The Parson Red Heads

A conversation with Evan Way

(January 2008)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

Regular Los Angeles showgoers may have found it difficult to avoid The Parson Red Heads in 2007.  The sharp-dressed and highly-populated band scored opening slots for the diverse likes of Menomena, Cursive and Maria Taylor - and left behind a trail of reviewers (including two from The Red Alert) who took a timeout from the headliners to praise the group's winsome and distinctly Californian pop music.  As 2008 begins, the road ahead looks bright for the Red Heads.  On tap:  a new EP and recording the follow-up to last year's well-received King Giraffe.  January also brought another residency for the band - this time the Monday Night Residency at Spaceland, something of a rite of passage for upcoming LA bands.  Their tour of duty ends on Monday the 28th (oh, and the shows are free).

In the midst of a busy winter, singer Evan Way told The Red Alert about his band's shifting momentum, the plight of full albums in the modern technological era, and the amount of drama to expect when you're out on the road with your wife and your sister.

There seems to be a lot of stuff happening for the band right now.  Do you feel some sense of momentum here in 2008, like all the hard work is starting to pay off in a tangible way?

I definitely do! I’ve felt that over the past year, even, we’ve slowly been building up momentum … once we played the residency at the Echo in December of ’06, things just kept building, I think. And now they are on a totally unreal level – getting to play a residency at Spaceland, getting to play on Morning Becomes Eclectic – this is all stuff that we’ve been dreaming about doing for a while. We are really having a great time. And to start off a brand new year with this stuff is just a great feeling, and makes us really optimistic for the rest of 2008. I think it's going to be an exciting year. We all feel like we are writing better music than ever before. I feel like we are continually improving as a band – we’re really getting to know how to play with each other. That in itself is just a blast.

At the end of last year, we made a list of “Goals for 2008”. One of those goals was to play the residency at Spaceland … and about two weeks later, we got confirmed to play it in January. It was thrilling to check something of our list of goals before the year even started.

You guys have been playing pretty steadily around LA for some time now - from your own residencies to opening slots for a pretty eclectic list of bands (including Menomena and Maria Taylor, which is how you’d initially popped onto our radar at The Red Alert).  Do you have a strategy to how often you play and who you play alongside - or is it mostly just taking the opportunities as they present themselves?

When we first moved to Los Angeles (from Oregon) in 2005, we made a very conscious decision to play every show we got offered or could scrape up. We had nothing to lose – the only thing playing shows could do was show our music to new people. So for a while, we were playing 3 shows a week, and practicing 2-3 times a week, as well. It was a little crazy, and really exhausting. But in the end, it really paid off, and I think really helped get us attention.

We’re at the point now where we try to play an average of 2 shows, maybe 3, a month. Sometimes they’re out of town. We like to play in San Francisco when we get the chance. As far as deciding who we play alongside … there really isn’t much strategy involved in that. We take opportunities that come our way. If I see that a band is coming through town that I really like, I definitely look into the possibility of playing with them. You know, we still just want to have fun. If a show sounds like it will be fun, we will play it, no matter where it is, or with who. If it sounds fun to us, we’ll try to make it happen.

Lucky for us, we have a great relationship with a lot of the promoters in town – Jen at Spaceland, Scott from The Fold, and Liz from The Echo – we basically owe them our existence. =) They have helped us out so much, and continue to help us out, by offering us shows and helping us out in so many ways.

For younger bands who may be saying “Hey, I want to play with Menomena and Cursive” - are most of these pairings the result of the headliner seeking you guys out?  Do you pursue certain shows yourselves? 

