interview by Christopher Bock
Band Site: www.nightrally.com

Devin and Farhad of Boston's Night Rally were cool enough to come out and give us this interview during a messy snow and ice storm in Cambridge. Luke was stuck in traffic, and was unable to make it. We ended up at India Palace in Union Sq. Somerville and spoke over dinner.

FE: So you guys got your name from the Elvis Costello Song ("Night Rally")...the question I had was whether or not you will ever write a song called "Declan McMannus..or had you ever considered to possibility?

Farhad: I like the idea now that you mention it...

Devin: Yeah, I never though of it.

Farhad: We never thought of it, but yeah.

Devin: The way we title songs is really PoMo. They are usually based on jokes, inside jokes even, not to make anyone else feel alienated from us, but yeah, all of our song titling thing is a little hard. We usually disagree on things a lot.

Farhad: It is definitely the minority of songs where the title is anywhere in the lyrics or is implied by the lyrics; it is usually something we were discussing about the song or something that happened to one of us earlier that day.

FE: It seems that, from reading criticism or articles about your band that one of the biggest fallacies is the constant comparisons to Fugazi. If you had to discuss influence, or describe your sound to someone that has never heard you, what would you say?

Devin: It depends on who it is, if it was my grandmother asking, I would say the Beatles, because, you know that's what her radar is... (laughs) everyone else,...well, last night someone asked me what my band sounded like, and I usually just say, like, post-Punk, but if they sort of like, squint and have no idea what I am talking about, then I might go ahead and say like Gang of Four, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello...usually they get it, but if not I just say U2, and then just leave it at that.

FE: So it is really just based on the audience or who you are speaking to, then

Farhad: Yeah, its hard...

FE: It is kind of a stupid question anyway, since you wouldn't want to [pigeonhole yourself into any one style or idea.

Farhad: I always try to say what the instruments are doing, it's funny, because I think that its a better way to talk about it to people who don't know genres or touchstone bands, but I find that it is more effective [when talking to] other music nerds to tell them, like, the guitar is creating the environment and the drummer is playing the whole kit and he's playing with like, little Lego pieces, but what if you were playing with longer, more complicated Lego pieces, and then you had to build with them. The bass is bass is providing some sort of glue that is like driving the whole thing along. Something like that, I mean I just kind of made that up, but...

FE: You guys are (sort of) a Transplants to Boston, I mean you have been here awhile now, but do you think that you could continue to do what you do and make the music you make anywhere, or is it something about Boston that specifically drives you to do something, or write a certain way?

Devin: My stage presence and the way I sort of carry myself, I don't 'carry myself' in this pretentious way, I mean just like carry myself and interact with other people has really definitely influenced by Boston a lot. That is not to say that it could not have developed similarly elsewhere, but when we moved here made really good friends with Clickers, we became friends with Clickers really quickly and started playing a lot of shows with them at their then house, in the basement, just going and hanging out with them a lot and becoming part of this community of sort of smaller bands, and that just began rubbing off on the way we make music. I really feel like we have developed our audience, and not audience in a weird way, but we think about our friends ,and we are able to make it for our friends.

Farhad: It's funny having moved out here in '96, just being like, a college student just having played in bands, not making any attempt to figure out the local scene, playing house parties and stuff like that, but then coming back and getting to play with Devin and Luke, I feel like I have met all these wonderful bands, and Clickers were just like the first people we connected with, we did the split with them, and they are still all our good friends and they are all doing new stuff now. There are a lot of people like that, people that we would just go to as many of their shows as we can , a lot of bands we have met since then, we go see them and they come see us. We have played shows that were 'bigger deal' shows as far as playing to the audience, but it was always awesome where we could always count on our friends from other bands, like the shows we started playing where the bands just came out to see each other. And I think that community of artists and musicians here is definitely a huge inspiration, I mean I guess you find that in every city so long as you stay there long enough to put your roots in, but we have found it here.

FE: So in general, do you feel that in Boston there is a cross dialogue between bands and everyone is influencing each other? Or do you find that it is more supportive in the sense that everyone is allowed to do their own thing? Or may be both?

Devin/Farhad: Both...

Devin: I mean Helms has influenced us totally. We accidentally sound like Helms every time we play. Obviously, Clickers was a huge influence on us, and Piles who are trying to get harder and iffier with their new stuff and things like that. But I think within that there is also there is also this really neat thoughtful side to the Boston scene that I always describe as an effect that there are so many colleges, it's that kind of town anyway, no one is out really late partying, and it's not really like a party scene, it's a lot of people who sit in their rooms reading and working on things and are really cool and proactive but not very showy or flashy. It's weird because that energy sort of bounces off and the ends of those energies ends in the art which then everyone sort of bounces off . But there is this really awesome sort of reflective side.

FE: To me it seems considerably less pretentious than the scene in say Brooklyn for example, and don't get me wrong there are a lot of cool bands that come from Brooklyn, but Boston in general is really unaffected by the whole 'fashion core' thing.

