Foreign Fields - The ripples of new popular music

interview by Lorenzo Righetto

Let's get the question about Bon Iver out of the way right off the bat. The story behind the recording of “Anywhere But Where I Am” somehow overlaps with the making of “For Emma”: the fact that you were holed up in an abandoned office in Wisconsin, with no heating, for starters. Do you think this kind of “background” information is important for understanding what's behind the music?

Yes, I think it's important for people to understand where you're coming from, when you're not doing something so traditional. Well, maybe not “important”, but it adds something. It adds to the experience we'd like everyone who listens to us to have – putting them in a place. We want the record to serve as a vehicle to the rolling hills of a Wisconsin winter. It has nothing to do with Bon Iver as an artist, but more as a person. I'm sure he grew up shoveling snow on the coldest winter nights, just like we did. When everything looks like glass.

You then finished the album at your studio in Nashville. Did you work on “bare” songs – just guitar and voice, so to speak – or did you already have some idea of how the arrangements would turn out? In the end, the more classically “folk” arrangements are pretty rare on “Anywhere But Where I Am”…

Every one of our songs started out from a guitar part, or a piano part. I'd say pretty much all of them were written in a “bare” format, with voice and guitar. Where I think we differ from traditional folk is that, if you think of that bare form as the song's skeleton, then Eric and I go on to break every one of its bones, together, before the track is finished.

Macabre, maybe, but the description fits how every song we write goes through a change, sometimes a radical one, during recording.

The music on “Anywhere But Where I Am” changes a lot from one track to the next, but you seem to draw, in particular, on ambient and cinematic music in general, like post-rock, rather than on folk or roots music. Is that a reflection of the combination of the two of you, one – Brian – the songwriter, the other – Eric, who studied “Film Scoring” – the arranger?

You know, one of the reasons we call this record “folk” is because that was our intention, initially. Both Eric and I like creating soundscapes, even though he's the “technical” one. I'm not sure I'd call myself the “songwriter”, since most of the album was written collectively. Incidentally, that's one of the hardest things for me to do – being in a room with another person and writing something together, but we both know we write our best songs when we're both fully engaged. We complement each other and play off our respective strengths and weaknesses throughout “Anywhere”.

Your lyrical style also seems to shift quite a bit across the record, from the sad tale of “Where The Willow Died” to the impressionistic “From The Lake To The Land”, all the way to more confessional tracks like “Fake Arms”. How would you explain that?

You know, I don't think lyrics are something Eric and I think about much before the song is written. A lot of our effort goes into the lyrics during the creative process, but they're always subordinate to the music. Our thoughts express themselves more through the latter.

What draws me, personally, to music is finding the idea, the emotion, within the music itself. One of the most powerful pieces in that sense I've ever heard is “Light Through The Veins” (you can hear part of it in the intro of “Life in Technicolor” by Coldplay; the piece is by Jon Hopkins, ed.). It speaks to me more than words ever could.

What would you say is the record's main mood? You chose a very existential title, one that implies a perennial dissatisfaction, a need to be displaced in space, but maybe in time too…

Exactly. The title says it all about how we started the album, and how we finished it. It's what led us to Nashville. Eric and I both have this creeping feeling that we're not where we should be. It's the pursuit of happiness, cracking at the edges. For me personally, at least, bringing that out into the open, and being aware of it for a whole year, brought that feeling to a kind of “closure”. It's nice to be at peace with where you are.

What I really like about your music is the nostalgia it gives off. Take these lines, for instance: “Come sono? Più alto?”, which sounds to me like a kind of comparison between oneself and the world. Is that rooted in some specific event or is it a more general reflection on the human condition?

I wrote "Taller" right after I moved to Nashville. It's about my personal journey of moving from Wisconsin to Chicago, then to Nashville, then back to Chicago, and then to Nashville again. Every move felt like something I had to do: it felt right, definitive. I felt happier leaving something behind.

But I realized, once I got to Nashville, that it was a temporary kind of joy — the feeling of being somewhere new and feeling like you're starting something from scratch. So that you could be happier than before. "Taller" is about the realization that you try to build your own growth by yourself. You can't just move somewhere and expect to feel more fulfilled. This happens on a daily basis too. I've come to understand that the scale of happiness is very, very small.

Have you ever wondered whether "folk" music should be about people's material problems? Do you consider what you do to be "folk", generally speaking?

I've never really thought about it, no. Maybe I should do some research into the history of folk. You know, it's something we're still dealing with (I mean, whether we consider ourselves folk or not). I'd say no, not in the traditional sense of the term. I'm not sure where artists we feel aligned with fit in (Patrick Watson, Bon Iver, King Creosote, and then Bjork and Steve Reich).

Listening to your album, it's clear that you keep a close eye on contemporary music. Do you feel there's the same tendency among other American bands to merge folk (or intimate music in general) with something more cinematic, as a way of expanding their emotional range? Do you think it's an adaptation of American roots music to what other bands have done in the recent past, first and foremost Sigur Ros?

Yes, I really think so. I couldn't just speak for American bands, I'd say bands in general. There's always something new to explore in music. It just so happens that we like venturing into big, boundless spaces.

I saw you perform at South By Southwest with some other musicians. What's the Foreign Fields live line-up?

I'm glad you asked! We play with some of the best musicians we've ever seen. Nathan Reich plays guitar and sings. Nate Babbs is our live drummer, he's from Minneapolis, and our newest addition is Clayton Fike, who plays bass, synth and sings.

South By Southwest also marked Adam Duritz's (Counting Crows) endorsement of your music, which also led to him picking you as support for his band on his latest tour. Can you tell us how that came about and how it developed?

Adam, and all of the Counting Crows, have been amazing to us. Adam, specifically, has helped us more than I can even explain (down to: "Adam, we don't know what to do with this album... But we want to promote it, what do you think?"). Going on tour with them is a real honor. They've made it, they've been successful for twenty years now - a milestone we've got to fight for.

He came across our music through Sean Moeller of Daytrotter. He really liked what we had to say with our music and we've been in touch ever since!

You started out as a digital project, self-released on Bandcamp. Only now are you putting out physical copies of "Anywhere But Where I Am". Do you intend to carry on without a label?

We like where we are right now. People are discovering our music every day, and it feels great to be able to make decisions and act on them however we like. That said, we are getting offers, and we might align ourselves with anyone who believes in us.

What are your current plans? Will you be coming to Europe?

Right now [May 2012, ed.] we're getting ready for the tour with Counting Crows, which starts in a couple of weeks. After that, we hope to get back to some of the "markets" we'll be passing through during the tour. We hope to head to Europe soon!

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Lorenzo Righetto, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition