Signal Hill
What inspires Signal Hill to continue creating music?
We started because we all had creative juices built up with no way to let them out. We were the 4 lonely teens at the proverbial high school dance and had no one to share ourselves with and all this pent up love to share. Now we’ve banded together and are having the best time of our lives dating the promiscuous lady that is Music, and damn, she is foxy. Hah. Silly analogies aside, there is no better place to be than sitting in the room with 3 of your best friends making something from nothing. When we are writing a new song, or jamming on some new parts that just come to us, and things fall into place, everyone just knows it is right and at that very instant glances are shot around the room, smiles emerge and we close back our eyes and play on. It is the most magical experience in the whole world. I don’t think there is a single drug out there that can deliver that collective euphoria.
Your last release, S/T EP, was a great success, what’s next?
We put out that EP and have had continued success with that (it keeps moving, too) and now we have just released our first full-length titled “More After We’re Gone”. We spent much more time on it’s recording, mixing, rerecording/layering and it’s mastering. The overall production value is ten times better. Taking the time needed, as long is it may be, and doing things slowly and correctly to our liking, has proven the best modus operandi to put out the record we couldn’t be more proud of. We all hope you enjoy it as much as we did making it. Next is a small tour of Australia with a few shows in Melbourne and Sydney with our good friends All India Radio graciously hosting us. Then we have some big changes (positive we feel) to work out and continue making new music together including a couple of 7 inches which we hope to get out this year. We are all growing and expanding our lives, some with spouses, one with a new baby, and will continue to make the magic. Haha, how lame does that sound?
Post Rock generates creative (and often lengthy) band and track names, how does Signal Hill come up with these?
I think it is especially true with instrumental bands, that track titles are about the only place where words can be used to either direct a listener’s thoughts to an idea or simply clue them into a feeling or concept that a band (or at least one of it’s members) had at some point in their heads. It could be a line from a funny story that happened to me (Standby, Sir) or a word that has boundless interpretations but holds a special feeling to me (celadon). Track titles are the most subjective thing so it’s hard to explain. I know we often start with a working title, many times a silly joke name or something with no value to anything related to the band, then as the song evolves, maybe one of us will bring in an idea and we all have reasons, many times unsaid and almost always adopted without question. The last example would be track 2 on our latest album, More After We’re Gone. We started that track as Rishkot’s Discovery, then it became Intention 64 from this junk email I got that had hundreds of random word strung together and the first sentence had something about Intention 64. We still refer to it as i64 amongst ourselves, because we are lazy and it is easier to say than it’s current title Intelligentsiya. In fact, most of our songs we have two letter abbreviations for (easier to write a setlist that way). Intelligentsiya came from Rishi who studied a good bit of Russian history and well, I’d have to ask him for the full details. We also have more simple, yet poignant track titles, a la Floruit, which tells of the period where an organization or a culture (or a band) was most active and flourishing, which fits with the album’s theme of evolution and life as a cycle. So yeah, too many sources to mention.
What have you been listening to recently that you would recommend to your fan base?
Tristeza, Mercury Program, Sam Prekop, Iron and Wine, Elbow, The Bad Plus, The Books, Cinematic Orchestra, Owen, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Toe, Beware of Safety, The Littlest Viking, This Town Needs Guns, Model Photographer, Ida, and David Axelrod.
The obligatory digital media question: We all know that digital downloads (legal or not) are changing the music business, would you say this is a challenge or an opportunity, and why?
It is 95% opportunity. No more than ever we can say, “Hey my friend in Warsaw wants to hear your album. Oh okay email him the zip file” and ten minutes later he is jamming our music. How powerful is that? We strive to play music for the art of making it and doing so as a group of best friends, and then to ultimately share it with people we care about. When we started we didn’t think about playing shows, until our friends said, “hey you sound good, you should play for more people to hear.” So we said okay, then they said “Hey, you should record some songs so we can send them to our friends that live further away and can’t see you play.” So we said okay. Now here we are, basically right where we started, having fun playing music together, we happen to play shows for people that enjoy us, and we happen to have some of those songs recorded to send out to people who heard about us. Our goal was always to create something special between us. If people like it, awesome. Now we have the power to very easily send the recordings all around the world to people that heard about us and want to listen. If they pay us, all the better. Since we don’t depend on the income from this band as our livelihood, that 5% challenge is invisible to us (almost). Our goal aside from making music for ourselves, is simply to be heard now. There is no argument that the positives of digital distribution are masked by the negatives. It is awesome for us and for any independent band that has no marketing machine behind them.
