American Bands

"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'?"

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

"Let’s talk about how good that album ['Flux'] is. If you’ve heard me speak about the album any other times, I’ve completely switched my opinion now. My promotions people have talked to me. I love it. Buy it. I love it! Everything is so great! That’s what people want to hear — how wonderful everything is and what a wonderful process it was making the album. They don’t want to hear the truth."

"Usually it’s more of a collaborative effort. It’s not that this one [Flux] wasn’t, but he took it in directions that I wouldn’t necessarily have gone if I was there at every moment. It’s more of Ryan’s work. It’s something that he fashioned out of his own likings. For me, making a more electronic sounding records was lazier. There's a lot fewer lyrics and there's a lot more repetition. I feel like I cheated."

"It’s interesting because you might not know our language, but even so, you get similar emotions as those who do know it. Also, when you don’t understand a language, you really concentrate on the sounds. For us, words don’t just relate to the language and the images they project; they also relate to the sounds, because the intention you give them is completely linked to how you position your tongue, how loud you sing, or what type of microphone you use."

"I experience different emotions for different songs… longing, desire, disappointment, escape. I prefer the overall impressions a song makes upon you. I find words to be limiting in that they are usually intended to convey meaning. I don’t want to impose that much on a listener or myself. I believe our songs aren’t about “getting it”, instead they are about experiencing what is created. I like to think of the music we make as art that is intended to be experienced by every individual in their own way."

"For a long time I felt that we hid behind the effects."

"If you can listen to a song that you created, that you wrote, and it still gives you the chills even after listening to it over and over again, that’s a good song."

"I hope people have a good experience, or a positive experience, but beyond that, I don’t expect people to get much from it. That’s not my intention when I make it. I don’t even know why I do it. It’s fun for me. It’s fun. When you get past that, you get in trouble. Nobody ever experiences anything like you want them to. And who am I to want people to experience in a certain way? Beyond that, I can’t even control that… I can’t control if people are going to buy it, or even care about it. I really loathe the music business."

"I don't think I could just sit and do only music, it wouldn't be enough. I'm not ready to quit and do music now. I wouldn't quit Psychology."

"I don't even think about it like that. It's not part of my identity. I don't go around saying, "I'm in a band." That's usually the last thing I mention."

"To me it’s very separate, I mean, writing poetry or writing prose --literature and that-— is completely separate from music. I mean, I think that’s why a lot of times we use nonsensical syllables and just whatever sounds good because… it’s about sound, you know? Really for us it’s about sounding — I don’t know — beautiful or whatever we want it to sound like."

"I compartmentalize my music. It's something I do as a hobby and a side thing, and I don't really mix it with my life. Even my everyday emotions I don't think I mix with it. But every so often, I think it seeps in. It's interesting, because it truthfully makes me uncomfortable. In some ways, I think it's kind of sappy and too expressionist to put your life in your music like that."

"It's amazing how little I think about my music. Like I never realized all the images it evokes... But I guess I don't have a lot of confidence in my ability to write. I don't necessarily think it's my gift. I'm not bad, but that's not the means by which I express myself. And I don't know how much I want to reveal of myself, like the really personal stuff."

"It's a lot harder for me to write words that are personal than to write nonsense lyrics because I'm getting into things that I reveal about myself. I don't know how comfortable I feel with expressing myself in that way or putting that into music."

"I'm not really sure what prompted me to do that. I have a couple theories about it, though. The first theory is that I don't know how to write lyrics, so that's the only thing I think I could come up with - the only thing I could produce. The other theory is that I like doing it."

"Some of them are in English and they make some sense, and some are in English and they make no sense. And there are others that are in a "make-believe" Italian, and then there's a kind of "make-believe" Latin, but I don't know Latin or Italian. And there's some French too... and some Indian, too, make-believe Indian. Most of it doesn't make any sense. Some of the new stuff actually does have a little meaning. Still, even if it does, I don't pronounce it well enough so that you can tell. When I'm singing it, I'm not concerned with pronouncing it so that you could understand it. I guess its not meant to be understood."

"As far as vocals go, I'll usually listen to a completed - or near completed - instrumental and just start humming some catchy notes into the microphone, find some that I like, then do a rough recording of them and see how they sound. If I wait a day or two and see if the notes stick to me, I'll sometimes try to write some words or phoentics to them. We get a mood for a song and if I think it has an Italian or Latin mood to it, I'll try to almost mimic that language to evoke that sort of mood. The songs in that way, at least on Idylls are more thematic. I tried to do something different with Ardor where I thought I'd maybe write some words to it. There are definitely more actual words on Ardor."

"He’ll usually do the whole music and play it for me, and I’ll come up with ideas, just notes and things, either on my own or with him."

"I've gotten conditioned to only do it in there. I have to have the microphone on and we make the songs up as we're recording. It's like going to church and you have this experience."

"I don't see myself as an artist or as a musician. I don't think about it as part of my identity... My music is something where I walk in and do it, and it's not something I think about in my everyday life. I don't dwell on it, or think, 'This or that will be a great part for a song!' When I'm in the studio, it's sacred, but I don't carry that artist persona around with me at all."

"People try to decipher a meaning in our name, but honestly, there isn’t one. It’s pure aestheticism. Beauty matters to us for its own sake. We’re aware that Love Spirals Downwards sounds like “LSD” to some people, but our music isn’t meant to “alter consciousness” or be psychedelic. It’s just music with an emphasis on beauty and feeling."

"We didn’t have one and we were trying to figure out what to call ourselves. I think this is funny --and Ryan gets mad when I tell this but-- we were calling ourselves “The Flower People,” from 'Spinal Tap.' The whole idea of a band was a joke to us. In L.A., but probably everywhere, you meet people and they’re all in a band. So we thought it was stupid. When we put the demo tape together, we didn’t have a name. The only other band names we had made up were jokes, funny names."

"We had to scramble to make more songs for Sam to listen to. I call us a 'Made to Order' band; we write only what is required."

"We later learned it was Susan who originally liked our music. It was Susan who, I guess, really found it and said, 'Oh, listen to this.' I think she pushed Sam into contacting us."

"LSD just might be the burgeoning leader of another full-on ethereal rock revival."

"It is an arguable fact that there are three bands whose names are synonymous with the world-renowned Projekt label: Black Tape For A Blue Girl, Lycia and Love Spirals Downwards."

"The work we did in that [Love Spirals Downwards] is pretty timeless. A few years may have passed but I still feel like that possibility is always out there. I get a good feeling when I see an LSD disc out there. It’s still going on in its own way, even if I’m not doing any actual work. For me, Melodyguild is a lovely extension of what I did with Love Spirals Downwards."

"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."

"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."

"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.*"

"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!"

"We started singing together in January of 1991."

"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."

"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!'"

"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."

"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 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'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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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 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.*"

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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?"