Interview by Shawn Breen and Faithdesired
Live photos by Faithdesired

I don’t really remember now how I came across Thrushes. I think it may have been on Myspace. I do remember it was the song “Heartbeats” that drew me in originally.

With a Ronnettes beat, Jesus And Mary Chain like guitars, ethereal, whispy vocals I could tell it was just what I was looking for. Weeks after discovering their music I saw they were opening for The Raveonettes at The Ottobar. I knew I had to see this band and this show. Of course The Raveonettes were great that night but for me the highlight that evening was Thrushes, whose minimal lighting set the mood for the show that night. They did not disappoint. Layers of guitar washed over and over me and this Saturday afternoon they are looking to do it all over again only to a larger audience at Artscape. Sure the mood won’t be the same. It will be outdoors this time during the daylight but I’m telling you if you close your eyes and let the waves of noise sweep you away, I guarantee they will.

So we sat down with Casey and Rachel to catch up.

BYT - Could you tell me a little about how and when Thrushes formed?
CASEY - Thrushes started in Summer of 2005. Just Rachel and I fooling around. I’ve been in bands before.

BYT - What bands? I was curious.
CASEY - When I was in college I was in a couple of Baltimore bands. The best one I think was called Propeller Song, this was probably ‘98-’99. I hadn’t really done too much since then just kinda played on my own, whatever, trying to find a band. I’d been trying to convince Rachel to play forever. So I finally convinced her to give it a shot. Quickly after that we found Anna (Anna Connor, Vox/Guitar), we kinda knew her on and off, forever. So we found Anna, then our original drummer Matt, we’ve known him for years and years. Again, we weren’t really in touch with him and just randomly met him again for the first time in 3 or 4 years. Then Matt moved away to Portland about 8 or 9 months ago. So we got a new drummer Ryan (Ryan Sterner) who came on and he’s been with us about 8 or 9 months.

BYT - Have any of the other members of Thrushes been in any other bands?
CASEY - Matt had been in bands before, he was in a band called Emma, which was probably right around the same time, mid to late nineties. He was also in a band called Lux Eterna. So he had been in some other bands before. Anna had been in some bands back when she was in high school, nothing too, too serious. I think she was in Johnny Five which was a girl punk rock band.

BYT - You are all originally from the area?
CASEY - Rachel, Anna and Ryan are. I’m originally from New Jersey. So I came down here for college in ‘95 and ended up staying.

BYT - Where did you go?
CASEY - Towson.

BYT - That’s where I went. (Laughs)
CASEY - I graduated with a degree in Philosophy from Towson in ‘95. Yea it was a fun place, it was definitely a good scene to be a part of, especially back then. I don’t know if you remember the all ages place on Bel Air Rd., The Small Intestine? We kinda all knew each other from back then and it was a really good scene to be involved in. We would just kinda go there and hang out every night, see bands and stuff. The bands I was in, it really gave us an opportunity, we were friends with Ben who ran the club and being right out of high school and in college we opened for some really great bands like Joan Of Arc, Rainer Maria, Kerosene 454 and a bunch of cool Dischord bands. It was a really neat place, no other club in Baltimore would let you do that kind of stuff. He was always really about local bands even if the bills were really whacked out, it was about putting together local bands which was good, it was a lot of fun.

BYT - Do you remember Memory Lane?
CASEY - Yep. That was right when I first moved down here. I think I was down here for the last year. We used to go down there all the time and see The Great Unraveling. There were a lot of good shows there. Then when it closed down, that was when The Small Intestine opened up. The Ottobar was where The Talking Head was but that hadn’t opened yet when The Small Intestine was there. That was a cool place to see bands.

BYT - One of the most enjoyable things for me about your bands sound is the use of the trademark Phil Spector “Wall Of Sound” and I read that the whole premise of Thrushes is to make “beautiful rock music”. It’s really noisy but at the same time it’s really beautiful. I saw a band from D.C., Lorelei over the winter and they did some really noisy stuff and it almost had me in tears. It was just really overwhelming, all the noise with the shoegaze bands…
CAS - We kinda came to that in a roundabout way. No one in this band really listened to shoegaze that much. I mean I have, I grew up in the nineties so “Loveless” was a good record and all of the early Sonic Youth stuff but none of us were really deep into the shoegaze sound. It was just after playing on my own for a while I had just picked up a lot of effects, especially delays and loops and things like that just to make it interesting when I was jamming by myself, because you can get different layers going without 3 or 4 guitars. So bringing that into the band, it’s just what we sound like. We didn’t have any intention of being a My Bloody Valentine. With this band I think, what I really wanted to go after sound wise, there is a Siouxsie And The Banshees song called “Dazzle” and that was the template for what I wanted Thrushes to be. Kind of dark, loud, have a big sound but also an emotional connection and bringing in a lot of The Ronnettes, The Crystals and Phil Spector kinda stuff.

