Freelance Whales lead vocalist Judah Dadone spoke with Daily Bruin A&E contributor Andrew Bain about the band’s writing process, development as a band and its upcoming performance at Coachella.
Daily Bruin: How did Freelance Whales meet? How did you start, and how did you develop into what you guys have become today?
Judah Dadone: The band started finding itself and finding each other in August of 2008. We were all living in New York separately. We didn’t know each other at that point, and everyone was working on different little creative projects and posting little demos and stuff like that that they were doing online. So, we found each other. After that, we had rehearsals based in Queens, rehearsing under a bakery in Astoria. Then, we spent all 2009 playing shows in New York both on stages and in the streets. Then, in late 2009 we started touring, and we continued touring the United States and South America and the U.K. through about 2010. Now its 2011, we’re still continuing to tour, but we’re kind of winding down and getting into the process of starting to make another record.
DB: Did everyone in the band play the same general style of music on their own, and did the band’s style evolve naturally from that?
JD: No, no. I think it’s more reflective of the fact that everyone in the band comes from different places and different types of music. We kind of have this philosophy of trying to consume music the way you would consume nourishment from as many different places as possible. I think we certainly have a lot in common in terms of what we like, but everyone comes from really different places. Some people are really into jazz and blues, some people are really into more electronic music, and some of us really like bluegrass, orchestral music and pop music, obviously. We’re trying to draw from a lot of different places and turn it into a weird sort of collage.
DB: On “Weathervanes,” it sounds like there are instruments everywhere. How many instruments do you use in the average recording?
JD: We never really took the time to count, and we’ve tried to be really careful about overdoing it because there’s five of us on stage, so we always want to record something that five people could play on stage. But, I think from track to track there’s a lot of diversity. Some tracks have banjo and some have harmonium and some don’t, and I think it’s the entrances and the exits of those instruments both on the record and during a show that gives it more dimensionality and makes you feel like there’s contrast from song to song and moment to moment.
DB: What is your writing process?
JD: The best part of songwriting is that you don’t actually have to have a process, and that part of what could make your catalog sound eclectic is like never approaching songwriting in the same way twice and indulging in the notion that every song you have to have a different approach. I think if you only have one way of approaching it, I think it’s a lot easier to kind of hit walls and stuff like that. It’s kind of like doing a sudoku or a puzzle or something like that; you just start filling in whatever boxes are easiest to fill in first and then all the rest of it starts to build around it. You can start any way; it’s really just a matter of what that specific puzzle is calling for.
DB: Do you prefer the studio atmosphere or the live concert atmosphere?
JD: I think there’s something to be said for the dualistic nature of doing music for a living. I guess the hope is that by the time that you’re done working in the studio, you feel a need to go play on the road, and by the time you’re done playing on the road, you need to get back in the studio. So if you’re doing one or the other, you might go crazy, but because they actually work in perfect foils and perfect relief from one another, then you get to live a very dualistic life and not just in that capacity but in lots of other capacities too.
DB: What are you looking forward to about playing at Coachella?
JD: We kind of got our first taste of festivals last summer. We did, like, the Sasquatch Festival and Lollapalooza and Outside Lands in San Francisco, and I mean beyond the fact that when you play those shows, you know that there’s a huge percentage of the crowd that might have some vague notion of who you are or maybe have heard your name before that are going to be checking you out. It’s an amazing opportunity.
DB: What can we expect from you guys in the next year?
JD: We’re going to spend a lot of this summer working creatively and certainly writing and assembling the record and probably recording it too. I mean, we don’t really have a sense of how long that will take, and we’re not really too worried about it, so we’re just hoping that people don’t mind holding tight for a minute because we want to take however much time we might need to make a second record that we feel really gives the band new dimensions to move into.