A few weeks ago, as LazerDisk Party Sex started a thumpin’ electronica set at the KahBang Music Festival Saturday night, I sat down with Henry Jamison, founder and lead singer of The Milkman’s Union, on the Bangor waterfront to talk about the band’s upcoming releases, their freakier side, future aspirations, and why you might never hear a live rendition of “America,” a fan favorite, ever again.
After a summer filled with recording sessions, concerts in basements, and a couple gigs at festivals, The Milkman’s Union is ready to tour, and they’re hitting it off with a show on Saturday at the Empire Dine & Dance at 9 P.M. with Wesley Allen Hartley’s new band, Splendora Cölt, and Tallahasse, a Boston/Brooklyn-based folk band fronted by a former NFL offensive lineman.
The following interview has been slightly edited for better flow, and — believe it or not — it was a lot longer than it appears here. For your reading pleasure, I cut out the fat and left you with the meatiest parts. Enjoy the read, and please use the multimedia extras to enhance the experience. The first question is about “Texas Hold Me,” a song that features Lady Lamb the Beekeeper and will be released on vinyl via Eternal Otter Records October 1st.
How did the collaboration with Lady Lamb come about?
When she had her going away party and she was nominally going to Brooklyn but she went to Cambridge for a while, and she was sort of going here and there, and she ended up staying with us for two weeks under cover. In the last day she was there—I mean I had asked her along time ago to sing on this particular song, and we just got her in the studio, I wrote out the lyrics, she had heard a demo version of it, so she learned her part. That’s the more local explanation of it.
The thing is that I honestly wrote that song as a half-joke. The name was a joke when I thought of it, I just was like, ‘oh switch the M and the E in Texas Hold ‘Em and there’s a cheesy song title.’ The hook was supposed to be a Taylor Swift-y hook, and so in the [Portland] Phoenix, I think it was Nick Schroeder [who] wrote, we need to re-evaluate the taxonomy of this band’s place in the Portland music scene. And I kind of felt like, I don’t want us to be suddenly known as this folk-country band, but these are the recordings we have, and Will Ethridge at Eternal Otter [Records] wants to put it out, so that’s going to be our first Portland release. It’s a little strange, but it’s alright with me, because I want to keep people guessing a little bit. And then our EP will come out eventually.
We have most of three songs done that will be a return to our live sound.
Will it only be three songs for the EP?
No, it will be five. Actually, the fifth is still a little debatable about what it will be. Basically, what I’m trying to do, in deciding what songs go on each release, is keep it chronological so there’s an actual development that happens. “The Golden Room:” that song was one of the first I wrote after Roads In. It’s our biggest statement on the album; this is our big club sound, so no, we are not a country-folk band.
So The Golden Room EP is basically your way to promote yourself to outside venues and blogs.
We’ll do a music video, and hopefully there will probably be some dancing, like A Severe Joy style.
What about the second album? Is that immaterial right now?
What’s been hard about recording the songs that we have is that they’ve been around for so long, so we have all our parts totally down and it’s just a matter of putting down what we do live. I’d like the actual LP to be a little more spontaneous, so “Sailor Boy,” for instance, I’d basically like to be a little tipsy, be like, ‘yo, Peter, lets just put down tracks right now.’ That’s how we recorded “Little Bird,” and there are ways in which that end up making it sound a little sloppier than it could be, but I also feel like it gives it more presence and makes me feel like I’m delivering the lyrics in a meaningful way and not rehashing the way that I’ve developed.
Sometimes I feel like live [performances] are diminishing returns in that I’m singing these songs, and I want to deliver them meaningfully every time and yet at the same time, I’m playing them so many times that I end up singing them in these sort of ruts, like I just sing them the same way every time. So I’d like with “Sailor Boy” and all these songs that are going to be on the LP to make it a little more spontaneous and have random people — like Jakob Battick or [people from] Butcher Boy — just jumping on tracks like that.
So would that make it considerably different from Roads In?
Well, Roads In was different than anything we’ll probably do again just by virtue of the fact that we were all in school, so we were just buying time here and there, recording in spurts months apart. Nothing will ever happen that way again, and I think we’ve gotten tighter and better. It will all be more cohesive, even if it has that spontaneity.
Do you have a timetable for The Golden Room EP?
We’re going to try to finish the basic tracking by the end of August, but then there will be lots of overdubs that will have to happen: strings and bringing various people in; then the mixing and the mastering and the pressing… maybe. We’ll see.
