Interview With Martin Crane of Brazos

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We got the chance to chat with Martin Crane of Brazos over the weekend about their upcoming upcoming album, Phosphorescent Blues, and tour with White Denim. Madison + MKE check out the awesome bill at the High Noon, Thu. November 5.

SC: Phosphorescent Blues, out November 10th, is your first full length
album. Can you take us through a little bit of what the album is
about? It’s incredibly good, you have to be really excited for it to
drop.

Martin Crane: Hey thanks a lot I’m glad you like it. And yes I’m excited too. We’ve
had a lot of music stored up and it’s nice to finally let it go. I’m
not sure I can say what the album’s about or not about, I mean, that’s
why it’s there to express those hazy things, but it feels like a
closing the door kind of album. There is a year of my life zipped up
in it. There’s a time, a place, there are people and a world it contains.

SC: The song ‘The Observer’ off PB is a nod to the Adrienne Rich poem,
“The Observer,” correct? I’ve read the album, like Rich’s poem, deals
with “trying to break free from the constraints of the city it’s grown
into, escaping by turning inward.” What exactly does that mean?

MC: Roughly, the poem is written from a city dweller who feels stifled by
the compromises she must make with her ideals.
So she wishes she was in Africa living with gorillas, alone and
unencumbered, free under the stars so to speak. This I can identify
with, and I think of music as the thing that can make you forget this
compromise that you must make with yourself.

For this album, I was listening to a lot of hypnotic minimalist stuff
(Simeon Ten Holt – Horizons especially), and I found myself lulled
into these calm, tranquil states. I’d forget who I was and what I was
doing. I wouldn’t feel compelled to get on the Internet. The panic of
my life faded with the outside world. An escape via meditating,
very internal. This is what I wanted the album to be like.

Of course, there are some pop songs on the album too, but I hope they
generally carry this same sense of peace with them.

SC: In regards to the blog culture, music leaking, and the extreme hype
placed on bands, how, as an artist, do you feel about the current
landscape of music?

MC: It’s good. It’s fertile. There’s so much of it, and that’s cool. Hype
is a side effect, but the drug is worth it. Me personally, I don’t
like the way I’ve changed my relationship to music I read about. I’m
less likely to stick with something and give it time as I was when I
was younger. Perhaps I’m becoming jaded or bored or something like
that, but I find that the one of the only ways I’m able to cleanly
listen to albums and give them a chance is when I find out about it
from friends or see a band live. I try to keep the personal
relationship I have to what I listen to very close.

SC : What have you been up to since the record was finished?

MC: I’ve been writing new songs, one of which we are playing on our tour.
Besides that I’ve just been trying to keep up with the business of
putting an album out in general. There’s a lot of non-music
related stuff that goes into that!

SC: You’ve been opening up for likes of Grizzly Bear, Shearwater, Vampire
Weekend, and Bowerbirds. What has that been like? How has the
reception of your music been?

MC: It’s been good. Grizzly Bear is amazing and they are really nice too.
As far as our reception, this time around it’s
been different in a good way. We’re finally figuring out exactly what
we’re doing and I feel like as a band the three of us have really come
together in the last 2 or 3 months. It’s a different band
than it was 6 months ago. Way tighter and in control.

SC: You’ve just started on a pretty formidable tour with the very
talented White Denim, are you excited to get out on the road and promote
Phosphorescent Blues?

MC: There are very few bands that I’d want to watch 20 times in a row
and White Denim is one of them. When they were starting out
my friends and I used to start mosh pits at their shows. Maybe we can
do that again in Madison.

SC: What music, popular or obscure, keeps you company while on the road?
Anything that you think WE should be listening to?

MC: Been listening a lot to some recordings of Peruvian radio i made when
I visited this past summer. You can hear those at
http://drop.io/peruradiomp31 that’s my dad coughing in the
background… It’s so passionate (the music, not the coughing)! They
are singing their hearts out. No posing.

SC: Lastly, kind of a weird question that I always like to ask people, if
you could write anyone’s biography, who would it be and why?

MC: Most of my best friends because I know who they are now and I wonder
where they came from.

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