The Whimbrels are a relatively new, New York-area band formed by a notable collection of experienced musicians who will be releasing their self-titled debut album on June 27th. Described as a “power art-rock band”, members include Arad Evans, Norman Westberg, Luke Schwartz, Matt Hunter, and Steve DiBenedetto, whose band credits include Glen Branca’s Ensemble, Swans, Rick Cox, New Radiant Storm King, and many more. Their debut album was mixed and mastered by Jim Santo and recorded at Carousel Studios in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, by Steve Silverstein.
Building on live performances, The Whimbrels always had a view towards recording, always documenting their regular sessions together and focusing on a Punk ethos of taking their most ambitious tracks straight to an audience. Writing music is something that developed in their sessions together, building around core song ideas over time, adding new textures, layers, and directions, resulting in an eclectic variety of sounds united by their Rock intensity on The Whimbrels. I spoke with Arad Evans about the band’s history, recording methods, and their ability to tackle complex compositions in a largely “non-technological” way that harks back to a Punk Rock ethos.
How far back did you all start thinking towards this album? I know live performance has been important for you, so was that the initial focus of the band?
We’ve been itching to get this album out for a bit. In terms of the arc of the band, I still think of it as a relatively new project. There was a pre-pandemic Whimbrels, but we only played a few shows, and it was a very different configuration. Then the pandemic came, and while many people, I’m sure, found the pandemic to be a wonderful opportunity to create, I found it very difficult, to tell you the truth. Not having the counter-irritant of regular life to push against, I wasn’t as productive as I wished I had been. It wasn’t until things started to get back to normal and opened up that I looked to start putting The Whimbrels back together again.
We kind of picked it up in different configurations at that point. So that wasn’t that long ago. Just a couple of years ago, we played a show at St. Vitus in Brooklyn, and it’s been off and running since then. Everybody’s got lots of other stuff, lots of other musical projects that they are doing, and I grab them when they can. Of late, everyone’s been focusing on Whimbrels, and we’ve taken off a lot.
Thank you for sharing that genesis story. Was the live play also a focus once you kicked things off after the pandemic?
I appreciate the idea of live play as part of the band. We sort of live to play live, all of us. It’s what we enjoy most about it. The whole point of having a band, for me, and I think for a lot of the other guys, is to get up in front of a bunch of people and make a racket. But I think we had in mind getting something out from the get-go. Our tunes take a little bit of time to work out. I don’t show up, and introduce a tune, and forty minutes later, it sounds pretty much like the record’s going to sound. That’s not the way it works at all for us.
It can take several months, and we worked pretty steadily, rehearsing at least once a week, even when we didn’t have a gig coming up. So I think that we were starting to write the first record the first time that we got together. Maybe we didn’t know it, but we were.
What you’re saying makes sense to me, having heard the record. The songs seem built as a living thing, with certain underlying structures that were then added to. That seems to work best by adding things over time.
Oh yes, absolutely. We record ourselves a lot. I’ll come in with an idea and a half, we’ll tinker with that, take it home and think about it, and we’ll come in the next time and say, “Okay, let’s try to bolt this on.” And so on. The other thing about it is that these guys are really good! And super-experienced. I’m just so grateful that they want to play this music.
Matt Hunter is bringing stuff in, too, and his stuff is excellent. I think both Matt and I benefit from the stuff that other people put in. The songs have a songwriter, but they have to grow in the hands of the band for a while, while people are thinking, “This works…this doesn’t work.” And having ideas that they can put in. One thing I don’t do, because I feel like these songs belong to this band, when somebody comes up with something on one of my songs, I don’t say, “What are you doing there?” I don’t pry.
Is part of the fun of working with this group of people that there’s an element of surprise in what they are going to come up with?
Yes, absolutely. Now that we have a common vision for the band, people pull stuff out of their hats, and it usually works. I don’t know if you found that the band had a common musical thread, but it’s the case as we get more used to working together, that the ideas seem to fit better together, from a compositional viewpoint.
I’ve been talking with artists lately about the benefits of writing for people you know. That’s bound to happen the more time that you spend together.
I think that’s key, too. Over the years, I’ve written for a lot of different things. I’ve done uptown, Classical stuff, as well as Rock bands. I have a strange little acoustic art song band. It’s fiddle, stand-up bass, weird percussion, and I play acoustic guitar. I definitely write for those people. As a composer, you have to make sure that the players want to play it. Players will play stuff that challenges them, or that sounds good to an audience, but they have to actually like it. It has to make them sound good. It has to be fun to play. So, you’re right, you’re writing for these people. With something like Whimbrels, sometimes you’re just writing to set the stage for what you’re anticipating they want to do.