Farhad: I really wanted to reinforce what Devin said, about Boston not being a hard partying scene. A lot of the best bands, there's no accounting for taste, but in my opinion, the best bands in the city and the people they are friends, we are just so much more like nerds and very honest and in love with the fact that we are all nerds, as opposed to trying to be rock stars or trying to be cool or outdo one another. Even the bands that are super aggressive that we know, I mean you look at Piles or Ho-Ag or Big Bear, still everyone in those bands are total sweethearts, no one is trying to do anything that is powerful, but just powerful in terms of expression.

FE: At Frigid Ember, we are kind of gear heads, I was just wondering what kind of gear you are using., or anything specific that goes into making your sound? [to Farhad] I know you are a sound engineer so you may have input on that...

Devin: Yeah Farhad is definitely the gear nerd, and he influenced me, he got me to buy, well he didn't get me to buy but I was given two choices on the things to buy and I guess I made the proper choice... (laughs) but I play an Ampeg BT22 and I think it sounds amazing. I used to play Farhad's Rickenbacker on all the stuff we recorded besides the new album, that is not near anyone yet, except our hearts was recorded with that Rickenbacker. But I just switched over recently to this thinline Telecaster that this guy Peter from the Honeypump board just sort of made out of Mexican parts and things like that, and then just a whole bunch of pedals. I guess the delay pedal is really a big part of my [sound], it could be any type of delay pedal, but I was really listening to a lot of Modest Mouse and that sort of stuff. I always say, though I feel kind of weird saying it, but I started to get into a lot of this modern minimalist Classical music, and I was really into those overlapping textures.

Farhad: I definitely support you saying that, I mean we definitely went to see Nixon in China.

Devin: Saying that is really my side way of saying that what type of equipment I use has little to do with what I am playing.

Farhad: I think you have a really instinctive way of using what you have, because I look at the way you set EQ on your amp and the way I do, and I am like doing computations in my head and your just like (imitating turning knobs) "nyeh nyeh uh" and we both end up sounding exactly where we want. I mean, you know I am the gear head and the one that ends up like repairing things when they, and they know that I went through a lot of amps, since I didn't want to look around for that SVT, and they didn't sound good enough or loud enough and I just a really pure bass tone, just a tube amp and a bass, maybe one or two pedals since Devin is doing so much awesome textural stuff I always feel like it would be a mistake for me to try and do anything too far in that direction> I have been playing around with some fuzz stuff and I have a microsynth that I use every once in awhile. But really the idea was to have that really full spectrum bass tone that you hear Steve Albini get like the way he has Bob Weston set up in Shellac, where it's low but it's high and can fill that area, especially since we are only a three piece, and when you are a three piece that has a guitarist that is doing all this textural stuff it gives me a lot more space to move around. We can do those things like Devin will rock out in traditional guitar way and I can drop back more. I don't know if I always hit it, but when I do what I am going for is just like a classic tube amp bass sound.

FE: I think that really works out very well, since you guys sound a lot more full than most three pieces. There is a nice contrast. You spoke about Honeypump before. How has the experience been with them?

Devin: No problems with them at all. Ben was there exactly for what he needed to be at that time...

Farhad: He's a good friend of all of ours.

FE: Will you be recording for them in the future?

Farhad: Well, it's kind of like a hobby for him. It was he and I doing it together. He started it then asked me on through putting out our record, but I just had too many things going on, so I stepped back and Ben took over. I think he just wants to get the first round of records out. I don't think that its something he wants to do long term. I think there is a lot of cool stuff he has taught us about, like Creative Commons that we have learned and hadn't though about until Ben came to us with the ideas> I think we are looking to get on a larger label right now. We have just mailed off the recordings we did in Brooklyn at the end of the summer. Very much it was just a one off thing and that's how UV Protection feels about the record in their dealings with Ben. I think he might try to get other bands to do small run of 500, but I don't think any one band is going to continue releasing stuff with him. It's just something that he wants to get all his favorite bands to do.

FE: We talked briefly about the relationships between the songs to the titles, but how about the lyrics? Do they usually come first, or do you complete the music first?

Devin: we definitely now jam on the music first. We made a really conscious decision when we moved to Cambridge, in the old band we used to write songs away from each other and bring them together to flesh them out, but now we decided that we are going to write it all in our basement at the same time. Because of that, the way we work is to come up with the lyrics last, sometimes it's last minute, like we will be scribbling them before shows if we have a new song with a melody and everything. That isn't to say that the lyrics aren't important.

Farhad: The way I always look at it is that the vocals are just three more instruments, you have the three instruments we play and then the three instruments of our voices, often times, since we are very much a pop band, the lead vocal line will be the lead instrument that everything else is supporting, but as far as what the song means, the lyrics have a lot to do with what the song means, but so do the notes on the guitar o the way the bass is playing, the way the drums are playing. Sometimes when we write stuff it's just nonsense syllables and we'll find ourselves saying like "It sounds like I'm saying this." I guess it's more a Dadaist kind of thing.

Devin: Like Steve Malkmus.

