Pedestrian chatted with one half of San Francisco duo †Girls’ about their debut album, jumping into the fame game head first and their not safe for work Hardcore XXX music video. As we learn, the duo aren’t the drug fiends everyone thinks they are, the cavalcade of beautiful girls aren’t models they’re friends and their debut album errr “Album” may well be this Summer’s most exuberant slice of hazy, washed out guitar pop. Ladies and Gentleman meet Girls.
PEDESTRIAN: Hey J.R. what have you been up to?
GIRLS: We’ve had a crazy week after the European tour and I’m just a wreck. We †re all a wreck. We just came off five weeks of touring and now have a week off before our US tour. It’s exciting for us, we’ve got a sold out show in New York, which is a big deal, we’re pretty lucky. Our guitar player quit halfway through the European tour, and we were like if you’re not into it †get out’. We had a friend step in from Dominant Leg – a really great band out of San Francisco. So we’re getting a whole new band with a new drummer and everything. We have four days of rehearsals and it’s been going really strangely. Going from a band you’ve played with for eight months and having done two tours with, it’s a pretty scary proposition a whole new band.
P: How did the others fit into the mix? Is it just for the purposes of touring?
G: For the band it’s just for the touring capacity. For the first record Christopher and I just did it. But we potentially want to find a permanent band, we don’t want to be a band with people always coming in and out although there is parts of that idea that I like. But for us to grow a band is a lot better. We want to be a band, band – we don’t want to be just two guys. They just have to be able to write their own solos but they have to pass it by us. We’re not masterful musicians by any means, we just know what we want.
P: Are you hard masters to please?
G: No, I don’t think we are hard to please. We just know what we want. OK, so maybe we are. We work on these things for so long, we have a pretty clear idea of how we want it to sound, and so if it doesn’t sound right you make it sound right. It’s like our baby, it’s hard to give them over to people and trust them all the time so in that sense maybe we are hard to please. But I’d like to think we’re pretty good guys to play with and be around.
P: Is it hard to welcome people into that bubble?
G: No, we normally base who we work with on their personalities and we just made a few bad decisions. You never know what can happen, if you base it around whether you like a person, they can play their instrument and you like being around them and spending time with them outside of the band, then it’s probably going to be a pretty good situation more likely than not.
P: How did you meet Christopher?
G: We meet through mutual friends and found ourselves at the same parties, the same shows. We weren’t really close friends until we started working on music together.
P: How did you progress from acquaintances to band mates?
G: It was through the recording process. Chris was interested in the process and was asking questions and I could tell from the questions he was asking that he had no idea what he was doing. He was just clueless when it came to the recording process. I helped him buy some equipment because I had a bit of a recording background and I had to go around to his house and show him the best way to use a four track, to get the best sound from it. And I liked a song he was playing so helping him with the four track and then we decided to do it properly and got a reel-to-reel half machine and do it for real.
P: How is it living and working together?
G: We get along pretty well, we don’t fight often, we have moments but then it usually blows over in a day or something.
P: How have you handled the whole “being in a band” process with touring, interviews and everything?
G: Oh I think we’re handling it pretty well. One thing that can stress my boat, as a spearhead of the band it’s sort of a responsibility to handle it well to try and keep everything together and in that sense I’ve handled it pretty well. I don’t read interviews or watch videos of our shows, I know when we’re bad and when we’re good – I don’t like to revisit it. It’s all been really fun, even in this stressful times and trying to put a band together there is still some fun in it.
P: How have you found the reception overseas?
G: It’s been great. It was all going to be a surprise, no matter whatever it was because we didn’t have any expectations; we didn’t know what it was going to be like. We sort of had an idea that places like France were going to be cool, that we’d go over well. It was great, it’s incredible we’re pretty lucky to get our stuff out there.
P: What’s the song writing process like between you and Chris?
G: Chris writes everything backs it with music and demo’s it to me on Garage Band and then we sit there and talk about it , genuinely off the bat and you have an idea of what you want. It’s not a very formal process, it’s fairly natural. Then we’d bring it into the studio after that. We’d sit there after work in 1am, until early in the morning and we start laying down the track, we’d always start with guitar, which now I see is a really hard way to do it. Then we’d just build on top of the melodies.
