| ABOVE
Evan
Way photographed on his porch at his home in Echo Park,
CA. The apartment is situation on a hill overlooking the
intersection of Alvarado and Glendale Blvd. and is walking
distance to The Echo.
Photographed
on October 25, 2009.
Concert
poster designed by Aly Redding. Aly also designed the cover
art for their recent 7" release, Orangufang. |
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It
may be impossible to find a more thoughtful and kind band
in Los Angeles than The Parson Red Heads. Fronted by songwriter
Evan Way, everyone in the band is super friendly, soft spoken,
and nice beyond description. Simply running into their drummer
Brette can lift my spirits. And so it's not surprising that
this attitude translates directly into their music, a blend
of folk and rock reminiscent of an early generation. In
fact, they capture that mood and atmosphere that I did a
double take when listening to the song "Raymond"
off their recent 7" Orangufang, thinking it
was a cover from 1970. I spoke with Evan in October of 2009
shortly after they, playing as a stripped down trio, returned
from a string of East coast shows.
Note:
The Parson Red Heads are kicking off a one month, 21
show West coast tour on Thursday, January 28 at The Echo.
Tell
me about this recent East Coast tour that you went on.
Evan Way: We signed on with a manager that
lives out in New jersey, so he and a bunch of other people
started getting on our case. We've toured the West coast,
we've done it a lot, and we play around here a lot, so it
just seemed like all of a sudden people were asking us if
we've played the East coast. Everyone started saying that
it was something we needed to do. We looked into what time
would be good and realized that if we went any later than
October we'd freeze our faces off and no one would want
to go outside to go to shows. It was really easy to book
shows, it's nice, everywhere is really close so I just booked
a string of shows. We did nine shows in nine days, hoped
on a plane, Sam, Brette, and I went out there and did a
bunch of stripped down shows.
Similar
what you did at the Abbot Kinney Street Festival?
EW: Exactly. Yeah, it was
cool. It developed a little bit [on the tour]. We were able
to rehearse while we were there. We stayed at a friend's
house and he had this huge four story house in New Jersey
and we got the whole top floor to ourselves; each of us
had our own room and we were able to practice. It was fun
cause we were actually able to make that form it's own thing
rather than it feeling like it was us playing our songs
in a half fully formed way, it was it's own thing all of
a sudden.
How
did your recent seven inch Orangufang come about? How did
that start?
EW: That's also connected
to the East coast. There was a blog on the East coast that
was interested in starting to put out seven inches, I guess
starting a seven inch label, and they approached us about
doing one. They approached another local band, Eagle Winged
Palace as well, and we were like, "why not? if you're
gonna pay for it." And they were like, "we're
gonna do Eagle Winged Palace's first and then we'll do yours,"
and then they just disappeared. I'd email asking what was
going on and there'd be no response. To this day I've never
gotten a reply. We had already kinda planned on it, figured
out what songs we were gonna do for it and they just disappeared.
So after a while I was like, "well, we got these songs,
it'd still be neat, there's a enough resources locally,
why not just keep it in the local community." So I
went up to Jax at Spaceland and said, "you want to
do a seven inch?" "Sure." "Alright."
(laughs) It turned out better, I was so glad we didn't do
it with the other guys, it's much better to do it with friends.
It
might have gotten lost doing it with them being that they
were on the East coast.
EW:
Yeah, doing it with Jax, she's so well connected
around here, it's just a cool thing. None of us lost money,
Jax made her money back, we got to put something out on
vinyl which was fun. It was just a neat thing.
Last
time I talked to her about it she said they were almost
sold out.
EW: Yeah, I think they're
all sold now. I think it's the first one she's made her
money back on. Which I was thrilled to hear. It kinda got
me spoiled to have something on vinyl. It's neat, but it
takes a lot of money, it's a whole nother world, I don't
know how The Monolators do it, they do all their albums
on vinyl without a label. I don't know how they do it.
Who
did the artwork for it the record?
