Farmer Sea - Past, present and future of Italian pop

The thing that struck me reading about you in the various reviews of "A Safe Place" – and I say this having fallen into the same trap myself, entirely unintentionally – is that, both as a criticism and as praise, people keep bringing up the international quality of your sound. Perhaps always with a touch of provincialism, all things considered. So let's hear it from you: do you consider your music "international"?

How could we not consider it international? Even artists singing in Italian within the pop-rock world draw on sounds that aren't really Italian at all, since aside from Neapolitan music there's very little that's genuinely homegrown – let alone us, who sing in English. Sometimes it feels like being born in Turin is a crime; should we adopt a thicker accent just to make it clear that deep down we're Italian?

Do you think that if you'd been born in London or Austin you'd have made the same kind of music, or has the Turin scene shaped you toward certain references and styles regardless?

We're a pretty isolated case stylistically, in our neck of the woods. So we haven't really been shaped by anything, and I think we'd have made the same kind of music no matter where we were.

I know you've been getting attention in England ever since your previous album, but how does this "international" quality of yours actually translate in practice? Do you have foreign tours planned (or in the works)? Do you expect to get coverage in the trade press at a European level too?

Even the new album is getting attention abroad – it's had good write-ups in the United States, France, Spain, England... We even got good reviews in Japan and sold a few records there. We don't expect anything, because we always keep our feet on the ground, but of course we're hoping some bigger media outlet will notice us. On the live front we have some contacts in the United States, and we're hoping that possibility comes together.

Is it really easier to get noticed today, at least in Europe? You chose free distribution for your output. Was that a deliberate, principled choice, or also a kind of surrender to how things currently stand? Put bluntly: is the world better or worse for a young Italian (or American) band without Megaupload?

Today there's a multitude of channels that let you get known worldwide without much difficulty. Megaupload is gone, but the future is streaming, and there's Bandcamp and Soundcloud, among others, which work brilliantly for that. Self-producing and self-distributing isn't a surrender at all – if anything it's a starting point: the web offers possibilities that were unthinkable just a few years ago, and on top of that, self-production lets you keep total control over your music without the interference of incompetent, unqualified people, of which the industry is unfortunately full. The key point is that it makes no sense to pay a label to press and distribute your record when you can do it yourself, especially if the label can't offer you any real added value. In short, it's a choice – a demanding one, but rewarding – that we'd recommend to anyone.

After working with an outside producer (Maurizio Borgna) on "Low Fidelity In Relationships", you went back to self-producing on this new "A Safe Place". Is that ultimately the setup you prefer? It seems to suit you very well...

By now we've built up enough experience to be able to work directly on producing the record ourselves, shaping the sound we had in mind. I have to say we also had a lot of fun doing it, and we'd like to try our hand at it outside of Farmer Sea too. That said, we're not ruling out working with an outside producer again in the future, especially since our preferred setting remains the band itself.

Let's go back to the criticism you've faced, which thankfully has been rare. While I don't agree with those who take issue with the fact that you sing in English, or that your music is too "international", etc., there's one thing that gives me pause: if I heard one of your songs without knowing it was yours, it would honestly be hard to attribute it to you. Do you agree with that observation? Is it something that "worries" you?

We're not worried at all, because we believe we have our own well-defined sound and identity, which is what matters most to us. Reading certain reviews, you'd think that singing in English automatically makes you derivative, while with Italian you can be the new Battisti with your personality fully intact. What does "making music that's too international" even mean?! Has anyone in Belgium ever criticized dEUS for not singing in Flemish? The answer is obvious. Maybe it's the critics who are too provincial... If you recognize that we're a band of international standing, you should be proud, not annoyed.

When we finished the album, after two years in which we had to face a lot of choices, sacrifices and difficult moments, we realized there was a common thread linking the situations we'd been through to the lyrics, and that theme was fear. So it started out as something purely personal, but a lot of people told us they recognized themselves in the same feelings, so evidently we ended up capturing a widespread sentiment.

I don't think that can happen in Italy, at least not anytime soon. I don't see the will or the courage to push and support certain things at a high level, and clearly the general public isn't ready either, and is asking for other things. We're a nostalgic people, with little curiosity and a lot of cultural laziness, who musically often stay fixated on what we listened to as teenagers. As long as the record industry keeps surviving thanks to the dinosaurs, I don't think it will ever dare to take any risks.

Sure, but at this point only as international guests! Or at most in a duet with Bertè, or Richard Benson... or whoever it might be.

That's a tough question. Off the top of my head, opening for Yo La Tengo on tour.

Farmer Sea will be touring Italy on the following dates:

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