MUSIC INTERVIEW: GROUPLOVE

The Best Thing to Come Out of a Hippie Commune Since the 1960s?

Sometimes the best fairy tales are the ones that turn out to be true (unless it’s some of the sicker Brothers Grimm stuff). The Grouplove story is one of them.

 

Boy plays show in New York. Boy meets girl, boy goes away on European vacation with girl, makes new friends, forms new band with girl and friends, band reunites a year later and records music for fun. Music is universally acclaimed, band is signed to major label, band records amazing debut album, band sits down and talks to Buzzine’s Stefan Goldby in Austin, Texas. That one of 2011’s albums of the year contenders can trace its roots back to a hippie commune in the Mediterranean seems incredible, but the boys in the band -- Christian Zucconi, Ryan Rabin, Andrew Wessen, and Sean Gadd -- swear it’s all true, but do also warn you to Never Trust a Happy Song…

 

Stefan Goldby: Let’s get the obvious question out of the way first. Tell me the story of the start of Grouplove, tell me about artistic communes in Crete…

 

Ryan Rabin: Andrew [Wessen], you tell it, and if it goes longer than a minute, you’re out of the band.

 

Andrew Wessen: I guess it depends on whose perspective it begins with, and everyone obviously has their grand story of how they even came to come to Crete, but I always think that a great starting-off point was when Hannah [Hooper] and Christian [Zucconi] met in New York: Christian, you want to elaborate on that a little bit?

 

Christian Zucconi: I had come to a show that I had played with a mutual friend, and she saw me play and we met after the show and ended up going out and having a really good night. We hung out a couple of times after that because she just had such a good sense of humor, and I don’t know, it was just a lot of fun… and a few days later, she invited me to go to Greece. I was playing in a band at the time, and we weren’t doing anything for that month of August, so I was like, “Yeah, let’s definitely go. I’ll go.”

 

And it was the best decision I ever made because I met Hannah even more, and I got to meet all these crazy guys out there, and it was just a really freeing experience at the most perfect time of our lives, to go out there and do it, because everything in New York at that time was kind of getting a little stagnant in a way, and we needed to put in a little reboot of inspiration, and we all got it with each other and it was really cool – just sharing music with each other every night, playing songs… It was really freeing.

 

AW: Ryan was… studying in Prague, was it?

 

RR: Yeah, I was doing an exchange program, and Sean [Gadd] was there with a friend’s band, and Andrew’s brother helped start this commune or whatever it’s called, and we all ended up there, and it was really cool. Just a bunch of hippies in a hippie commune.

 

AW: It was a really small village called Avdou and it’s up in the mountains and it’s like a 20-minute ride… We all had our little scooters and we had to ride down to the beach together every day, and we had this little secluded beach that was away from all the tourists, and it had all the overgrown ivy, and it was kind of our own little beach, and we just passed around guitars. It sounds so made-up or out of a movie, I swear to God. But basically just learning about each other, and we made our own little group within the larger group of artists that were there.

 

RR: That’s how we met, and then a year later, through staying in touch, everybody came to visit Andrew and I in Los Angeles, and there was no band or talk of a band yet, but they came and I have a little home studio set up, and I said, “Let’s just play some of the music we jammed on in Crete for fun,” and that’s all it was. And one song turned into seven or eight, and that became the EP.

 

And then once we had taken a step back and looked at what we had done in that month in LA, I said, “This is actually pretty special. We shouldn’t just leave this alone and let it sit there. We should do something with it.” So Sean moved from London, Christian and Hannah packed up all their things, sold everything and drove across the country and moved to LA, and now we’re making a run of it.

 

SG: What was the spark? Plenty of people go away and have a great summer holiday experience together, but not all of them are still in touch a year later and deciding to start a band: What was it that made you guys want to circle back and keep the party going?

 

Sean Gadd: We just became such good friends, I think. After Crete, we were always staying in contact.

 

RR: There were a lot of people – a lot of musicians, a lot of artists and stuff, but within that big group of people, for whatever reason, the five of us became the quickest friends. You meet a good group of people within such a big community of wacky artists and stuff…it felt special at the time. It felt weird to not stay in touch.

 

SG: I think going back to our normal lives was slightly depressing after that, even though we all led such amazing lives. [Everyone laughs] It was kind of depressing afterward… Christian went back to play with his band, and these guys were doing stuff musically, and I was in a band in London. And I just don’t think we were fulfilled doing what we were doing, and it was a bit of a crossroads for us.

 

But we never set out to be a band. We just wanted to hang out and play music because it was such a natural thing. So it was like: how can we continue those times we had in Greece? And somehow we got lucky and we’re doing it now, and it’s amazing that we’re still hanging out and continuing what we started.

