Over the phone from Austin, Texas, on a break in his busy schedule at the South By Southwest festival, The Pains of Being Pure At Heart’s lead vocalist/guitarist Kip Berman (he, and they, of the late-March-arriving full-length Belong ) talked learning from past festival experiences, differences in European-versus-American concert-goers’ customs, and why it’s good not to be in a band with junkies. The group appears tonight on Late Show With David Letterman.
You guys have been at SXSW for a few days—how’s it been going?
It’s been really good. The festival is so crazy, so hectic, but it’s really fun to get to play music a lot. There’s a condensed amount of shows, a couple of shows a day, and like running around, and kind of jumping up on stage and playing; it’s very off-the-cuff and spontaneous, but really fun. It’s a good time.
I’m guessing this isn’t your first time at SXSW?
No, we came down and played a lot in 2009, when our first record came out—we played like twelve shows in three days. And then last year, we played a couple shows, but we didn’t have a new record or anything. But now that we have a new record coming out, we played like six shows and it’s been really fun.
Has the experience changed from those first two times and now?
I mean, the experience changes, because I guess you learn what to expect a little bit more. That first year we literally had no clue what we were doing; we were running around and we missed a show. There’s a lot of chaos and confusion. Having that experience and having played it before, you have more of a sense of what to expect and how to manage it and how to deal to with it; how to show up for stuff on time. We’ve tried to be at least a bit more responsible, as best we can.
And how has the tour been going so far—you guys were in Europe, if I’m not mistaken?
We toured a little bit in Europe, leading up to the release of the record. It wasn’t super-extensive, we just played a few shows, but it was fun because it was our first chance to play these new songs for people. And it was exciting to see people’s reaction and to see people be so positive about the new record. Now that the record’s gonna come out in a couple of weeks—and it’s already streaming online for free— people are more familiar with the songs and getting to play them for people is exciting. There’s something about hearing a song that you know that is exciting. It’s so fun that people now actually have recorded versions of our songs. Even though our record isn’t going to be out for a couple of weeks, it’s really cool that our label was nice enough to let us post it up before the release date. A lot of bands on bigger labels don’t have the freedom to share their music so openly, and we’re pretty lucky that our situation allows us to be transparent, like: “Hey we made a record, we want you to hear it. We want you to buy it too,” but we’re not trying to trick anyone into buying something that they haven’t heard or buying something and then being like “Aww, this sucks, I don’t want this.” It’s more important to us that people just get to experience the music. And then they’ll make decisions about whether they want to come see us play or buy our record or whatever, based on that. But, the most important thing for us is focusing on the music we recorded.
Do you feel there’s anything different about the fans in Europe, and how you’re received there as opposed to the U.S.?
You know, it’s weird—I don’t want to sound too much like a hippie, but there is sort of a universal interaction with music. There are subtle cultural traditions that are slightly different in Europe versus America. In Europe, it’s far more common to ask for a person’s autograph even if they’re not in a famous band; in America, you’d only think that if you met Bon Jovi you’d want to ask him for an autograph. In Europe there’s more of a sense of like, if you see a concert you like, you’d want to get the band to sign the record. It’s not a sense of inflated, rock-star egotism. It’s a very normal interaction with small indie bands, to get signatures at the show. So, I guess, initially, when we were touring that kind of struck as strange, but it’s the way people interact with music. My mentality towards music is that I celebrate stuff that isn’t that famous, but it’s famous to me. I’d want it to be O.K. to ask…I met Puro Instinct [and] John Maus in the lobby of the hotel this morning, and I would have liked to ask for their autograph just because I like their music and it would’ve been cool…but you can’t do that. They would’ve been like “What the fuck’s your problem?” or something like that. I would’ve seemed weird.
Your bio mentions the closeness of the band and how you’re genuinely good friends. How did you first meet?