P: What’s with the hard core XXX version of †Lust for Life’?
G: That’s not even the hard-core XXX version, it got cut. I’m kind of upset it didn’t get put out actually.
P: You wanted a different version?
G: Well yeah there’s a gay porn version we were really pushing for that was incredible. Nothing like anything anyone else has ever put out before, but at the same time it’s really beautiful about two people who love each other and we’re from San Francisco so it’s not a surprise to us. The XXX one was kind of a reactionary thing because our label kept on saying they wanted us to do a †clean’ version. They wanted to put the song with the edit over the top. So we would laugh about I and then became really literal about it and decided to make a really dirty version. We did the whole thing as a joke sort of but it was of it was done with people we know and who trusted us who knew were going to make something that it was going to be pretty in the end.
P: All your videos seem to have that sense of friendship and freedom, what’s the shoot like?
G: They’re all pretty natural, we don’t tell anyone what to do. In our video there is a lot of people hugging and holding hands, but that’s very San Francisco, which is on everywhere that might be shocking for others but we never really considered it like that.
P: What’s it like living in San Francisco in 2009?
G: It’s just a mess, it’s great – a beautiful mess. It’s kind of dirty, there are a lot of creative people doing creative things and there are a lot of people wasting their lives away. It can be whatever you want. New York sort of has the same thing, but here there is more of a free feeling, a little less creative.
P: Why did you call your debut album †Album’?
G: We went considered a lot of names I’d rather not mention to be honest, Chris wanted it to be named after an Elvis song, I wanted to do something sort of like an Emo band. One day when we were at home and Chris was working on the album cover and we arguing about the name so he put the word †Album’ in the title code. We both agreed it was good and didn’t want to argue about it anymore. It is what it is, it’s a photo album in essence.
P: How did you settle on the band name?
G: It was a spur of the moment, Chris was working on a project called †Girls’ and playing a couple of the same songs and we were sitting around talking about band names and I said the word girls and it just stuck.
P: Speaking of, it seems all the girls that hang around you are really attractive, is that just a coincidence?
G: Yeah, well all the girls we hang around with are attractive, they are really beautiful. We have a lot of beautiful friends, but it gets misconstrued I think. Comments like †look how cool that band thinks they are’ etc. But it’s not like that at all.
P: On your Myspace page you’re band website link takes you to drugs.com. Do you actually use drugs.com?
G: I think all bands use drugs.com. There was a time we did use drugs.com, you don’t want to get ripped off on your pharmaceuticals that you buy on the street. You want to know what you’re taking. It’s not really prevalent in the band anymore. But we did, but no longer do.
P: Did it help the creative process?
G: No it hindered the creative process. We’d record out some of the tracks on the record and you’d hear mistakes all over the place and that was because we were high and lazy and didn’t care. But it adds to the overall sound. It wasn’t intentionally a drug album, or have drugs linked to it. But I guess it is a drug album. I don’t know what it is – nah it’s just a record.
P: If the band hadn’t had taken off, would you still be stuck in that lifestyle? Were you forced out of it to be professional?
G: Yeah there was a sense of responsibility that was felt. It was silly because that was all we talked about and that that was all we did, but it was blown out of proportion. I’d say now that most bands probably do more drugs than we do just from experience. We just felt like we would be uncensored with people. We were just these two guys that made a record in our living room basically and we started to get phone calls about interviews and we were just laughing in the back of heads when we told people we were on drugs because it was funny to us. The whole process was very contrived, we were getting a kick out of it and we were entertaining ourselves and entertaining the interviewer. But we were very naive, pawns in a little game and didn’t know it could get so blown out of proportion
P: So your process to pretty much everything has changed?
G: Yeah, but even if it didn’t it wouldn’t be that bad. Who knows maybe I’m lying to you. Maybe I’m shooting heroin right now. No, we’re a healthy band for good insurance reasons.
