Ben Knox Miller : No, we had smooth sailing. We had a friend show up on our doorstep a couple days before Bonnaroo, and he sold everything he owns and bought a Ford Econoline tour van because he fell in love with this band from Zimbabwe that he wanted to bring over to the States. And he booked them a month of shows, some big festivals this summer, and were all set to go, and then their visas got declined. And so he just came to our apartment and was like, ‘I’ve got nothing to do. Every day I’m calling up a new club and canceling shows that I’ve booked for my band, and here’s everything I own—it’s this van. Can I take you to Bonnaroo?’ So whereas, normally, we tour in a minivan, comparably it was real luxury.
MOKB : Yeah, close quarters in a minivan with all that gear.
BKM : Yeah, it’s insane. We’ve just put off the inevitable purchase of a van for a long time. Not really sure why. I guess we don’t need it. We’re comfortable with each other.
MOKB : So Bonnaroo is your first big festival. How has it been so far?
BKM : The problem with it has been that there’s always somewhere that we have to be, and there’s a lot of people who are doing interviews, but it doesn’t seem like they really give a shit about anything. We’ve had a lot of interviews from people who are like, ‘There’s a thousand bands coming in every day.’ Maybe they’ve heard your music, maybe they haven’t, so they’re just asking these fabricated questions like, ‘How’d you get your band name?’ or ‘So what’s it like to have this new audience?’ Just the generic questions, the dead giveaways. So we haven’t gotten to see enough music because we’re answering these stupid questions.
MOKB : [laughs] Yeah, sorry, I’ll move it along quickly so you can go on your way. [laughs]
BKM : [laughs] No, this is good.
MOKB : So has anything crazy happened with you guys? Last year was my first year here, and a Port-O-Potty almost fell on me and a strange, unwanted man entered my tent at some random hour. [laughs] So has anything like that happened to you? Any unwanted men …
BKM : [laughs]
MOKB : … in the minivan?
BKM : No, I don’t think so. I almost feel guilty because we have hotel room for the first time, and when we tour in the States, we crash on people’s floors … so we have this hotel room, and it’s four stars—or maybe it’s three stars, or two? I don’t know, I’ve never been in a four-star hotel—but it’s a lot of stars, more than we’re used to. Everything feels so clean and prepared, and there’s shuttles taking you around. It’s a weird feeling. I feel like we’re being herded everywhere. It’s been really easy. I wish I had a more interesting story to tell you. Next time, we should just bring a tent.
MOKB : So, since you’ve already been asked so many generic questions, I might as well ask one too. Have you actually gotten a chance to see anyone you’re excited about?
BKM : I got to see David Byrne, which I’ve wanted to see David Byrne for a long time. It’s crazy. It makes your head spin. You don’t know what you’re watching. He’s always just a little bit ahead of you—like where you can’t tell what he takes seriously and what he doesn’t, and whether the joke’s on you or not, you know? And I love that. And we got to see Lucinda Williams, and I’ve loved her writing for a long time. There’s not that many ‘song’ people here—there’s a lot of bands, and it’s kind of survival of the loudest.
MOKB : As you guys have experienced.
BKM : Yeah. Her, David Byrne and then last night, I just wanted to see the Phish spectacle also. I’ve never seen Phish live, and I have plenty of friends who are insanely obsessed with them, so I still feel surprisingly neutral about it, but just to watch the place explode and how much energy was in that room blew my mind a little bit. I feel like anthropologists should study it because it’s like this really weird niche of human insanity.
MOKB : So I was in the guest hospitality area yesterday, and your set from Thursday night was playing on the TVs, and people were glued. And it was really cool to see.
BKM : Get the fuck out of here. [laughs] My mom called me and told me she saw it on AT&T or somewhere and said that she thought it was incredible and that we must be so happy about it. But we weren’t happy about it at all.
MOKB : You weren’t happy about it? Why weren’t you happy about it?
BKM : I don’t know, it was just so many things we were adjusting to. It was the first time we played on that scale, and our songs are so quiet, so it’s hard to tell if anyone is listening. So I was shocked when people were coming up and saying they liked it, and some of them really saying (they liked) it, because everybody says they liked it, but a few were saying they really liked it. I don’t know, it’s just so different from anything we’re used to. It was very confusing, and the rain was so loud. Were you at the show on Thursday?
MOKB : No, my flight got delayed, and I was stuck in Dallas.
BKM : Good, so you can have your first real show experience somewhere better. But the rain was so loud that we couldn’t hear ourselves on stage, so it was just like playing into the darkness. We couldn’t hear ourselves, and we didn’t know if the audience could hear us and it was very confusing. But, everybody who saw the video of it and heard it said they loved it. We’ll get used to this pretty quickly, I hope, because there are so many of these this summer that if we don’t, we’ll just drive ourselves crazy. We have to get used to it.
