Ticonderoga

A conversation with Mark Paulson

(September 2005)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

2005 has been a productive year for Ticonderoga.  After reuniting in Raleigh after a temporary hiatus, the three longtime friends released a self-titled full-length earlier this year, now followed by The Heilig-Levine LP.  Both albums are richly served by the band’s triple-headed approach (each member is credited simply for “Vocals, instruments”), which causes bends in the road at unexpected places.  And yet there is a unified front to Ticonderoga—one that has earned them comparisons from a range of cred-carrying bands both straightforward (Red House Painters) and challenging (Gastr Del Sol).

“Vocalist/instrumentalist” Mark Paulson takes readers through a brief history of Ticonderoga, beginning in a grade school in Iowa, surviving a breakup, and continuing toward an unplanned but perhaps inevitable reunion in a new setting. 

Let’s start with a little biography.  How did this trio of childhood friends wind up in a band together – and then end up moving that band from Iowa to North Carolina?

We all grew up in the same small town in Iowa, and we started playing music in sixth or seventh grade.  There was sort of a dearth of things to do in a small rural town in Iowa, and we’d all had musical upbringings up to that point.  There used to be a fourth person that we played with, too, until he went to a different town for college.

Basically, we were playing in some incarnation until 2001 or 2002, and then we broke up.  We were all done with college and we played for about a year after that, and then we weren’t really feeling it and there were a lot of interpersonal conflicts and what not.  We basically went our separate ways to make music on our own.

Wes Phillips moved out here with his girlfriend because she is getting her degree at Duke.  He’d been here for about a year and a half, and I was looking to move out of Iowa because I didn’t want to go to grad school in Iowa.  My girlfriend was looking at Chapel Hill as a place to go, and Wes was begging me to come down and start playing music again.  So I moved down and a few months later, Phil Moore broke up with his girlfriend and decided there was nothing left for him in Iowa—so he moved out here, too, and we started playing again.

What kind of stuff were you guys playing in sixth or seventh grade?

Oh, man.  We all went through our different phases.  I went through a distinct—I think it went Kiss, then Aerosmith, then Van Halen.  But Grinnell College is a very liberal school and they have a lot of money for concerts, so, especially as we got into high school, that became our major live show outlet.  A lot of college kids kind of took us under their wings and helped us with recording and put us on some compilations.  The atmosphere at the time was extremely open-minded and the music scene was very eclectic.

Was it a localized scene?  Or they were bringing in national tours? 

Yeah, they were bringing in national acts.  I got to see Fugazi and fIREHOSE and all these weird bands that I never would have heard of in ninth grade if it wasn’t for the school.  On our tour last spring, we got to play there—we hadn’t played there in years.  It was great.

Prior to doing the band together, then, you guys were school band and orchestra kids?

Yeah, but not so much Phil.  Phil did choir and studied piano for a few years when he was young, but he wasn’t really into it.  At first, he was just the singer in the band, but then he started playing guitar and getting more serious about it.  I’ve been playing instruments like violin and piano since I was really, really small – I started violin when I was three and piano was five.

A parental influence, then?

Oh, yeah.  My parents were never really pushing it on me, but they wanted to give us that option.  And then Wes is the only one who actually went to school for music.

Jumping ahead to the new album, I was curious about the recording space that gives the album its name.  The press release says it was a “cavernous” space where you guys played for free.

It was pretty cool.  We were going to use some photographs from that building for our album art, but we didn’t end up doing it.  It was a conscious decision to try to use acoustic—I pretty much do most of the recording and mixing, and I don’t like using artificial reverb.  I think it sounds bad.  Once you’ve done a few dozen recordings of a group in a room, you kind of get tired of that bedroom sound and you go to great lengths to try to overcome that and create different spaces in the music.  There’s nothing like having a big, nice, reverberate room.

I work in a restaurant and the chef at the restaurant has been working with this developer in Raleigh who owns all these properties.  But he’s very enthusiastic about the youth involvement and things like that, sort of antithetical to what most people think of when they think of a developer—there’s an evil stigma to it.  But [the chef] called him and a minute later comes back and says, “Okay, you can use this church, there are two buildings downtown you can use.”  So we basically moved into a floor of this building that was in the very preliminary stages of renovation in downtown Raleigh. 

Nice.  Now what’s the timeframe of these songs?  You had the self-titled album that came out earlier this year – are these songs from that same period? 

Actually, the second album has the biggest timespan; the starting points for some of those songs were written back when we weren’t even a band in Iowa City.  A couple of them are brand new.

When our label found us, we had put an album up on our website and three EP’s, like 25 songs, and that was the core, that was what Steve Brydges heard.  The first album is about half from that and half new.  This album, I guess, is maybe four songs from there and the rest is new.  Our next album, which will hopefully come out this spring, will be all new music.

The press release says that the next album will be your most collaborative.  It almost sounds like you’re closing a chapter with this one, as far as your approach goes.

Yeah, we’ve sort of always held full collaboration as our brass ring.  It’s really easy to sit at home and write a song by yourself.  We’re trying to remove all ego from songs and the sound of the band, trying to find the essence of what we each do best so we can fuse that together.

Has that album already started?

Yeah.  (laughs)  For better or for worse, we’ve done some jams, which we’ve always been leery of doing.  I think what we’re going to do a combination of using jamming for source material and also a lot of back-and-forth.  For instance, Wes is in Iowa this month and Phil and I are working on music and getting it to a certain point and then sending it to him with certain instructions, “We need this and this and this,” whether it’s arranging or vocals or guitar parts or whatever.

On the two records you’ve released, then, has the recording process been pretty swift since you’re each bringing in pretty developed songs?

A lot of the songs actually develop during the recording process—maybe not at the most basic level, but arrangements and instrumentation.  Some songs are completely written by one person, other songs are a complete amalgam of all three people.

For live shows, are you guys still doing the merry-go-round thing on instruments?

Yeah, it’s been like that lately—well, it’s been like that always, so far.  We’re trying to keep that in mind when we write songs now, trying to put some parameters on it.  At some of the last shows, we’ve been playing like three songs where everybody doesn’t rotate, which I think the audience appreciates.

Yeah, it can be difficult to maintain momentum. 

Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with taking a couple breaks between songs, like 30 seconds, and talk to the audience or whatever, but we’re going to try to keep it at a minimum.  But we all want to sing the lyrics that we write.  Although we’re trying to distance ourselves from proprietorship to our songs, there’s still going to be that lyrical connection.  As long as that happens, there’s going to be some rotation.

How much touring have you done?  Have you done the full-scale national yet?

We haven’t gotten to the West Coast yet.  We did a month last spring and that took us all up and down the East Coast and through the Midwest.  We haven’t done a lot of the South Central region, and that’s our first tour this season—Texas and back, get those southern states.  We’re working on more stuff; we want to do a college tour at the start of the second semester.  We’ll just see how radio play is and all that—we don’t want to go to the West Coast if it’s going to be awful.  We’ll wait until we feel like people will come out.

For people who are just familiar with the records, will they be surprised by the live show?  Is it pretty faithful to the albums?

For the most part.  That’s one of the great things—there’s a band called Physics of Meaning in Chapel Hill, and we’re going to be touring with them at least for the trip to Texas and back.  I’ve been playing violin in some of their live shows and Wes has played with them a couple of times, so we’re going to kind of integrate bands.  We’ll be playing their sets and probably have them play some of our stuff, which will include another violinist and a cellist and oboist.  Hopefully we’ll be able to do some really faithful recreations of some of the more orchestrated stuff on the record.