Minus Story

Interview by J. Pace

With My Ion Truss, Lawrence, Kansas’ Minus Story have left behind their trademark “Wall of Crap” home recording approach. Assisted by producer John Congleton, whose credits include Modest Mouse, Explosions in the Sky, and many more, the band entered the studio to emerge with their purest, most dynamic recording to date. Under the Radar spoke to singer/guitarist Jordan Geiger as the band were fresh off a tour with Old Canes (of which Geiger is also a member) and Shearwater. We discussed the tour, the question of a new Old Canes album, playing in a band with your childhood friends, their label Jagjaguwar, his solo work, and more.

Under the Radar: You guys just got back from tour, right?

Jordan Geiger: Yep. We played our last show for the tour on Saturday, and we’re all just…exhausted. [Laughs]

UTR: How’d it go overall?

Geiger: It was awesome. It was kind of a difficult tour, just because we had an East Coast tour scheduled, which was all we were gonna do, and then I sort of, uh—me and some of the guys from Shearwater decided we should do this tour. They already had their tour scheduled but they didn’t have another band. They’re friends of ours, so we’re like “Ok, well how can we do this?” And so it ended up we went to the West Coast with Shearwater, toured from Texas all the way up to Seattle, and then had two days off and drove all the way from Seattle to Minneapolis to start a week and a half with Old Canes. And so we basically covered the whole country in three weeks. Usually, we will cover just one side of the country in three weeks, so—pretty grueling.

UTR: Yeah, there’s all that no-man’s-land between the West Coast and the Midwest there….

Geiger: Exactly. We probably drove like 8,000 miles, I think.

UTR: You toured with Shearwater a bunch of times before, right?

Geiger: Yeah, we actually just toured with them once—it was Okkervil River, Shearwater, and Minus Story and we did maybe four or five dates or something. Just from a week of touring, we sorta just became really good friends. That was two or three years ago, we’ve been friends ever since. I played on an Okkervil EP and I recorded some demos with Shearwater—we’re all kind of like a big family now, it’s pretty nice.

UTR: You toured with Old Canes on the East Coast. Are you still playing with them?

Geiger: Yep. I played two sets every night, so that was really fun.

UTR: Did that wear you out?

Geiger: No, I thought it would, but I do really different stuff in the two bands. I sit down, for one thing, in Old Canes, which makes a big difference, and I just do percussion, trumpets, a little keyboard, harmonica… If I had to sing, I don’t think I could sing two sets every night. I don’t think I could lie, stand up and rock out for two sets, but sitting down and doing different stuff—I can do that, you know.

UTR: So is Old Canes gonna get us a new album any time soon?

Geiger: Oh yeah. Chris has nine songs close to done—I think he’s at the point of finishing vocals and putting extra bells & whistles and stuff on there, so….I don’t know how soon that’ll be, but everywhere we went people were like, “Where’s the new Old Canes Record?” and we’re like, “Well, it’s on Chris’s computer.”

UTR: Yeah, it’s been awhile.

Geiger: What people don’t know is that the first record took forever to do. We recorded demos years ago, and then we recorded the whole record with one engineer and then scrapped it. Chris even tried to record it with a different person, and then finally he did it himself. It took forever to do it. The first record sort of materialized out of thin air for most people, but anyone who knows Chris knows it was kind of a long process to get it done.

UTR: I wanted to talk about the new [Minus Story] album a little bit, of course. I noticed a lot of the reviews—plenty out there now—almost all of them mention that you’ve gone from your kind of mid-fi or lo-fi self-produced approach, the “wall of crap” as you guys call it, to a more cleaned-up sound—going into the studio and so forth. Was that something that you planned in advance, or did it just happen naturally?