Farhad: We just follow it to where it goes, but there are some songs where we talk to each other, like "what are you singing about there?" and that's what we did with the triptych (Clickers split--ed.) more so than with anything else we have done. But yeah, usually half way through writing the lyrics is where we start to ask like "hey, were you saying that there?" and figuring it out and that's always a lot of fun for us. I could imagine another group of people would be really frustrated b y that, since you are thinking the song is going one way and then what are your band mates saying?--it's ruining it--but I am always interested. In one of our new songs, Devin is doing a lot of Foghorn Leghorn quotes from the old Looney Tunes, and when I realized that was what he was doing I was like "that's great, that's so cool" . Eventually after you play the song long enough it starts to make sense to you. It may seem silly, but there is a reason why we are tapping into that particular thing.

FE: So then where does the music start? Is it an organic process or something you all bring parts to?

Devin: It's an organic process. A lot of jamming. Farhad is the one who definitely brings the most, not completed by any means but he's always in his room playing riffs and he thinks that I don't hear him, and he'll like bring them to rehearsal.. (laughs)

Farhad: It's true...

Devin: I hardly play my guitar at all when I am away, so it's definitely like I try to treat it as little like something that ties me down. So it is a really organic thing.

Farhad: Luke doesn't not play drums, but he does all these like hip hop projects.

Devin: So he is definitely off in his own musical world most of the time. So when we come together we really start playing and jamming.

Farhad: I feel that Luke is the best of the three of us at hearing things before they happen. Devin and I have more an idea of a style or tone, but once we are playing it's like once we are playing its "I don't know" and things start going off in a different direction than you thought. Luke spends a lot of time with songs, like figuring out how they are going to fit together...

Devin: He's a lot smarter, musically than me and Farhad.

Farhad: It's true. He resolves confusion a lot.

FE: Awesome. So, besides Boston, where have you played that has been cool or given you a good reception, or just a place you enjoyed playing?

Farhad: DC went really well.

Devin: Yeah, DC like a month ago.

Farhad: I think we were all scared of that show because DC has such a reputation for being a very, not exclusive, but there are so many things in DC that it can be really hard to play there and be from out of town that you've actually shown up on anyone's radar. But we actually got a lot of MySpace comments and people writing us afterwards and everyone at the show was really super nice. I was really way psyched on it.

Devin: We haven't really played much elsewhere. We played New York a few times and we played up in Vermont, New Hampshire once each maybe. But, New York has been weird every time. I don't know, it's just weird...

Farhad: I think we are still waiting to play the right kind of show.

Devin: Yeah, we haven't really found [it]...the good show we had there was a few months ago when we opened up for The Wilderness, and that was great. I felt really good because we were like hanging out with the bands and they saw us, but there was really no one else to see us. We went on at 8:30, which isn't a complaint, but it was just hard for me to say that was a sweet show or anything. The other New York shows have been just like "this is a bar where they have shows sometimes". We are slowly starting to spread out.

Farhad: I fell like, especially in New York, there is that whole 'paying your dues' thing, which is totally to be expected, so it's always worth doing and we always enjoy ourselves, but you can't compare that to playing back at home where there are so many less things to worry about because you are on your home turf and everything is a lot more comfortable. usually, you know the bands you are playing with, the venue and that people will come. And we don't want to get too comfortable with that, and it's not that we don't want to push ourselves to do other things, but there is still this big contrast between the two.

FE: The last question is, since you have new recordings that you are shopping around, what are the plans from there? More out of town shows?

Devin: That's basically it, trying to get on SXSW and Macrock and be more conscious about tours and things like that.

Farhad: Yeah, we have had bad luck with booking tours thus far. The two we tried to book, were complete nightmares because it was us and other bands and we were all very green at it, so we had a lot of things that were just disorganized or faltered. So most of that got scrapped. We salvaged one or two dates, the first being here, which would have been the kickoff show anyhow. But yeah, that's the plan to see what happens by SXSW, and see what happens in the spring, though I guess we are getting down to zero hour, and then see who replies to the packages we have been sending out the past couple of weeks. And I guess we are ready to start writing some new stuff.

Devin: yeah, the last two years have been really about figuring out a lot of stuff, I mean the inner workings of the band and trying to figure out each other as musicians, who's doing what, when how. And we are really excited, this new album we recorded is twelve songs of us banging out heads against the wall for a lot of time. So I feel that we are at this point now, where we don't have to figure out what we are making anymore, and we can really just concentrate on writing a bunch of awesome songs. We're all psyched about that.

Farhad: It's finally realizing all the tools we have when we were writing these twelve songs, or however many others we wrote and ended up scrapping. It was figuring out what was us and what wasn't us, who's good at doing what and how certain things can happen. I feel that we have learned a lot about that. So, now in once sense we really want to get somebody to be interested in the album that we did, but I've been looking at it that now, as far as the music itself is concerned, that's that and it's there, and we're trying to get someone interested in it. But now, we can feel free to be whatever it is that comes naturally to us as far as the new stuff we write.

FE: Well that's it. Thanks for the interview.