Is playing this album’s music live difficult? There’s a lot going on.
Weirdly tuned guitars aren’t nearly as rare as the music listening public thinks. We’ve all done it before. We practice at it. People are good at their instruments. I wouldn’t say that it’s hard, but maybe it’s something that a lot of bands couldn’t do.
From an outside perspective, it seems like it would take a pretty good memory to play the songs, because there’s not a lot of repetition. These are compositions, so maybe having a classical background helps.
Thank you for saying that. I like the idea that people are seeing it as something that’s put together from beginning to end. Something that’s counterintuitive, though, is that Rock musicians have a much better memory for song forms and musical forms than Classical musicians. I find it difficult as well, since I’ve spent a lot of time playing classical music, to remember forms as well as Matt and Norman do. Because they don’t read music, they just remember it. Once I come into the practice room with a chart, I’m stuck with that chart, but they will have been playing that song for three or four weeks already, completely from memory. It’s an interesting thing about Rock musicians. They have that aural ability to remember song forms, and it’s pretty cool.
When you say that, I’m reminded of some of these earlier Rock musicians, from the early days of Rock, who would tour endlessly with various bands and play hundreds, if not thousands of songs. So you’re right, we should give more credit to Rock ‘n Rollers in that regard. They would cover so much music, and it was in so much demand to do so.
I’ve played my share of bar bands, and you’d have to know five or six sets, which was probably a hundred songs. It’s a great skill. We do have a little tour coming up, by the way, around the time of the release, in June. We’ll be doing Hudson Valley, Boston, and New Haven, and really looking forward to it. There’s something about being on the road and playing every night that really dials it in in a way that nothing else can.
It’s a big sound, with a big band, which is getting rarer these days. That’s probably challenging to organize and record in its own right.
The logistics are a complete nightmare, but we manage. Believe me, I’ve thought about the luxury of being just one or two people, but I like a band. You get that kind of collective momentum going, and it’s something special. I also have to say that I think that we’re non-technological in The Whimbrels. By which I mean that we have effects boxes, but nothing’s looping, there are no samples. There are a bunch of people with guitars. I play almost a whole set with just a very light delay on my guitar, and that’s it. Norman, for this unearthly sound he gets, he’s only got two or three boxes, a trade secret! I don’t inquire too closely. That’s Norman’s sound. If you want Norman’s sound, get Norman. [Laughs]
I’m not surprised to hear that, but I’m excited to hear you say that. Because it would be much more common to approach this kind of endeavor with a lot more electronic stuff. People might even build their tracks remotely, and not together, for instance. The fact that you don’t do any of that is pretty astonishing to me. I kind of assumed that some of that must be going on to create this music. If I encounter an artist in their 20s, that’s usually what they are doing. That’s normal.
I’m not saying that they might not have a better idea. They may well. But that’s just not how we roll. Those recordings are live recordings. I’m not saying that if somebody made a hash of their part, they didn’t go back in and re-record it, since it’s a record and you want it to be right. And it’s also the case, which is true for the history of Rock, that you make a record, then you play it for six to eight months, and by the time the record comes out, you say, “God, I wish we were recording it again now that we know how to play these songs!” But with this album, what you see is what you get. At one point, we’re actually changing guitars, during a song, while it’s playing. You whip the guitar off and pick up another one, just because you need a different tuning. It’s not anti-intellectual, it’s just non-intellectual. It’s just not the way that we approach it.
Sorry to sound like a geyser, but back in the day, when Punk Rock was happening for the first time, and everybody was rejecting this super-group, polished sound, if you showed up with a box, you couldn’t even be in the band. You were expected to go straight in. Some of us haven’t lost that.
It’s very impressive. The sound on this record was part of why I asked, “Is this hard to play?” I assumed that you needed some electronic finessing to make it possible for you all to play this live.
Yes, I should probably make that point more about this record. It’s straight in. This is it. I think this is true of Swans, and it was certainly true of Glen’s band, that those guys understood electric guitar tone. Not “electronic”, but “electric.” They knew how to get amazing guitar sounds out of that instrument of just a vibrating string and a magnetic field. That’s sort of how I think all of us came up, without so much using the guitar as a tone generator, that you then mold with electronics. It’s a different thing.
It’s a lot more complex sound, I think, than you get with electronics stuff. I think in terms of the overtones, and the sonority of the guitar, the more complex thing is when you can actually hear the strings vibrating, and when you get the natural overtones, than what you get if you’re trying to replicate that same sound electronically.