BYT - So it was a little bit of an influence for you?
CASEY - Oh yeah, you can’t help growing up in the time we did in the eighties and nineties and it not. That’s just the stuff we liked to listen to. We liked to listen to Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr and Sebadoh and it is what it is.

BYT - It’s funny because we were listening to some of your stuff today and you can hear some of that sound.
CASEY - That was the thing. This band really started off as we just really wanted to play music, just stuff we wanted to hear and if people liked it, people liked it and if they didn’t like it, whatever. That’s always been our philosophy. We’re not trying to re-write the book or anything. This is just music that, if we heard it, we would like to listen to it and that’s kinda what we do.

BYT - I think it’s kinda interesting I found myself going through the influences that you had listed online on Myspace and I was going down the list checking them off and by the time I got done I was like, that’s almost every one of MY influences. I can totally relate and so I wonder if a lot of your fans feel the same way? If there’s a sense of sharing, like they kind of belong?
RACHEL - Nostalgia.
CASEY - I think so, I think it depends. We get like hardcore shoegaze fans that like what we do. Me personally, I grew up liking the Dischord/D.C. sound. There’s definitely the noise part of it a little bit and some of the rythyms but that’s definitely not shoegaze music. So we get that and especially listening to more of the classic stuff from the sixties, which I think is definitely unique about our band, we have our own sound and style. We do some different things within that, some songs are more shoegaze sounding, some are more noise, bugglebum pop sounding stuff and we have some stuff that sounds kinda Sonic Youth-y. They all sound like Thrushes which I think is cool.

BYT - Sometimes your influences creep into your music even if it is unintentional. Today I was listening to “Roy” and I could hear “The Funeral Party” by The Cure and I could also hear “Twin Peaks” in there…
CASEY - I wrote that way before this band. That was definitely in the David Lynch mold. It was definitely an overt reference to that kind of sound which really, honestly is more of a big influence, more then any other single thing. Those early David Lynch soundtracks, the Angelo Badalamenti stuff. I think it’s just really beautiful and sweeping.

BYT - That’s exactly the way it is, it’s just that sweeping sound.
CASEY - It has creepy noire undertones to it, a lot of layers but done really, really simple.
RACHEL: - That’s where we got into building suspense with songs and playing with that idea. Build suspense and then release. We got into that after we were playing with that song.
CASEY - Definitely cinematic kinds of things which is definitely something we are interested in doing. Especially lyrically. The lyrics aren’t overly huge. We don’t have a lot of lyrics. Most of the lyrics tend to be small vignette type things where you could visualize some sort of cinematic scene going on. We wanted to encapsulate mood and the cinematic scale of stuff into 3 minute songs. Especially David Lynch as a director, everything in that scene, immerses you in that scene. The music, the visuals, the dialogue, everything is together. He does a really good job of that and that’s where I wanted to be.

BYT - That’s a really cool movement with the music. We were talking about Mogwai and 65daysofstatic and about how sometimes the music is so much more important then anything else. You don’t really need the words. The words come through the music and the music speaks for it’s self.
CASEY - The music for us definitely comes first, the lyrics come after the music is set, it’s trying to find the lyrics for that musical piece.
RACHEL - Anna will usually write it, right in the room. We’ll play and we’ll just keep jamming around while she sits there and writes. She doesn’t go home and think about it, it’s just right there.
CASEY - The idea was the vocals being another instrument.

BYT - So Anna writes all of the vocals?
CASEY - Anna writes all of the vocals. I did “Roy” but there’s only like 3 lines to that. (Everyone laughs) We had talked about the sharing of writing stuff but she’s singing it all and it’s weird writing lyrics for someone else to sing, especially from the different gender perspective.

BYT - Do you know if and when the song “Trees” will be released commercially? Will that be available at some point? I know there is a video for it.
CASEY - That was one of the first songs we wrote after we were finished this last record. We kinda decompressed and re-focused and we had some fits and starts but that was pretty much the first real song we wrote after that. It will definitely be on the next record. Hopefully we are planning to go into the studio in the fall, by September or October, if we do that, it will probably be a spring release for that. there is a demo floating around that we recorded real quick which is what the video is. It’s just single tracks, there’s not a lot to it.

