Ra Ra Riot: from the left, Ali Lawn, Mathieu Santos, Wes Miles, Milo Bonacci and Beck Zeller. Photo by Alanna Romeo
On Wednesday, July 29, I had the pleasure of talking with Ra Ra Riot bassist Mathieu Santos. We discussed the band’s role in New York City’s All Points West Festival (a muddy orgy of rock, hippies and sewage) as well as RRR’s plans for a follow-up album to their debut: The Rhumb Line.
If you haven’t listened to this to band, do so immediately. It sounds like they’re putting in the hours necessary to make a great follow-up album.
1) Can you explain the basic differences between doing a festival as opposed to your own show?
Festivals are just about mass exposure. You go in with the idea that people aren’t familiar with your songs, and you just want to convert as many fans as possible. Nothing really compares to the club show or your own headlining tours.
2) What’s strange about concert advertisements is the difference between the so-called headliners, and other acts. Headliners get the gigantic lettering and other acts simply don’t. Who decides the pecking order for these shows? And does that put less or more pressure on your band?
It’s kind of interesting to see how a band’s credibility is determined by a font size. A lot of different factors and a lot of people are working at this: album sales, chart positions, sometimes a band just shoots up out of nowhere. All that stuff. Being lower on the bill never bothered us. It’s all a part of a long uphill battle. We wanted to take the longer, more steady, very calculated approach. So far it’s working out.
3) Festivals, I’ve found, can offer extreme audiences: they either love you or hate you and let you know it. Is RRR changing anything up for the festival, or would that be counter-productive?
The thought is to just keep your head down and focus on performing well But our performances are more inhibited than during a club show, and the stages are usually really big, which can throw you off a bit.
It’s also hard when you’re performing in the daytime because you can clearly see that there are just hundreds of people walking around and they’re either going to check you out or completely ignore you. So, it gets a little competitive when you know there are other bands performing at the same time as you, and you’re just trying to get a crowd forming.
5) Which bands are you going to check out?
Vampire Weekend and the Fleetboxes. Wes and I saw them perform on SNL. They were just so, so tight, so passionate.
It was exciting to see that the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs are performing the day we’re playing. I was also pretty excited when our manager told us that was the Jay-Z was the new headliner.
6) What I think is truly interesting about RRR are your arrangements. Some songs are cello driven, others guitar based, one even revolved around a synthesizer. Would you mind explaining RRR’s recording process?
It’s a really fun process, it’s also a very long process since there’s a lot of giving and taking, but you have to be aware and compromising enough to not only write your own part but recognize when an instrument should take the lead.
7) Is RRR currently working on a new album?
Yeah, actually we’re doing APW then a festival in Boston , then we’re heading to upstate NY in our homeland and staying on a peach orchard where we’ll start working on the next album. We’ve been looking forward to it for over a year.
On [The Rhumb Line] we just recorded every song we knew, there wasn’t any true direction. But this time around we’ve been touring so much that everyone’s been writing on their own, so we have a ton of demos. As far as the direction, I guess it sort of remains to be determined. But everyone’s been getting into some new influences. I thinks we’re going to experiment with more instrument space. Milo’s been playing a lot less guitar and his ideas are more synth based this time around.
To read all of Matt Thomas’s published works, visit his homepage at: www.thevillagetotheleft.net
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