Get Him Eat Him

A conversation with Matt LeMay

(June 2007)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

On the newly released Arms Down, Get Him Eat Him frontman Matt LeMay draws from an impeccable slate of power-pop and indie-rock influences, from Ted Leo & The Pharmacists to Spoon. Either through his band's early momentum or his connections through his moonlighting gig (he writes for Pitchfork), LeMay even borrowed members from a few of indie's most-beloved: The Wrens and Broken Social Scene (Jason Caddell of Dismemberment Plan, another influence, served as co-producer). But for all the predecessors and all the potential chefs in the kitchen, Arms Down comes across as more winsome and earnest than derivative or calculated. The release time is right, too—summertime being especially ripe for this sort of breezy, guitar-driven enthusiasm.

After having a recorder crap out during an initial interview, LeMay graciously agreed to an encore, and chatted to The Red Alert again about the making of Arms Down, and his dual role as a critic and a recording artist.

Well, we covered a lot of interesting ground last time, so let’s retrace a few steps.  You were talking about how you approached Arms Down somewhat differently because of a “less is more” approach.

When we made Geography Cones, we had such a short period of time; we were at Tiny Telephone in San Francisco for five and a half days.  We’d booked six days at the studio, but wound up playing a show one of those nights - we got offered a show we couldn’t really say no to, opening for The Arcade Fire.  I think we went in with a naïve assumption that the more cool stuff that was happening at any one moment, the better the song would be.  With this album, I think we went in with a similar approach; the songs that were written early still reflect that same sensibility.  As we were recording, things got a little more stripped down.  When we were mixing with Chad Clark at Silver Sonya in Washington, DC, he started taking a radically subtractive approach to the stuff we’d recorded.  He said that what he learned from working with Fugazi - and this has nothing to do with their recording so much as how they write songs - was the flashlight principle:  at any moment in a song, you should know who the flashlight is on and where your attention should be focused.

We had planned to mix the whole record during three days with him, and that was clearly not going to happen, but those three days left us with a lot to think about -and that’s part of the reason that the record took so long to mix.  We pared things down, reshuffled a bit, and tried to apply those lessons to everything we’d done in the interest of making a record that had a lot of different dynamics to it.

Did the flashlight principle click right away?  Or was there suspicion that it would play out as well as it wound up playing out?

Well, it’s interesting… when we did Geography Cones, Jay Pellicci mixed the album - he’s an incredible engineer and an incredibly good-natured guy; that record would not have existed if he hadn’t put in 20-hour days out of sheer goodwill.  I’ve always liked to have a lot of control over how everything is done.  When we were working with Chad - I love Chad a lot, and he’s a brilliant engineer and a great musician in his own right, but he’s not somebody who will not say what he thinks about something.  The first thing he said when he listened to our music when we were mixing was “This is not the record where everything sounds big and there is a million things going on.  I think you guys could make a record like this, but that is, in fact, not the nature of the record you made - so let’s try to get to the nature of the record you made.”  At first, I was certainly very skeptical.

I grew up listening to Dismemberment Plan and listening to Chad’s band, Smart Went Crazy - I think Con Art is one of the best records ever put out.  It became clear to me early on, working with Chad and Jason Caddell from Dismemberment Plan, that there was a lot to learn, and there was a process of my generation of musicians looking to the last generation for the lessons that we don’t have the experience to figure out on our own.  That’s exactly what happened with Jason and Chad working with J Robbins and Jawbox.  I think that’s a potent and magical force, in terms of us letting go and being willing to understand that we don’t know everything, and that we don’t know exactly how everything should sound.

The counterpart to that is that I read an interview with Deerhoof, another one of my absolute favorite bands, in Tape Op magazine, and Greg [Saunier] was talking about how he mixes and masters all of their music using terrible equipment but running off his own knowledge of how the music should sound.  On one hand, you have the approach of “We’re giving this over to these people who are much more experienced than we are” - on the other hand, you have the approach of “Nobody knows better than we do what these songs should sound like, because they’re our songs.”  We bounced back and forth between those modes a lot, from song to song and situation to situation.

Is there a fair amount of push-and-pull within the band itself, or is the push-and-pull mostly between you and the producers and engineers?

I think we’re still figuring out how that works between me and the band.  Everybody definitely has input on the way they want everything to sound.  I’m having trouble describing it because it took on a nature of its own; the dynamics of recording were spread out over so many places and so many people.  It took on a rhythm that I don’t know can be described in terms of the roles of individual players; it was just this thing that wound up happening.  Saying “magical” is kind of corny, but the experience of working with people that you respect that much, and having them take your work seriously, was really incredible for all of us.  Individual egos sort of ceased to be a concern.

How often do the songs emerge when you’re walking down the street, and how often do they emerge from concentrated periods of sitting down and saying that it’s time to write a song?

It’s pretty evenly dispersed, I think.  I wrote the chorus of “Just So” while I was on a bus from Boston to Providence, and I had a dream that we were about to cover an R.E.M. song and that was the R.E.M. song in my dream.  As far as I know, it’s not an R.E.M. song - it’s very possible that I ripped off an R.E.M. song.  I wrote and recorded the demo for “Exposure” in one afternoon during a concentrated session.  Initially, the goal was to write a song that had two interlocking keyboard parts; one of those parts became a guitar part, and that part became “Exposure.”

How does your critical background factor in to how you dissect your own work?

