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Murder By Death
Interview with Adam Turla on MBD Concept Tour on Feb 12, 2009 by
Murder by Death on Concept Tour
By William Jones
Murder by Death's latest album, Red of Tooth and Claw, brought the band back to the setting and characters of Who Will Survive and What Will Be Left of Them. It is a concept album considered to be part of the band's Desert Series and acts as a sort of prequel to the earlier album. So the band is currently out on a special U.S. tour that sees the return of keyboardist Vincent Edwards, and both albums performed in their entirety each night to a backdrop of video footage put together by the band.
Punkbands.com caught up with songwriter/vocalist/guitarist Adam Turla of the Bloomington, Ind. Rockers, Murder by Death, to get the scoop on what fans can expect on the tour, and the band's latest musical endeavors, including a 7-inch split covers series.
Can you briefly explain the idea behind the upcoming tour and why you decided to do it? It seems like a pretty big undertaking for each show....
Adam Turla: It kind of all came together individually. We had an old piano player who toured with us for years. Then about five years ago he decided he didn't like being on the road all the time, and he wanted to just stay home. Recently we've been hanging out and he was saying he wanted to go on tour again, so we just facilitated that idea. We have these two albums, Who Will Survive, and Red of Tooth and Claw. Red of Tooth and Claw is kind of a loose prequel to the other one. It's all part of the same story and world. We thought it would be cool to play all of Red of Tooth and Claw into Who Will Survive and have it be a narrative kind of show - have a story panning out. With that, we threw in the mix - I've been assembling all these videos that we're projecting on an old movie screen behind us when we play. It's kind of a big production that all sort of ties together the story.
Red of Tooth and Claw comes later in your discography, but is a prequel to Who Will Survive - in what order will they be played at the shows?
AT: Red of Tooth and Claw, then Who Will Survive - we're playing it straight through. We've been rehearsing a couple weeks with our piano player. It's definitely taking some practice, just because there are songs we haven't played in five years or have never played live. It's kind of different, because we do a lot of touring and we thought it would be fun to have a different approach to this one.
What is with the geodesic dome you guys posted a picture of? Is it in Indiana?
AT: Yeah, in Bloomington, where we live. Basically, there are no good practice spaces in our town. There's just nowhere to rehearse. So we were talking to our old piano player and he was playing with another band in town, and I asked him if he knew of anywhere. He said, "Actually, yes." I guess his band - the drummer owns that place and lives in it. They have a nice stage set up with the PA. So we're kind of renting it from him, because he's out of town. It's just crazy. You pull up to it and it looks like it's from another world.
Will the video only play in certain cities?
AT: It depends on how big the stage is. It's a question of can we actually get the screen up there, have a projector set up. I'd like to do it every night, but we're not playing big clubs every night. We're trying to do it as much as possible.
What can you tell readers about the program you've put together for the shows?
AT: Basically what it is is we hired this friend of ours, this artist, and he designed this simple, one sheet. It's a really cool drawing that has an illustration of the characters from the album. It has the set list, basically, because we're playing, with the exception of the acoustic show [in Chicago], the albums straight through every night. It's the same set, so you can actually see - oh, this song is next. It's a free thing. They're really nice. They're printed up on this old card stock. It's a free handout at the shows for everyone who was nice enough to come out. It's got the dates stamped on it - a little bonus for everyone who shows up.
Is this the first time you've done anything like this?
AT: When Who Will Survive came out, we did a weeklong tour of playing that album all the way through. That's kind of where this idea came from. And we've done projections before, but it's been almost three years. So we're taking some of the footage from the old projections and adding new footage - reviving some old ideas that we never fully developed. So this is a much more ambitious and complete version of some other things we've tried on a minimal level.
Going back to Vincent Edwards, who is slated to play with the band on this tour, and also appeared at a show the band played in Chicago last year - is Edwards making a full-time return the band, or this a one-time tour?
AT: The idea is that it's a one-tour thing. He's got a life. We're not really looking really far ahead right now ... It's just for fun. We thought fans would appreciate it. It started with - he did a Chicago show at the Abbey Pub in March, because he had been aching to play. It was really fun, and we had a really good time hanging out. Then he came up and did another one at the Metro in October, and we just decided on that tour to suggest the idea to him. He was like, "Sure, I'm in." He does wood-working. He builds furniture, custom furniture, at home, so he has a flexible schedule and he's able to just drop it and come with us for five weeks.
While I've got you, where did the idea for the 7-inch series come from? How do you feel it's going with the first two releases, and what can fans expect from the upcoming vinyls?
AT: I would say the idea just came from the fact that we are just really big fans of William Elliot Whitmore. We started playing together like seven years ago. We're both fans of each other's music. It's something we talked about several years ago and we finally got around to doing. That was just so fun to do - to reinvent someone's song that you already like. We've played like 75 shows together. We know his stuff so intimately that it's fun to just reinvent it, hear it another way. And it's the same for us to hear someone that we really enjoy play one of our songs and reinterpret it. So that's how it started, then we liked it so much we decided to do more of them. Fans responded to the idea because it was creative. It works really well because we don't have any labels involved. It's just the bands. It's extremely DIY. I actually do some of the basic artwork, finishing touches for the artists that we hire. I actually mail them all myself, because we do a preorder through the website. It's really just us. So it's kind of cool, because it just lets us do whatever we want. You really are just totally changing someone's song. The next one is Amanda Palmer of Dresden Dolls covered one of our songs. We need to record our version of her song. From there on we've got a couple bands, ... but not really sure. We're trying to branch out; I really want to get a metal band. We want to ask Mastodon, just to see if they'd be interested. I think it would be cool to get a band that's totally outside of our genre, a band that doesn't sing in English or something, just to mix up the series so we have a lot of diversity. Finding the bands is the hard part, because we just started with the bands we know and are friend with and we think would make sense. I'm kind of hoping some ideas present themselves to us.
Will you be doing more things like the art contest you did for the O'Death split?
AT: I don't know. It worked really well. We just said send us your art; the winner gets the whole 7-inch series and 10 copies of the one you designed. I ended up getting so many good designs that we were originally just going to pick one design, but we had two that we really liked, so it's different on each side of the 7-inch packaging. There are still like eight more designs we thought we can use, so I emailed these people and said I'll pay you to use that for a t-shirt design. People were just thrilled. We figured some people probably won't be into it, but everyone was just excited to be involved and be part of it. In the future maybe we'll do more. There are seven 7-inches, so there's a lot of art that needs to be done. Maybe we'll do another contest.
Will the songs be available later in any other format?
AT: I don't know; that's the question. The Whitmore one is sold out, so I'm thinking of doing it on iTunes. When we have all seven of them out, I'd like to do maybe a double 12-inch to try to get it all on one record. I think that would be pretty cool. It's going to be awhile before that happens.
Any plans yet for a full-length follow-up to Red of Tooth and Claw or is the band just concentrating on the 7-inch series for now?
AT: Now we're finishing touring. We're touring until June. We're going to take the summer off to write. The 7-inch things, because there are five more, the idea is to have one out every three months. It's not a huge project; it's creative and fun. It's only one song, and it's a cover. So we're going to start writing our material when we have some time off.
