American Bands

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Were beeth they biforen us weren, And hadden feeld and wode. The wood comes into leaf, Thou might and canst and owe sheld. Therein never havest owest then, Ychabbe y-yerned yore"

"I begin again, As the world outside ends. Dense, even in the still light, To owe you my life. I tell you, Make castles when you want to, And fill them with sights. Stir about the stars, During nights below these tides."

"Suzanne Perry - vocals, lyrics"

"Ryan Lum - guitar, bass guitar, keyboards, percussion, programming, sampling, recording, mixing, production"

"We got a card from one of our friends who goes to art school... Susan, Sam's girlfriend, goes to school with our friend."

"What it was, was that we were coming to the end of the summer and we had set ourselves a deadline. We did 3 songs and sent them out to 3 places and figured if no one called us on it, we'd just keep making music."

"The first song we ever made was "Forgo," which is on Idylls. I had never written a song before. I just got in there and started humming in the microphone and that's how it happened. And we listened to it and we thought, 'Hey, that's not too bad!' And then we just made a couple more and just sent them out."

"We just decided to fool around with doing music, but actually Ryan resisted me singing on his music for awhile because he thought it would cause problems in our relationship."

"My sister was singing with Ryan, maybe like one or two songs, and then I was going to school in London for awhile and hearing tapes of my sister's, and they never really got off the ground and did that much stuff. So I came back, and basically a little bit after that, we started singing -- I started singing on his music... It wasn't like we were singing together a lot or singing together live a lot. We did two songs together; we crapped one and kept one, then we did two more, which gave us three songs. We sent them out to Sam of Projekt and that was it. That's how it started."

"He had a couple other singers before, like he was trying my sister out. It's funny because I was in London at the time going to school, and he was sending me tapes with my sister on it, and I thought, 'I can sing that. In fact, I can sing that better!"

"We were actually going out before we started doing music together. I had never done music with anyone before."

"I've been in choirs and have had some voice class, but I have not had any formal long term training."

"Our music exists outside of any particular time or place. It’s music to be listened to today or tomorrow. When you hear a song from a certain era, you usually have to have lived through that time to fully understand it. With our music, that’s not necessary."

"I don't have this big scheme or plan; I may stop soon, or I may go for another ten years!"

"Where we are now is pretty much what I have expected. I never wanted to try to become a huge band like Nirvana. I'm happy with where we are at."

"When we create, we don’t worry about what style or genre it is. We just do it. Labels are useful for stores and marketing, but we create from feeling, not classification."

"Of course you never know if somebody else is going to like it. You know immediately if you like it. That’s what I do. I write what’s going to please me, not somebody else: not the record label, or some unknown hypothetical band somewhere."

"I make what deeply moves me and what feels right and don’t worry about what kind of genre it is. I probably cut across too many genres anyway to be considered as being a part of any genre. I’m just some guy that makes music in my bedroom. Scenes and genres don’t exist in my bedroom."

"It’s kinda funny, I listen to lots of electronic stuff but most of my music is very acoustic guitar based. I go back and forth between pure acoustic music and then I let to go full on with my analogue drum machines and samplers and just tweaking knobs and stuff. Just to keep things fun… I guess if I did too much of one thing I’d get kind of burnt out."

"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!'"

"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."

"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!"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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’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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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'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."

"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!"

"It took you momma nine months to make it, but it only took that nigga thirty minutes to take it."

"I bust raps like the boys bust gat shit."

"Don't want to meet your daddy, just want you in my caddy."

"She was, fine as fuck I wanted to sex the ho up. She said "let's hit the parking lot so I can sick your duck.""

"Nobody wanted to dance, when i had a lot of time on my hands, now i have a lot of hands on my time, and everybody wants to be a friend of mine, wo wo."

""Forever" never seems that long until you're grown"

"You can plan a pretty picnic, but you can't predict the weather"