It might end up being like this 7” that we release it first on Bandcamp and not have it be downloadable at first, and then have a release party, probably on a CD with cardboard case we put a stamp on. Because we just don’t have the money to put it through disc makers again.
And then, that will also serve as the demo for labels. So we’ll be sending it around and trying to get buzz around. Hopefully a label could pick it up and release it, if it has enough of a sheen on it. But if not, then at least, it’ll like, ‘OK, we have an LP, will you please release it?’ Or, if that doesn’t happen either, then we’ll record the LP and shop it around, which is what Milagres and Brenda have done.
You guys seem to not want to revisit Roads In. I was wondering if there was a reason behind that. This is more of a question for the fans who might have really liked the first album — if there’s any reasons you can give for that.
The main thing is that we tend to want to rehearse and play newer songs because we’ve honestly just gotten sick of the old ones. When we need to play longer sets — maybe soon we’ll have to play longer sets if we’re headlining anything — we’ve generally been playing 45 minute sets so we just want to play the things that we are into. There’s a sense that we’ve outgrown it a little. The guy who was here asking for the song: I would have been willing to do that, but our sets are very structured in a way that once they’re written, there’s no deviating in a way, because I need to keep on my guitar here and there.
I don’t disown most of those songs, really. Eventually I’d like to re-record “Roads In,” the song in particular, because there’s some things I wish there were different about it: I go a little sharp in the second chorus. Although, don’t listen to that.
Too late.
Yeah [laughs].
Well, we’re not trying to slight anybody, except maybe in the case of “America.” That song I wrote my freshmen year of college, so by the time it was recorded, it was already two-and-a-half years old. It’s so far in the past… I can’t really relate to the person who wrote that.
When you guys played a house show in June, you played a really angular and noisy rendition of —which song was that? Or was it a combination?
It’s kind of weird. That song was originally called “We Weep in the Wilderness,” and then it’s in Drop D and I wrote another song that had nothing to do with that song, but for some reason, I saw it building out of it, and it actually shared some of the lyrics, so it’s like “the way you walk in the wilderness / blah, blah blah.” So we started calling that the “We Weep Redux.” It was the re-envisioned version of that song, so we wanted to be a little freaky for those boys [who run the house shows] because that basement can get very heady and strange. That was probably a one time thing…
That song: it’s bizarre. Sometimes I write things that feel mathier than anything I want to do. It’s like, I’ve written this song, someone else would have liked to have written this song, but I don’t know how it came out this way —
You don’t really enjoy these noisier songs?
I enjoy playing them, but when it comes down to it, I feel that song would feel very jarring in a normal set. It’s too similar another song that is the bride between the two weird sections and that song’s a pretty concise pop song, and to some degree — I just like pop music and so that’s probably the main reason I want it to be the pop song. At the same time I feel like it would be alienating to people who are into Surfer Blood.
Right. What you’ve said leads me to ask: do you think it compromises your creativity, or any kind of songs you’d like to write? You’re thinking about your audience, so it that OK with you?
That’s what was nice about playing in the basement at the house show. It felt like suddenly we could engineer a set to a particular audience, so “these guys will appreciate something very dissonant and very whack.” My sensibilities are poppy enough that I feel like it’s not going to be an issue. I’m not worried about a 14-year-old crying. She can just hit ‘next’ if it’s alienating to here. My favorite bands are Deerhoof and Dirty Projectors and all this stuff that is very strange but has broad appeal, so I don’t feel limited by that really. I don’t necessarily like that song. I’m into writing freakier shit, but it needs to be right. It needs to feel like I mean it.
You indicated that you’re very open to getting signed to a label, especially for the second LP. How far along do you think you guys are? Do you think it’s realistic at this point to reach a wider audience? Because you have toured a lot in New England, you’ve played with Deerhunter and a bunch of other bands that a lot of other people can’t say they have done. What is your feeling on where you are?
We just need to think that it’s realistic. We’ve seen bands like Milagres [recently signed to Kill Rock Stars] who have continued to think it’s realistic if you keep working and keep getting better. So we’re going to make an album that’s as good as we can make it. It just sort of hard for me to give up the idea that there is the possibility of living off of this, so I’d like to do it as my only thing. And even though the Internet is changing everything, there’s still maybe this window that we can slip through, where we can tour and make albums, and that’s what we’re doing.
Drop some knowledge.