been great. I mean, it’s been interesting. We did a week of cd release shows starting on Aug. 8th, when the record came out, and at those cd release shows it was really incredible to see so many people singing along and knowing the words already, just one or two days after the record was out. Especially in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Boston and Long Island, like those areas, our home base areas, there were a lot of people there…well, for us a lot of people. A couple hundred people are a lot of people considering we toured for a year on our first record, playing in front of basically nobody.
 
Did people seem turned away at first, because that was the thing that shocked me when I saw you guys on the Spill Canvas tour…
 
D: Well you saw us on the first day of that tour, which was the first time we toured on the new material.
 
Okay. Cause when I was watching it, I was wondering what happened to all of the Lafcadio stuff? It was all gone.
 
D: No offense and not meaning to rub people the wrong way but we had kind of come to the realization that with the first record that not a lot of people cared about it. Obviously record sales weren’t that great and the connection between us and the crowd at shows was never that great with Lafcadio. It just didn't seem like people would really connect to it, and if they did, it was kind of like a “well, I like this song, but I don’t like that song” type of thing. So we were looking forward to just going out there and playing all new material and saying, you know, this is what we’re doing. If you don’t like it, too bad, and if you do, good, listen to it, cause we like it. We weren’t really afraid of turning people off with all new material because that’s what we were going to be playing anyway, so if they didn’t like, we weren’t gonna try and hold on to people with a couple of songs from Lafcadio and beg them to be our fans.
 
Well it seemed like a pretty big switch in sound. Lafcadio seemed like a very guitar driven record. When I heard it, I kind of got that big anthem sound out of it with your vocals, which are huge as well and that was the sound. And then on the new record, for example the first three tracks, I noticed a lot of atmosphere over top of a rhythm section.
 
D: That was the goal with this record, to make it very drum and bass oriented. There were even one or two songs that were written around a drum part. Like “Love” started off as a drum beat. “A Break A Pause” started off as a drum beat and “Ghost of York” started off as a drum beat. Those were all just ideas where somebody came in and said “I have this drum beat.” Like “Ghost of York,” Cliff came in and with the drum beat in the chorus, with the time signature change, 8-7-6-8-7-6, and said “I have this drum beat, let’s write something around it.” And within that one night, we wrote the entire song based on just that chorus drum beat. And there are other songs, like “Song for Luna,” I had come in with a chord progression and vocal melody and I took it to Cliff and I sat with Cliff for like two days, because the main focus of the song was to get the right drum beat over the chords, because it was such a simple progression, and it was this song could turn out a million different ways and let’s take it in a direction we wouldn’t think of initially. And that took a while, to feel the song out enough to be able to try something, and go in a direction that’s really different. And obviously, the drum beat for that song is almost this Latin-reggae, really intense thing and that was something that took a while. But that was the purpose of it, because the original song was written on an acoustic guitar, but when you listen to the song, there’s not acoustic guitar in the song, there’s no chord progression, actually, until the bridge. So – and this applies to a lot of songs we wrote – you take the original element, which was usually acoustic guitar, and completely take it away, and completely take away all chord progressions whatsoever, and replace it with organs and pianos and guitar swells, and atmosphere.
 
There seems to be a lot more “space” on the new songs.
 
D: Yeah, and that what we wanted. We wanted to make sure that we left room for the drums and bass. So that the drums and bass took over the presence of the song.
 
At this point, Julio Taveras arrived and pulled Dan out of the interview to go deal with an issue at the door and guitarist/backup vocalist Saen Fitzgerald sat down and joined me…and we just kinda chatted for a bit…then Dan came back and Saen and him finished the interview together.
 
So I heard that you guys just landed the Sparta tour; is that gonna be one of the bigger tours you’ve been a part of?
 
D: Yeah, it’s definitely going to be the biggest clubs we’ve played at, for sure.
 
It seems like that tour will be good for you guys; good exposure to the right kind of crowd for your music.
 
D: I think it’s gonna be awesome.
 
Cause it seems like some of the past tours you’ve been on, they’re good packages, but you guys sound so much more different than some of the bands you go out on tour with and now it seems that you’re building towards playing with the right bands and in front of the right people.
 
D: That’s what the goal is.
 
I really wanted to talk to you about the sound of the new record. It’s such a big shift from Lafcadio; was the writing process different this time around at all?
 
