The Appleseed Cast

Those who missed The Appleseed Cast's performance at Calvin College this summer missed a doctoral-level lesson from one of college rock's strongest bands. The set previewed many of the tracks off the band's new CD, Two Conversations, which was just released in July. The new material, both live and on record, is a distinct departure from both the atmospheric textures of the band's critically acclaimed 2001 release, Low Level Owl Vols. 1 & 2, and the early emo sounds of 1998's The End of the Ring Wars, proving that The Appleseed Cast is a band that's constantly looking to evolve, despite existing in a scene that often clings to its past. And while the quintet still hails from Lawrence, Kan. (a place some call the heartland of indie rock), its sound is ready to spread all over the world as the group plans its first tour of Japan and a return trip to Europe as follow-ups to its current U.S. tour, which will stop in Michigan in October. Recoil spoke with Appleseed Cast vocalist/guitarist Christopher Crisci via phone to reflect on the band's last appearance in Grand Rapids and to get the story behind the new sound of Two Conversations.

Recoil: What did you think of your show at the Calvin College Arts Festival?
Christopher Crisci: I thought the show was good. I was super, super sick. You probably heard my voice since you saw it. My voice just sucked. It was bad. I felt like I was Tom Waits doing Appleseed Cast.

R: Did you enjoy the atmosphere of being able to play outside? Do you get many chances to do that?
CC: Yeah, that was cool. We have a place [like that] in Minneapolis. It's a college that has an outside thing right on this lake and we've played there a couple of times, but normally not.

R: Do you have any idea why your sound seems to appeal to a sort of college-aged audience?
CC: I think our music and our subject matter is probably a little more mature than what most younger kids listen to [and] our music is probably a little louder than what most older people want.

R: What was it like creating Two Conversations?
CC: It was interesting. We kind of approached it differently than we have previous albums. We kind of started with the idea of the story and the lyrics first. It kind of spawned from about a year of like not being able to write anything. We just weren't happy with anything that we wrote and we were just kind of directionless. We always want to change our sound some degree on each album and we were just trying too hard to, you know, it was like anything different would work. That's not true, there has to have some sort of direction to the album because it's like every song is so different from the other ones and there's no continuity and the album is just going to feel thrown together. So we actually sat down one day and I had the idea of this story and we just came up with song titles before we even had songs - working titles, I mean we changed a lot of them, but we had these working titles for like where in the story each song fit in the progression of the whole album and we put that on a board and we just worked on it like that. So we knew what each song was about before we even started it. So in that way, things flew together that way, it was really interesting.

R: Now that the album has been out for a while, are you happy with how the final product of that process turned out?
CC: I'm very happy with most of it. There's one thing I would change if I could which is some of the mixing. There [are] those points on the album when I'm like, 'I wish the guitars were louder there,' or you know. I don't think it's a bad mix, it just think that there's a few spots on the album where if I could change something now I would, as far as the mix goes, but otherwise, I'm really happy with it.

R: How have your fans reacted to the new sound?
CC: The majority of [the response] has been great, but there's always, and it's happened with every album we've put out, there's always the old hardcore fans [who] right now are like, 'This album's not like Low Level Owl.' But there's no point in putting out Volume Three.

R: Considering that, how do you guys approach creating a set list for your live shows?
CC: I guess the great thing about this album, different from [Low Level Owl], is that we can play basically every song off the album, whereas [with] Low Level Owl, a lot of the instrumental interlude things were kind of impromptu studio things. And we do some of that live sometimes - we'll put little noise things between songs. Right now I think we're going to do about half new and half split between the other records.

R: How would you say being a part of the music scene in Lawrence, Kansas (which includes such bands as The Casket Lottery and Mates of State), has influenced you as a band?
CC: Lawrence is very supportive. I guess the main influence we've gotten wouldn't be musically really. We kind of write for ourselves and we're not writing for anyone here. It's just a really supportive scene.

R: Would you say the scene has changed over the years?
CC: You know, I've only lived here for five years. It's probably changing, [and] it has changed a little bit over the last five years, but that's, you know, new bands pop up and other bands disband - that caused a lot of change. But I've talked to a lot of people here about it and like in the early nineties and stuff I guess the scene here was ten times what it is now.

R: A lot of people, including organizations like Pitchfork Media have described your music as being groundbreaking, so I have to ask, where do you see rock music heading in, say, five years?
CC: Wow. Well, for independent rock, I don't know, it's just a smaller version of corporate rock, if you ask me. You know, it's just like it will stay the same until some band comes around and blows us away and everyone is going to want to be like that. Which happens, like that's what Nirvana did. And lately, in like indie music, that's what Godspeed did. There's so many bands now that want to do that.

September 2003