MOKB : The re-release of your album Oh My God, Charlie Darwin was Tuesday (June 9). How did the album change for this release?
BKM : There were two significant things. One, it was re-mastered by Bob Ludwig, so the overall sound is warmer, and the other is that it was re-sequenced—some of the songs shuffled around. The re-mastering was kind of for obvious reasons: because the record label said ‘We can pay for you to get it mastered by the greatest mastering engineer in the history of mastering,’ who like, invented all the methods, so it was like, ‘Of course.’ And Bob Ludwig is a genius. He has incredible, warm analog equipment. Also, just has some sort of spirituality that must make it onto the record. There’s something about him. He believes in crazy forces that most of us don’t but with such fervor that perhaps it translates somehow. And the re-sequencing we did because I think we came to feel like the album was a little impatient on the first release. We did the Darwin song, which is sort of a one-of-a-kind on the record, and then we did “To Ohio,” which I guess is a little more typical of us and mellow, and then went straight into two rock songs, which felt a little bit impatient. So we put “Ticket Taker” at number 3. We though it would be a good way to let it evolve more.
MOKB : Has any of your DIY approach from the original release had to be sacrificed upon the wider re-release?
BKM : Of course there’s a little bit of sacrifice because we did the first 2,000 copies ourselves. We painted them with house paint, we painted them all blue, and then we did two layers of silkscreen on top of that. So every one that we sold had been made by us, which gives a certain something. But then we sold out of those pretty quickly—more quickly than we thought we would—so we had to make 5,000 more, and for that, we were on tour the whole time. And it took us about 10 days to paint all those, so to do 5,000 would have been twenty-something days for us. So we hired that out to our friends in Providence, so it was still a hometown thing, and our friends, they painted it the same way, and they did 5,000 more, and we sold out of those and had Nonesuch do the re-issue. And we able to convince Nonesuch to let us do the first 20,000 with our friends in Providence, so even the ones being sold in Borders or Wal-Mart—or wherever they’re selling them—they’re still painted in Providence by people, so if you scratch it or get it wet, you’re gonna fuck it up.
MOKB : Don’t fuck it up, people buying it!
BKM : [laughs] Yeah, so I was thrilled that they let us do that. It was like a nice gesture of goodwill right at the beginning of our relationship with them and sort of a sign that they’re open to us keeping the tangible thing part of what we do.
MOKB : So one of your songs, “Home I’ll Never Be,” is by Jack Kerouac. What made you guys want to put your own spin on it?
BKM : Well, we first heard the (Tom) Waits version of that, and it’s just so beautiful. It’s on the last track of Orphans, which is his collection of things that didn’t get released or for whatever reason, there’s a new version of the song. It’s a three-disc volume, and the last one is sort of this grab bag of random stuff, all completely different from the last. This one song was just a tape recorder on top of a piano, and he just feels so spontaneous. He sings a Kerouac song, it’s from On the Road, and it’s haunting, it’s beautiful. I think you should listen to it. I think just about anybody would have their mind blown. I just fell in love with the song and wanted to do it and found a way to turn it into a rock ‘n’ roll song that just got us excited. Thematically, it fits with the record. I don’t think it stands out as a cover.
MOKB : Another thing I was curious about was Jeff (Prystowsky's) mustache. I’m curious …
BKM : Jeff! Mustache question!
MOKB : I want to know—magical powers? mystical? seduction of women? There’s got to be some sort of force behind that mustache. What sort of fringe benefits does it bring to you?
Jeff Prystowsky : [laughs] You know, not many people have a mustache like this one, so it makes me stand out when I’m walking around at home on the city streets. People will roll down their windows and say, ‘Low Anthem! Low Anthem!’
MOKB, BKM, JP : [laughs]
JP : And I think that’s because they see the mustache. It’s like it’s just become another symbol for the band or something. Yeah.
BKM : That’s true. This is not—I don’t think this is a hipster mustache, though. It’s more of like an old-time baseball player’s mustache—Rollie Fingers. You know, Jeff waxes it and rolls it—not right now! it’s Bonnaroo.
MOKB : So you curl it up?
BKM : Oh yeah.
JP : Sometimes, yeah.
MOKB : Sorry about the lame mustache question. Evidently you must get this a lot.
JP : No, that’s ok. I started growing my hair out and growing a mustache because actually I was a big fan of Neil Young, and I saw him do that.
BKM : Also, his plan is to grow it out long enough so he can make a bass bow out of it.
JP : True.
MOKB : It’s true?
JP : If it grows down to your butt, you could cut it short and then have just the right length to use the hair for a bow.
