THEY SHOOT HOURSES, DON'T THEY?

The term ‘thinking man’s rock’ — or some variation of it — has
been thrown around a lot in the press over the last few decades in
reference to a host of different musicians to the point that the
term has now either become a sales tool or lost its meaning
altogether. At different points in their careers, groups and artists
as far–flung as The Deftones, Husker Du, Richard Hell, Captain
Beefheart, Bob Dylan and (of course) Thinking Fellers Union Local
#282 have all fed at the ‘thinking man’s’ trough and, while the
term is the thing that binds, the music produced by each of those
names bears little resemblance to any of the others. There is
no common ground and what constitutes ‘thinking man’s’ rock is
a softer a concept than one might initially think. With that said,
conventional wisdom goes out the window and one must search
for definition of the term by more abstract means. All of this is,
obviously, a set up to how They Shoot Horses Don’t They?
guitarist and singer Nut Brown views his own music and how it’s
made. Throughout our conversation, much less concrete ideas
like energy and feelings take the foreground over riffs and
structures. It’s freedom over form — letting go over reigning in —
and it’s not long into a conversation with Brown that it becomes
apparent that he thinks about it all the time. “About ten years
ago, I had a vision of what this band would be like long before it
started and it had more to do with energy than it did with sound,”
says the singer as he attempts to explain the early incarnations of
his band. “It had more to do with feelings and energy than
something so pedantic as ‘We want this to sound like The Beatles
or Captain Beefheart’. It wasn’t a matter of wanting this sound or
that sound. I wanted to create a feel in a room and the right
combination of friends that were into it happened to coalesce.
“The early beginnings of the group happened in an attic —
we weren’t a band — and just came together and we’d trade off
on instruments and make up spontaneous songs on the spot.”
Those beginnings occurred in 2003 in Vancouver and now, a
full length album and an EP in, the band has begun to see the
returns on their work as they recently released their sophomore
effort, Pick Up Sticks and are set to embark upon their longest
tour to date that will run across Canada and loop through the U.S.
Even when presented with the question of what the band was
shooting for when they entered the studio to record the album,
Brown can only say that the hard and fast rules as well as the
conventional wisdom that typically governs each act didn’t apply.
“These songs took a long time to develop and a lot of times we’ll
have the basic idea and we’ll just start playing it,” explains Brown.
“The lyrics won’t be done yet — they’ll be in flux — and they’ll
change and we’ll add other parts. Some of this batch of songs
took over a year to write; obviously, we weren’t working on them
every minute, but they kept changing in that period of time to
ultimately become what they are now. We’re always constantly
evolving the songs.
“The way that we work is, we go into the studio and muck
about for a little while, leave it, come back, listen to it, take things
out, rearrange parts work on some things and take our time
doing it with time to process it,” continues the singer. “It’s not
like we go into the studio and bang out the record in two weeks
or anything like that.
“It might be nice to try doing that sometime, but right now
we work weekends or weeknights here and there.”
All of that said, while Brown and the rest of the band share
the same vision, the singer is quick to say that everyone involved
in the group’s ambitions are modest; they know what they’re
doing might not be for everyone, but those that find They Shoot
Horses Don’t They? will find something truly special. “Day jobs
will never be a thing of the past for They Shoot Horses,” Brown
insists flatly. “We know we’re only going to sell a limited number
of records with what we’re doing, or we’d have to be on tour ten
months out of the year.
“Even if we decided to sell out, the chances of it working
would be so slim it would be staggering,” continues the singer
with a remarkable clarity of thought. “I mean, the higher a band’s
level gets, the more money it needs to spend. For example, if you
make five T–shirts and sell them, it’s plausible that now you’ve
created demand so you’ll have to make ten T–shirts because more
people want them. Then it’s 50 and that costs more money and
the only way to break past that is to sell a shit load of records. If
you look at the groups that do it even from an underground
perspective, they have to make changes and concessions to
accommodate that and I can’t imagine doing that with this
music.” V [BILL ADAMS]