The Rapture Interview Uncut

Getting Ready for The Rapture

Coming of their 2003 album Echoes, which was named Album of the Year by Pitchfork Media, New York quartet The Rapture released Pieces of the People We Love, which continues the catchy indie dance music from their previous release. They their high energy live show to The Metro on Sunday, November 5th. I called saxophone/keyboard/percussionist Gabe Andruzzi when he on the tour bus in Boston.

Gabe Andruzzi: Are you calling from Lincoln Park right now?
DePaulia: Oh, you know Chicago?
GA: Yeah, I used to live in Chicago a long time ago. I had maybe one or two friends that went to DePaul.
D: Where did you live?
GA: I lived a bunch of different places. More or less like around Wicker Park and Humboldt Park, like Ashland and Chicago, and then way down Damen by the United Center and then I lived in Humboldt Park right near the Empty Bottle.
D: You guys were supposed to play Lollapalooza this year, what happened?
GA: Our schedule was really crazy at the time, and Luke had just had a child, I don’t really remember exactly what it was we just kind of became overbooked, and part of it had to do with us in personal.
D: Any chance we will see you there over the next five years?
GA: Probably, I’d say there’s probably a good chance, were you there?
D: Yeah, I was there, it was pretty cool.
GA: Was it fun?
D: Yeah it was great, lots of people there, more than I thought there would be.
GA: That’s cool. I can’t even imagine it, Chicago being overrun by a festival like that. Seems crazy.
D: It’s in Grant Park, and you look around and the city is all there, and there’s a huge swarm of people, and all the bands are playing, it’s surreal.
GA: It is weird, I’ve actually played in the bandshell once in Grant Park.
D: When was that?
GA: It was part of a protest that a convention was there in ’96 and it was like a bunch of weird Chicago bands. I don’t know if you know any of them, but like Flying Luttenbachers and Bobby Khan.
D: What were you like in college?
GA: I only went to college for a year and a half, and I went five years ago, so I was in my mid-twenties.
D: What were you majoring in?
GA: Ethnomusicology and religious studies.
D: What were you studying in religious studies?
GA: I was just beginning, I was studying the basics of how religious studies works, it’s a very broad field, but I was going to do something dealing with ritual music, like ritual religious music.
D: How did you get started with the saxophone?
GA: I think I’ve been listening to a lot of music with saxophones and my roommate at the time had a horn he played all through high school and college and I was like nineteen. I always jumped from instrument to instrument. I played like guitar and bass and drums all while I was a teenager and I picked up this horn and played it a bunch, got into it and decided I wanted to be a horn player.
D: How often do you hear “more cowbell?”
GA: A lot, actually, but not much in the past week. I used to hear it all the time.
D: I imagine it’s real annoying.
GA: Yeah, I guess it’s kind of annoying, it can be, it depends on who’s saying it.
D: So Will Ferrell has had an influence on the cowbell industry?
GA: He has definitely had an influence on the culture of the cowbell and how people think about the cowbell and relate to it. It’s a funny fuckin’ skit. He’s a funny man so you can’t really be mad at him.
D: Does The Rapture have beef with Jessica Simpson over the “Get Myself Into It” video?
GA: I don’t know. Not in particular, we had already set up it up a week before we shot it and we found out Jessica Simpson was doing a roller skating video, and we’re like ‘aw fuck, Jessica Simpson is doing a roller skating video and we’re doing a roller skating video?’ So it kind of made us feel a little dumb. But we found out what she was wearing and the director and Mattie (Safer) wanted to have her in the video and just kind of do something fun with it. And it’s fuckin’ Jessica Simpson. You can’t take her seriously as a musician, she’s just like a big cultural icon. I don’t think we were really trying to take a cheap shot at her or anything, we were just trying to do something goofy. I mean her videos, she’s trying to be funny. Have you seen her video?
D: Yeah.
GA: She’s trying to be clever and self depreciating at the beginning and then the whole video is like a big piece of pop candy. I kind of feel like she’s the polar opposite of what we do and what our roller skating video is like. Whatever, I’m fine having beef with her and I’m fine not having beef with her, it’s not really worth much of my time.
D: So we’re not going to see tabloids about a feud with the Rapture and Jessica Simpson?
GA: Oh no, we could go on tour together, that might be fun. Or do a movie together. I would love to do a movie with Jessica Simpson.
D: What’s the best part and the worst part of touring?
GA: The best part is really playing the shows and being able to play to a different audience every night as well as also kind of seeing places, or seeing cities. The worst part is not actually getting to really see cities, going somewhere and only being there for half a day, and a lot of that day your working. Waking up on the bus is always slightly alienating. The best part is definitely playing the shows, definitely performing, playing music.
D: Do you have a favorite song to play live?