BKM : Normally, they get that hair from stallions, right? Mongol stallions. Their anatomy makes it so their hair hangs between their legs, and they pee on it throughout the course of their life, which makes it very brittle and good for bass, so we’re not sure what we’re going to do to distress the hair. The length and the thickness is there. Maybe your mustache hair would be thicker?
MOKB : Well, I’ve named it ‘The GM.’ The Glorious Mustache.
BKM : [laughs]
JP : You’re the first to name it.
BKM : GM, I like it.
JP : Actually, I get this at shows. People pull me aside and say, ‘Can I take a picture of you?’ And I say, ‘Sure, sure, of course.’ And they like, point to the mustache, and I’m like, ‘What the hell?’ and they’re like, ‘We love the mustache!’ And sometimes they’ll literally say, ‘Can we take a picture of your mustache?’ and they’ll zoom all in. It’s weird!
MOKB : Well, I’m glad it’s gotten a positive response. I’m curious about your instruments because you use so many unconventional ones. I envision some sort of toy chest of instruments in your house. Do you have something like that you can just explore when you’re looking to do something new and fun?
BKM : Yeah, we have one of those. We live in this third-floor apartment, and we have all these attics that are filled with these instruments that we collect traveling or that people give to us often, or we find them in thrift stores, beat up. One of my hobbies when we’re not on the road is to restore instruments, so that pump organ that you see, I collect these pump organs and refurbish them. They’re beautiful inside, and they’re from an age where everything is mechanical, so you can see how it works, so there’s nothing electrical that could go wrong so you don’t understand it … there’s something so rewarding about the mechanisms. So I do that, and the E flat horn is also an ancient instrument. It’s an English marching band instrument, like an adapted version of the French horn. It’s easier to hold. … It’s a great instrument. I don’t know how we came by it. … (and) a classical percussion instrument called crotales—it’s typically hit with a mallet. We were in a composition class back in the day, and we saw somebody use it with bows. And if you play the notes next to each other, there’s this insane air pressure that they create as they resonate, and they create this swelling. It’s hit or miss whether it’s going to come across live because of the acoustics of the room and all these other things, but at their best, that instrument blows my mind. It’s really beautiful.
MOKB : So you play approximately a bajillion instruments on the album. How many of those are you actually able to—
BKM : —play confidently?
MOKB : I was going to say ‘take along with you on the road?’ but that too.
BKM : Oh, I see. [laughs] Well, play confidently, the answer is we just kind of learn parts for the records, like, I don’t really know how to play that horn, but I know how to get the tone right for that song and play a little bit so we can use it. Our musicianship is probably far behind our ear for arrangements. I think that’s really what we’re doing—we have these instruments because we hear the frequencies that we want, to get the frequencies buzzing and exciting us, so we just have to find the instruments that do that and learn to play them enough so we can do it. It’s always awkward bringing a new thing on stage. We just got a fiddle and a cello. [laughs] We broke them out at a couple festivals before we came down here, and it was just awful. Completely out of tune, scratchy, just ugly. But we will learn them in public, and it will be awkward for a while, and eventually, it will become part of the sound. That’s the way it went with everything. What was the question? The question wasn’t about our playing … how many do we bring on the road? Yeah, there were 27 on the record, and we bring, I think, 13 on the road.
MOKB : So many instruments, and only three people playing!
BKM : Sound guys hate it.
The Low Anthem On Tour:
07/04 - London, UK @ O2 Wireless Festival
07/04 - Utrecht, NL @ Tivoli
07/25 - Philadelphia, PA @ XPonential Music Festival
08/01 - Newport, RI @ Newport Folk Festival
08/04 - Pittsburgh, PA @ Club Cafe w/Joe Pug
08/06 - Indianapolis, IN @ Locals Only w/Joe Pug
08/08 - Chicago, IL @ Lollapalooza
08/10 - Newport, KY @ Southgate House w/Langhorne Slim
08/11 - Nashville, TN @ The Basement w/Langhorne Slim
08/12 - Asheville, NC @ Grey Eagle Tavern w/Langhorne Slim
081/4 - Chapel Hill, NC @ Local 506 w/Langhorne Slim
08/15 - Baltimore, MD @ Ottobar w/Langhorne Slim
08/16 - Philadelphia, PA @ Philadelphia Folk Festival
08/29 - Plymouth, MA @ Plymouth Waterfront Festival
09/04 - Stradbally, IE @ Electric Picnic
09/11 - Dorset, UK @ End of the Road Festival
09/12 - Dorset, UK @ End of the Road Festival
09/13 - Isle of Wight @ Bestival
10/02- Austin, TX @ Austin City Limits
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