Geiger: It’s definitely something we planned in advance, I think. For No Rest for Ghosts, we really reached a place where we couldn’t…where we recorded the songs, and then we played them live, and they had a certain energy of us playing them live. Just me, personally, with the equipment I have, and the engineering knowledge I have—which isn’t a ton—I sort of realized, OK, if we’re really going to be playing live, and playing together in this way, I really just don’t have the skills to get that to sound the way we want. The other thing is, when you record stuff yourself, really awesome accidents can happen. For home recording—and The Captain [is Dead, Let the Drum Corpse Dance] especially was really all about that—you know, just me, home alone, hooking up all these effects pedals and just doing weird shit with the songs. I think after we had done that for two EPs and two full-lengths, that kinda wasn’t a surprise anymore, what was happening, you know? I think going to the studio was just the logical next step.

UTR: So you got the songs all prepped and then went in there and cranked them out in what, four days?

Geiger: Yeah, a lot them actually weren’t completely written when we went in there, which made it even more stressful. But, yeah—I’ve always just sorta fetishized recording studios and stuff, and we had taken a tour of Electrical Audio one time when we were on tour, when we drove through Chicago. Everybody was just like, “If we have the money to make a studio record, this is where we wanna do it, you know?”

UTR: Yeah, it’s kinda the cream-of-the-crop, indie-wise.

Geiger: Yeah, and John Congleton…I’ve known him for a long time. I used to play with Appleseed Cast, and we toured with him in Paper Chase in…I guess it would be the fall of 2002. We really hit it off, I think we probably have similar temperaments in some ways. So yeah, even before we had a record out on a label or anything, he was just like, “I’ll work you a deal, you can afford recording if you want to.” It’s just taken years for it to get to that point.

UTR: What kind of role did he play in the studio? Was he shouting at you guys, you know—“You can do that again!” or was he just pushing the record. More of a producer?

Geiger: I’d say he was definitely a co-producer. He wouldn’t be a producer in the way that some people think of producers, like really determining what the songs sound like, you know? I think he had a pretty good idea of what we were going for. In the first four days at Electrical, the engineering was the most important thing he did, because, me and Nick, who had traditionally done the recording, we didn’t have to set up anything, didn’t have to deal with any technical issues, we were just 100 percent talking about playing. And so he got just a really great, clean, beautiful recording of us all playing. And as far as listening to takes, he for sure had a definite hand in determining what we kept, because we didn’t have enough time or money, enough tape, to do any different versions of anything. You know, we had to play a take of a song, and either it got erased or we kept it.

UTR: You had to commit.

Geiger: There was no, “Oh, we’ll keep this and listen to it later and decide.” Sometimes we would play one, and we would all be like, “Yeah, that was great,” and John would be like, “You know, I think you could do that better. Let’s listen to it.” So we’d listen to it, and I’d say all the time he was right.

UTR: It’s good to have that outside ear sometimes, I think.

Geiger: Yeah, exactly.

UTR: It’s funny, because you went into the pro studio, and somehow got almost more of a raw sound than your home recordings, as far as the live instrument sound.

Geiger: That’s totally true.

UTR: But there’s still that consistency, in my mind, in the way you mixed it. You know, still plenty of effects and tricky mixing. Did Congleton help a lot with the mixing as well?

Geiger: Oh yeah. I’d say that’s the main part where he really had a 100 percent hand in how the record came out. I thought it was going to be really hard for me to just let him mix the record, and for me not to be there basically standing over his shoulder and saying, “No, I don’t like that.” He was just like, “Here’s how I like to do it, and I can do it any way you want, but the way I like is just—you guys just leave me alone.” We mixed in Lawrence, so we had this nice downtown to go and hang out, get coffee, go shopping, blah blah blah… He was like, “You guys should chill.” He would work on a song for three or four hours and we’d come back and he’d play it for us, and we’d say, “I don’t like the way this one part went, but everything else is fine,” you know. The mix is totally his invention based on the conversations we had the whole time about what we wanted the record to sound like. He definitely had a huge hand in that, kind of a sixth-member type thing, you know?

UTR: It’s a perfect transition from your earlier [sound]—from “the wall of crap,” as you say.