D: I think before we even started writing, we sat down and we talked about what we wanted to do and we discussed the fact that we wanted it to be more of a collaborative process. And then we actually followed through with that initial conversation. So we wrote together, as a band, and there were all different ways of writing, as opposed to the first record, where it was mainly me coming in with a chord progression and then the vocal melody and saying “here it is, let’s write a song around this.”
 
Did the lyrical process change as well?
 
D: Yeah, it did. I mean, I was always unconfident in my lyrics, like that was never my forte. I would be really quick writing vocal melodies but never had the confidence to follow through with the lyrics and I would always do them last minute. So, this time around, in the very beginning, I gave that over to Saen. I would write the melodies and then whatever melodies I wrote, we would demo, whether it was me on acoustic guitar or demo as a full band and then I would sing ad lib basically, and just make up my own makeshift lyrics and then Saen would take them and study my phrasing and he would write lyrics along to the phrasing. There are some parts where we would keep the original lyrics that I had wrote, but most of them were written by Saen. With the exception of a couple of songs.
 
So then was there more dissection, lyrically and musically this time around?
 
Saen Fitzgerald: Well, on Lafcadio we just kind of wrote the songs and did a very quick demo process. And on this record, we wrote and demoed at the same time. So we were recording these songs and coming up with different atmospheres and recording tricks which were just as important as writing a guitar melody. And, like was Dan was saying before, he would write a chord progression and Cliff would be like (feigns 4/4 drumbeat), “Well, that’s the only thing that would go to that.” But on this record, everybody was a songwriter. Like the third track, “A Break A Pause,” Cliff wrote the main theme of it on piano and the drums and the bass. And on a couple of songs, I would write the drums and bass and no one was afraid of playing whatever the best idea was.
 
D: There’s definitely a part of every song, whether it be a drum part or a guitar part, a bass line or a vocal melody, that was definitely not written by the person who would normally write those parts. There’s a vocal melody that Saen wrote, there’s a guitar part that I wrote that Saen plays, there’s a drum part that Saen wrote that Cliff plays. We would all write parts for each other sometimes, if we had a different idea in our heads and nobody was closed to taking someone else’s idea
 
S: But the demoing thing was great. It was almost like we recorded the album and then we recorded the album again. So we had almost like a test run.
 
So you basically had more time to go over everything and make sure it was exactly how you wanted it to be?
 
S: Yeah, we took like seven or eight months to write the record and do the first demos.
 
What was the time frame for Lafcadio?
 
D: Ohh, it was over years. We wrote songs when we were in college. I mean, we always took our band seriously, but how we took our band seriously then and how we take it seriously now are definitely two completely different things. I look back on how we took the band then and it wasn’t serious, even though at the time, we thought it was. We would write a song every few months and we’d get together and practice once every other week. And that, to us, was serious, because at the same time, we were all going to school so far away from each other. So to get together every other weekend was actually a big deal for us. And then when we started to get into the whole business of it and started working with labels and they found out we were still in college and we went to different colleges in different states, they were like “you can’t do that.” And now we realize that a lot of bands out there touring never went to college.
 
Well, your education seems to come through in your music. Lyrically and musically, there seems to be an intelligence there that sometimes gets missed.
 
D: Definitely. I think that when I was in college, taking classes in different subjects…I was inspired to write music, so it was definitely an inspirational period that some people don’t have or other musicians, who don’t go to college, don’t have.
 
Where do you guys find inspiration for your lyrics? Are there any interesting stories behind the songs?
 
S: Well, the lyrics in general were kind of a kooky idea. It was kind of like an Elton John type of thing, where he doesn’t write his own, he has Bernie Taupin doin’ it for him. They would just sit at a piano and ad lib and Bernie would write lyrics. For us like in the song…
 
D: Summer…
 
S: Yeah, okay, so like on the song “Song for Luna” [aka, Summer]. It just started out with the word “summer” and I sat there for a while trying to come up with better opening lines and in the end, I just couldn’t even top “summer.” Even though it’s not too impressive, I would get inspired by Dan’s adlibbing. And as far as the lyrical content, everything is pretty much personal. I wrote a bunch of fabricated stories, like the song “Ghosts of York” and “Stab City.” I mean “Stab City” is about a town in Ireland called Limerick, which I’ve never been to, but I had a friend there who was telling me about how shitty it is and how you could just be depressed by being in a certain environment and that was very inspiring. And then “Ghosts of York.” I’ve never been to York. York is a town in England, obviously. And I just kind of came up with this story which is basically a metaphor for imaginary friends and trying to connect with somebody when there’s nobody there and you end up connecting with your own self. I guess it kind of stemmed from my selfishness, thinking about myself and at the time I was going through a rough little patch and it helped me write depressing lyrics I guess.
 
It also seems like you guys have gotten lumped with the kind of emo/punk scene that’s especially popular right now. But recently you seem to have been able to get around that and realize other markets and that the emo/punk market isn’t the only market…
 
D: Some people think it’s the only market! And some people are like “What do you mean you don’t want to play with this band.”
 
Julio Taveras interjects from the back of the room: “What do you mean…you guys aren’t an emo band?” [everyone laughs]
 
Was there a conscious decision to try and move away from that?
 
D: There was, definitely…it was the decision. I mean, we didn’t have to try not writing songs that weren’t emo, I think it was natural not to write songs like that, but it was a decision to try and get out of that scene. I mean, no offense to anybody who’s really into it, but there’s so many boundaries in the scene and I think that our band isn’t ultimately going to find the right listeners…I mean there are people in this music scene who are open minded and will appreciate our band, but I think that it’s only a select few and, in general, the people who are in the scene aren’t going to get it. Like on a mass scale. I think that if you go to Warped Tour and you see people who listen to certain bands and you know that those listeners aren’t going to like your music.
 
S: It sounds crude. But, unfortunately, we’re talking from past experiences where we’ve tried.
 
D: Yeah, I mean, for example, we’ll sit at the merch table at warped tour – we did – and play the music for people and play our fastest song and they would be like “do you have anything that’s not slow? You guys aren’t a hardcore band?”
 
“You don’t scream in your songs?”
 
D: Yeah, and people would ask that! “Do you have any songs with screaming in it?” People ask that kind of thing and at that point you know that’s not where you belong.
 
And if someone goes to your website or Myspace page and looks at your influences, there are a lot of bands listed that would be considered “classic rock” and more obscure. Who or what would you list as your influences?
 
S: It’s tough. I mean, ultimately, the best answer to that is each other. We play off of each other all the time. And, of course, the record’s that we listen to do influence us, but I think it’s more of a personal kind of thing. We listen to a lot of hip-hop and a lot of Latin music as well, a lot of jazz, the kind of things that you think of as having artistic credibility. But good songwriting is kind of a universal thing, and it’s an aspiration to get to that level, in any genre of music you’re playing in. But we did get an email from a girl who is into the band and is the daughter of the keyboardist in Yes, who is listed as one of our influences. So that was cool.
 
Well there’s also an acoustic track on this record…
 
D: Right. “I’m Kickin’ Myself.”
 
Right. It’s actually a very classic rock sounding tune. It seems to have a very Led Zeppelin acoustic feel to it…
 
D: Yeah, a lot of people have been saying that. I actually wrote that song about five minutes after watching the Bob Dylan Documentary No Direction Home, the Scorsese documentary. I had been watching it with my father and was just so inspired by the music and his attitude about music and thinking, as cliché as it sounds, I wanted to be Bob Dylan. I mean he is so fucking cool! Every song that I write from now on has to sound like Bob Dylan! And I went to my room after the movie and I wrote the song in like four minutes.
 
You guys have also been on two comps recently, the Bob Dylan tribute comp for Drive-Thru and the Counting Crows comp, distributed by Victory, and it seemed like your takes on the songs you did were an effort to pay homage and instill your own sound a bit…
 
D: Well, the interesting thing about us doing the Counting Crows cover was that…it was a…ummm…
 
S: It was a fun experiment.
 
D: Exactly! It was an experiment. To go listen to a band that we aren’t necessarily fans of and find a song that we appreciate and then put our own twist to it. And it was a challenge to pick a song that all four of us agreed on because we weren’t huge fans and there weren’t songs that we had in mind, so we had to sit there and listen to the songs and pick one out and spend some time really studying the song because we hadn’t heard it before. And it was definitely a really fun process and the whole ending, vocally, was a lot of fun for me because it was all adlibbed, and it was like “do another take…no, do another one…alright, that’s the one.”
 
And it seemed like you kind of made it into your own song at the end…
 
D: Exactly. We just kind of took the ending and went with it. It was fun doing that too, because when we were in the practice studio, Cliff was playing the drums and he had two different drum beats. And we were like “well, why don’t you play both of them?” And that’s what we did; we recorded two different drum takes. So, at the end of the song, there are two different drum beats playing at the same time. And that was stuff we had never got to do in the studio before.
 
