An Interview with Edward Droste

Howdy! Well, to be honest I doubt there is going to be a grand remix project/EP reworking the songs. To be completely candid, I’m the real remix junkie in the band and am usually the one requesting them/soliciting them. I think there’s a bit of a feeling that we’ve “done that” already in terms of releasing covers by other artists, remixes, etc etc. That said, they are always nice as a b-side, or bonus track and will continue to pop up periodically. Neon Indian has one for Cheerleader which I’ve still yet to hear but should be out in the interwebs sometime this fall. As for the stems to “Two Weeks”, I wasn’t kidding! There is actually a widget/device thingy that has the stems and we keep meaning to release it, but for whatever reason we haven’t done it “officially” yet—but as far as I know, at the very least “Two Weeks” stems will be unleashed for all the mash ups and remixers in the world that might be momentarily interested.

Actually, there was no studio time with the legend. We had ALL always been huge fans of his and discovered a connection to him via a friend of ours (who manages Chairlift) and asked her to present this semi-random, but fun idea we had of him essentially just singing Daniel’s part. He came to a show first, really liked the tunes and then agreed to do it, so we sent over the track for him to record on his own. As for free reign, indeed! We would never create parameters or rules for him! When you ask someone like that to do you a favor and collaborate, you let them do whatever the hell they want, and I'm glad we did! I love his riffing, especially at the end!

I really enjoy collaborating with other artists and playing around with songs. I think this is a huge reason why there are so many “different versions” of our songs, or remixes, or covers, etc. It’s a way for us to keep our own material fresh. I really love hopping on other people’s songs because in a weird way it’s much easier because the lyrics and melody are done and they just want you to sing it—so it’s purely a performative thing, which can be really nice without the history of knowing and having written or worked on the creative side of songwriting. Of course it depends on the project, like the DNTEL track was a barebones track. He asked me to make up a melody and words, but Cliquot was all Beirut and Final Fantasy. The only reason I got involved was because Beirut was filming his complete Blogotheque series for The Flying Club Cup and Owen wasn’t around so he asked me to fill in. I doubt a Treasure Island duet is going to happen as I’d need time to rehearse with them, etc and it’s been a few years now since I even did it as a take. Perhaps someday.

As for Victoria, I honestly believe she is one of the most amazing vocalists out there right now. I think the whole band does. Any chance I have to tour with her, collaborate with her or just be in her world, I take. I’m Beach House’s #1 fan. For realz. Their new material gives me goose bumps. I’d roadie for them if I had the time. Sell their merch. They own.

Nobody has vocal training at all. Our voices have changed probably because we’ve learned how to perform through the years. We used to sit down and stare at the floor and mumble into a mic…it took ages to learn how to grow comfortable performing and singing out. I still think to this day, there’s a part of me which thinks I’m not meant to be doing this. I’m shy on stage. I get nervous. I have trouble communicating heavily with the crowd. I don’t really think I’m a born performer. It’s not a struggle or anything, and it’s something I really enjoy, but there will probably always be a slight discomfort and unfamiliarity to it no matter how much we tour.

A lot of it is really intuitive. For instance, someone might have written a melody and then other people just throw in their ideas for harmonies. Sometimes they get nixed, often they don’t. Everyone has their own vocal range and natural harmonies that come to them. Usually, one can assume, if you hear someone singing they wrote that melody. It would be close to impossible for me to write a melody for Dan and vice versa and only we know what melodies feel natural for us to sing. The same goes for backing harmonies.

I think we try not to over labor the songs, but we also enjoy taking the time to live with the material. There have definitely been moments where I thought a song was done only to see it completely reformed and reshaped. Different mixes or arrangements will always exist, sometimes if they seem relevant pieces of them might pop up in a live show or surface on an EP.

At the heart of it I’m not an instrumentalist. I’m not trained on anything other than a few years of guitar lessons in high school. As you’ve all noticed, I play instruments anyone can play, which I joke are “children’s instruments”—it’s not difficult or weird at all, because frankly I get frustrated with my own limitations instrumentally speaking. I consider myself much more of a song writer/singer. I can add some texture with an autoharp or mini keyboard, and write simple little parts for them, but ultimately I focus more on the vocal/lyric/songwriting side of things. This is why I enjoy writing so much with my bandmates, taking trips with Bear or throwing song ideas back and forth with Dan—they can flesh out ideas I have on an instrument, and I can sometimes provide a bit more of a naive/intuitive untrained ear to the songs. We all have different musical tendencies and I think we each serve as a foil sometimes to check each other’s habits. As for the future, I’ll never be the guitarist Daniel is, and when recording it’s sort of like “why have me play guitar when Dan can play it better?”—live of course we only have so many sets of hands, so I lend what I can. Sometimes though someone might like how I’m plucking the guitar in a sort of weird, untrained way and we’ll record that—but I doubt they’ll be a revisit to the guitar sample/loops of Horn of Plenty years, although one can never say.

Not really. I’ve listened to Veckatimest once since it came out just to sort of “remember the recording” since we all became so fully engulfed in touring and performing live. You listen to an album SO MUCH when recording/mixing and mastering that by the time it comes out, it’s not that it’s stale, it’s just loaded and you need some space from it. I can’t even remember the last time I listened to Horn of Plenty. Probably 2-3 years ago.

We just try to find artists or directors we admire and let them go wild. A music video to me is actually just about someone else’s vision. It’s all about letting them interpret the song as they see it, sort of like surrendering a song for remix, as in you never know what part of the song will strike someone and they’ll focus on. I enjoy videos that are memorable, and generally speaking I’m really pleased with the sort of odd collection we’ve accumulated thus far. You’ll never see a video of us with “live footage” or “road life”…There’s no way to know what direction future videos will take, as it all comes down to what directors we choose…There is a new video coming out for Ready, Able soon which I’m REALLY pleased with—it’s claymation and one of my favorites yet.

I appreciate it all, such as letters, mixes, cookies, but one of my favorite things actually wasn’t something a fan made for me, but rather what they made for themselves. While mixing Veckatimest upstate I got into a weird kick of drawing all these random cartoons on post it notes, which Chris Bear became semi obsessed with, so much so he decided to make T-shirts out of them (some of you maybe were at the DOE show at Emos in March, where they were all wearing “Droste-Ts”, their name for the T-shirts with my post it note cartoons). Anyhow, one of them is the “This feels chill” image which is really random as I don’t smoke pot at all, and I tweeted the T-shirt with Bear wearing it once and I guess someone who followed me managed to exactly redraw the image and put it on a T-shirt of his own, and at a Dallas show in June, he got up on a friend’s shoulders during the set and in a frantic way was pointing at his shirt like “LOOOK DUDE!! I MADE IT” and we all just cracked up so hard. Kinda the best homage ever. We all really appreciated that.

The Florida lobbying is a relentless beast isn’t it? Haha. You know we all have, on multiple occasions, requested being routed through Florida, but there are so many factors at play. For some reason, booking agents are really resistant to Florida because it’s out of the way and I guess maybe there aren’t lots of great venues? Truthfully I don’t know why. I know we’ve asked about it and for some reason it just keeps not happening. There are so many parts of the states we’d love to tour but for whatever reason (no demand?) we don’t. We’ve never played New Mexico either and part of me would just like to do a 10 day New Mexico tour as I love that state so much. We only played Florida opening for the Books back in spring 2006…I really hope we make it back there at some point. I can assure Mr. Bluth that we’ve asked about it multiple times—it’s bound to happen eventually!