The Rosebuds

A conversation with Kelly Crisp

(July 2007)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

Photograph by Kristine Larsen

Dark and euphoric, romantic and foreboding, Night of The Furies marks a dramatic and continued growth for The Rosebuds.  Taking occasional cues from glamorous '80s synth-pop, there's a dance fever that pulses through tracks like "Cemetery Lawn" and "Get Up Get Out," although there are troubled undercurrents steadily running through the album, which finds fresh life in themes both personal and political.  Opener "My Punishment for Fighting" surely will stand as one of the best odes to regret in 2007, crystallizing on the line "I could never be all you need me to / My punishment is living without you."

Yes, a bad moon is right around the bend on Night of the Furies.  But things are pretty rosy in real life for the husband-and-wife duo of Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp, who have been living a charmed creative life since spontaneously forming as a band in 2001.

I’ve heard from a number of people who will say that things like they wished they had pursued a career in music but it’s too late, and then they read interviews where the artists have been in bands since they were 10 years old and it can be that much more disheartening.  Music wasn’t something that was always in the master plan with you, though, was it?

Oh, no!  No, no, no, no.  We don’t live a normal life – we’re in a rock band and we drive all over the country, and we’ve been to Russia and Europe and all these things.  I realize that it seems kind of crazy, but the reality is that it’s very normal for us.  We’re not musicians as much as artists—we have this art project called The Rosebuds, and you don’t have to be a certain age or have a certain kind of style of music or a certain proficiency level with any instruments to be in The Rosebuds.  So why couldn’t you start doing something like this?  I used to get all hung up on stuff like that—“I don’t play an instrument well enough, I haven’t ever had any art classes so I can’t paint.”  But that’s all excuses.  We’re doing it, and we don’t have anything to go on—we’re just doing it. 

Ivan and I grew up on dirt roads.  If there was ever an unlikely couple of people to be in our situation, it’s us.  We booked our first show five hours before we played it.  We started the band when we booked the show.  So we’ve always decided we’re going to do something and then we figure out how we’re going to do it later.

That’s the way to do it, I think.  Now I read the hook with Ivan about how he was pursuing a future in basketball before an injury kind of put him in a state of flux before he found his way to music.  What were you doing during that same timeframe?

Oh, I was just raising myself.  I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do.  I’ve always been involved in theatre; at the time we started the band, I was in a performance group, like an all-female vaudeville thing, a variety show type of thing.  We wrote and performed our own material, and I was mostly doing comedy.  I’d figured out at that point that I’m not normal; I can’t live a normal life, so I’m just going to have to accept that I can do my own thing.  I wanted to do more stage acting, but it was really super-competitive in Wilmington, so I started to do stand-up comedy.  You don’t have to have anyone hire you—you just do it.  Ivan was kind of the same way, just teaching himself to write songs while realizing that he wasn’t going to be satisfied without some creative outlet.  He started playing the guitar and his voice is just incredible, so he already had that going for him, even though I didn’t know at first.

That must have been a surprise.

(laughs)  Yeah, it was a real surprise!  It’s gorgeous.  He holds back, you know, but his range and depth is amazing.  His mom is the same way—it runs in the family.  But, anyway, both of us were trying to experiment and we were up for doing anything, and that’s how we got this thing going.

When you play the first show or your first series of shows, what gave you the confidence level to say “Hey, this is clicking – we should send this to labels, we should get this out to more people?”  Did it take some validation from the crowds that were coming to the early shows?

It was completely magical.  Here’s what happened:  we booked a show after Ivan found out about a cancellation at a local club.  He got off the phone and he goes, “Alright, get this, we’re in a band and we got a show tonight, so we gotta put some songs together.”  We had five hours and we worked out five songs—one of the songs was “Back to Boston,” one of them was “4-Track Love Song.”  We had some pretty realized songs from the very first day, and part of that was because Ivan had already been busy writing these secret songs.

So we go down there and play the show and everybody loved it.  We got invited back the next week.  We didn’t even have a name yet.  The second week we played under the name The Rosebuds.  Some people came up and were like “Man, you guys were great!  I really loved it!  How long have you guys been together?”  I just remember in those early shows laughing and saying “This is our second show” or “This is our third show.”  These were just normal people because we didn’t have a crowd or anything, we were just playing for guys having beers.  But by the third show, something weird happened—people started bringing T-shirts that said “The Rosebuds” and they were like “Here’s the merchandise, we want you to take it and sell it.”  The sound guy gave us some copies of our show that we recorded and he was like, “Hey, I want you guys to have this to sell.”  And that was it—we became official through the help of the community.  We kept getting asked to play more shows, and it never stopped, and we kept saying yes.  Then a Merge band [Ashley Stove] came through town and it was a big deal because we lived in a small town, and we opened for them and they loved it and they were like “You gotta come to Raleigh and play a show!”  We went to Raleigh and realized “Oh my god, this place is two and a half hours away, but they have this whole huge, secret, amazing music scene going on.”  So we moved to Raleigh and started playing shows around and being fans of the music.  We recorded a demo in our friend’s bedroom and sent it to Merge and they signed us.  We didn’t even think about a different label; we just said “We’ll get signed to Merge.”  Isn’t that naïve?  (laughs)

Well, that sort of targeting is smart, though.  So often people will just blindly throw themselves out there.  Jumping to the albums, then, how much premeditation is there going into an album?  Do you discuss specific themes, specific genre leanings, or do you just kind of go where the songs take you?

Well, for Night of the Furies, for example, we had three albums’ worth of music that came out.  Ivan especially is like a melody-writing genius, you know what I mean?  He’s like a savant.  So he’s got these songs going all the time.  On Night of the Furies, all of those songs fit together and have something in common with each other thematically, content-wise, and mood-wise.

Things sound like they go pretty smoothly in the world of The Rosebuds.  What’s the hardest part of the creative process?

Oh, I don’t know.  There’s no hard part.  We work very hard, and sometimes my brain hurts.  But it’s not a hard process for us.  The hard part comes in trying to figure out how you’re going to live on the road.  The writing of the songs is the magical part; the reality of the songs’ existence after they’ve been written, that’s kind of a struggle sometimes for us.

I’ve seen the theme of artistic freedom come up several times in your interviews about Night of the Furies, particularly in discussing the differences of producing the album on your own.  Does that imply that you felt somewhat stifled or limited working with an outside producer?

Well, no, I wouldn’t say that, because we worked with Brian Paulson, a really amazing producer.  But it’s not in the sense that some people work with a producer.  Let me think of somebody… I don’t know, who’s popular on the radio right now?

(collective pause)

Fergie?

For Fergie, a producer means something different than it does for us.  She goes in and says “I can sing and dance on stage,” and the producer makes the record.  But our songs are so completely realized that our demos don’t sound much different content-wise than our final product.  It’s simply the technical execution of the sounds… where do you want to put the amp?  How do you want to treat the vocal—do you want reverb?  Now we pretty much have all those things worked out for ourselves.  We were getting such good results with the demos for this record.  We had Brian help us with the drum sounds…God, nobody is better at drums than him.  Lee Waters, the drummer who helped us on Birds Make Good Neighbors, recorded some drums, and Matt McCaughan, who’s our main guy live, did some songs.  We took all that stuff and went home and then finished the record ourselves at home.  It was a community effort, and we still involved the same people we had involved the whole time.