|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
Howie Day: It's A Beautiful Day by Brian Ives and C. Bottomley from www.VH1.com
Singer-songwriter plays loop the loop with his guitar, gets inspired by U2 and Radiohead, and finally hires a band. |
||||||||
| You may not know Howie Day, but entire college dormitories have swooned to his music. Since the singer/songwriter released Australia in 2000, he’s played campuses and clubs around the country. Using a delay pedal to create layered loops on
While his fans were studying for midterms, the Maine native faced fresh challenges. With a major label behind him, recording the new Stop All the World Now became a very different venture than creating the lo-fi Australia. There was a big name producer (Youth, who produced some of Day’s favorite albums, like the Verve’s Urban Hymns), a London studio, and, at last, a band of other musicians. Stop All the World Now might even make Day diehards believe they’re encountering their boy for the first time. In place of his versatile acoustic guitar is a tornado of sound comprised of pealing electric guitars, “Let It Be” pianos, and sweeping orchestras. The singer's voice and tunes feel very much at home in the sprawl. In fact, his soaring and pleading on the euphoric single “Perfect Time of Day” is worthy of that old breast-beater, Bono. The spiky-haired 22-year-old sensation has made a disc that fully realizes his ambitions, and clearly aspires to play in the big league. Day spoke to VH1 about how crucial change is, pimping records out of his car, and his unique approach to live performance. See VH1 exclusive live performances, "She Says", and "Perfect Time of Day". VH1: When did you decide that songwriting was your thing? Howie Day: I was always into music. I was that little kid that took piano lessons that didn’t have to be forced to practice. When I was 12 or 13, Nirvana and Pearl Jam came out. All of a sudden I wanted to be Eddie Vedder. The piano wasn’t as cool to me anymore, so I had to get a guitar. Somewhere around 15 or so, I decided “That’s gonna be my job” and started writing songs. I probably wrote “She Says,” which is on the new record, when I was 16 or 17. VH1: So those old songs still resonate with you. HD: Yeah, I hold on to the ones that still bring imagery into my head and I still feel emotional about singing. VH1: You sold 30,000 copies of your debut Australia on your own. How did you go about doing that? HD: We drove around the country in my car and played 300 shows a year for two years. We sold CDs out of the back of my car and at the shows and over the Internet and they added up. After two years, when I looked back and thought, ‘Wow, I sold 30,000 records this way,’ it kinda blew me away. VH1: How would you describe how you perform solo? HD: It was an evolution of effects pedals. For a really long time I was the classic singer/songwriter guy, with just the acoustic guitar and the vocal mic. I got bored with that after a few years. Every song gets kind of strummy and you can’t get a really good dynamic going with that. So the first thing I did was I get a delay pedal for my vocal. At that time, I didn’t have a front-of-house sound engineer, so I wanted to be able to control my own effects and sound like the big boys. Then I ran into Joseph Arthur at a little coffee house and watched him perform solo. He does a similar thing [with effects pedals]. It’s like a lot of loops, a very ethereal sounding thing. My jaw hit the floor. So a week later, I found myself in a music store buying a loop sampler. It grew from there. As soon as I got comfortable with one effect, I’d buy another one and hook it up to the chain. It’s actually pretty fun onstage now. [Watch Clip] VH1: What was it about Youth’s work that attracted you to him? HD: When you go to meet a producer, you have these weird conversations like, “Well, if we made a record, here is what I would do.” The thing I liked about Youth was it was more about catching the vibe or mood of a song, rather than trying to make a five-minute song into a four-and-a-half minute song and concentrating on making the sonic side of the record perfect. VH1: Had it always been your intention to work with other musicians? HD: Yeah. The reason I’m a solo artist is probably because there’s a certain amount of control that I like to have. Being in the studio, and even playing live to an extent, it’s great to bounce ideas off of other people. It’s camaraderie, too. It’s like you’ve got your brothers in there. It’s better that way, I think. VH1: How did you get the title Stop All the World Now? HD: I was under the gun. I procrastinated with the title and it came right down to the day I had to decide. I was taking the easy way out and listening through the songs for a lyric to steal for the album title. “Stop all the world now” [from “I’ll Take You On”] stuck out. In the song, it’s referring to two people in a relationship scenario. Personally, things are changing quickly, and sometimes I wish I could wedge an extra day between here and there just to chill. Then on a macro level, the whole world seems to be losing its mind. It all worked. [Watch Clip] VH1: What’s the inspiration about the single “Perfect Time of Day”? HD: “Perfect Time of Day” is a classic seize-the-moment song. It starts off sounding a little morbid, an “afraid of dying” kind of vibe, but it has an underlying message of “Seize the moment. Life is short!” VH1: What about the video? HD: The video was sorta my idea. This is the first time making videos where I’ve had to be visual about what I do. The first one I did was pretty cinematic. It was all shot in a diner, with a very slow motion kind of feeling. I was learning the ropes on that one. For “Perfect Time of Day” I wanted a whole lot of personality, something with a lot of split screens and a lot of hidden stuff, fast-paced, with a lot of vignettes about perfect times of day, keeping it simple but interesting. VH1: You mentioned other artists who last. Who do you look up to? HD: Anybody that’s been around for ten or twenty years. You get the feeling that they do their own thing. Radiohead, for example, made everybody mad by going electronic, but that’s what they wanted to do. Who knows what might have happened if they made another OK Computer? Maybe they wouldn’t have lasted. Or they would have lasted, but it wouldn’t have been as [exciting]. Variety is the spice of life! |
||||||||