EW: That was done by our
friend Aly who lives in Seattle. She's done a bunch of our
posters, like if you ever see a poster with a drawing of
a pretty girl with flowing hair, that's drawn by Aly. We
had a couple design ideas that we were sending back and
forth and then like two days before we needed it settled
I saw that cover from the Monkey's album,
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what's
it called, Aquarious something something, it's a drawing
of them all standing in a field, and they're drawn in that
style where they dont have any faces and its just an outline.
And I was like, "thats really cool." So I looked
up the cover online and sent it to her and said, "how
about something like this? And maybe you could put some
sheep in it." She was like, "alright," and
the next day she sent us the art. It was perfect.
I
was talking to Sam Fowles about the name Orangufang but
I can't remember the exact story, where did it come from?
EW: We always go through
a whole process thinking about names. We're recording a
new record and don't have any clue what we're gonna call
it, but we always start taking polls and lots of people
send us ideas. For a long time I had this idea of calling
a record Unicornucopia, which I thought was funny, And we
thought maybe we'd call it that but with it only being a
seven inch with two or three songs, calling it Unicornucopia
is kind of weird, a cornucopia seems to require a little
more heft. Sam, as a joke at one practice, said Orangufang,
it was a total joke, we all laughed, and then it got quite...we
said, "thats not so bad." We kept it in our heads
and as it got closer to having to decide it was the best
name. We wrote it down and realized it even looked cool
written. (laughs)
I
can't remember when I first saw you guys play, but there
were more than ten people on stage.
EW: That's likely. (laughs)
Maybe it was at The Echo during our residency, we were playing
as a fourteen or fifteen piece band at The Echo residency.
How
long have you been playing as The Parson Red Heads?
EW: We've been playing with
that name for five years? Brette, how long have we been
playing as The Parson Red Heads?
Brette Marie Way: Four and half years.
EW: Almost five I guess. We formed in Oregon
and played in Eugene for a while under that name.
Who
all was in Oregon?
EW: Me and Brette. Sam was
there in the very beginning, left [the band] and then came
back. Charlie who you might remember, was there for a while,
big beard, played bass. A guy named Tom was our original
guitar player. And then my sister. My sister was already
living here, but we all moved down and she joined. And we've
gone through many core members, mostly bass players. But
then all the while we had tambourine players, my friends
would come up and play tambourine, Raymond started playing
pedal steel with us quite a bit, so the band kind of inflated
and The Echo residency was out of control. It was like,
"lets just go as big as we can." We had two back
up harmony singers, four gutiar players, a pedal steel player,
bass and drums, three percussionists...
Who
was orchestrating all of that?
EW: I was, it was insanity. I don't think
I could do it again. It was really fun, you'd be playing
and you'd turn around and behind you who knows what's going
on. It's just crazy. It was really fun to do, and I'm sure
it was fun to watch, but its hard to keep it up, to rehearse.
How
does that compare to your recent shows where you're just
playing with you, Brette, and Sam?
EW: It's way different. Our
full band shows can still get up to seven people, Raymond
still plays a lot, the tambourine player still plays a lot,
so we still have around seven quite a bit. But only three,
doing shows like that really takes some getting used to.
It felt very uncomfortable at first but now we're comfortable.
When you're playing with fifteen people you don't even necessarily
have to play that well, it's actually almost impossible
to play well with a fifteen piece band, someone's going
to mess up. (laughs) It's just hard to get it to sound good
live, that's not really the point though, it's just supposed
to be a fun thing, whereas with the three piece you gotta
be right on or else it doesn't work. It's just like playing
solo. When I do solo shows, it's all about the song. It's
not really about putting on a show, if I perform the song
well it's a good show, if the song's not that good it's
not gonna be good or if I play the song poorly it's not
gonna be good. It's a lot less forgiving,
Do
you write most of the material for The Parson Red Heads?
EW: On the next record Sam
will have three songs, which is the most he's had on a Parsons
record. He had one on Owl and Timber too. Other
than that I am [writing all the songs].
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