Blanket Music

A conversation with Chad Crouch

(April 2006)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

Spring is here again, and Portland's Blanket Music have a gift for anyone shaking off the winter doldrums in the company of a special someone:  two discs of unabashed, sweetly melodic indie-pop love songs - one of originals (The Love), one of covers (Love Translation), all lacking any trace of indie irony or kitsch.  Snuggle up!

Frontman Chad Crouch also does double duty as the founder of HUSH Records, an "anti-rock" label with an exciting and productive roster, and a history that includes local acts done good like The Decemberists.  In a chat with The Red Alert, he talks about putting together two discs of from-the-heart love songs, and finding the delicate balance between his musician side and his label head side (and a few other sides for good measure).

Did you know right from the beginning stages that you wanted to do this new record as two separate discs of love songs, one of originals and one of covers?

You know, I think we were just playing around at rehearsals and doing some covers that happened to be love songs—one was Debbie Harry’s, we did some Beatles tunes, and we did some old tunes that I dug out.  I did a solo CD-R of love songs back in 1997, and a couple of those made it on to the CD nine years later—in much different arrangements.  The two that stood the test of time were “Reno” and “Love Police.”  Those are very old songs.  I tend to work in batches, so I started writing more love songs, and that’s how it all got started.

The album is really a feel-good album for listeners.  Is it a pick-me-up to play, too, or do you get to a point where you’re beyond that?

That was intended, to make an album that was happy and feel-good.  And with a collection of love songs, I didn’t want them to be unrequited love songs, I wanted them to be happy, in-love love songs.  Al Green love songs.  The fact that we recorded it last spring and are releasing it this spring is intentional, too.  I think people come out of their shells again.  I know I’m ready…  Flowers are blooming outside, but we’re stuck with winter weather here in the northwest.  I’m ready for spring to come in earnest.

For the newer songs, how intact are they when you bring them in for the band?  How much gets worked out by the group?

They change fairly dramatically.  The words generally stay the same, and the chord progressions are the same.  But the tempos can change dramatically, the time signatures can change… and doing the arrangements is a lot of fun. 

I demo out all the stuff with just an acoustic guitar for the band.  I thought I might include them as mp3s on a CD, but then I thought the better of it.  (laughs)  Let the songs speak for themselves as the finished product that they are.

Jumping back to the words… you obviously have an artistic background and you’ve said in the past that you approach lyrics from a very visual perspective.  Was that different on this record?  Working with such earnest love songs, it seems that it would be.

The lyrics are very honest.  It’s a very willing to wear my heart on my sleeve kind of thing—and they’re personal.  I didn’t want to shy away from that.  It’s a shift from the last record, which was more of a creation, more about evoking a world around the songs.  This one wasn’t as visually motivated, that would be accurate.

You’d also talked in the past about feeling like an imposter in some ways because you started out without much musical training.  Has that changed now that you’ve been doing it for a while?  Do you feel like a veteran now?

(laughs)  I do.  I honestly do, I guess, kind of feel like a veteran, simply because I’ve been doing it and I’ve been around people that have been doing it.  And I know that even people who are enormously popular and have found mass acceptance don’t necessarily have the talent… people have different kinds of talent.  I always felt like the guitar was kind of lost on me.  I can’t play a burning solo to save my life—and neither can Colin Meloy… or many, many, many other people who have become almost legends in the musical world.  It’s just part of pop music, that you don’t have to be a Mozart to write a song that will find its way into the hearts and minds of a lot of people.

In addition to lyrics, my other hang-up is track sequencing.  When you have an album like this that has a very clear theme built-in, how important is the track order?  And is that a gut process or a deliberate process?

I think most artists are very deliberate about their sequencing.  I know that when we went to sequence, it was more based on maintaining dynamics and interest.  Certain songs are paired to be together—for example, “I Love You” and “Kiss,” we always play as a couplet; they’re kind of like the same song to the band.  So those obviously had to go back-to-back.  With the rest, we used general rules of thumb—a lot of cliché rules.  There’s the solo track on the end that’s kind of a sweet ballad, a nice closer.  Then there’s the pop song on the beginning.  We’re pretty traditional about the way we sequence the record, and it’s not necessarily telling any story with the record, just making it an interesting record to listen to from front to back.

On the covers disc, Love Translation, did it make it more or less challenging to have been so intimately acquainted with all the songs?  These weren’t songs you were approaching fresh by any means.

