Q + A: The Submarines on Recording in Their Underwear and Grouchy Boston Cops

Blake Hazard and John Dragonetti may be one of the cutest couples you’ve ever met, and a fabulous duo onstage. They are the Submarines, an independent alternative band that just released their third album, Love Notes/Letter Bombs. Their music has been used for everything from the popular TV show Weeds to the 2008 movie Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Their song “You, Me, and the Bourgeoisie” won the Independent Music Award for Best Film/TV Song in 2010 after it appeared in an Apple commercial for the iPhone. Despite being featured in various mainstream medium, the Submarines still record their music at home in L.A. and play intimate shows at venues such as the Brighton Music Hall where they played on April 25.
The Quad and WTBU Radio sat down with the Submarines before their show on Monday to talk about their newest album, return to Boston and  belief in the traditional format of telling a story through a record. Additional reporting by Ali Weltman.
John and Blake in the midst of their performance | Photo by Patricia Bruce

[Love Notes/Letter Bombs] is your third album. What’s different about it?

Blake: Well, we kind of set out to do something different from what we ended up doing. We wanted to make something that was a little more minimalist and we were listening to some hip hop production that had maybe one or two things going on. But as we got going, the layers started happening and all the sudden you just need to hear a harpsichord, all of the sudden you just need to have all these crazy sounds, so it ended up getting pretty intricately layered. And we also didn’t intend to write about our relationship very much, and in spite of ourselves, we totally did.

John: Some of the songs, anyway.

Blake: So, our intentions were a little different from the outcome, but, you know.

John: Also, I think that this record, too, we wanted to do something that we were going to have fun playing out a little more, and I think some of it’s a little faster than the material we’ve written before, so, I don’t know, it just makes it… gives it a little more energy for us on stage.

Blake: Yeah, it’s a little dancier, too, so there’s more room to move.

John: Some of it, yeah. And, definitely, we tried different things with this record in terms of working with other people. We’ve always just done stuff at home, maybe done … a couple of additional things outside our studio, but we went and we did some tracking with Jim Eno from Spoon in his studio in Austin and he did some drums, and added a live element to it, which is really cool. We also decided that it’d be the right time to try to get somebody else to mix it for us, to get, again, another perspective, so we decided to work with John O’Mahoney on this and John’s done a bunch of Metric stuff that sounds really fantastic, among a lot of other great things, too. Those were kind of the main departures, I guess, in a way, for us, from the earlier records.

So you guys have done the last two records yourselves, then?

John: Yeah, all three of them we’ve done ourselves… and this one I guess we still did pretty much 90 percent of it at home, really.

Blake: The only exception on the last one was doing strings with the section quartet, which we recorded in their studio cause they [couldn’t] really set up, and we did that again on this record, so.

John: You can’t fit more than two people in that room.

Blake: Yeah, it’s pretty tiny. It gets really hot in there, so we end up recording in our underwear a lot. It’d be awkward if more people joined.

So you guys live in L.A. now, but you’re from Boston?

Blake: We lived in Boston for years. I’m from Vermont and John grew up overseas, mostly in Dubai.

John: Yeah, I grew up in Dubai. … There was not much there when my family was there, but my parents moved around a lot, and then I came to Boston to go to school, and that’s how I ended up here, and that’s where I met Blake, years ago.

Blake singing loud and proud | Photo by Patricia Bruce

Blake: I love coming back. It’s great. One of the amazing things to me about Boston is that, and this might sound negative, but I don’t mean it that way at all, is that it stays the same. You come back and it hasn’t radically changed. There might be a new club, for example, where we’re playing tonight used to be another club. But looking around, you don’t feel like, where is this place I used to love? It feels like it’s all still there.

John: Same grouchy guy giving you a parking ticket.

Blake: Yeah, yeah, for better or worse.

John: This guy was chewing us out when we were loading in this morning for this other session and he was so grouchy and so mean. It didn’t bother me, though, I was like, oh, this is so nice. Everyone’s so nice in California, it’s so great to just have some east coast, you know…

Tough love?

John: Yeah, exactly. It was pretty funny.

You guys have done some different promotional things for this album, right? Your Twitter, and your blogs are different from other bands, and you did something with Etsy?

Blake: That was great, it was instigated by some people we work with. I wish it was our idea. But yeah, we’ve definitely been jumping in to the social media world, which really wasn’t comfortable for us at first. But now, like a lot of what we put on Facebook, it just feels like we’re starting a conversation with people in a way. It feels more real and connected than I originally thought that it would. When you’re just sort of tweeting out into the universe, it feels sort of self-involved, but now I feel like it’s like talking to people.

John: Yeah, you’re having some sort of interaction. It’s an adjustment. It definitely takes some time, you know. The days of just making a record, maybe making a video, are long gone.

Blake: Yeah, that’s it. There’s so much more that bands need to do now to stay current. People’s music memory is so short now. It’s like, you put a record out and people have forgotten you from a record you put out two years ago. I just read something on an unnamed music blog source that said, ‘Remember so-and-so? He played our festival last year and put a record out. Formed the band in ’09 and played our festival. Do you remember him?’ And I’m like, what? Two years ago he formed the band and he just played their festival. Have we forgotten? I don’t think so. That would be like… amnesiac’s society, you know? Very bizarre.

John: That’s what’s happening, though, with these things [smart phones]. You just don’t use a certain part of your brain anymore. It’s terrible.

Blake: Having said that, we’re completely addicted to our smart phones. We’re ridiculously in our phones all the time.

That’s kind of a trend, now, though, that a lot of the time records aren’t what you want to put out anymore. It’s a lot more live music and stuff like that.

John: Sure.

Blake: We want to make records. I know some artists are more, sort of free in their thinking about [collaborations] and I think that’s great for things like remixes and collaborations, but we still believe in an album, something that you listen to from start to finish that takes you somewhere, and I think that that gets lost sometimes with just single-oriented….

John: I agree with Blake in that. But, also, I think those things that you’re talking about, just doing a single or doing songs here and there, I do feel like that’s exciting and in some ways frees you up. An album – it’s a lot of work. At least, for us, I think in between those things I would like to be doing more of that kind of stuff, like in between albums, where you’re keeping things going.

John performing | Photo by Patricia Bruce

 

I’ve heard that you’re really cool with bootlegging the concerts and just kind of… interested live recording?

Blake: We haven’t really talked about that specifically…We’re comfortable with it.

John: I don’t mind. I don’t know if it sounds that good.

Blake: I think we’ve even posted a couple of the things that people’ve done on our website. So, no, we appreciate it. It’s also good to know what it sounds like … I think it’s a cool way that people just share the music, and they want to share their experience of it, you know, that’s the way they saw it, the way they heard it. Although, through their phone or whatever it doesn’t quite sound the same, but it’s kind of neat to have their perspective on it.

We saw the little box for love notes or letter bombs. Have you guys gotten any really good ones?

Blake: Yeah! There have been some really, very good ones.

John: Saying pretty honest stuff. Some of it you can’t say out loud. Some of it’s kind of harsh.

Blake: Well, some of it’s really heartfelt, and then some of it’s very funny, and some of it’s really lovely. So there’s a real mix of things, but I think the first batch is going up [on Facebook] tomorrow. People have been great, just really open with it. Again, it’s like that idea of having more of a conversation than just like, here’s what we’re doing, here’s what we’re doing, ad nauseam. It’s nice to have people show what they’re up to, or what they’re thinking.

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