When we opened for Cursive, it was a result of our publicist, Dane at Yukon Promotions, getting in touch with Cursive’s agent and simply inquiring. And then on the other hand, the show with Menomena was offered to us by the concert promoter. So it is a mix of both, for sure. We’ve gotten shows basically every way you could get one – seeking it out, being sought out, or being asked by a promoter. Making friends with bands and promoters is so important … there is no sense in being competitive and stuck up to your peers in the music business. We’re all in it together. It’s a community, you know? We feel like all these bands who play in our area are like family to us – if you all support each other, help each other with shows, go to each others shows – it makes it so much easier, and really makes it a better experience. Its really an honor to play music along side all these other talented bands, and to be part of shows with them. It should be treated that way, you know?

Los Angeles is an adopted home for the band - like it is for a lot of bands (and for this writer).  Does it feel like home yet?  And do you have a favorite place to play?

Yes, Los Angeles definitely feels like home. We’ve been here over two years now. It took some time to get used to life here, for sure. But we have really settled in. You find the places you like to be, and the people you like to be around, and you make those your home, you know? Once you find those things, the city becomes a much different place than when you first arrive.

As far as a favorite place to play goes – we LOVE playing at The Echo. It is like a home away from home. And Spaceland is beautiful … we are having the best time playing there right now. I would say those are definitely our two favorite venues in town. We got to play at the Troubador once, and it was such a blast. We’d love to do it again sometime. But that is a whole different kind of experience. We like The Echo and Spaceland because we feel totally comfortable. The staff at those venues are so nice. Echo and Spaceland are part of our whole music community – they’re almost like a clubhouse for us bands.

There was a deliberate aesthetic to The Parson Red Heads from, as far as I can tell, a pretty early point - from stage attire to artwork.  Was this a point of emphasis for you as the band was beginning?  Or something that just sort of fell into place?

We didn’t have the aesthetic sense from the VERY beginning. But definitely, once we started to really feel the band was going to be a serious pursuit for us, we started to take that into account. When you first start a band, especially for us, it was just purely for fun. It was a hobby. But as we went, it became so much more. Once we started seriously considering that it could be something we really did something with, that’s when we started taking the aesthetics into account. We wanted it to be a real show when we played – a really fun thing to watch, you know? The white outfits kind of came out of nowhere – it was a random idea that just clicked. It just made sense the first time we did it, and none of us ever wanted to stop. It just felt right. I think the general aesthetic – from the outfits to the artwork – is a real natural extension of the music, and of our attitudes about the music, and our personality as a band. What can I say? We like flowers, we like animals, and we like things that look like they came from the 1960s!

For a lot of people, the idea of taking a mere road trip with their family can inspire dread.  But everything I’ve read about you guys makes it seem like it’s pretty smooth sailing on the Good Ship Parsons (which is also the impression that gets transmitted from stage).  If they made a Walk The Line style biopic on your band, would the screenwriter be able to find any drama?

Haha – honestly, it would be very hard to write a dramatic story based on the life of The Parson Red Heads. There isn’t a lot of a drama. We are like a family, for sure – a family that gets along strangely well. You know, on tour people get tired and cranky. But that is about the worst of it. We really love each other, and we really really respect each other. And I think we all are aware enough to realize how special it is, and how great of an opportunity it is, to be able to spend so much time making music with your best friends and loved ones. It’s not something any of us want to take for granted, and it’s definitely not something we want to ruin with arguments that, in the end, aren’t important. We all share an equal vision of what we are supposed to be doing, the music we are making, and where the band is headed – it makes it really easy when everyone is basically on the same track.

Your sound obviously has some roots tracing back to L.A.  Do you remember being turned on to the likes of Gram Parsons and The Byrds?  How was that musical horizon originally opened to you?

My personal musical evolution has been a long and winding road, to be sure. My sister (Erin, who plays keyboards in the band) and I were raised in a really musical household. Everything was done in song. And we were raised listening to folks like John Denver, Barry Manilow, Peter Paul and Mary, 2nd Chapter of Acts – a lot of good folk music. I think that might have something to do with it, for sure.