Right. Well, are any of you guys trained musicians? Have you, Dan, had any vocal training?
 
D: I think all of us have some training in music. Julio, Saen, and I all took guitar lessons from the same guitar teacher. Cliff took lessons for a little while. I took piano lessons when I was younger. I took maybe two months of vocal lessons and learned how to sing correctly because when we actually started the band I had never sung before. When Saen and I started out first band, when were sophomores in high school, we had my cousin singing. My cousin was a singer, but he never showed up to practice. So I, having an ego, decided I wanted to sing, but didn’t know how to sing. So I started singing and I would lose my voice every practice. I mean literally lose it to the point where I couldn’t speak for like two days. So I had to take lessons because I was just killing my voice. But I wouldn’t consider myself a trained vocalist at all.
 
How does having Rob on tour with you guys change the overall chemistry of the band? He wasn’t in the studio with you guys, right?
 
D: No, he wasn’t. It’s good because it gives me more freedom, as well as frees people up to do different things cause he’s always playing the keyboard, so I’m able to play different things, whether it’s guitar or do some percussion. It’s a liberating thing for me. I like being able to connect more with people. When I’m sitting behind a piano, it’s really hard to look at people in the audience, because I’m facing to the side when I’m singing, and I feel very disconnected from the crowd, which is not a good thing.
 
S: It also takes the sound to the next level, too. Just having another guy singing and playing percussion and keyboards, trumpet, all these great, different flavors, allows us to be able to sound more like the album then we ever could without him.
 
Vocally, at least, it seems to work because you have a tendency on your albums to have sections where large groups of people are singing and having another voice on stage helps to present that live…
 
D: The thing about all the vocals is that we’re a band that’s gluttonous when it comes to being in the studio and we always crave more. I remember being in the writing process – and especially with Cliff – and I would write a vocal melody and I would record it and he would be like, “Is that all you’re gonna have for that part?” And I’d be like, “Well what do you mean?” Like in “Stab City,” in the chorus, the “don’t say you see me” part, after finishing it, Cliff said, “Well that’s only one melody…you should put another one there!” And we’re a band like that, and we‘re all at fault with always wanting more. So much so, that there’s a point in the studio where the producer says, “Do you realize you have sixty-one tracks on this song?” And our response is, “Yeah, but we really wanted to add this glockenspiel part cause the section just doesn’t make any sense without it.” And he would answer, “But you have; three organs, seventeen vocals, six guitars, two different drum tracks.” And our response would be, “I know…we just want more.” And we are like that in the studio.
 
How was working with a horn section and arrangement for “Stab City?”
 
D: That was Saen’s idea.
 
S: Yeah…I’m a big Charles Mingus fan and I’ve always dug his idea of like, horn explosions, kind of like a chaos of just everything going on. And for some reason I heard it really, really bad in that song. I really wanted it in the chorus of the song. So we found some horn players that our producer had worked with and they jammed with us a little bit and then just came down to the studio and improvised, well…the horn solo was improvised in the studio. And the horn arrangement was written maybe like five minutes before they recorded it. So it was a very spontaneous thing and it turned out making the song perfect, for me.
 
How has being in what is, essentially, a full-time band changed things for all of you?
 
D: Well, we’ve considered ourselves a full-time band since 2003. I don’t think that I’ve held down a job since 2003. The last three years, this has kinda been it for me, so it doesn’t feel any different for me, although I do feel like there’s more promise in it right now. Of course, I could be biting my tongue in six months if it all doesn’t work out. But right now, at this point in our careers I feel like it’s going somewhere…and I’m really happy to be in the place that we are.
 
What do you guys see in the future, musically and as a band?
 
S: We were talking about this a couple nights ago, actually. I was talking to Cliff about what he thinks the next record is gonna sound like. He had one idea and I was like, “Really? You really think it’s gonna sound like that? I had more of this kind of idea.” I don’t know. I guess you can’t really ever tell. Songwriting and being in a band is a very “in-the-moment” type of thing, I guess. But as far as the business aspect, I don’t know. Just stepping it up every time. Next time we come to Chicago, maybe play a better venue with a bigger band.
 
D: The next step is there, as long as we perform it right.
 
 - Ian Lashbrook, Punkbands.com
 
Thanks to Dan, Saen, Julio, and Cliff for the interview and great show. Thanks to Jaime Arthurs and Will VanDyke for helping me set all this up.
 
Check out ATAL at:
 
www.astallaslions.com
www.myspace.com/astallaslions
www.triplecrownrecords.com