We were all friends, and I think that’s pretty important. I’m sure a lot of bands form because they want to find four guys who are really good musicians or want to make it. But it was really different for us, and I feel that helped us a lot. ‘Cause being in a band, and now we’ve got a chance to tour a lot, you realize how much time you spend with other people in the band. In a van, driving for eight hours a day. And playing a show with them and sleeping in the same place as them. You spend a lot of time with the people that are in your band. Playing music was just an extension of other stuff we’d do together—we’d go to shows, hang out. I was friends with Peggy [Wang, vocals/keyboards] and Alex [Naidus, bass] and Kurt [Feldman, drums] was my roommate, and initially we had a drum machine, but after a few months of playing with the drum machine, it was definitely limiting. Peggy was like, “Well, your roommate Kurt plays drums, you think he’d be into it?” I was kind of scared to ask him, because he was pretty cool. But I asked him, and he was like, “Yeah, dude, I’d totally do that!” He was psyched, so he joined up, that’s how we formed. Every band has its moments, but I think we’re pretty lucky in that we never had a problem with each other as people. I genuinely would hang out with Kurt and Peggy and Alex and Christoph [Hochheim, guitar], even if we weren’t playing music with each other.
How did Christoph join the band and how does he impact your sound?
It was actually wonderful. At first, after the record [their self-titled debut] came out, we went on tour…there’re ideas of our sound, which is a big, heavy, guitar kind-of sound; but it was hard to really convey that live, with just one guitar. I think after that first little tour we did in February/March of 2009, I realized we hit a wall with what we could do performance-wise. And Christoph was a friend of ours, and he was playing with Kurt in Depreciation Guild at the time. He’s a good guitar player, but he’s also a really good person. It was the same idea; it wasn’t just some random dude to play guitar. Him joining the band initially made us more full live, but I think also in terms of songwriting for the new album. Now that he was playing with us, we had to write guitar parts for him to play and kind of think in bigger terms—like, “Now that we have two guitars, they can’t just both be playing an E chord the whole time.” There have to be other things going on. And in a weird way, just having him there forced us to find a way to make use of his skill, because he’s talented, and you don’t want to just have two guys on stage both playing the same thing. It was wonderful in those terms. I also think he also really fits with us in terms of music—he’s really as passionate a music fan as I know. I feel like we’re more a bunch of music fans than an actual band—we’re just people who love music and love playing it. He really got us into a lot of stuff; he’s a huge Ariel Pink fan, he loves John Maus, R. Stevie Moore—he’s really cool. He’s also an easy person to spend time with, he’s a genuinely nice, smart, intelligent person. I don’t know how to say this—I think people forget that if you’re in a band with a bunch of junkies that seems cool for, like, a day, but that leads to the band falling apart the second you get out of range of your junk, or whatever. The New York Dolls tried to go on tour in Florida in the ‘70s and they had to quit the tour half-way because they couldn’t get any heroin down there and they had to go back to New York. There’s something to be said for playing music with people you want to hang out with anyway. It almost feels like being on a road-trip with your friends.
A band name question: I read the story about it coming from the title of friend’s unpublished children book—what attracted you to it?
It was just a beautiful name. And I think we selected the band name before we even started the band. We started the Myspace profile and we hadn’t written any songs yet, but just the idea of it was so right and perfect for us. That just seemed to really fit what we were going for, I don’t know—there’s so many bands, so much music being made—why not just take a risk and do something kind of extreme and not make compromises and push the idea of emphatic pop to its limits. Even if a lot of people look at that band name and are like “These dudes aren’t cool” or “These guys aren’t for me,” that’s fine. I’d rather a handful of people really believe in the music that we’re making and really enjoy it, it be meaningful to them, than just be like the generic band of the moment—really popular, but very skin-deep. I‘d rather a handful of people still listen to our record in ten years, than everyone listen to it this month. It’s not an egotistical thing, and it’s not elitist, it’s just those are the kind of bands I grew up loving.
