Love Spirals Downwards

"Out of all the chosen representatives of this genre, Love Spirals Downwards is the most acceptable to general audiences. Dare we call it 'pop ethereal'?"

"Make no mistake, Love Spirals Downwards stand alone as a landmark to ethereal and madrigal greatness."

"Love Spirals Downward[s] shares a psychedelic code with the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and a musical code with groups like the Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance."

"Suzanne's voice could lull a King's Army into blissful dreamscapes, thereby calming war torn battlefields'"

"Will you fade now, should I let you? Met with indifference, I remain. So much depends now on this distance, These things escape. Well now I'm too dizzy, I am out of myself. Can you feel it? Too much within yourself. I grow dizzy."

"Your lips are conquerors, Your lips are filled with lies. Lost, lost in what seems, That’s how it should be. Who, who is to see, We write in water, Now."

"Sky's the same as it always was, Nothing we do. So hard to keep anything, When you're expected to. This is the time when water stops, History dies with you. Like rings of trees in sideways forest, Forgetting."

"Stretch stretching, Far beyond this delta between we. Dive, diving, Deep beneath the surface suddenly. All my thoughts are broken. All the words are worn. Can it just be spoken? Can it just be warm?"

"City moon so soon, You’re the world to me. Barely one, Star which hung, Sailing to the sea. And yellow time is overhead, Unchanging things imprinted. Can it all be clear?"

"I'd cross the ocean just to be there by your side. I've felt the water as it's river flows to dry. The night sky warms me, tell me should I close my eyes? Those lights that blind me, say you, "Just you step inside." Right by your side. Right by your side."

"Trom rey am Lea lam Fiore fio Freya say Dolce spira Scherza mira Va go"

"I'm about as Gothic as Snoop Doggy Dog. I've never categorized myself nor my art as Gothic. I really don't understand where people get the idea that we are Gothic."

"Projekt has been successful at marketing itself to goths. We're not gothic, nor are any of the bands that influence us. Whoever thinks that we or Slowdive or the Cocteau Twins are goth must have a funny idea of what goth is."

"The last time I went to a gothic club in L.A. was in 1989…I believe that the whole gothic club scene here has grown lifeless; there’s no new creative influx… I remember myself and others leaving that whole scene for good in 1989 and headed for the then-new "Acid House" clubs such as the "Alice In Wonderland" themed Alice’s House which had the life and energy that had been missing for so long in the goth scene.*"

"There was a certain vibe at Projekt Festival… I don’t think people realized we were the artists! When we walked out on stage I had this really trippy shirt on, and people laughed at me up at the front!"

"The conflict arose because at least half of the people came to party, show off their cloaks and fangs, and make new Gothic friends, in any case not for the music."

"I have nothing against goth music. What I am against is people summing us up in one fell swoop as a goth band… it’s a disservice, it’s dishonest, it’s inaccurate. People can think of us whatever they want… people think we’re a goth band, or a new age band, folk band, techno band… even a yuppie band! Not that we’re yuppies, but yuppies can dig our sound. Even adult contemporary has been thrown around. It just goes to show that our music is open ended."

"Sure, we sound like them in certain analysis, but in a broader sense you could say we sound like 10,000 Maniacs if you don’t know music all that well. It depends how far you want to split hairs. Do I mind being compared to them? Yes, if people think we’re trying to be like them or sound like them… It takes the uniqueness away from us and tries to conveniently classify us. The same with comparing us to gothic bands. We’re not a gothic band, we’re not an anything band. We just make pretty music… To try to sum it up like that is problematic. You’re going to miss something."

"I really don't think we sound like them, to be completely honest. I'm not in denial or self-deception, it's my honest belief that if you listen to our music, we don't sound like the Cocteau Twins."

"It's hard to think of a band name; we had to think of one rather quickly to send our demo tape out. We should have just sent it as Ryan and Suzanne! Anyway, our choice of band name didn't follow from our wanting to associate ourselves with the drug."

"We were listening to the radio one night --late-- to a new age show and the woman was saying, “Love, it spirals, upwards, upwards!” It stuck in Suzanne’s head because it was really late… 3 or 4 in the morning. We were parked in front of her house. It tripped us out a lot. So we said, “OK, that’s the band name, Love Spirals Upwards.” Then we decided to change it to "downwards.""

"It seems like it could be a contradiction, but it’s not. Our band name, in a way, reflects our way of making lyrics and our whole attitude towards music. What sounds best is what works."

"We weren't trying to be a band, so we were shocked and surprised when there was any response at all. We mailed out the tape to three companies: 4AD, Creation, and Projekt - who we didn't know about, we heard of it through a friend of a friend. Sam wrote us back a letter of interest. He didn't say he would sign us or anything, but he wanted to hear more stuff."

"Why did we even send it out? I guess I was recording another band here and they were making a tape to send out places, so we figured, 'Hey, we can do that!'"

"It's been an important pursuit of mine, but I never had any intention of pursuing music as a sort of career, on a 'professional' level. I just always made music for myself. It made me happy. I'd been doing that for years, until Suzanne came into the picture."

"We started singing together in January of 1991."

"We were boyfriend/girlfriend for maybe a year or two before I had her sing on my music. I knew her two years and I never knew she sang that well!"

"A lot of those songs for Idylls I had never intended to be released ever, they were just demos — not all of them, maybe half the songs were just demos — that got turned into real songs. On this new album [Ardor] since we were signed, obviously I knew they were going to be released. As far as a concept, um… no, not really. I had more — on this album — of a sound concept, but it kinda hit me when I was almost done with the album. Maybe the way I mixed the songs kinda tied them all together.*"

"I'll come up with some chord sequences that I like on acoustic guitar and build from there. After that, it's all very intuitive. An idea comes in the studio and it's recorded right then."

