Parquet Courts: Retreat from Reality
photo credit: Pooneh Ghana
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Everyone has a different “pandemic reality” moment or some kind of breaking point—the NBA shutting down, Tom Hanks testing positive, a work trip being postponed— where they realized, “Oh, wow, this isn’t going away any time soon.” Parquet Courts frontman Andrew Savage will never forget his, partly because it happened on his birthday: March 13, 2020, the day President Trump declared COVID-19 to be a national emergency.
“I went out to dinner that night,” he recalls. “Everyone was very nervous, and one of my friends was like, ‘Maybe we should postpone for a couple weeks until things are back to normal.’ Then it was clear it wasn’t going to be a couple weeks, or even a few months. We had a world tour booked for the fall of 2020 so, when that got canceled, I was like, ‘Well, the 10 years that I’ve had in this band were beautiful—obviously everything has to come to an end at some point.’ And I was confronted with the reality of ‘maybe this is the end.’”
Luckily, it wasn’t. The shapeshifting indie-rock band persevered through this turbulent time, releasing their kaleidoscopic seventh LP, Sympathy for Life, after delaying the project for a year. But that global existential crisis did make Savage “reevaluate” his own life and career, realizing he needs to savor every moment of his “wonderful and absurd” path.
“I don’t think I ever really took being a professional artist for granted,” he says. “But I didn’t realize exactly how special it was until [it seemed like] it wouldn’t happen anymore.”
Even though Sympathy for Life was recorded before the novel coronavirus upended the world, the songs feel weirdly prescient—the title speaks for itself, and its psychedelic, often groove-based tracks zero in on “collectivity,” an essential theme within the quartet’s oeuvre since their 2010 formation in New York City. “There are a few things on the record that have an eerie foreshadowing to what happened in the world immediately after we did it,” Savage notes. “Maybe that would be one of them—this craving to gather that people now have.”
Ironically, the band’s most communal-minded album originated from a place of isolation: For Savage, the seeds of Sympathy were planted during a trip to Italy, staying at a “really remote” farm to focus entirely on writing, without the typical distractions of city life.
“I like to do that once in a while—go some place to focus on art and not [have] the temptations,” he says. “I didn’t do any tourism when I was there. I didn’t have a car, and it was an hour walk to the town when I needed to get supplies once in a while. That’s when the songwriting process for this record really started. I was working on ‘Walking at a Downtown Pace,’ ‘Pulcinella,’ ‘Trullo,’ ‘Just Shadows’ and some more that we recorded [but which didn’t make it on the album].”
Savage had a unique regiment, often working out while on acid—a process he dubs “trippy lifting” in the band’s press bio. He’d also regularly write in this altered headspace, and the trippiness seemed to seep into his embryonic ideas.
“It’s hard to talk about drugs and the creative process because, ultimately, it’s all coming from you—or whatever’s floating out there,” he says. “But whether it comes from some collective consciousness or your brain, the substances—coffee, alcohol, acid—alter the way you think about things. It’s not the only way I write or even the way I write most of the time. But it’s something you can do to mix things up a little bit sometimes.”
The psychedelic vibe also fit in with the “classic” music he’d been listening to—including “a lot of Pink Floyd.” After a while, Savage had a vision for a sound he wanted to chase. Using what reads like pure linguistic silliness, he taped a piece of paper to his wall reading “CAN, CANNED HEAT, & THIS HEAT”—a sort of meeting ground between the Krautrock, experimentation and soulfulness of those three bands.
“There’s that [1969] Canned Heat song ‘Poor Moon,’” he says, elaborating on the concept. “I was listening to it and realized it’s kinda Kraut-y. That’s where I drew this link between Can and Canned Heat and how cool it would be to kind of combine those two sounds. I guess the natural extension was This Heat. That band is amazing for a lot of reasons, but they had this great experimental texture. I love the vocals in Canned Heat—I think they’re so soulful and bluesy. I also wanted to do some songs that were a little more singing-oriented, rather than screamingor shouting-oriented. On [2018’s] Wide Awake!, I was losing my voice quite a bit playing songs like ‘Total Football.’ I guess that’s where that came from.”
Bassist Sean Yeaton vividly remembers Savage presenting his plan.
“I probably hang out with Andrew at my house in Pennsylvania more than in New York,” he says. “We’ll be down here, just shooting the shit, looking at UFOs and whatnot, and he’ll break out a couple songs he’s been listening to. We tend to go through a process of sharing what we’re into at any given time. I remember him coming down here before we recorded and having this [idea]. I remember thinking, ‘That’s pretty cool.’”
Yanton says Savage has “done this sort of shit” throughout their friendship. “‘Did you know this about that band? Did you know that Chumbawamba was a punk band?’” he says with a laugh, channeling his bandmate. “For whatever it’s worth, I had no point of reference for Canned Heat. I remember him being at my house—we were sitting around a fire, and he was like, ‘Can, Canned Heat, This Heat.’ I was like, ‘OK, make it work, and I’m happy to do it.’ We were able to pull it off pretty well.”
