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ACL 2009 Preview: Phoenix
This isn’t French pop quartet Phoenix’s first rodeo — childhood friends who grew up in the Paris suburb of Versailles, they’ve been active under their current name for 13 years and played together in various configurations for even longer. Across three albums of infectious pop — 2000’s “United,” 2004’s “Alphabetical” and 2006’s daring and challenging “It’s Never Been Like That” — the quartet developed a reputation for penning the kind of songs that got stuck in your head.
But this year has brought the band a tidal wave of hype and adulation, with their fourth studio album, “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix,” a collection of 10 fiendishly hook-heavy rockers, garnering universally glowing reviews and landing the band performances on seemingly every late-night talk show on network television. In the midst of a sold-out U.S. tour, guitarist Laurent Brancowitz spoke to us about their unlikely recent success, the trials of a French band that chooses to sing in English and the importance of friendship to the group’s work.
American-Statesman: The release of “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix” seems like it’s brought you to a whole different level of critical acclaim and popularity. From where you’re sitting, have you noticed a shift in the kind of attention you’re receiving?
Laurent Brancowitz: Yes, for sure. In New York, the reaction was so crazy, and of course there was “Saturday Night Live” and all that. We’ve done a lot of shows on this tour and they were all packed and it was a really good feeling. We weren’t expecting it so the surprise was even bigger. We really thought this album was weird and strange. When we were making it we were talking about making it very French and very Parisian and having songs about Franz Liszt and being very futuristic in its sound and all that. We felt it was very complicated and all the songs were very complex. But actually it has been the album that has touched the most people, which is amazing.
You started out writing “Wolfgang”’s songs on a houseboat on the Seine River in Paris. What was the idea behind that, and what was the experience like?
The idea was to find a place that had romantic qualities. Because when we are touring we do not really write songs. We need a very long moment to just be in the right state of mind, and it was a good way to do that. We knew that we had to do the writing in France, and we wanted to do a very European album, so we went to the most French place ever, right under the Eiffel Tower, and we stayed there for two months. But some of us got seasick, so we could not stay. They were not very productive months necessarily but it put us in the right state of mind. We did the rest of the writing in a hotel room in New York.
There was a decent amount of time between “It’s Never Been Like That” and “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix” — did you take that break to figure out what specific ideas you wanted to pursue on your fourth album?
We always need lots of time on an album. Our song writing and recording style is to do everything together, so it can be a very long process and hard to find a proper way to record. But the way we work is, we wait for something surprising to happen. The best thing you can do is let chaos be the ruler of the creative process. We knew we wanted a long instrumental in the middle of the album, which became “Love Like A Sunset,” but other than that you try never to have a plan. We had a vague desire to do something special but after a while, we forget all those things and just let things happen. The main thing is to forget about your plans. Let unexpected things happen.
The first single and first song off the album, “Lisztomania,” is named for Hungarian pianist Franz Liszt. He’s a tremendously unlikely subject for a pop song but it works very well — what was the idea behind selecting him as a song subject?
A lot of things made it feel very attractive, like a big magnet. We love the fact that Franz Liszt’s story was very old European culture but felt very modern and connected to the things that happen in the present. It was too good to resist. The lyrics are about the loneliness of the person that’s on stage. That was a thing we could relate to.
Phoenix, Air and Daft Punk all emerged from Versailles at about the same time, and obviously all of you were associated and had played together. All three of you have gone on to very successful careers. Was there something about the music scene in Versailles at the time that made it so fertile?
I think the key factor was that there wasn’t anything for young people going on at that time. So this isolation, it created a very strong bond between musicians. And we spent so much time together and we shared the same records for so many years and got excited about the same music. I would say that it was really a matter of being so bored that there was nothing else to do, so we met each other and we worked very hard trying to create music that mirrored the music that we listened to, so that there would be something there for us.
Phoenix has always chosen to write its songs in English. How has that gone over with French audiences?
It was kind of difficult for us in the beginning. When we were looking for a record company, everybody told us it wouldn’t be possible to sign a French band that sang in English. But all our favorite bands were from the U.S. or England and English is the universal language of popular music, like Latin was the musical language of the Middle Age. It’s just a convention. But French people’s sense of their language is very proud and they think the songs on the radio should be in French. So it was rough in the beginning. But even then we’ve always had an audience in France, and now they are very warm toward us. We have managed to conquer the French heart, I guess.
Phoenix has been together in varying forms since 1993 — is it hard to still get along and still be creative with one another after this many years?
You know, we are friends more than colleagues, so it makes our working relationship very unprofessional. Everything we do we try to do in a very amateur way, and we succeed in that. We are not the most mature band in the world, but it’s very important to keep it fresh and feel the same excitement when we are playing or creating a new song as we did years ago. And that’s the thing that makes it all work. Those moments of magic that you share with your best friends make it all worthwhile. We know it’s precious and since the very beginning we knew the most important thing was to keep this naïve friendship going. We knew it would be hard but we knew it was the most important thing.
Phoenix will perform on Friday Oct. 2 at 4:30 p.m. on the AMD stage.
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Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: ACL Festival 2009
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By Brian Barker
October 3, 2009 8:51 AM | Link to this
Music may be considered a universal language, but I think we need a spoken one as well.
Have you noticed the growing use of Esperanto at an international level :)
Eurovision entrant Patricia Kaas translated her entry into this international language for the Eurovision Song Contest for example.