Islands – Nick Diamonds’ Polymorphous Pop Band

Let it be said that Nick Thorburn is a nice guy.

Before you meet Thorburn (a.k.a. Nick Diamonds), it’s easy to think that he’s some sort of pampered artist.  Thorburn was in the critically lauded indie pop group The Unicorns.  After that group split, he formed Islands and recorded 2006’s Return to the Sea, which earned glowing reviews, including an astronomical 8.4 and “Best New Music” rating from Pitchfork.  For an indie band, that is the equivalent of a Catholic priest getting a letter of recommendation from the Pope.  Soon after, Islands signed to Anti- records (home of Tom Waits, among others).

So, maybe some people just assume that, with such a track record, Thorburn must be your classic front man head case.  But the truth is, he’s just a nice guy – almost a kid, really, at 27 years old – who often feels the victim of “shy/asshole confusion,” a concept originated by Seinfeld co-creator, Larry David.  This is something he talks about at length in most interviews.

Islands’ second album, 2008’s Arm’s Way, was heavier and less accessible than their debut, but better than reviews would lead you to think.  Now, the group is back with Vapours, a rhythmic, synth-driven album full of carefully crafted pop songs.  

Glide met up with Thorburn at The Alcove, a hole-in-the-wall bar in Gainesville, Florida, before an Islands show to discuss Vapours, Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies and the return of drummer Jamie Thompson.

It seems like Vapours is a rhythm-oriented album.  Whereas your other albums seemed to originate with the guitar, these songs seem like they started with rhythm.  Is that accurate?

You could say that.  It’s partially true.  Jamie’s back in the fold, and he’s got a strong rhythmic sensibility.  Secondly, I demoed these songs, every one of them – some with very clear rhythms and some open-ended – but I’ve never demoed songs for the records, so I demoed everything on this record with a little drum machine and got a feel for how the movement of the songs should go.  It’s always the same process for songwriting – me in my bedroom working out a song on an acoustic guitar or whatever.  But putting it to tape, like demo-style, was different.  I’ve never done that.  Like, the first record I wrote the songs the way I always do, and that’s when I was just starting to really write my own songs, the first Islands record.

Is that so?  You were just starting to write songs then?

Well, I was with The Unicorns, but I looked to Alden [Penner] as a real foundation for support.  Because he had come from a place where he was really a songwriter and a musician.  You know, he had guitar lessons, it wasn’t like he was a trained professional musician, but I had no background in music.  I was just intuitively kind of feeling my way through it.  And after The Unicorns broke up, I was kind of forced to do the stuff by myself, which I did, and then brought it to Jamie who put a huge spin on it rhythmically.  And he kind of did, for the most part, with this [new album] too. 

So did you ask him to re-join or did he just do it?

I asked him to.  It was a weird thing, you know, because he’d left.  I wanted to make this certain kind of record and he was down to do it.  I’m treating Islands as a really touch and go kind of thing.  There’s no schematic to how it’s going to play out.  It’s just, each record is it’s own creature and the lineups are always in flux.  They’ve been that way since the beginning.

I’ve heard it said that every album is, in some way, a reaction to the previous album you made, and I wanted to see what you think about that.  I feel like with your albums especially, I can see that being true.

It is true.  You try not to be influenced by the reception, critically and publicly, to your records, but to a certain point, it does seep through.  It’s not the over-arching, motivating factor in the next follow-up record, but it does play a part a little bit.  And also personally and creatively, when I was making Arm’s Way I was looking back at Return to the Sea.  It was mostly to do with the production – I still feel like “Swans (Life After Death)” is maybe the best song I’ve ever written.  I don’t know if I’ve ever done better.  But the way that record was made, the way it was produced, I was just completely like, “I have to make a record that can actually be heavy . . . that can actually cut to the quick and be really dark and heavy.  I’ve only really scratched at the surface.”  That’s what Arm’s Way was.  It was like, Let’s fuckin’ get into it.  Let’s get really meaty and get these hooks, get these big guitars and big violins and not do this half-assed job, this lo-fi thing – which I wasn’t intending to do.  I mean, people like that shit as though it’s an aesthetic that you decide.  But, it’s actually like, well, sometimes you just don’t have the money and you want to make a really classy, shimmery record.  And with Vapours, it was like, well I kind of need to scale back and focus more on having the foundation of a good hook and a catchy song.  Because that’s where I come from, loving good pop songs.

I feel like Vapours is your first complete pop album.  Even though “Return to the Sea” has a lot of poppy stuff on it, that album also has its more expansive moments.  But this one seems like all really nice, tidy pop songs.  Do you agree?

Well, the last song is pretty nutty, though.  But, it’s as nutty as My Bloody Valentine is, which is nutty but beloved, you know?  I mean, I’m not making decisions based on – it’s not a popularity contest.  I’m not just trying to be popular.  I’m following a certain rhythm and I’m trying to be true to myself.  But I also love to make people happy.

There’s a certain beauty to pop music, though.

There is.  It’s undeniable when it hits.

I wanted to ask about a few songs in particular.  “Switched On” is a great album opener.  Where did that come from?

