Things are looking up for the guys in the experimental post-hardcore outfit Q and Not U. They're in the middle of a successful tour, and their latest release, last year's excellent Different Damage, was met with almost universally strong reviews. The Cardinal recently spoke with drummer John Davis about touring, the recording process, and where the band is at this point in their career.
How do you guys avoid burn out? You tour a lot, and you record, and you also serve as your own publicists and have to do the website, and interviews... doesn't that get pretty exhausting?
Not really, I think that I had more of a problem with that a little while ago, like two years ago.. I wasn't used to it. I was in a couple of bands before... that toured a little bit, but not too much, and that was all the exposure I had had to it.... I've gotten more used to it, I'm used to touring and answering e-mails, I mean, I enjoy it... I like hearing from people and hearing what they have to say. Above all we just love playing music, and we're just totally, completely sick music addicts. On tour we'll have to send home like huge boxes of records that we bought. That's what we do, we look for museums or record shops. Those are the two big things we do on tour.
Especially now that things are getting better, we can count on at least a few people will be there and know the stuff.
When did this success come about?
I would say just recently. We were a four piece for the first two years we were together,...
Yeah, with [ex-Q and Not U bassist] Matt [Borlik] ...
Yeah, Matt, and towards the end of that time it was like \this is pretty cool."" In DC we could get a pretty decent crowd and come close to selling out the Black Cat, which is like the big club here. We would go outside of town and people would know our songs and we could always wind up playing to fifty or sixty people, but we just couldn't go on like that, we didn't enjoy being in a band with him in more, so we kicked him out, and there were like six months that we weren't doing shows. It wasn't that we weren't doing anything, we were practicing and we recorded that ""On Play Patterns"" single and whatever, but that was like six months of downtime.
So there was never a period where you thought that you would break up?
No, there was never a period. I mean, we asked each other, the three of us, before we gave Matt the boot, ""do we want to just want to break this up and start something else, or should we just..."" well, we all knew that the three of us wanted to keep working together and we asked ""should we do a different band"" and we all though, no, we've put so much into this band already, not knowing that we were going to put like ten times more into it through out the year. We didn't want to give up because we felt that we were the band anyways, so we kind of had to start over, you know.
So our first show as a trio, it was at a festival, and there were like a good amount of people there, but we totally sucked, I mean it was horrible...
What was wrong?
We were just, you know, learning all the new songs, and new instruments, and it was a completely different sound from what people had expected, and I think that a lot of people didn't even know we were going to be playing as a trio. So to do something not only different from what they were expecting but for it to be different and bad, well, that sucked. And we just kind of had to start over, and start over in the fact of people being like ""whoa, what happened to them?""
So we did a tour last spring, we did about a month of shows... I think the response was good, but most people were kind of weary of what we were doing, and then we did the record over the rest of that spring and over the summer and it came out in the fall, and that was the first time that it was like ""well, maybe people are actually going to like what we're doing now."" It still wasn't any time of, you know, enduring response, but it was getting better. So we hadn't even played the US that much once the record came out until February, but once we did those shows it was like ""Whoa, people actually like this stuff now!"" and like the record sold like pretty well, and we were really happy with the response now. People know the songs, people were no longer asking about us as a four-piece. We knew it would take probably a year to establish that we were a trio, and that this is who were are, and it's better than what we used to do. And so, it's been about a year, and I feel that we have. In fact, it happened a little bit faster than I expected.
It seems like as soon as the album was released there were glowing reviews.
Yeah, I mean, that was a good tour for us. Before that, we were just getting our act together and learning the new songs. I mean, there are songs on the record, I shouldn't even admit this, that we learned a week before we recorded them...
Which songs are we talking about here?
Um, well, the song, I'm sure you can guess, ""Oh no""... it was definitely just adding layers, fucking around, trying things and stuff that like, and Ian was fully supportive of that... At first, I didn't like it that much but then I came to like it. Another song on the album, Air Conditions.. well, we wrote it on a Monday, and then I left town for the week, and then we went into the studio on Sunday. We wrote it, we had one more practice, and then we recorded it. It's a weird song, and especially playing it live, I wish that we could have recorded it how it became after playing it live for a year.
I guess that's the one thing that I wish the record had more of, and I think that people noticed this because they found it more subdued, but I think that the record is missing the energy that we would have liked to put into it, but that's just sort of the problem with recording. There were a lot of new things that we did on that record, and that's why I'm so excited to do the third one, because it's like ""Different Damage"" is about trying new things, and it's truly the document of a band just starting to do that, whereas now here we are, a year later, having played, a hundred... well, by the time we record again, two hundred shows, and you know, that's a lot.
There's a lot of improvising that we do live, a lot of things. We're going to record a single over the summer and then record a new album at the end of this year. I'm hoping to get it out by next April.
How many new songs are you sitting on right now?
We don't have any new songs right now, but we have a lot of parts and ideas. That's how we write. It's very rare for anyone to come in and have a full song. And even when we do, like there's this song that I wrote on Different Damage, you know, I had the wholes song done on the guitar, and so we just kind of switched it up when were writing it, because, as you know, I'm the drummer, so when we were recording it I was doing the guitar and Harris was playing the drums...
Which song this?
""No Damage Nocturne,"" the second to last song on the album. I always imagined it as sort of this faster song, you know, but sort of with this kind of weird... well, I don't know, just chord choices and such... It's a song without a chorus, which is sort of weird, I mean, we don't often have choruses per se, but that song really didn't have one. Well, Harris wrote this drum beat that was based on a sample on Paul's Botique, you know, that Beastie Boys record, which is certainly one of those records that we all love. Anyway, so Harris has his beat, and I had my guitar part, but his drum beat was so slow and I was like ""I don't know,"" so we decided to switch it up and he went back to guitar and I played drums, and basically it was just this convoluted thing, and the song ended up how it did, and I actually kind of hated it. Now I like it and we'll play it live, but for a while we didn't.
What are you doing on drums with that song?
Well, my left hand is the drum stick, my right hand is the tambourine, so I'm playing the high hat with the tambourine for the first verse, and then in the middle of it, when it goes to that weird, slightly spaghetti westernish bridge, I put the tambourine on the foretom and pick up the second drum stick and play with sticks for the bridge where it's just symbols, put the drum stick back down grab the tambourine again, and then switch back to two drum sticks for the part at the end where it kind of comes in a little bit more. And then that sample at the end, where it drops out and sounds really weird is our practice tape of the song, you know, from when we first wrote it. It fact, it might even be Harris on drums for that part. The idea was that we were going to switch back and forth between the practice tape and the studio tape, so it would be this really weird jarring thing for the whole song, but we couldn't really get it to sync up right so we just did it at the end. Fortunately, the tempo that we did the practice tape with was the exact same tempo that we did it in the studio with, so it just worked out. Most people would imagine that it's just a studio trick where we distorted the micas, but it's not that.