Geiger: Well thanks. Yeah, he definitely understood where we were coming from and everything. I think we were sort of afraid that it wouldn’t sound like us somehow—it’s kind of irrational to think that way, but it’s hard not to have that fear. That it’s somehow magically gonna be this really slick thing that doesn’t sound like us, but it totally did. I mean, listening to the records he’s done, like The Paper Chase, and the Appleseed record he did, really all the stuff he’s done—you can do stuff super-slick, but I think his own tastes lean toward more raw-sounding things.

UTR: Yeah, he’s good at combining that, you know—super-live drums, but still affecting the mix. One part will have a filter on the drums, but then it’ll drop out or something. You know, little tricks. I think that really suits you guys well.

Geiger: Cool.

UTR: Do you think you’ll continue to do a more live approach in the future?

Geiger: I don’t know. It’s kinda too soon to tell. In the past, we would’ve started working on the new record by this point, but uh, this time I think we’re gonna wait a little bit. I don’t know, this record was a lot more expensive than the old ones for obvious reasons, so we’re gonna give it a longer time of plotting out what we’re doing next, and hopefully we’ll get two or three more good tours in there so we can pay back our studio debt and what not. The next record, the stuff that we have worked on now—it could turn out totally different, but I really have it in my mind that I want to do some composing of music, with other musicians like string players, horns and stuff like that. I don’t know how it’d turn out, but we’re pretty excited about doing that. I’m pretty prolific, and so is Andy as far as writing songs, so by the time we get to the studio it might be a funk record or something weird…

UTR: A full-blown concept record?

Geiger: There you go.

UTR: So while you were recording My Ion Truss, you did the Make the Dead Come EP?

Geiger: Yeah, that was in between a few sessions.

UTR: Was that almost to escape the sort of more pressurized environment of a studio?

Geiger: Totally. Totally. I think working in the studio and knowing that we had this record coming really gave us license to do a bunch of really fun stuff that we wouldn’t do on a “major” release. I don’t know if you’ve heard it, but we have all these found sounds mixed in there. All the guitars are recorded direct, there’s no amps—and that is purely for lazy reasons…

UTR: [Laughs] No setting up mics.

Geiger: Yeah, exactly. We recorded the drums—me and Nick—in Kansas City. Andy did his stuff at my parents’ house in Booneville, Missouri, and so I didn’t want to bring his whole guitar setup, I was like, “Andy, just bring your guitar, and your effects and we’ll do the guitars direct.”

UTR: You can barely tell any more these days. People will do all their guitars through a [Line 6] Pod and it sounds like a miked cabinet, you know?

Geiger: The other thing is right when we started recording that record, Deerhoof had an article in TapeOp about how they record. I don’t know if you’ve read the article?

UTR: Yeah, yeah—that’s exactly what I was thinking of.

Geiger: That like 100 percent gave us license to just use direct guitars. Deerhoof in that interview—and their music of course—but the interview is really super-inspiring to us to really like, just make this fun record. Indie rock is weird, because there’s so much money and weird hype thrown at it now, that it’s easy to lose sight that it’s art, you know? Not only that it’s art, but that it’s…it’s not a career and it’s not a job. People make it into that, but I don’t know if that’s really the right way to go about it.

UTR: Yeah, I think a lot of times their music suffers if they do.

Geiger: The things that made us want to be in a band in the first place were things like The Flaming Lips, Guided by Voices, and all that sweet home recorded stuff in the ’90s, as well as big bands like Pearl Jam and all that, whatever major label shit was big in the ’90s I’m still into in some degree…rock music.

UTR: So kinda that purity—the music, the band, not the posturing and style and everything.

Geiger: Exactly.

UTR: And you guys have been playing together for eons, right?

Geiger: As Minus Story, I think we’ve been playing since 2001 maybe? Or 2000. But yeah. Brian, the bass player, I’ve known since we were in kindergarten, and Nick and I have been playing together since before we even owned our own instruments. He got his drum set, and I think I had my dad’s acoustic guitar—if you can imagine two 12-year-olds playing “Come as You Are” over and over again, that’s basically what it was.