BYT - So you have been writing a lot lately or are you waiting?
CASEY - No we’re pretty much done writing for the next record. I think we probably need to do 2 or 3 more songs and then tighten some things up. Our live set right now is about 80% new material that’s not on the record. We have a tendency once we finish a song to just add it into the live set, just to get feedback on it and see how it sounds live.
RACHEL - We’ve probably cut out a couple of new songs we’ve written since the last record too. We’ve played them a couple of times and said, “Eh, that’s not so much us”.
CASEY - I think we’re pretty happy with the song list we have going into the next record. This last record, we went in to record a 4 or 5 song EP and it went really quickly. The recording process was just a day, day and a half setting everything up, making sure the drums sounded good, the guitars were just right…

BYT - Monotonous?
CASEY - Yep, by the time we got done with all of that, we had tracked like 5 songs in 3 or 4 hours. 2 or 3 takes and we were just like, if we have to go through all of this set-up again, we might as well just lay everything that we have down and we’ll see how it is and if we have a full length we have a full length and if not we have an EP.

BYT - So it didn’t start out as a full length, it started out as an EP?
CASEY - It started out as an EP and it was done in 2 1/2 days.

BYT - Where did you record at?
CASEY - Lord Baltimore Studios which is in Baltimore.

BYT - Who produced it?
CASEY - I produced with David Andler and Brooks Harland engineered and mixed on it. Brooks is really great, hopefully we will get to work with him on the next record. So we’re psyched about that.

BYT - Did you employ analog or digital recording?
CASEY - We were one of the first bands in the studio, the studio was pretty much brand new and had just been finished when we were there. They had tape machines and everything else and the idea was to go in and record to tape. When we got in the tape machine was down, and we were just like, whatever, we’ll record into Pro Tools digitally and either mix down or master down to tape. It was all digital, honestly, from the mixing end it was a lot easier. If I had a choice what we’d probably end up doing is record digitally again and then mixing down or mastering down to tape just to get some of that warmth of tape on there. Then again, with a band like us with the dynamics that we have everything is in the red anyway so I don’t know if tapes going to be better or worse for our sound anyway.
RACHEL - Brooks kinda knew where we were coming from so he was able to get it right, with everything that he was doing.
CASEY - We were lucky, everything just came out. It came out good.

BYT - The pictures I saw of the studio looked like a big open brick warehouse.
RACHEL - Basement? (Laughs)

BYT - Haha… I guess I should ask - Was there a lot of echo?
CASEY - It depends, we tracked live, everything was recorded live in the same room. Which is important for us. The room sound was really, really good and Brooks did a really good job. I think one of the reasons we are able to work so quickly in the studio is the sound is real soft around the edges and there are a lot of mistakes that you can make that will never get picked up, that just get covered over by the sonic massive-ity of what’s going on. It’s not like we are a math rock band where every note has to be right on. The sound covers a lot.

BYT - Do you have any aspirations of playing outside of the East Coast, expanding a little, maybe doing a tour or semi-tour of the U.S. at some point? Maybe after the next record?
CASEY - We’d love to, we went out and did a little Midwest tour last Summer, which was a lot of fun. If we can do it, we can do it. The issues are…

BYT - Gas prices? (Everyone Laughs)
CASEY - Gas prices, we all have jobs and everything else. When we can work it in, we can work it in. We’re pretty happy doing what we are doing. We never thought we would be in this position at all. I said to myself as we were recording this record, if I had 20 boxes of CD’s, if I had half the CD’s in my basement in 20 years I’d consider that a success. Just to be able to give away some of them. People seem to really like it and it’s been good. For us, we just like playing music and that’s it. We don’t hold on to any kind of aspirations that we’re going to be some huge band. We’re all mid to late 20’s, early 30’s. We’re not 18 years old anymore, we’re not sleeping on floors and doing that kind of stuff.