GA: I think right now I really like playing “Get Myself Into It” and “The Sound.” I just really like playing the horn on “Get Myself Into It.” It’s a lot of fun to play it for some reason.
D: Is it hard to go out night after night and give a high energy performance, or does it come naturally with the music?
GA: It can be hard. Because the days when you are usually on tour are pretty low energy and then you get really amped up. So, when you come right out at first, it takes a little time. In the big picture of things being hard, its not that hard. It’s a weird thing to do. It’s a weird thing to do, it’s a very strange thing to do, to get up and perform and have lots of energy and have this rapport with audience for an hour, hour and a half every night. It’s hard to explain. It’s definitely like a weird kind of high. It’s kind of like sports in a way, when your adrenaline really starts pumping, and if it’s going good you get slightly euphoric.
D: In the last three years since the record, how long did you actually have off from The Rapture?
GA: I don’t know, maybe all in all, not seeing anybody, maybe two and a half month.
D: What did you do in those two and a half months?
GA: Probably one or two of them were Christmas vacations. You know, get out of town for a couple days here and there, go to the beach. I sat in front of my computer a lot, making music. There was never a stretch more than a month long. Like when we finished touring off of Echoes we took a month off.
D: Everyone seems to be making a big deal about switching producers, and the three new ones on the album, how much of an effect did it really have on the new album?
GA: I think it had a big effect. Part of a general approach to the new album was that in Echoes half the song were songs that the band had performed a lot and then the other half were songs the band kind of played and started writing and took shape in the studio. Whereas on the new album, we wrote tons and tons of songs before we got into the studio. We didn’t really write anything in the studio, everything had been demoed and played and that was central to the approach of making this record was to really have it be band focused. So starting there was in some ways the bigger thing. The relationships we had with the producers were all people we knew and were all friends, so we just pretty much just went into the studio and started working. With the DFA it was a long process before we started even recording Echoes and it was recorded over a longer period of time because everybody had day jobs. We weren’t in too much of a hurry. It’s hard to really say in that respect to really say what the difference is as far as what did each of the producers bring to the record that made it so different as opposed to when we worked with the DFA, because there’s so many other variables.
D: You seem to be always compared to bands like Gang of Four, is that annoying or do you feel flattered?
GA: For me it’s never really here or there, I’m not all that flattered, I mean they’re good band, but they never really hit me personally.
D: What do you listen to?
GA: I listen to a lot of different stuff. I listen to a lot of like, prog and prog disco, a lot of spacey disco. A lot of electronic music, and like house and electro. I listen to a lot of hip hip. I listen to a lot of early renaissance music. I started getting back into jazzy recently which I haven’t to really listened to in years. I started pulling out my old jazz record. I listen to a lot of west Africa music. Phillip Glass, that’s my dude. We all listen to a lot of different stuff. Luke (Jenner) listens to a lot of metal. He’s been getting into like shredding on the guitar.
D: Do you think it helps to have different musical backgrounds?
GA: Yeah, it does, it helps. It can get in the way as well, I mean we all listen to a lot of different music, we all have different approaches to even to listening to music and thinking of music. I think what we have in common is we’re familiar with a lot of different stuff. We all really love music, I don’t know if we’re record nerds, but we’re music nerds in different ways. It makes it easier, it can mean that we’re all open so we’re all open to each other and each others ideas. But what’s central to the band is our love of rhythm and our love of rhythms that makes people move.
D: What’s Robert Smith like?
GA: I only met him a couple times, he seems like a very nice shy person, who is possibly slightly paranoid.
D: Did you guys do anything special for Halloween?
GA: We played a show at the Bowery Ballroom. We wore skeleton costumes and wore these skull masks that would light up. They had a little battery in it. We did a dance to the “Monster Mash” before we played. I don’t know if it worked or what it looked like, not one person actually commented on it to me. We didn’t really decide on the dance moves until right before the show. We’ve been on tour so we did have time to work things out and kind of one of our qualities is that extra things like that we always kind of do half-assed with a lot of sense of humor. I don’t know how it went over I’m really curious. (Laughs)
D: I’ll be looking for it on YouTube.
GA: Somebody must have shot it on there with their camera or their phone or something.

An exerpt of this appeared in the November 3, 2006 issue of The DePaulia.