MUSIC INTERVIEW: WHITE DENIM

Frontman James Petralli on Lips, Tours, Tunes & Power Stuggles

By: Team Buzzine

May 3, 2009

White Denim, a psychedelic garage band with a fascination for trashcans and trailers, combines such everyday found objects with language experiments — à la the poetry of Gertrude Stein — into their visual approach toward music. Fresh from SXSW, the Austin, Texas trio is currently recording their third full-length album, FITS, in their studio by the desert. Frontman James Petralli, who once considered a career in professional baseball, spoke from Denver, CO with Buzzine's Amy Liu before the soundcheck for the night’s show.

Amy Liu: You have just returned from Canada. How did you like touring there? Was the crowd any different?

James Petralli: It’s a little bit more — at least in Vancouver and Montreal — like playing for a European audience. They tend to get down a little bit less self-conscious, I guess. There’s a lot of enthusiasm, so we really like playing in Canada.

AL: What cities other than your hometown do you like enjoy performing at?

JP: We’ve had really great shows in London; basically all the gigs we’ve played in the UK have been super fun. We’ve played some shows in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco that were really great. And then there were some big surprises –- we had a super great crowd the other night in Salt Lake City. Really it just depends on the night of the week you’re playing. Any city could have a great night.

AL: What type of day job were you doing before playing full-time with White Denim?

JP: I was driving a truck. I was a plant-deliverer. I drove this big truck and delivered native perennials and annuals to a nursery. Well, I was a little bit more than a truck driver. My job was to work on area-specific plants and consult people on their gardens. I tried to sell plants to nurseries as well. It was a great; I spent a lot of time listening to music and singing into a tape recorder. I was outside a lot. There was a lot of alone time to do the things I wanted to.

AL: Since there are three of you guys, are there ever any power struggles in the band?

JP: Yeah, naturally. Everybody has a really chill personality in our group and most of the time it works out, but there are three distinct personalities. Mostly during touring really — it’s never really musical. We tour in a minivan with really close corners constantly, so most of our issues are social, not musical.

AL: Where do you guys like to jam and write music? Any particular atmosphere that’s most conducive?

JP: We spend a lot of time at our studio in Driftwood, Texas. It’s about an hour outside of Austin and it’s completely isolated out there; we don’t even get phone reception. It’s a really good place to block out and hash things out without any disturbance or anything.

AL: Did you guys know there’s a little record company in Pennsylvania also called White Denim? 

JP: Yeah, when we picked our name, we just picked it. We didn’t Google ourselves or anything, but we’ve actually talked to the record company, and they’re nice.

AL: What’s the significance of all the cutouts of lips on the covers of both Let’s Talk About It and Exposion?

JP: The artist we worked with is a guy I used to play in a band and went to college with. It was the first thing he ever did for a rock ‘n’ roll band. It’s relative to Warhol and also a reference to The Rolling Stones’ mouths. He might have done that not recognizing it at first. I guess the mouth was a big thing for our first EP, Let’s Talk About It. We don’t really have a logo, so the mouths have kind of become our logo.

AL: What did you study in college?

JP: I studied English.

AL: Do you guys release the same singles in the UK and the US?

JP: Actually, we haven’t properly released anything in the US. We don’t have a record deal here, so we’ve been pressing small runs of CDs and vinyl and putting our stuff on iTunes. We haven’t released singles or tried to push anything onto radio really. Everything that happens for our band in the US is probably directly
related to blog posts.

AL: Do you write a blog yourself?

JP: No, we don’t have a blog. but there’s a blog called Gorilla vs. Bear. It’s been instrumental in our being able to tour. The responses we’ve gotten from the blog have led us to our current situation.

AL: Can you divulge any juicy details about FITS?

JP: I don’t know. We toured 28 weeks last year. That was a ton of touring. It was our first experience with that type of travel. We’re creating this record that reflects all the energy that was going on. We try to put that into our music.

AL: What are you working on right now?

JP: The most immediate thing we’re doing is trying to write for the singles we’re going to be releasing. We’re also working on extended, more instrumental versions of our songs for B-Sides — some psychedelic stuff. Most of our music is just trying to pack a lot of ideas into two- or three-minute pop songs.

White Denim's new album 'FITS' is in stores now from Downtown Music.