"It's usually a building process, it's just different what I start building from. Sometimes it will be a drum sound, and I'll build on that, or it will be a keyboard or acoustic guitar part. It gets turned into a pretty full blown instrumental after awhile, and then the vocals usually come in last - near the end - and I'll fix up the drums and mix it down sometime later."

"We've got our own home recording studio. In fact, the way we write, we have to do it at home. We don't make up 10 or 11 songs and say, 'Okay! Time to go to the studio and record all the songs!' I'll have some rough sounds or ideas and I'll record them down on tape or into the sampler, and from there I'll start getting more ideas. It will build from what I previously recorded. That would be a very costly, practically impossible, thing to do in the studio. We would be racking up the kind of budget like Sgt. Pepper's or something!"

"I'll do the music first, and when it's almost done, Suzanne will listen to it, then we both make up the vocal parts. We don't rehearse or anything, I just start laying the tracks."

"For the most part, I'll always have the music almost done. Sometimes I won't have the drums finished, or I might have a guitar part or two left, but the music's done. Once I have that done, I'll bring it over to Suzanne and she'll start humming and making up vocal parts. From there, we'll start getting words fitted in to it, we'll record that, and then I mix the song down and it's done. It could take many months."

"I don’t think Suzanne was as easily able to make parts for this kind of music as she was the more acoustic based music. Her sister on the other hand was making up parts left and right, so it kind of worked out."

"I was surprised by how few people seemed shocked by it! I guess people that liked our sound before –if they truly liked it– they liked our new sound, too. It still has all the mood and feeling as our old music does, it just has more drums, so as long as you’re not beatophobic — and there are those out there, trust me, I’ve met a few people who just can’t like our album because of the beats. They said, ‘Just get rid of the drums and I’ll like it,’ and I go, ‘It’ll be really boring then!’ So, assuming you’re not the beatophobic type, yeah, most people have gone along with it. I’m surprised by how many people think it’s our best record. I think it’s our best record."

"The last song we recorded was our Christmas track, "The Little Drummer Boy." I don't know exactly how many songs that she'll be singing on. Like on Flux, she sang on about half of them or so, but yeah, she'll be working with me, I’m sure Anji will be working with me on some of the new tracks. Maybe Kristen --she sang on two cool tracks on Flux. Anji here has sung on two unreleased tracks that I made last fall. They’re more of dance tracks that I’m deejaying."

"Right now we’re just a recording band, I think it works better that way because I don’t have a bunch of other musicians to work with. If we played live we’d have to get a whole new concept of “working together.” We’d have to practice and rehearse things. None of that ever happens, we never practice. I just create things and we record them on the spot."

"It's really weird to have these songs - some on Idylls have been out for years - and going back and playing them now. The only time they existed is us recording them -- we never rehearsed the songs once in our lives. I'm not kidding."

"We don’t really tour per se. It’s usually been a few one-off shows or a string of small shows put together. I’ve never been, like, packed in a van on the road for a month. It sounds kind of, I don’t know, not fun? I like the music part. I like seeing things. But… traveling too much can get kind of wearying. I might starting hating everyone, all my friends I’m traveling with. It’s always been more of a studio project than jamming live, so you know, less reason to wanna go out and jam live, since we don’t really do it here at home, anyway."

"More of a spiritual experience. Some kind of musical listening experience that guides you in a higher direction. Not higher like taking drugs, but lifting them up a little bit, engaging their spiritual dimension."

"I’ve just never felt that art must have meaning: it just is. It’s sort of a funny fallacy that most people seem to insist upon everything in the world as having meaning. What is the meaning of a sunset? What’s wrong with just simply experiencing it? Likewise, our art exists without demanding that it has some higher or more important existence apart from the experience of it. Its meaning is irrelevant."

"Oh I don't know what Suzanne is singing about. She just uses words that sound good. There's no storytelling or anything like that you are supposed to get.... Asking her to write a real story or poetry would be almost a foreign concept."

"I believe that many people think that we are weird mysterious people, perhaps because our music is a bit weird and mysterious. Many interviewers seem a little surprised when they meet us. I think that they were expecting us to be different than how we really are in person, which is really down to earth and real. We are definitely not pretentious."

"Our main quality is that we never pretend to be someone we’re not. We’re not interested in technical perfection or impressing anyone—we care about emotion."

"A friend recently transcribed what she thought were the lyrics of our new songs, and they were different from ours. But the interesting thing is that her lyrics were just different from ours, not better or worse. The way she had imparted her meaning to the lyrics was really intriguing. That’s why I think it’s so exciting to use lyrics like ours: there’s not a single meaning that everyone is expected to understand. I bet there are as many different meanings for our songs as there are people that they listen to them."

"In junior high and early high school I had maybe three or four years of guitar training, but I didn't really learn anything after the first year or so. I don't know why I kept going."

"We're not a big musicianship kind of band. It's important, but we're not Yes or something like that. We play what we gotta play to make the music sound right. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's a little difficult. The most important thing is that we play it right."

"I go between making this pure acoustic music and then going into this analog synthesizer, drum machine sound, tweaking knobs and stuff — just to keep things fun! If I did the same thing for a while, I’d get burnt out!"

"I'm a firm believer of always trying different things, trying to push myself, not falling back into what I did before - even if it was successful. I get bored, and I feel as if I've cheated myself, too, if don't push myself to do something new."

"All of my other albums I really cringe at listening to. Actually, it's kinda sad; Flux is the first one now where it's like, 'I finally did it right!'"