>>PREVIEW
THE ELECTED
Saturday, October 21
Liberty Lounge
For a guy who makes such easygoing music, Blake Sennett doesn’t have an easygoing schedule. When he’s not making hook-heavy pop with pals in Rilo Kiley, he’s working up material for his sun-drenched side project The Elected.
Admittedly, juggling more than one band is a trick many artists have mastered, but on The Elected’s latest album, Sun, Sun, Sun, Sennett ups the ante.
"I take on all the writing duties," says Sennett, who fronts the band and plays no less than nine instruments. "Wearing all those hats can be a bit of a drag sometimes. It can get tiring."
Tiring, indeed. When The Elected released their first album on Sub Pop back in 2004, it blended mild glitch with acoustic campfire pop. This time around Sennett modelled the album on the classic AM radio tracks of his youth.
"It was something we decided before we started recording," he says. "We were going to abandon all the beats and try to make more of a band song. Try to make something a little more consistent with some of the recordings we grew up with – that our parents used to spin. Those records didn’t have any beats or modern sound effects, so we tried, if we could, to stay away from modern-sounding stuff."
To make good on that decision, Sennett added the title of producer to his resumé . He and bandmate Mike Bloom manned the boards for Sun, Sun, Sun and while it’s a role Sennett easily slipped into, it’s not something he would readily try again.
"I felt like any record I work on, I kind of take that role on anyway, to some degree," he says. "It was cool, but ultimately too much work."
There is a hint of irony in that statement. When a multi-instrumental singer-songwriter-producer tells you something is too labour intensive, it’s obvious that he has brought the workload on himself.
"I tend to want to always do something," he says. "I probably take on too much, but I always want to be making a record or touring."
In the case of Sun, Sun, Sun, it’s doing both. You see, The Elected hadn’t finished work on the album when it came time for Sennett to go on tour with Rilo Kiley. Instead of putting the record on the back burner, he and Bloom took the show on the road.
"We recorded the basic tracks out at Los Angeles, and when we didn’t finish in time, we dumped all the tape onto hard drives and my friend Mike and I finished it on the road," says Sennett. "He was touring with Rilo Kiley as sort of a fifth man and so we would take our opportunities and record vocals and record guitars like that on the road."
Of course, between sound checks, long drives and late nights, touring doesn’t leave much spare time to crank out an album. To make the most of his free time, Sennett learned how to convert any hotel room into a studio-away-from-home.
"For vocals we would take apart beds and turn them into vocal booths," he says, "Anytime you are recording, unless you really want that effect you want to cut down on the reflections. So we would take apart beds and make little rooms for vocals or little boxes for guitar. Or we would take off all the bedspreads and cover all the walls of the bathroom with them. It’s pretty effective."
Taking hotel beds apart? Apparently Sennett isn’t afraid of hard work or whatever might be living under a hotel box spring.
"A lot of it was in Europe," he assures, "and they keep their hotel rooms cleaner than we keep ours." |
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