Headlights

(A.V. Club, Milwaukee print edition, Oct. 5, 2006)


For a band that divides its time between the road and a farmhouse near Champaign, Illinois, Headlights is pretty easy to mistake for a Milwaukee act. The trio recorded much of its first LP, Kill Them With Kindness, here, and recently finished a month of tour dates with Milwaukee’s Decibully. (They’re now headlining a tour of the Midwest, East Coast, and South.) While the term “shoegazer” comes up nearly every time someone mentions Headlights (even on the band’s own MySpace page), Kill’s rhythms and arrangements run from symphonic ballads to jolly rock shuffles. The only constant is the breathy vocal interplay between keyboard player Erin Fein and guitarist/bassist Tristan Wraight. Fein, Wraight, and drummer Brett Sanderson recently spoke to The A.V. Club about (sort of) rural living, what’s good about Donovan, and why they’re not cute.

The A.V. Club: You play a lot in Milwaukee. Any reason?
Tristan Wraight: We have a lot of friends there, and they’re all in really good bands and let us play with them.
Erin Fein: We’ve played with New Sense, and The Championship…
TW: And The Mustn’ts, who broke up, I think.
Brett Sanderson: Obviously Decibully. Def Harmonic, Sport Of Kings.

AVC: You recorded your album with Kristian Riley, which seems kind of appropriate, because he also produced Maritime’s last album.
EF: He plays in New Sense, and we were friends of his for a long time before we recorded the record, and we just started talking about it and he started talking about it, and we wound up doing it there.
BS: It’s good to record with somebody you’re comfortable with.

AVC: You live and do some recording in a farmhouse. Have you had any difficulties with that?
TW: Yeah, it’s a real piece of crap. [All laugh.] It’s a total dump.
BS: It’s potentially haunted.
TW: It should probably be condemned. “Farmhouse” paints a romantic picture, but it’s really just a big, shitty house near a cornfield and a soybean field.
EF: And it has weird, lingering smells that come from the walls, and we’re pretty sure there’s some dead animals in there. [Laughs.]
TW: It’s a charming place to live. A fixer-upper, if you will.

AVC: How far away are you from people?
BS: You can see the mall from our window.

AVC: Nick Sandborn from Decibully is playing with you on this part of the tour. Do you prefer playing as a three-piece or a four-piece?
TW: I think it’s more fun to have a bass player, but it’s weird because there’s two versions of Headlights. The four-piece, we can fly by the seat of our pants, and the three-piece is very precise.

AVC: One review of the album described your vocals as “cute enough to pinch,” but you don’t sound like you’re actively trying to be cute.
EF: I think that there’s something about this boy-girl band phenomenon that the media has coined as something really popular right now. A lot of bands that have male-female vocals get described as cutesy or cuddly even if it’s not necessarily the case. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. Maybe it means they think it sounds pretty or light.
TW: We really don’t try to sound cute. We just try to sing the best that we know how. [Laughs.]

AVC: The album is all over the place stylistically, from symphonic tracks like “Your Old Street” to straight-up rock songs like “Lions.” Did you make a conscious effort not to settle on any one sound?
EF: I don’t know if that’s necessarily intentional. We draw from a lot of different influences, and I think that’s something that winds up happening. We’ve always had all these different kinds of songs; we want to be able to have the freedom to experiment with different sounds. We don’t want to say, “Does this sound like a Headlights song?”
TW: There are records that we really love that are very consistent, but we also really get excited when we listen to a record that takes you to a bunch of different places.

AVC: What are some of your favorite all-over-the-place bands?
TW: Take any Beatles record, and dare I say Pink Floyd? I thought the “Mellow Yellow” guy, Donovan, was always really up for having a really good time. [All laugh.]
EF: Mercury Rev is a good example of that. And they’re a huge influence on us, I think.

AVC: Before you got picked up by Polyvinyl Records, you were distributing The Enemies EP by burning people copies of it on the road.
TW: Wu-Tang style!

AVC: Is it nice not to have to do that anymore?
EF: It is awesome, but I also really like when bands do stuff like that.

AVC: When you’re trying these different kinds of arrangements, are you perfectionists, or do you just try and let things happen?
EF: There is a moment in “Your Old Street” where I can hear this little note that I’m singing a little bit flat, and maybe no one else can hear it, but we didn’t really have time. We just slapped it on, and I kind of like that.
TW: That’s the fun thing about recording—you never really know what will happen, or what mistake will turn into your favorite part on the record.

AVC: One of the songs from the EP, “Everybody Needs A Fence To Lean On,” was used in an episode of Grey’s Anatomy in February. What was the scene like?
EF: A husband and wife are breaking up, and then it switched over to this other room where this kid who had some sort of disorder had died.

AVC: That’s cramming a lot of pain into one scene.
EF: [Laughs.] It is!
TW: Which is why our song was perfect for it.
EF: I think I shed a tear.