Yeah, these are all songs that I’m pretty intimately acquainted with, having published nine out of eleven, I think.  With all of the covers that we do, we always try to exert our own DNA as a band on the song.  Some songs are quite a bit different, and some aren’t as different.

We would try out ways to play a song, and if it sounded too similar to another song we knew we were covering, we would go in another totally different direction.  If one song sounded too Latin, we would go more toward straight-up pop or whatever.

And then did you take it to the original performer and say, “Hey, check it out?”

No!  (laughs)  No.  A few of them didn’t hear it until I gave them the finished product—which is kind of nice, too, because then they see the whole packaged deal.  There was something satisfying about the whole element of withholding and surprising.

I’ve talked to a number of bands and musicians over the years who have said, “Oh, I’d love to have my own label and put out whatever I want, help my friends, help local bands… but I’m too worried that it would drain me from making my own music.”  Is that something you’ve had to work at avoiding?  Or has it been a pretty clear division?

Oh, let me tell you, having a label is a tough road to hoe.  Of the business models that one could want to get involved in… (laughs) having a record label may be one of the most shaky.  It’s a little bit better now that, you know, if you sell something on iTunes, the person can’t really return it—or iTunes can’t return it.  Whereas if I sold a CD to our distributor two years ago and it sat in a store for two years and didn’t sell, the store could return it to us and we would give them a full refund.  There’s no other wholesale business that would let you have something on your shelf for two years and let you return it.

Also, just how competitive it is… just like the Pavement song, bands start up every day.  There are so many bands, and they will compete against you at humongous losses of time and resources and capital.  In other sectors of business, a company will go out of business if they’re not breaking even in three years or whatever—but not with music.  That’s what makes it special and intriguing.  But, yes, it definitely is a time-sink and a balancing act to carve out time to do my own stuff, especially as I have two other jobs.  (laughs)  I have my artwork and I dabble in real estate.

That’s enough to keep the schedule full.

It is!

Okay, so what’s on tap for HUSH as the year charges ahead?

Oh!  This answer is easy.  Norfolk & Western has an EP which I’m very excited about.  I compare it to Death Cab’s Forbidden Love EP, where it just kind of finally clicked for everybody.  That’s on tap, and the Super XX Man, and Corrina Repp is releasing something, and then Norfolk will come right back in the fall with a full-length.

Since our site also focuses on some social matters, I wanted to talk about Friends of the Children, since I know you’ve been involved with them.  Can you tell us a little about what they’re about, and how they’re different from organizations of a similar ilk?

Friends is quite a bit different than many organizations.  It requires a lot of investment in the children’s lives that they commit to.  It started in Portland was started by a guy who grew up in the neighborhood where I live now—the neighborhood was a lot tougher then—and went on to become quite well-to-do and wanted to be philanthropic with his success.  Touching on where he came from, he went back into the neighborhood and created this program with mentors—“friends”—and the friends are each assigned to no more, and this is amazing, no more than eight kids.  They make a ten-year commitment to be a friend.  I think their track record is proving to be very successful.

They’ve since started satellites, and I know that New York’s Friends of the Children is quite active.  It requires some fundraising savvy.  These friends are paid a full-time salary.  It’s not a high-paying salary, but it’s certainly enough to live on, somewhat comfortably.  It’s pretty amazing.

Before we wrap up, I wanted to give you a chance—since we’ve been talking about love songs—to send a little valentine to your city.  What makes Portland such a nice place to set up shop? 

Well, I grew up here.  (laughs)  But I’ve also taken the time to move across the country very slowly.  I rode my bike across the country as a teenager, and we went right through big cities, too.  I got to meet people on a very human level, and I always thought, “Well, this city is pretty cool, but I really like where I came from.”  I think one thing it has going for it is just geography—it has the mountains and the sea within an hour of traveling time.  As far as the city, it’s got the cosmopolitan stuff, but it also feels pretty village-like.  It’s very negotiable.

And although it’s changing, rents and mortgages have been pretty good, particularly for a West Coast city.  That’s why there are a lot of bands here—there are basements, and you can work a part-time job and afford your rent and have a basement and have time to practice.  But all along the West Coast we’ve seen real estate, and rent to some extent, go up—so we’re having to work a little bit harder now than three years ago.  (laughs)

Well, maybe that wasn’t a good question, then—maybe you don’t want people to know about all the perks that come with living in Portland.

That’s a popular quote from a former governor of Oregon—“please come and visit…but don’t stay.”