The Books Interview

The Books are an out-and-out cornucopia of collaboration. Clicks and sound clips combine with guitar strings and gentle singing. Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong’s third album created together, Lost and Safe, expands on the cello, mandolin, guitar, banjo and found-sound patchwork of their previous albums. Nick sings now. All together it’s warm and haunting, surrealist Americana. I don’t know if that means anything, but the point is the music is bizarre, faintly reminiscent and constantly alluring. The collage quality of these songs calls for the listener to try and put disparate puzzle pieces together and make meaning from the sometimes absurd and always enigmatic relationships that occur. Nick and Paul collaborate. Electronic sounds and acoustic instrumentation collaborate. Artist and audience collaborate. In this intro consonant sounds even collaborate with each other in some vain and flowery, forced flaunting of phrasing. Jesus, I love it when a theme comes together.

Lost and Safe is out on Tomlab and The Books are touring for the first time ever this spring. Go here: www.tomlab.com. They really put the “web” in website at www.thebooksmusic.com; it’s as mysterious and beautiful as their songs. Nick and Paul were fun to talk to. Everything they do together, including this interview, quickly gets all deep, but (thankfully) remains unpretentious. At one point, Paul told me he’d prefer if they weren’t called a “band” but just “a group of artists.”


What’s your relationship like outside of your music?
Nick: It’s certainly not just a friendship in the normal sense of the word. I think it’s more like a sibling kind of a relationship. Because we’re in this boat together, and we have to deal with a lot of different things outside of the music now. You know, take care of business as well. It tests our relationship in ways that go far beyond what a normal friendship would be. It feels like much more of a family kind of relationship.

Paul: The most interesting aspects of us working together are when we are able to share our ideas and our musical vision and ideas on art in a way that will become more than the sum of it’s parts. It’s the best time we can have. When we find a true connection. Outside of music, I think just having spent so much time together we can work through a lot and help each other out a lot. We know what we’re good at.

N: There’s also something essentially unknowable about each other, too. That plays an important role in how things go. There’s an element of unpredictability. Paul was saying he really doesn’t know how I hear things. We could be listening to the same thing, and I’ll be following one line and he’ll be following something completely different. We can try to communicate those things in words but there’s something unknowable about somebody else’s hearing.

P: It’s also very useful. To find out that your partner in music is reacting completely different to something that you have very strong feelings about, yourself, gives you a certain confidence that other people will have the ability to feel their own thing about it, too. And it’s not a singular thing, and I’m not trying to conduct people’s reactions.

N: Our backgrounds are completely different. He grew up in Holland, and I grew up in the suburbs of Boston; two totally different experiences. What we have internally, just our own set of references that we have in our brains, is different. There’s a whole lifetime of listening that’s impossible to know.

I feel like this wouldn’t be an article about The Books without a question about how difficult it is to classify and give a label to your music. I’ve read you describing it as “food music.” We have a habit, at Fran, of comparing music to different kinds of parties. Like a house party or…
P: Oh, not a political party?

Well, yeah, that would work, too. What kind of party would you compare your music to?
P: It’s the great party going on downstairs.

N: It’s like a cross between a wine tasting and… man, I don’t know.

I was thinking a “gin and potato salad party.”
P: How about a wine tasting and autumn leaves party. It happens outside as much as it does inside.


Interview sidebar:
Nick, you invented a machine that blows smoke rings. How did you do that?
N: I ate some fruit salad and I took the containers and spray painted them black and cut little circular holes in them and I found some speakers that fit inside of the rim of the fruit salad containers. Then I got one of those DJ fog machines and pumped fog into the inverted salad containers. I hooked the speakers to my computer and sent half sine [some kind of science] waves through them so the speaker cones move forward and come back to their resting position and blow a little puff of air over through the opening. So, depending on the volume of the sine wave and also the frequency, you get smoke rings that either spin at different rates or they come out fast or slow. I made a whole series of smoke ring compositions.

Ooooooo, neat.