The time that gets tricky is now when the record is actually coming out.  When I’m writing, it’s really helpful because on a given week, I’ve written two record reviews and I’ve talked about “Oh, this song does this thing in a way I don’t think is good” or “This song does this thing that’s really great.”  So I have different approaches always circulating in my mind, and when it comes time to write a song, that works its way in.  Having that critical ear - sometimes when I write a song, I’ll literally just put the demo on repeat all day and listen and listen and listen until I hear something that sounds like it could be different.  I try to listen to my own music with that critical ear while I’m working on it, and hopefully avoid those moments when you get so into the idea of your own work that it’s hard to improve on it.  I definitely have moments like that all the time, but I do my best to apply a critical ear to the work as I’m doing it.  There’s definitely a window after we do something as a band where I’ll listen to our album obsessively - in a good way.  Then I won’t listen to it again for years because it will drive me crazy to hear it.

Is your opinion of other bands shaped by personal experience - can you be turned off a band’s music if you know they’re assholes?

Yeah, definitely - which is part of the reason I try not to be an asshole.  (laughs)  There are very few musicians I’ve met who are assholes.  But unwarranted asshole behavior makes it very difficult for me to enjoy that person’s music.  Enjoyment is sort of the key concept here; if you have an unpleasant experience with somebody, then hearing their voice singing in your face is not going to make you happy.  But for the most part, I think people in bands tend to be very nice and down-to-earth people.

I don’t think the ratio is any different than any other profession.  It could even be better, actually.

I think a lot of people don’t understand how trying and unglamorous the life of a working indie rock band is - especially with gas prices the way they are, you’re not going to make money, pretty much… unless you’re one of the ten bands that are making money at a given moment.  You’re going to play shows where there are no people, you’re going to play shows to large groups of people that hate you, and you’re going to work your ass off that, critically speaking, is going to be a mediocre record, or a great record that nobody cares about critically.  I think that experience is really good, in a sense, because, at the end of the day, you have to just take pleasure in the work you’re doing, and you have to have faith regardless of what people say.  Your interest and faith in that record has to come from you.

Yeah, I mean, you get in certain circles and Sufjan Stevens is this iconic, gigantic figure, but he’s really not selling that many albums.  I assume he’s one of the ones making money, but probably not as much as the people in that circle may think.

The whole concept of indie celebrity is something I find very troubling.  Sufjan is a good example.  I saw this woman Marla Hansen, who plays viola with him sometimes, do her own set in Brooklyn about a month ago.  And it was really wonderful - I enjoyed her music a lot.  Sufjan was there playing backup with her, but nobody made a big deal out of it.  These were people who didn’t care about which musician had one degree of success more than another.  Right at the end of the set, about 20 high school age Sufjan fangirls flood the place and start snapping picture.  It was like, “Really?  Really?”

Indie rock used to be nerds.  It used to be for people who wore XL-sized Jesus Lizard T-shirts and didn’t have a lot of friends and probably smelled kind of bad - and that was great.  It was a nerdy and knowledge-driven subculture.  Now it’s a little bit more cool - it’s a lot more cool.  Liking the right bands and wearing the right clothes at the same time will make you cool now.  The people who like the cool bands are the same people who care what clothes you’re wearing, which didn’t used to be true, either.  On the one hand, it’s great, because bands can reach more people and make more money - but at the same time, it can get kind of icky, I think.

Let’s back up with you and your immersion into indie rock.  When we talked last time, you were taking about when you started writing for Pitchfork, you had a rather limited knowledge base.

Yeah, I saw a poster for Jonathan Fire*Eater and I thought it was a cool name.  I looked it up on CDNOW’s Album Advisor and it pointed me in the direction of a lot of canonical indie stuff:  Modest Mouse, Pavement, Sleater-Kinney, and all these bands.  I was really excited because I’d never heard music like that before.  I assumed it was really weird - stuff that totally bizarro freaks would listen to, especially Guided By Voices, which was my larger-scale entry into indie rock.  I heard Mag Earwhig! - which is a lot of people’s least-favorite record of theirs, but I can’t process objectively because I loved it so much as a teenager - and I thought “Oh my god, this is so weird!”  I read that this guy is kind of old and they’re from Ohio - which, growing up in New York, is like an alternate universe.  It was really exciting for me.

Then I started reading MAGNET magazine, and through a Guided By Voices fan website, I started reading Pitchfork when I was 16.  I submitted a review to them because it seemed like so much fun.  This was before Pitchfork was even remotely a big deal, and especially before indie rock culture had spread to the point where anyone in my high school would have had any idea what Pitchfork was - this was just further evidence of my being this weird guy.  “I write about records on the Internet now” - everyone was like, “That’s great, you would write about records on the Internet.”  That’s part of the reason I find it so bizarre whenever people think I’m cool because I write for Pitchfork.  My experience has been writing record reviews in my mom’s apartment and listening to promo CDs… a lot of people have asked me what it’s like as if they’re some mystique about writing for Pitchfork that would make it any different from writing anything else that winds up on the Internet.  It’s really weird.

Before we finish, I wanted to make sure we covered the story about the guy with the giant inflatable middle finger on the stage.

Yeah, I’ll restate some of that spiel, too, because I think it’s an important spiel.  For the most part, it’s understood that you’re going to play with bands you don’t like, and you’re going to play with bands that don’t like you - and that’s fine.

But we played a show in New York with this guy who calls himself Mr. Move.  It was sort of one-man electro stuff.  He had a song that goes “Girls…girls…they’re easy to fuck.”  His fans - there weren’t terribly many of them - started spraying beer over our equipment, which resulting in our violating a deeply-held policy that we don’t load out during another band’s set.  But it was either that or we were going to get in a fistfight with Mr. Move’s fans - which didn’t seem like a good idea because we’re not the most warrior-like of bands.