From left to right: Tunde Adebimpe(vocals); David Andrew Sitek(guitars, producer, samples); Kyp Malone(vocals, guitar, bass); Gerard Smith (Bass, Keyboards, Synth, Samples); Jaleel Bunton (Drums).
A few weeks ago, I had the chance to interview Gerard Smith. This is the guy that is always in the back besides the drums.
Gerard: I try to lay low mostly. I’m more an acoustic performer. I do a little bit of sound collection and recordings. That’s what I did for Cookie Mountain and even more so on this record. I’m not a bass player at all. I got asked to join the band for a short tour. I didn’t really think what was gonna happen cause Dave and Tunde used to work together but they never had it out to be a band.
After a brief discussion about the current tour, we went on to talk about TV On The Radio’s fourth full length track by track.
Halfway Home: A post-punk ballad that ends with a bang.
Gerard: Epic power teen ballad(laughs). I was really impressed with the song writing aspect of the song. Tunde wrote the lyrics and the melodies. I was really happy with the way it got handled and it kinda reminded me of things from Return to Cookie Mountain because it’s really dense and has build up.
Me: How does Tunde present these melodies to the band?
Gerard: He usually brings a demo. With Halfway Home, I was curious with how it was gonna get treated you know? So he had all this layers building up. In the original version there were even more harmonies conflicting with each other and building up into the song itself…and I was really interested in seeing were things were gonna go with that. Tunde is a multi-instrumentalist and he is probably ten times a better composer than most multi-instrumentalists I know.
Crying: Quite funky. Soulish falsetto vocals by Kyp Malone and extra catchy guitar licks by David Sitek.
Gerard: Jaleel and I were the last two to join the band. Jaleel was the second to last and then I was the last one…so we always maintained a bit of distance during the writing process into contributing instrumentation and not necessarily songs. This time around Jaleel and I got together and had the time to work on things before hand so we were just working on laptops and pro tools you know? Just goofing around. Jaleel had written what is now Crying. I was really happy with the fact that we took the time to work on these things and that it was one of the songs that later got worked on.
Dancing Choose: Tunde Adebimpe sings as if R.E.M.’s Michael Stype were to rap on It’s the End of the World. Strong horns arrangement.
Gerard: That was one were Dave sorted out the instrumentation. Tunde came in and heard it and worked on it and the rest is history. For me, I was really scared of that song. I was really terrified because of the textures and the whole first impression one gets but it worked out and after reading the lyrics I was impressed. It reminds me of things Dave and Tunde did on their own.
Stork and Owl
Gerard: I was really happy with this one because one of my samples got used. Those initial pounds and beats, that’s me. It’s one of my favorites …it’s so peculiar. Like a really odd ballad with a shoe gazzery goth sound that I kinda grew up with.
Me: The string arrangement is really good
Gerard: Yeah, yeah I really think that as well. On the demo it had something I liked a lot more. There was this string synth that I fell in love with…but as things progress they change you know?
Golden Age: Another funky sounding tune by Kyp. Reminds me of Prince.
Me: What about the Golden Age video?
Gerard: How about that video? (laughs). It’s something that’s been on the works for a long while. It’s about a lot of things we all have talked about. It’s like when you sit around with friends and go “what would I do if I had a bunch of money?” or “what would you do if the world was gonna end tomorrow?” you know? It’s a combination of a lot of ideas people have been talking about and one of them was cops arresting cops…
Me: and cops dancing…
Gerard: (laughs) Yeah! Cops dancing. I was like “lets get a bunch of dancers dressed up as cops!” and then the cops are like care bears (laughs). We are really fortunate to be doing this because we’re in our mid 30’s and it’s crazy to be in a rock band at this stage of the game.
Family Tree
Gerard: Tunde is a fucking amazing melodist. Like with painting…Monet was great with color, Tunde is just fucking great with the melodies. Family Tree is a ballad but it’s not very obvious. You can interpret it from different angles.
Red Dress
Me: TV on the Radio doing Afrobeat…
Gerard: Yeah, yeah! Right, absolutely. David is obsessed with afrobeat. I wasn’t around that much for the development for Red Dress. I was taking a day off and then came back and it was pretty much done. I was like “Wow! That’s crazy”. I put the keyboard tag at the end. Well actually, Jaleel and I came up with that. I came up with the first part and then Jaleel was like “ohh do this other thing”.
Love Dog: Another stunning vocal performance by Tunde.
Gerard: This one and Stork and Owl are my favorites from the record. It’s an amazing fucking song. Tunde came in with most of it in one night after working on these other demos. He did that one just sitting around and he just killed it. Jaleel pretty much laid down the basis for that song and David put something on top of it. I put a couple of little beats in the background at one point, I hope they made it because I really like that tune.
Shout Me Out: Cool guitar work. Like Halfway Home, it has an awesome build up that takes the song home.
Gerard: That song went through so many changes and I was really scared of where it was going. The original version was more aggressive.
DLZ: This is one of my favorite songs in here and honestly, I don’t feel like describing it ‘cause I can’t.
Gerard: I got a lot of my samples on there. I used a lot of drum samples that I collected on tour, mostly during sound check when Jaleel was testing his drums out. Tunde did the programming for that one. He wrote the drum sequence. This is another tune that went through a lot of changes.
Lover’s Day
Gerard: People say “ohh this is so different from the other stuff”. But you know what’s funny? Lover’s Day reminds a lot of Cookie Mountain.
Me: Because of the noisy guitars?
Gerard: Yeah, you know…and it’s another ballad but it has this weird, almost like New Orleans marching band. Kyp wrote it and worked really closely on the developing of this one. He worked a lot with the horn players and the arrangements. He worked the vocals with Eleanore Everdell and had her come in and come back again. I was really happy to see how much time he put into it and the developing of his abilities in the studio
Dear Science is a little bit more close to OK Calculator than the others. I was always impressed with the variety on that record, too many things happening. Now we have more textures, more ideas. It’s more certain.
Gerard: Way before I was even in the band, I remember they gave me a copy of mixes of OK Calculator as they were finishing it and I had a copy with me one day and I was on the subway and I saw David Byrne and I was like “David Byrne! What’s going on dude? Hey man I think you should really check this record out, my friends made it!”, and I gave him a copy.
Discography:
OK Calculator (2002)
Young Liars EP (2003)
Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes (2004)
New Health Rock EP (2004)
Return to Cookie Mountain (2006)
Live at Amoeba Music EP (2007)
iTunes Live Session EP (2007)
Dear Science (2008)
www.myspace.com/tvotr
www.tvontheradio.com
By: Rubén González Juárez
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