Song Exploder - Converge - Dark Horse

Episode Date: June 19, 2014

The band Converge formed in 1990, when its members were teenagers. They've been making music that lives somewhere in the intersection of punk, hardcore, and metal for almost 25 years. Guitarist Kurt Ballou spoke to me from his studio GodCity, which is where Converge writes and records. I also spoke over the phone with singer Jake Bannon. Coming up, they'll talk about how the physical space of GodCity influenced their songwriting, how the Boston hardcore scene gave them a home, and how to get the classic Swedish death metal guitar tone.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi-Kesh-Hirway. The band Converge formed in 1990, when its members were teenagers. They've been making music that lives somewhere in the intersection of punk, hardcore, and metal, for almost 25 years. Guitarist Kurt Paloo spoke to me from his studio, God City, which is where Converge writes and records. I also spoke over the phone with singer Jake Bannon. Coming up, they'll talk about how the physical space of God City influenced their songwriting. the Boston hardcore scene gave them a home, and how to get the classic Swedish death metal guitar tone.

Hi, this is Kurt Ballou from the band Converge. I play guitar in the band, and I'm also a recording engineer, and I recorded the majority of our most recent material. The other members of Converge are Jake Bannon on vocals, Nate Newton on bass, and Ben Kohler on drums. Today we're going to talk about the song Dark Horse, which is the first song on our 2009 album, Acts to Fall. The guitar tracks on this song, I fall into this trap whenever I'm recording, especially a Converge record where, like, if I do something, I want to use it, I'm not good at editing out the stuff that I've put effort into. So sometimes, like, I'll record tracks with a whole bunch of different tones just to experiment to see which one I like the best, and what I end up usually doing is just using all of them. This record had a little bit of a longer recording process, where we sort of picked at it over the course of several months. And within that process, I was recording other bands.

And one of the bands that I recorded was called Black Breath. And I really liked the guitar sound that I got for them and decided late at night after one of their sessions to do another layer of guitar tracks with their guitar tone on this record. The big character of their tone is the boss, heavy metal pedal, which is pretty well known these days for producing the classic Swedish death metal. metal tone. For some reason, a bunch of American post-hardcore type bands have latched onto that

in recent years. It's a pretty awesome tone. So I use that. It's just layered for thickness. Hi, I'm Jake. I sing for Converge and create visuals, write lyrics, all that stuff. The song is about losing a friend and looking through that loss at the rest of your life that you have in front of you and what you can do with it. To me, it's a very very important. positive song, you know, trying to ride towards positivity, trying to a constructive, positive life. I feel that people that don't really understand

our band, they would possibly misinterpret a sort of aggression level for something that was not positive in some way. They're about trying to find some sort of light at the end of the tunnel. Negative themes just not really our style. It's just not who we are as people. Jake really has two different modes that he sings in.

There's Shouty Jake and there's Monster Jake, where he uses pretty much an entire lungs worth of air for every word. I think recording vocals is one of the hardest things to do, particularly in a hardcore band because vocalists, they feed off the energy of a crowd. And so when you're standing on a stage and you've got all these people with their eyes fixed on you and you've got like a drummer like Ben behind you

and then and Nate and I and it's super loud. So you've got all this volume pushing the words out of you from behind and you've got this much different feeling than being in a room by yourself with some headphones on. Jake is adamant about recording all of his vocals with a handheld microphone. That's just the way that he performs best. Well, if my instrument, put a guitarist,

want to put a guitar on a stand. It probably feels a bit awkward because you don't really have the tactile feel of holding a neck and being able to move it appropriately the way your body wants to move. It's no different with a microphone either. You just play. It's what I'm used to. The backing vocal choices are generally a band decision. Nate's a very strong singer.

I'm not as strong a singer as he is, but I can fake it good enough for a recording. It's just sort of reinforcing the chorus. Nate really plays bass like a guitar. doesn't pick anywhere near the bridge and he plays a lot of chords and he's a guitar player that you know we got to play bass for us when Nate Ben and I are working on the music for a song in the past 10 years or so we've really tried to create a musical song structure that will be in support of a memorable vocal structure I think early in the band's career we tend to just chain together riffs that we thought sounded cool and that

That's all well and good, and that's certainly in the tradition of metal is how it was done. We're all more a fan of the pop song format, and we find that our favorite most memorable metal songs were written with a hook, a repeated chorus and a sensical verse. With Dark Horse, it really is. It's pretty verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. And I think that that's one of the reasons why it's, I think, a memorable song. You know, we're working in this sort of 5-8 pattern and one of the riffs we came up with just sounded better with sort of a 5-4 drumbeat behind it. So like, I started God's City in around 1995 in my parents' basement just with some modest recording equipment, a half-inch, a track recorder and that sort of snowballed.

I set up my current studio in Salem, Massachusetts. and I've been open here since about the end of 2003. The relationship between God's City and Converge is definitely a symbiotic one. The space that you're recording in, the space that you're practicing in, affects your creative process. You know, like, when you get on a stage behind, like, a drum set in some huge room, you just, like, hit the snare drum once, and it's, like, awesome. I just want to, like, play slow stuff.

My studio is what I would call a medium-sized live room, and it's quite well treated. So it's pretty dead in here. So we can hear what we're doing fairly clearly, and I think that that's one of the reasons why we tend to write predominantly fast songs. It's actually the first time I've thought about it that way, but it makes a lot of sense. Every teenage weirdo has a need to define themselves to establish their independence, but in doing so also needs to feel a sense of belonging, but maybe belonging to something that's a little bit outside of what everybody else belongs to.

And that community of hardcore bands and underground metal bands and stuff is the community that I gravitated towards and felt was a surrogate family of sorts to me. And I know that Jake absolutely felt the same way. I've never really had, for my creative efforts, you know, I've kind of just done what I've done since I've been. kid, you know, nobody's tied to me on the back and said I'm doing a good job or not. We're certainly not a huge band by conventional standards, but in terms of the musical scene in which we love and we play to,

I never thought it would be possible for a band to do as much as we've done. And now, here's Dark Horse by Converge in its entirety. For more information on Converge, including links to buy their music, visit Song Exploder.net. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out of full-length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career.

And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists. And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Robe. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Malina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jen, Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light,

and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. You can find all the past and future episodes of SongExploder at SongExploder.net or on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you download podcasts. Find the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary story-driven shows. Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. My name is Rishi-Kesh hereway. Thanks for listening.

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