UTR: [Laughs] So—by now you probably have a subconscious connection. When you’re writing, can you just kinda start jamming and everyone latches in there?

Geiger: Yeah, definitely. I think that’s really what’s kept everything together and stuff, just the ability to know that the other people are going to sort of intuitively understand where the song’s going. The way I write demos—with The Captain, I would do a demo, but before anybody heard it I would do some of the basic tracks that ended up on the album. Some of the songs, I would have a fully orchestrated thing before any other instruments were on there. Basically because I had a lot of time on my hands at the time. I was just sort of living off the money from Appleseed Cast touring, so I didn’t have a job, and we weren’t touring so I would just record music non-stop. Now I’ll do a demo and I’ll purposely not do any other parts on it, because I don’t want to determine ahead of time what’s gonna happen to the song, you know?

UTR: Yeah, let the groupthink take over.

Geiger: Yeah, it’s more fun now. I’ll take the basis of a song, and Nick has the drumbeats, and my part will end up completely changing by the end of the process, so it’s a much more collaborative sort of approach.

UTR: Has that been affected at all by the fact that now you guys are spread out geographically?

Geiger: It really hasn’t been affected, mainly because of the Internet. At this point, we all have recording equipment and we all have the access to be able to put it on the Internet, so we kind of write that way. I’m moving back to Lawrence in a couple weeks, actually. The thing that’s been lost, that I kinda miss, is just playing—being in a band that just practices and gets together to just jam, because Minus Story doesn’t get to do that any more. I’m looking forward to going there and playing with a bunch of people that, I have no idea what they’re gonna play, you know?

UTR: Yeah, drink some beers, make some noise.

Geiger: Exactly [laughs].

UTR: So in Lawrence, it seems like a lot of people have that kind of camaraderie, and there’s a fairly strong community that’s been cranking out great indie bands for a while now. Could you talk a bit about what it’s like there?

Geiger: Well, when I moved there I was going to school at KU, and I didn’t know anybody. It was kind of depressing to be somewhere where I knew a lot of good things were going on, but I wasn’t involved. I randomly ran into this dude at the computer lab at KU, and I heard him talking about his band, and it was this guy Andrew from Ghosty, who are an amazing band—our two bands have developed alongside one another. Some time after that, when we finished Mobius Syndrome, Appleseed Cast had just gotten this super review on Pitchfork, and I didn’t even know they were from Lawrence, but I bought the record, and found out I lived a block from Chris Crisci, and so I dropped off a CD at his house. At some point he called me, and was like, “We need a keyboard player to go on tour,” and I’m like “Sure!” I think after knowing those two people, Andrew from Ghosty and then the Appleseed Cast guys, I really got to know a lot of people. It’s a really small town. There’s a lot of students, you know, 24,000 students come and go every year, but for the townies, it’s a pretty small town. We played there on Saturday—I can’t tell you how many of the people I saw are from bands. There’s only a couple bars that people go to, and you end up seeing and knowing pretty much everybody. There’s a band called Drakkar Sauna, on Marriage Records, and they’re totally my favorite band in Lawrence, at least ones who have records out right now. They’re gonna tour with Magnolia Electric Co. this fall. Their new record’s great. I played some trumpet on it and actually recorded one song, as well.

UTR: So you’ve been doing some solo stuff, too, and posting it as you go, I’ve noticed. How does that differ from the Minus Story stuff?

Geiger: Well, I’ve had a huge backlog of songs that have been a little too personal to me to be Minus Story songs. There are some personal songs on the Minus Story records, but I always feel weird if there’s a real particular area about a song that’s about me, and my girlfriend, and my cat, or my parents—whoever. I don’t think of Minus Story as being a vehicle for my own personal agenda, it’s much more collective. So I have this huge backlog of songs, and posting them—they’re actually not online any more—but posting them was just a way to kinda keep myself active, and hopefully generate some interest. I’m actually going to be mixing the record with John Congleton, probably next month. I don’t know if…Jagjaguwar is definitely going to put out a solo record by me, but I don’t know if this’ll be the one. This might be a little smaller. I’m sort of looking for a smaller label to do it.