 

SG: It’s challenging for any five people to be in a band and find out a way to make that work as an artistic unit. You have three different kinds of cultures thrown into that mix. Taking New York, LA, and London and smooshing them together: How does Grouplove function as a band?

 

CZ: I think that’s what makes it work – all our differences.

 

RR: It helps that we weren’t friends before.

 

CZ: Yeah, there’s no habits formed from earlier on; there’s no history. We kind of just start clean, and you start where you’re at at the time in your life together.

 

RR: And you’re right – there’s a ton of different cultures in there, and we all grew up listening to kind of the same music, but everyone has different tastes and favorites, so I think we have that sort of eclectic mix where everybody writes and brings their own spin on it from their own perspective of life and growing up.

 

SG: I find that the people you grow up with…it can be harder in a lot of ways because you form bad habits, and when we got together as a band, we all had an idea of what sort of band we wanted to be in, but it’s hard to do that when you’ve been playing with people for a few years, and you just fall into patterns.

 

With us, I think, because it was so fresh and because we didn’t know about each other’s pasts… when we met in Greece, all we knew about each other was we were in shorts on the beach, we had a guitar and that was us. No one was judging, we were very supportive. So being in this band is the easiest thing in the world. It’s exciting: It’s fun.

 

AW: I think we tried to capture those differences as best we could in our recordings and our eclectic styles of having everyone singing, and everyone has their own songs in the band, everyone writes… I remember the thing that drew me the most to everyone in the band was I remember meeting everyone and thinking, “This is such a character, such an interesting person, so different from the people I normally meet at home.” We all meet a lot of people, we’re from cities, but you know…

 

RR: [To Andrew] I don’t think you’re very interesting.

 

SG: [To Andrew] You’re pretty dull, to be honest.

 

AW: I know.

 

RR: But thank you for thinking that.

 

SG: Andrew is pretty interesting. He’s… read books and stuff. [Laughs]

 

AW: I read Clifford, yeah, that’s right.

 

RR: Clifford was actually inspired by Sean’s beard.

 

AW: I did win an award in grade school for drawing Clifford. I was obsessed: I would draw Clifford on everything. And I won an award for my grade. I have no idea where it is, but I really want to find it.

 

RR: Why didn’t you just say it was framed and up on the mantle? You’re just ruining everything...

 

SG: Turning to the recording of the first EP itself, is there a day that stands out in your guys’ mind as being particularly memorable?             

 

SG: First day?

 

CZ: First day, yeah. We had really nothing to do in our time in LA; we just went down there on a whim and we ran into these guys, and Ryan is, like we said before, “Come on and let’s do something.” So the first day of recording was the most special day; it sticks in our minds because that’s when we knew we’d be doing more songs. And the first day we did “Naked Kids,” which is a song Hannah and I wrote as a tongue-in-cheek, fun, silly pop song, and that was the easiest one to record first, because it was two chords…

 

RR: …And they wrote it in the dead of winter in Brooklyn. That’s my favorite part of it.

 

SG: That breaks the illusion.

 

RR: Fair enough.

 

CZ: …And we just recorded it and it went really well, and that was after the first day, listening back, we were like, “It sounds really good. Let’s do more and cancel our flights back to where we’re going and record seven or eight songs.”

 

SG: I think the last day of recording was quite a moment as well. We had to carry Hannah out of the studio… Remember that?

 

RR: You wouldn’t go to sleep. You’re like, “I’m going back to London tomorrow: Let’s stay up and do this all night.”

 

AW: And that’s when you did the “Getaway Car” take.

 

SG: Yeah. That’s when we got my best take, finally.

 

CZ: It was like 6:00 in the morning, and I don’t know if you guys know “Getaway Car,” but there’s this sample sound in there, and that’s actually Sean’s leather jacket zipper…that Ryan took and did magic, weird stuff to it.

 

RR: I was like, “Sean, you can’t do this in your leather jacket,” and he’s like, “I’m cold, man. Let’s do it.” And it was all these zippers…going tsss tsss tsss tsss…

 

CZ: And then you tuned the zippers…

 

SG: Apart from the tuned sound of Sean’s zipper, what about the EP are you guys proudest of?

 

RR: Its honesty, I guess, because it came out of nothing – no preconceived notions, no grand scheme of how it was supposed to sound…

 

CZ: Yeah, and we’re proud of Hannah too because she never sang before. That’s the first time she sang. She’s an amazing soprano…

 

SG: She’s a shower singer.

 

CZ: …a fine artist and painter. So we’re really proud of her for stepping up.

 

SG: She’s annoyingly talented: She tells us she’s learning percussion and keys and picking it up. She’s an artist anyway, so this is the way things come naturally to her, so…er…I hate her.

