For Ben Knox-Miller, the recording of The Low Anthem's atmospheric new album in two weird Rhode Island houses helped make him as a songwriter. They had to contend with bats, electrocutions, and scary toilet breaks, and became experts in fungal growth, he tells JIM CARROLL
BEN Knox-Miller knew things were turning weird for The Low Anthem when they first started touring in Europe. Their charming 2008 album Oh My God, Charlie Darwinhad certainly opened a lot of doors for the Rhode Island band at home, but this was Europe. They didn't know anyone in Europe.
“I was so sceptical when we started doing those first European shows,” remembers the band’s chief vocalist and songwriter. “Why would someone come to see us in Ireland or England when people wouldn’t come to see us in Providence unless they knew us personally? We had been working around Rhode Island for a few years, doing pubs and sports bars and house concerts. If we got three gigs a week that was great, because we could cover our rent.
“But we were instantly playing rooms in Europe with 500-1,000 people at the show. We had no idea how that hype culture works, and I still don’t know why it worked.”
Whatever The Low Anthem were doing, people were responding. “I think it didn’t happen any quicker because of the music,” says Knox-Miller. “I’m sure our manager and record labels wanted to drum up the hype like with any band, but the music isn’t something people will be able to bop their head to. From my perspective, it does still seem to have happened very fast.”
Knox-Miller is at home in Rhode Island preparing for another heavyweight bout of touring to support new album Smart Flesh. The album, recorded in an abandoned pasta sauce factory and a garage once occupied by a reptile breeder, is another bewitching set of low-key, atmospheric songs from Knox- Miller, Jeff Prystowsky, Jocie Adams and Mat Davidson. As before, the vivid lyrics, spooky airs and glorious folky soul will drag you closer to the speakers.
For Knox-Miller as songwriter, it was another step in his apprenticeship. "I'm still relatively new to songwriting, and have only really done this record and Oh My God, Charlie Darwinin a serious way. Before those two, there was no real craft to what I was doing and I didn't have much in the way of ideas about what I was doing.
“But with these two records, I’ve written enough songs and seen them on record enough to know that the way I feel about a song is going to change, and there’s nothing worth protecting. No matter how attached I feel to a song, it’s just a product of how I felt at a particular moment. You have to look at them dispassionately. I try to write all the time, I try to write a song or part of a song every day to stay in practice, but I throw out most of the stuff.”
Thirty songs were written and considered for Smart Flesh, but only 11 made it. "We just cut away the ones which didn't feel relevant or even felt too relevant. There were some songs which were too direct, and tied up some of the questions and ideas in a way that hurt the other songs because they were so magnetic.
“The word ‘wire’ occurs in a few of the other songs, and there was one song which answered all the questions of the meaning of the imagery, and instead of it being an open thing it began to damage the other songs. We carved that one out, which was unbelievable to us and everyone who worked on the album because we thought it was the central song. But in the end it was getting in the way instead of adding something.”
Is it difficult for a writer to let go of his creations like that, to banish some of his children? “When you put it like that it sounds biblical,” laughs the songwriter. “But even though I write all the songs, we’re a band, and the ones which make the cut and make sense are the ones which are not confessional.
“Certain songs got cut because they were too personal to me and they didn’t make sense in the context of the band or the album. Along the way it became a very sparse record which has a lot of suggestion and unfinished ideas. There’s a fog to it. It’s a shorter record than we thought it was going to be too.”
Perhaps the unconventional spaces they chose to record in had a bearing on the sound of the album, such as the former Porino pasta sauce factory in Central Falls, an abandoned 4,000sq ft building with huge 20ft walls.
“We thought it was haunted at the time. It was all dark and crumbling and decaying, with broken glass everywhere and these old rusted bay windows banging in the wind. The only working bathroom was five minutes away from where we were working, downstairs on the far end of the building.
“When you had to go, you would try to hold on as long as possible, because you didn’t want to take that walk in the middle of the night. It was genuinely scary.
“We spent a lot of long nights there, and had a lot of intense moments. It was an unusual recording studio and it took a long time to get it right. Sure, some things didn’t pan out as well as we hoped and we had to be adaptive, but it was a unique space and we got a unique sound from it.”
The other unconventional location was what they called the “gator pit”, a house in Providence that used to be occupied by a reptile breeder. “The gator pit had its own problems,” chuckles Knox-Miller. “There were a lot of bats that came in at the same time every night and flew around our heads while we were recording, and you could hear them swishing around when you listened back to the recordings.
“But the biggest problem was the bar next door, which played pounding loud soul and r’n’b music that made the walls shake. We were bunkered in there, waiting for the antics to end so we’d have a few moments of silence to record before the bats came in.”
The bats and the bar weren’t the only drawbacks. “The previous tenant had been evicted, and he slashed all the electrics when he left, so there were lots of dangling cables and a couple of electrocutions when we were setting up.
“Then there was the mould. We had black mould, white mould, green mould and that slimy mould you get under sinks. I spent some time on the internet reading about mould, so I became an expert. We had a long list of grievances and could freely cite from the Rhode Island landlord-tenant handbook afterwards.”
But the location had its compensations. “The bar did a killer, home-cooked barbecue on Fridays, and that place could have been a perfect studio,” he says. “There was a huge walk-in concrete safe in the back that had this great reverb. I mean, where else are you going to find that? Maybe we should have tried to live there permanently.”
Smart Fleshis out now. The Low Anthem play Dublin’s Vicar Street on Sunday