UTR: You guys have been with Jagjaguwar for four records now. Has anyone else approached you as you’ve gained popularity? You plan to stick around?

Geiger: Not directly. We definitely have contacts or friends at various labels, but nobody’s directly approached us or anything. I think it’s sort of one of those things where if we were looking for another label, I’m sure there’s other people that would be interested. The other thing to consider, too, is—I think everybody knows that…like, Jagjaguwar—we basically got signed at the absolute most perfect time to be on the label. The Captain came out, and when No Rest for Ghosts came out, between Secretly Canadian and Jagjaguwar—for me, there was just a bulletproof lineup over the past two years of great records that have come out. I mean, Okkervil River, Antony & the Johnsons, Magnolia Electric Co., Parts & Labor, Black Mountain/Pink Mountaintops, Scout Niblet—just all these awesome bands, you know?

UTR: Yeah, I feel like nowadays you can’t trust label names as much as in the ’90s, when you knew what you were getting with Touch & Go, or whatever, but with Jagjaguwar I feel pretty confident I’m gonna like a lot of the stuff they put out.

Geiger: Yeah, we are really, really proud to be on the label. I couldn’t tell you how good of a label they are. I know a lot of people in bands and a lot of people that have been on different labels, and I don’t know of any label that has been as good to their artists as Jagjaguwar is to us and to other people. The thing that sort of explains it the most, is that, and it is the sort of main issue with our band and the label is basically that we don’t sell a ton of records, but they treat us like we do, you know? So it’s awesome, but we have to constantly check ourselves and be like, “Well, let’s not forget that we’re not selling 10,000 records or whatever.”

UTR: Yeah, there’s work to be done.

Geiger: Yeah, exactly.

UTR: I saw in one interview you mentioned that you guys generally get way more press in Europe than you do here. I was wondering if that changed with this album?

Geiger: Totally. No Rest for Ghosts we were really hoping we’d have some more good press in the U.S. We did have some good press, but not a lot. Actually, that record was sort of a sleeper—we got a lot more press in 2007 than we did in 2006, you know, especially with blogs getting real big, you know. You can find tons of reviews where people are like “I just heard this record even though it’s been out for six months,” that sort of thing. Like France, for some reason, we’ve been in a bunch of magazines and reviews and stuff. But this record has totally changed. Jagjaguwar has really stepped up their process of promotion and all that stuff, and I think we were really more prepared this time, to be like, let’s really hit it hard and try to get tours and press and reviews and all that stuff, you know?

UTR: Are you going to do—or have you done—any European touring at all?

Geiger: No. We actually had one scheduled which got cancelled, and that’s pretty much how we ended up recording this record. We didn’t want to do anything for the rest of the year except Europe, because it was gonna take so much money and effort and so forth. That got cancelled, and we decided let’s go and make a record instead. That’s kinda number one on my list of things to figure out now that we’re home, so we’ll see.

UTR: Potentially…

Geiger: Yeah, and we’ve actually sorta cooked up an Old Canes/Minus Story European tour—I don’t know if it’ll happen, but we’ve traveled together in the same van and it worked out really well, both bands saving a lot of money. I played with them of course, and they played with us a little bit. Everyone gets along and so forth.

UTR: What’s next for Minus Story?

Geiger: I couldn’t tell you what’s next. I have some projects I’m working on and we all have different things going on this fall, but as soon as we can get another good tour we’ll be playing. That’s pretty much what’s next at this point, is just supporting the record and playing a lot of shows. I think we’re at our best right now as far as…we’re definitely playing the best shows we’ve ever played, just by virtue of us touring together and writing the record live the way we did, so that’s our number one focus right now.

www.minus-story.com

7/2007