That was one of the later songs.  It was one of the last songs written.  It started when my girlfriend and I, we were listening to HOT 97, which is a New York hip-hop station, and the Young Jeezy song “Put On” came on the radio, and the chorus is like [sings] “I put on for my city / On, on for my city.”  And my girlfriend turned to me and said, “You know, there’s like an inherent ‘60s kind of throwback song inside that chorus.  There’s kind of a Sam Cooke vibe to it that you can peel away.”  So I kind of stole that idea, I said OK, I’m going to craft a song around that idea. 

There’s a lot of, for lack of a better word, pretty singing on this album.  The harmonies are very pretty on several of the songs, like “On Foreigner,” for instance.

I’m just trying to croon.  I love singing. I love harmonies.  I feel like I picked that up from Jim Guthrie, making the “Human Highway” record.  That was a pivotal moment for me in terms of vocals.  He’s such a beautiful singer and musician and it was a real treat to make that record with him. 

I read an interview with you from Return to the Sea era, and you talked about having the song “Tender Torture,” which ended up on Vapours.  That’s an old song.

It is old.  It pre-dates Return to the Sea, or the release of it.  In that time, I wrote “Tender Torture,” and we were playing it on the Return to the Sea tour, but it didn’t fit with the aesthetic of Arm’s Way.  I wanted to prove that there was a certain depth to the band and a muscular flex, which maybe came off to some as being really self-important or self-aggrandizing, but it was really just like, there’s more to it than just some fluff.  Like, “Don’t Call Me Whitney, Bobby,” [from Return to the Sea] has such a light air to it that people sometimes think – I don’t know, I just wanted to prove that there’s a varied pallet there.  So, “Tender Torture” is from around that time and it just felt like it was right.  For a while, I wanted to actually give it away to a songwriter, because it’s such a sappy song.

You talk a lot in interviews about what a difficult lifestyle being in a touring band is and how much of your life you put into it.

I said it’s difficult?

Well, you said it requires a lot of sacrifice.  I wonder how you feel about that now.

Personally, I don’t’ want to be too dramatic and say that I don’t have a choice, but I don’t at this point.  I’ve painted myself into a corner.  It’s a great corner, and I’m happy with the paint job, but it’s a sacrifice I don’t know if I can undo.  For people who have devoted their time to Islands and to the project I’ve kind of spearheaded, I feel so grateful and I realize that it’s a lot of work and it’s a lot of drudgery.  We’re a real working-class band and we do everything ourselves.  We don’t have roadies to load our gear for us.  We do all that shit ourselves.  Right now, at the moment, we’re tour-managing ourselves and doing our own merch.  We’re really self-sufficient, and not because it’s cool and we’re obsessed with Ian MacKaye [Minor Threat/Fugazi] or something.  It’s a financial situation.  It’s a big weight to bear, but it’s also such a fun life.

At what point do you feel like you’ve made it?  You’re on a great label . . .

You never do, sadly.  We’re on a great label.  We’re able to do what we do, sort of.  I have lofty expectations, I guess.  I want to be able to do this for a long time because I enjoy it, but it’s not easy.  It’s hard to say.  It’s perspective, you know?  I’m happy.  I feel lucky.  But I also feel like we’re doing such an honest thing and we put so much blood, sweat and tears into it, it sucks when you see such tossed-off, clichéd nonsense become so adored.  We feel like we really, really care about what we’re doing and we really want to move people and it sucks when you can’t mobilize as much as you’d like to.  But, it’s all perspective.

You talked early about not paying too much attention to reviews, but with Return to the Sea, that album got generally glowing reviews . . .

“Generally favorable” – Metacritic.org

When an album blows up like that, how does that affect you as a songwriter?

Aw, man.  I don’t know.  I don’t like to over think that shit – it makes me crazy.  At a certain point, you can’t not let it kind of control you, but I think back to The Unicorns days where I was just so much more naïve and kind of blissfully unaware about the kind of bullshit that ends up becoming fake important, like first-week sales or reviews.  I mean, at the end of the day, none of that shit matters.  I mean, it matters to an extent because you’re able to be afforded the opportunity to do it, financially speaking.

You might have gotten this a lot already, but I wanted to ask about “Heartbeat” – the song where you use Auto Tune.  I feel like that’s going to be a very discussed part of this album . . .

And it’s going to be disgusted.

What was the thought process behind that?  It’s an easy thing to be cynical about, but if you just listen to it objectively in the song, it sounds kind of cool.

Yeah, I was just fuckin’ around on GarageBand and I saw the Auto Tune function and I had this song that was like a super syrupy little pop song, and it seemed appropriate.  And then we tried in the studio to record the song without it, because obviously it’s such a timely sort of thing.  It’s not going to be relevant in a couple years.  It’s going to be like a punch line, maybe.  But we tried without it and it didn’t really work.  It was like the glue for that song.  I consulted Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.  It’s a set of cards he and his buddy Peter Schmidt devised where, when you’re in the studio and you’re kind of lost, you consult these cards, you pull them out, and it kind of tells you what to do.  So I was like, “Fuck, I want to find some other effect or something else that glues it together.  Auto Tune is so played out already, I can’t imagine when the record comes out.  It will just be a fucking joke.”  So, I pull out the cards, turn it over and it says “Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency.”  And, you know, the most immaculate and consistent thing in modern music is Auto Tune.  It’s designed to be consistent and immaculate.  So I took that as a sign to leave it. 

No You Dont – Islands

Related Content

Recent Posts

New to Glide

Keep up-to-date with Glide

Twitter