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It’s not like Parquet Courts have kept making the same album over and over: On the journey from 2011’s American Specialities to Wide Awake!, they’ve added an artier, more experimental edge to their snotty post-punk sound. But Sympathy for Life is a somewhat-jolting reinvention, even down to the way they recorded and built the songs. “Once we got in the studio together, one of the first things we did was press record on the tape machine, jamming and filling up the tape with our improvising,” Savage says, recalling their sessions at Brooklyn’s The Bridge and The Outlier Inn in the Catskills. (The band also recorded with producer John Parish at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Box, England.) “That was just an exercise we did to get our feet wet. But we had such a good time doing that, and with the encouragement of [producer] Rodaidh [McDonald], we kept doing that. And that’s how most of the album was made: We’d fill 40 minutes of the tape with improvising, and then Rodaidh would help us edit it into a song.”
Since they weren’t “writing” in the traditional sense, the members of Parquet Courts weren’t so focused on their own particular roles—thinking more about overall textures than their own riffs or rhythms. “We’d keep whittling down [those jams] until we had a song, essentially,” Savage says. “And because it was improvising, it wasn’t too precious, like, ‘Oh, no, you can’t cut that out!’ It wasn’t like a bass line that someone had labored over for a long time. It all moved pretty quickly and smoothly, and it ended up being a good way of working.”
A good example of this process is the pulsating, post-Remain in Light art-funk centerpiece “Marathon of Anger,” which stacks David Byrne-like harmonies over some shadowy guitar figures, growling bass and bleeping keys. The track was edited down from a 41-minute improvisation into a four-and-a-half-minute groove. Yet, the resulting cut still has an Afrobeat sensibility, with each player’s small part balanced as one piece of a larger puzzle.
“One of the things that’s different on this album is that Austin [Brown] doesn’t play a lot of guitar,” Savage says. “He was playing a lot of synth, and he was controlling a mixer, manipulating people’s signals. I was putzing around with this piano, and I was doing these melodies, and he’s kinda manipulating it with a delay component, and we thought that was kinda cool. Rodaidh just pressed record, so we were doing that, and my brother [Max Savage] hopped on a drum machine, and we just started jamming based on that keyboard line.”
Savage acknowledges the Afrobeat influence on the new LP, drawing a connection to the psychedelic movement.
“Going back a record, if you listen to a song like ‘Violence’ from Wide Awake!, that has a very clear Afrobeat influence,” he says. “We’ve definitely been into that as a band for a while. It’s really cool, psychedelic music, and it’s really trancelike. It definitely is a kind of psychedelic record, but that wasn’t talked about or planned too much. I think it’s kind of interesting because, a lot of times, moments that are rich with psychedelic energy often happen in correspondence with some kind of severe political turmoil. It seems like an appropriate time for there to be some kind of psychedelic [movement]. It’s like a retreat from reality—for when reality becomes too harsh and cruel and unbearable, which it has been.”
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Working with a blanker creative canvas, Parquet Courts allowed themselves to get weird: Savage, for one, pushed himself to improve his guitar skills.
“I’d previously definitely considered myself a lyricist first and a musician second,” he says. “But, on this record, I wanted to become a better guitar player. We’ve been a band for 11 years, and this is our seventh LP. And part of that is you need to do things that are new and fresh—playing with song structure was important for me. Especially in the early days of the band, Austin and I were doing these kind of free-form anti-solos with us just improvising. It’s really cool and fun, but with anything that makes you special, you don’t want to overly rely on it—then it becomes an old hat. I’m not trying to be Yngwie Malmsteen. It just seems like a natural challenge, like, ‘Let me actually write some solos and learn them and have to feel the pressure of performing them correctly.”
Yeaton also became more invested in his instrument, more “cognizant of how the bass fits into everything.”
“I never played bass before this band, and I just want to be really good at it, but I want to be good at it from the perspective [of ] these bassists who are outrageous,” he says. “Even like Brian Eno—at his base, if he can play any instrument, it might just be the bass guitar. I get that he can play a bunch of shit. But he’s got that weird Ampeg bass with the pickup on it that makes no sense. On this [album], I had so much fun [writing bass lines]. The way that I approached it was like [Eno and Byrne’s 1981 album] My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. One of the things they did, which I completely ripped off, is that they recorded multiple bass lines [for one track]. One song in particular that sticks out is ‘Regiment’—such a sick song. If you listen to it closely, there are at least two basses playing at the same time, but I believe there are three. I would listen to it obsessively and read about it obsessively.
“‘Marathon of Anger’ is the best example of this,” he continues. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna do a ‘Regiment’ kinda thing.’ Over the years, there have been these moments, especially with the bass lines, where I’m like, ‘I don’t get what to do.’ As much as I’d like to be Flea, I’m just not that. There was a point in our career where I could have been satisfied with playing mostly single-note shit. But I’ve since started telling myself, ‘I’m gonna try to do weird shit.’”
For Savage, these sharp left turns are the very reason to keep making music. “Every artist of any description should do a creative challenge,” he says. “You should try something that you can put in your process—something that changes things, that forces you to see things differently.” During the pandemic, everything looked a bit different—but the singer says there “wasn’t much room to become jaded” in this strange time.
“At one point, I resigned myself to the possibility that life wouldn’t be coming back, that maybe I’d have to find a new way of life,” he admits. “But since we’ve finished the record, it’s been a constant engagement with me—which, to be honest, was one of the huge things that helped me get through [this time]. And the entire time, I’ve been thinking about how fun it’s gonna be to play live, how fun it’s gonna be to have my whole life back.”