 

[Everyone laughs]

 

SG: It sounds like the next evolution of the band is that at some point, Hannah’s going to realize she doesn’t need you guys any more…

 

SG: Well she’s not here now, is she?

 

[Everyone laughs]

 

SG: Tell me about your studio. I love how grandiose it sounds to say, “Yes, we went to Ryan’s studio in LA…” Obviously it’s right next to Pacific or one of the other big ones… In my mind, we’re talking maybe control booth the size of this suite, probably the performance room maybe twice that…but can you paint the picture of actual reality for us?

 

RR: No! No, I will not. I will not paint the reality: You just keep thinking what you want to think.

 

[Everyone laughs]

 

SG: OK, I’ll just draw a veil over that, in the name of artistic mythmaking, fine. But I will put my foot down and say that I do have to know about your album. I know the EP is just out, but you simply can’t go EP and then not go album... If everything about your music so far was organic, including creating the EP, how do you keep that casual vibe alive, now that you are ‘officially’ a band?

 

CZ: Well, we did it at Ryan’s studio again, which is cool.

 

RR: [Sighs] Okay, okay… the EP was in a little back house that we would use when my parents weren’t home at my parent’s house. And basically we just moved that equipment for the album into my little apartment in downtown LA, and we did the album there. Kind of same method, same way we did the EP.

 

It’s weird, you would think that somehow everything would be different all of a sudden, like… now it’s a real band. Like, what do we do differently? But we didn’t: we just did the songs we liked. Everybody brought songs, and we said, “Let’s do this one, let’s do that one; this sounds good,” and it went along very… bit by bit. There wasn’t one grand goal in mind other than,  “Let’s just recreate whatever magic we had within the group on the EP: Let’s just do it the same way.” The songs have evolved, but the process is still the same.

 

SG: We moved basically from the Hollywood Hills to downtown, so I think you can hear a bit of downtown in our album: That’s definitely the difference.

 

CZ: We were nervous too, going into the recording, because we felt a little ill-at-ease that we were changing the vibe from the EP: Can we still do it again? And then it worked out really well. It was still just the five of us.

 

SG: I guess that’s the way that we’ve kept the vibe of Greece; it doesn’t matter where we record, I feel now. I feel as long as we’re together and we’re doing things our way, you can’t always stay in the same place. It’s like touring – we’re always moving, but just as long as we’re still doing things our way, then I feel we’ll… produce… … music.

 

[Everyone laughs]

 

RR: …and there’s our Spinal Tap moment.

 

SG: Nicely done, Sean. Okay, about…that…music… Obviously there’s a Grouplove ethos, a vibe that you tap into that goes back to the formation of the band: Does that come alive on stage? Every time? When you have a crowd to interact with, how do you know when it’s going well?

 

SG: I think for anyone on this planet that has come to a Grouplove show, they should expect nothing less than the spectacular, because I think the energy that we give on stage is 100%, and we feel it and we like to get the audience involved, so they’ll probably have one of the best nights of their year… or life…

 

AW: Because they all live really boring lives?

 

CZ: It definitely helps when there’s an audience there feeding off what we’re trying to put out, for sure. But we bring the same kind of passion every night, or at least try to. And so far, it’s gone really well. 

 

RR: Not to sound too melodramatic, but if you feel the songs and if you believe in the songs you’re playing, it should naturally come out that way. There could always be variables, like if there’s no one in the crowd, but then you just make it a practice session. We’ve been lucky that hasn’t really happened much – empty rooms. But you never know.

 

SG: I’d like everyone to come see Grouplove because we’re fun, we’re energetic, and we’ll definitely give it our all. We’re not gonna come on stage and ever give a half-ass performance. We’re gonna give it everything we’ve got.

 

SG: The setup to your band sounds like the setup to a bad sitcom: Guy meets girl, goes to Greece to live in a hippie commune… So how can Grouplove ensure that this sitcom doesn’t end in a Charlie Sheen moment? That’s really the key question, I feel for us all here today...

 

RR: Andrew needs to stop doing heroin.

 

AW: Actually, we’re the Spice Girls with really good plastic surgery: This is actually our second incarnation.

 

CZ: [Ignoring Ryan and Andrew] …Just continuing to write honest songs that mean something to us, and everyone being on board to keep playing them. I think we’ll definitely be able to keep putting out good music…

 

RR: … and Andrew needs to stop doing heroin.

 

SG: I guess Grouplove is like a bad sitcom. I sometimes wonder if I read our story, if I’d hate us or not. But the story is true, and it’s just weird how it all happened, so if anyone reads the story and hates us, we do apologize. It’s not our fault. It’s our story’s fault.

 

[Everyone laughs]

 

Grouplove’s debut album, ‘Never Trust a Happy Song,’ is released September 13, 2011 on Atlantic Records.