But it really wasn’t until I was about 19 that I really started exploring rock music from the 60’s and 70’s. Before then, I had been more interested in Radiohead, and a bunch of “math rock” bands. Then one day I just started exploring older music – I was inspired when I discovered the re-released record by a band called The Action. The record is called Rolled Gold, and still stands as one of the best rock n’ roll albums of all time. That really just got me going, and I haven’t stopped exploring since then. There is SO much great music to discover from that era. Its impossible to hear it all – but it is hard for me to justify concentrating on new music, if I haven’t fully explored all the music from the past that inspired it.

That’s obviously an era in which the album was very strong - those were artists who were making not just a single or two, but putting thought into full albums that were meant to be digested as such.  Now people are saying the album is an endangered species.  Do you think that people will continue to write and releases albums, per se, or will we see a shift away from that?

This is a sore subject for me. I am really strongly against the idea of bands just recording and releasing singles. The death of the full length album is an idea that depresses me. Luckily, I think that as long as there are there are musicians who respect the idea of the art form of making a RECORD - not just a hit song, and not even just a CD with 11 songs on it, but a complete RECORD – I don’t think that it is something we’ll have to worry about. I can’t imagine musicians saying “well, people are more apt to buy singles, so that’s all I’m going to make”. Personally, I think that the process of making a complete album, and the final product from that process, is a really special thing. And I’m hoping that enough people continue to realize that. I honestly have a hard time believing that we’d ever reach a time where people will stop recording and releasing albums. We have history proving that it is classic albums that stay relevant and powerful in people’s lives – not classic digitally released singles.

Flashing forward to the present day - how do you find out about new music nowadays? 

I read a TON of blogs, I’ll be honest. Mostly while I’m at work. That is definitely a place where I find out about new music. I love reading music magazines, and I love reading blogs. I really enjoy reading about what is going on in music. Some people are doing really great things. Some are doing not so great things. But it is always interesting to me. I could spend hours and hours just reading reviews of records and interviews with bands. Plus, we get to PLAY with a bunch of great up and coming bands. That is always exciting – to get to a show, and watch a band you’ve never heard before play, and realize “these guys are incredible!”. That is really the best way to discover new music, in my opinion.

Are the songs on the new EP songs that stemmed from around the same time as King Giraffe, or is it a separate, newer slate of songs?

The songs that are going to be on the new EP are kind of a mix. We haven’t really decided exactly what the track list is going to be – but our choices range from some songs we’ve had lying around for a few years now, and then some as new as a few months. The majority are a new batch, though.

And do you have a release date targeted for the EP?  Tentative tour plans thereafter? 

No official release date – we are really taking our time recording and preparing. We want it to be something we can feel completely happy with, and completely confident in. Plus, we are having such a great time – we don’t want to ruin it by rushing it TOO much. Hopefully we’ll be able to have the new EP done and available by April, but I wouldn’t say anything is set in stone. No definite plans to tour behind it yet – we’d love to get out on the road as much as possible, but we also want to make sure we view all our options. We are hoping to get an opportunity to tour opening for someone – that would enable us to get out beyond the West Coast a little easier. So we’ll see. Also, we are hoping to begin the recording of the full length to follow the EP towards the end of the year sometime – maybe even in late summer.

Creative types often like to say that the future is limitless.  But gazing into your crystal ball, are there directions that you’re pretty sure the Parsons will not be taking on their albums?

Of course, there are definitely directions that I can be sure we won’t be going. Obviously, the dark and tortured paths of metal (of all sorts … black, death, slash, grind, etc) are not ones we are going to be following. At least not anytime soon. =) We are definitely exploring and expanding our sound, but there are things I don’t really see entering the Parsons world. I don’t see us bringing in electronic elements – a lot of bands are mixing electronic music into their sound with drum machines, loops, samples, etc – but that really isn’t our thing. Our music is really based on organics, on melody, and on the 6 (or 7 or 8 or 9) of us playing in our practice space together, singing together, all that good stuff. That process is the best and most natural to us, by far.