The M's

A conversation with Josh Chicoine

(January 2006)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

A wind has been blowing through the branches of the MP3 blog trees for the past few weeks, and it’s whispering “M’s.”  The Chicago band seems ready to make a big splash with Future Women, a collection of tasteful, tuneful retro-pop and psych-pop.

Although they began as a non-touring band, The M's have already performed as an opening act for Wilco, The New Pornographers, and Polyvinyl labelmates Of Montreal.  While The M's share the pleasantly universal appeal of those bands, their most common reference point has been T-Rex.  The Kinks, as they often do, also figure into the mix.  As frontman Josh Chicoine explains, Future Women was made while looking both forward and backward.

You guys had all been in different bands prior to coming together as The M’s, and the styles of those bands sound pretty different from this band.  Was that a matter of changing tastes with time as far as what music you wanted to play?

Just probably taste changing.  You know, you go on and things just start and stop all of the time.  For us, we started hanging out at a time when we were into what we were doing.  We started out being mostly a recording band—we didn’t really have any intentions of being a live band.  We were just hanging out together and recording songs.  I had a couple studios in a couple different places I’ve lived at in Chicago, so it was easy for us to set up shop.

Eventually, we got a bunch of songs recorded that we all liked.  We had friends in other bands and we’d set it up to play with them.  We got a pretty positive response, and we kept at it and recorded a four-song demo that got us a little more serious about it. 

So you weren’t still in other bands in those early days?

No, not really.  Everything was kind of fizzling out at that point.

With all of the songs that you wrote near the start—your bio says there were about 100 of them—are there any that you think about revisiting? 

Yeah, that’s always been on the horizon for us.  One of the things we want to do is release a record really quickly after this one, a mixture of the songs we liked most of all.  But we go back to those songs pretty often.  There are a lot of good tunes and interesting songs in there, but we’re always trying to move forward, too.  We play a lot of shows in Chicago and we don’t want to just be playing the same set over and over.

I recently read that you guys had performed Future Women in its entirety, with all of the horns and strings intact.  That must have been fun.

It was really fun.  It was amazing to be on stage while that was all taking place.  Trying to get the album together on stage did prove to be a little more difficult than what we’d conceived, but it was still pretty amazing.  We don’t have too many opportunities to play with a seven-piece orchestra.

How are you going to handle those sections when you go out on the road?  Do you know yet?

No, not yet.  There’s really only one song, “Trucker Speed,” that is tough.  It sort of dissolves into horns and strings—that takes over.  We haven’t figured out how to do that; more than likely, we won’t try it, unless we do a shorter version. 

You guys have already shared the bill with a lot of great bands.  Are there any in particular that stood out, bands that you loved, or thought “Holy crap, I can’t believe we’re playing with these guys?”

Wilco is definitely up there.  They still influence us, just to not be scared to release a record that veers away from what people’s preconceived ideas of us are.  That was an eye-opening experience for us, plus to get in front of people and have our tunes be really successful in front of large crowds that have never seen us before.

The New Pornographers—we always talked about playing with them, basically since we got wind of them.  That was cool to have that happen, especially because it was New Year’s Eve and we were with Rogue Wave, too, and they’re friends of ours.

A few critics have said something that’s struck me as curious:  that you guys would have a higher profile if you weren’t based in Chicago.  Is there any basis for that?  Has Chicago been a difficult scene for your style?

People are always wanting to define a city as having a particular scene, and I think sometimes they try a little too hard.  Writers have their own ideas about things.  It’s tough to know whether we’d have a bigger profile in New York or L.A.  We’ve been able to do what we want to do here in Chicago, and have it be pretty fast.  Chicago is a really cool place to make stuff—you can make stuff and fail and still be okay.  This is our place right now.

Polyvinyl is a label that is local for you, and they’re a label that’s impressed me because it seemed like, several years ago at least, their catalog was maybe headed mostly in one direction, but they’ve kept things interesting and diverse [Of Montreal, Saturday Looks Good To Me, etc.].  How did you first attract their attention?

We went on tour with a few of their bands.  We were looking for a label, and we talked to a few, but nothing really clicked.  We went on tour with Of Montreal and we went on tour with Decibully, and it came back to the label and got them more interested, got them coming out to the shows and talking to us.

There’s no producer credit given out on this record, right?

Yeah, we did [the production].  Steve, our drummer, is a really fantastic engineer and he took care of most of that stuff.  We all did it, but it’s definitely under his watchful eye.

Good to have one of those around.

Yeah, it helps out a lot, and it really shrunk our recording costs.  We basically took over a studio here for a month and took our time with it, did what we wanted to do without somebody running their two cents whenever they thought it was necessary.

We produced our last record, too, and we wanted to take a step forward with our production values.  We hadn’t gotten to the end of our rope; we were definitely psyched about raising the bar for ourselves and doing the record on our own.  It’s unlikely that we’ll do it again, but it’s a tough relationship.  We’ve tried other producers in the past, and it’s never quite worked.

It seems like I’ve done more interviews with bands who’ve had their van stolen or gear stolen in the past year than in the four or five years before combined.  How did you soldier on after that?  Were you able to stay out on the road?

Luckily, we weren’t doing much touring when that took place.  We’d done a tour with Ambulance out east, and that was the last hurrah for that van—that van was a piece of shit anyway.  You should have seen it.  The front grill had been stolen the week before, the thing was breaking down all over the place.  You couldn’t drive it four miles without it breaking down.  When it got stolen, we were like, “Alright, let’s just all fan out and we’ll find it within four miles.”

We just started a new year, of course, and everyone is fresh off their “Best of 2005” lists.  I won’t confine you just to albums, but what are some things you listened to or watched or read that you wish everyone out there had a chance to experience?

Well, talking about your site and politics, George Packer’s book The Assassin’s Gate is pretty much the book that everyone should read.  It gives you a really good handle on what’s going on with the administration’s policies on the Iraq war.  You get a good idea about the lead-up, the ideological underpinnings...  He was just on The Daily Show and, man, he’s right on target.  Everyone should read that book.

As far as records, I like the new Devendra Banhart record and the New Pornographers.  We’ve been going backward as much as forward.  We listened to a lot of Fela Kuti—I think that helped form some of our ideas for this last record.