DEERHUNTER
It’s 4 a.m. when most people are tucked up in bed. However, such an ungodly hour is of no real concern to Bradford Cox, and nor should it be. At the time, he and his band Deerhunter were about to release their excellent eighth album Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? It’s a record that, once again, truly highlights Cox as one of the greatest songwriters of his generation.
Cox has never been one to sit on his laurels and wait for the next trend to come along. Always several steps ahead of the curve, his music has confounded expectations since the very first Deerhunter release almost a decade-and-a-half ago. Adorned by the avant-garde and taken to heart by any number of minimal left field genre categorists you’d care to mention, both he and his band’s music have provided an altruistic anomaly that’s had commentators, critics, and fanatics alike chewing the fat over where they sit in the contemporary family tree.
Which is just how Cox likes it. Out on a limb, doing things his way on terms set by no one other than himself. Never one to be swayed by the bright lights, Cox is content sharing a modest house with his dog in a quiet suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. Away from the hustle and bustle of inner city life, Cox is able to retreat and ponder his next musical dalliance.
For the next hour and forty-five minutes of our late night interview, the Deerhunter frontman will talk us through the making of the album, about collaborating with Cate Le Bon, his sadness at the untimely passing of former bassist Josh Fauver, how he loves solitude, and why nostalgia can be incredibly toxic.
Dom Gourlay ( Under the Radar ): When did you start writing the album? Which songs came first? Bradford Cox: As with any Deerhunter record there’s always a mixture of very recent work then one or two older songs. It’s quite interesting because in terms of the older songs, they ended up being the easiest to re-imagine once we started recording them in Texas. For example for absolutely no reason that is known to me, a very long time ago I’d written this song called “Plains,” which was very garage and quite stark. Almost like a Pink Flag era Wire song. The lyrics were really incomprehensible because as anyone who’s taken an interest in our music will know, I’m a very strict devotee to the stream of consciousness technique. So I write all my music that way. I write all of my lyrics using that as the only process. “Plains” was written so long ago that it’s meaning was lost to me. When we started re-recording it in the actual plains of West Texas it took on a new feeling of barrenness. The songs that were most recently written, things like “Death in Midsummer” and “No One’s Sleeping” came over the last couple of years in between touring. The most recent song on the album (“Tarnung”) was written by Lockett [Pundt, guitarist]. We literally locked him in a closet in the studio and said, “Don’t come out until you have a song!” All he had was a Chamberlin keyboard, which is a more organic version of the Mellotron. So he wrote the entire song like it was an orchestral piece using a Chamberlin and some kind of tape device Cate [Le Bon, producer] brought.
Cate Le Bon produced, played, and sang backing vocals on various parts of the album. How did she end up working on the record? Is it something you’d been planning a while?
She’s like a sister to me. One of my closest friends. I’ve known her for quite some time so it just came naturally. Her involvement with this album started by coincidence. Moses [Archuleta, drummer] had been in contact with the proprietor of a studio called Sonic Ranch. We were initially going to record this album a year before we ended up doing it. It wasn’t meant to be so long in between albums. The record was already written. There were a lot of difficult times in between the two records. Not so much for me, but in the other band members’ lives. Quite a few important, sad and difficult times. There was a divorce and the loss of a parent and obviously these things
