Pretty in black: The Raveonettes' Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo
(Credit: Soren Solkaer Starbird)
Wagner has reason to be feeling cocky these days. The Raveonettes’ latest album, “Lust Lust Lust,” has been widely acclaimed as the Danish group’s best work to date, a pitch-perfect blend of shoegaze feedback, brooding, trip-hoppy atmosphere and lush harmonies that hearken back to the teenage symphonies of ‘60s mad geniuses like Brian Wilson and Phil Spector. If David Lynch needs a soundtrack for his next film, this is it.
From his home in New York, Wagner explained why he didn’t watch Phil Spector’s murder trial and why he doesn’t mind people downloading the Raveonettes’ music for free.
You say you wrote over 100 songs before you wrote the song “Lust,” and that became the foundation for the record. What was it about that song that you liked so much, out of the 100 you had written?
I liked the simplicity of it. I liked the fact that it had a different chord progression than we had ever used before. I liked the fact that it was really dark and yet it had a really great beat to it. And I liked the sort of monotonous tone of the song. I’m always fascinated with stuff that drones, and I think that was a perfect drone.
The very first thing you hear on this album is the closest thing you guys have ever done to a full-on electronic beat—it almost sounds industrial.
Exactly. It’s my love of electronic music, and particularly my love of old-school hip-hop. When I was a kid and hip-hop came out, we were all very excited about it. You know, early N.W.A. and stuff like that—it just has a good vibe to it. I always loved it. And I always tried to see if there was a way that I could incorporate it into this band.
Are all of the songs on the album about lust in some way?
Yeah, they are. Most of the album really is lusting after the unknown. Lusting after things you can’t get. It’s sort of like you want everything all at once. And sometimes you can’t have that. Sometimes you’ve got to choose, and that’s a hard thing.
I know fewer musicians were involved with this album than you worked with on your previous release, “Pretty in Black.” Are you touring with a smaller band this time around, as well?
Yeah, we’re a three-piece this time. It seems to be working out really well, because it gives us a lot of space onstage, sound-wise, because we don’t have a bass player and we don’t have an additional guitar player anymore. So there’s just a lot of room for us to have the sounds come out right, the way we want it. It’s the biggest sound we’ve ever had, even though we are fewer people.
I read an interview in which you expressed admiration for what Radiohead did with their pay-what-you-can experiment. Is that something you hope one day to do with the Raveonettes?
It’s always a tricky one, because you work with labels and do distribution deals, and you are aware that people spent money to put out your album and money needs to come back in. But I’m very much in favor of [the idea] that music should be free. I rarely pay for music myself, and I must say that in the years when music got available on the Internet for free—and probably illegal, too—I must say that I’ve discovered more music than I’d done in my entire life. So there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that in my sense.
So as a working musician, do you then make your living from things like licensing and touring?
Yeah, publishing and touring and stuff like that. I don’t think we’ve ever made a single cent on selling an album and I don’t know if we will. But the thing is, also, we don’t spend a lot of money [on] making records. A lot of bands are still very old-fashioned. They still like to go in and spend a year in a big studio that costs thousands of dollars a day and make it sound perfect—when in fact all it comes down to is that it’s gonna be compressed into a single MP3 file anyway. [But] the way we record and the way that we do it, we don’t spend any money on our albums. So we don’t feel like we’re being cheated if people download our record for free. We just want to get our music out there; we think our music is so good that everyone should be able to listen to it. If they pay for it, fine; if they don’t pay for it, I really don’t care.
Do you record in a studio or do you do most of your recording at home?
Everything at home.
It’s kind of fascinating to me to hear you say that, because one of your obvious influences is one of the great studio wizards of all time, Phil Spector. But what you’re saying is that the technology exists now where you can get that same huge studio sound at home.
Yeah. I can get a bigger sound at home if I want to. Plus, recording at home, there’s no pressure. If you book a studio for two weeks, you have to finish that album within two weeks. You have to get up and work every day, and if you don’t feel like working, you just wasted two thousand dollars not working one day. And I hate that. So here, I can just record whenever I want. It’s fun. I’m surrounded by everything that inspires me. I have my whole vinyl collection, CDs, DVDs, books—everything that I want is right here.
Speaking of Phil Spector, did you follow his murder trial at all?
I did in the beginning a little bit. But I grew tired of it. It was just the same every day.
Is he someone that you would ever be interested in working with?
I would do it because of the name. But I don’t think it would be a very pleasant experience necessarily. Because the thing is, the way that he produces and the way I produce—it’s just miles apart. He can do a vocal track over and over and over for two weeks to get it just perfect, you know? I do a vocal track two times and then I think it’s perfect and I let it be. I write three or four songs a day and record them. He would write three or four songs a year, probably. So it’s a very different way of working and I really don’t think I would have the patience for it.