BYT - It’s something about having the passion and really enjoying what you do, just taking it every day. Like you said, you can play, make people happy, people come to hear you, people like it and you can put out records and people like it. Then you are getting satisfaction.
CASEY - A good template for us has always been like a lot of the bands on Touch & Go. they put out a good record every 3 or 4 years, they tour once every couple of years. they do their own thing and they are able to put out records, have a family, work, do what they have to do. Label wise, that would be ideal for us. that would be something we would be looking for. Someone to let us go out and do what we do and not have the pressure. Not have to play 200 dates which honestly in this day and age with the amount of publicity on the internet and blogs everything is hyper accelerated and it’s like a new band every day. Every minute of every day. If your not constantly out there, it’s hard. Ideally we would like to put out a record every couple of years and be able to play good shows. For us, I think a realistic goal is to be a really good Baltimore band. I don’t think there’s any shame in that.

BYT - There are quite a few that I’ve seen over the years, Lungfish, Candy Machine, outside of Baltimore they weren’t really appreciated as much but they were really exceptional.
CASEY - To be able to say, we are from Baltimore, this is what we do. We’re not going to be Cold Play. When national touring bands come through, we’ve been lucky enough to get some pretty good shows. Hopefully that keeps up.
RACHEL - That’s like the best part about Baltimore, it’s just big enough that the bands come around but just small enough that we can get on the bill.
CASEY - If we were in New York, forget about it. For us, playing out of town, it’s been really great. We play New York pretty frequently and for whatever reason bands in New York have a hard time getting shows in New York. Just because of the way everything is, and you know, we get good shows all the time. It’s good being from Baltimore and we wouldn’t have a lot of these opportunities living in a lot of these other places. we can drive up to Philly for the night, we can go down to D.C.. It’s definitely a cool place to be right now which is good. I think with all of the press lately, it’s a double edged sword but it’s been good for us.

BYT - Rolling Stone had just said something about Baltimore being one of the best music scenes in the country.
CASEY - We kinda get thrown into that for whatever reason. we are kinda like an after mention of the whole Wham City thing. I mean we are not involved in that at all, we don’t know any of those people but you know… whatever.

BYT - We saw you open for The Raveonettes at The Ottobar. Is it a little weird opening for a band like that?
RACHEL - It was the best night, EVER!
CASEY - The Raveonettes have always been one of our favorite bands and we have seen them a bunch and this was kinda like a dream show for us.

BYT - I didn’t know Sharin was pregnant when they played that show, did you know that?
RACHEL - No we didn’t know either.

BYT - Nobody knew. I heard an interview they did shortly after where they were talking about she wasn’t going to play the rest of the tour, her sister was, did you hear that?
CASEY - Yea, it came out right after our show.
RACHEL - We’ve loved them for like years and then when Todd sent the email to Casey I was just like, “Oh my God”! We found out in the fall and we had to wait until March. It was the longest few months.

BYT - So you guys are excited about this October 2nd gig?
CASEY - Yes.

BYT - When are you allowed to announce it?
CASEY - Hopefully next week.

BYT - So it hasn’t been announced yet?
CASEY - It has not been announced yet. It’s a new band from Glasgow and it’s pretty good, pretty good stuff. So we’re really, really super excited. It’s in the vein of The Raveonettes style, so we’re pretty psyched about that.

BYT - I was going to ask if it was My Bloody Valentine but I doubt they would play Baltimore. What if they asked you? (Everyone laughs)
CASEY - I’d have to think about it for a couple of minutes…

BYT - Then say yes… I’ll get back to you…
CASEY - Yea I mean, obviously we would do that.

BYT - Alright, well you have a couple shows coming up, Artscape this weekend, Hampdenfest in September and then your super secret show in October. So hopefully people will get out and see some of those shows. you are playing Saturday correct?
CASEY - Saturday afternoon. (3pm to be exact) We’re going to do Hampdenfest and then that October show and then that’s probably going to be it for a while.

BYT - Then some recording?
CASEY - Yea, it will probably be out in Spring.
RACHEL - Save our dollars.
CASEY - Yea, that’s the other part of it saving up for the studio and having to put out a record. This is self released. Birdnote Records is our label so we pay for everything.
RACHEL - (Laughing) So that means it’s us.
CASEY - If there’s a label out there that wants to pick it up, that’s depending on how quick we get the recording done, we may shop it around. Who knows? Somebody may pick it up somebody may not. It really depends. I’m sure there are labels out there that would put it out, it would just be finding the right one for us, like I said, we are not playing 200 shows a year. We have house payments and car payments, health insurance.
RACHEL - Health insurance that we like! (Laughs)

BYT - It’s kind of interesting to meet people that have are in between the responsibility where you have car payments, house payments, kids but then you also have the things you really truly love and enjoy and you have to find a balance.
CASEY - It’s definitely tough and as we get older, have kids and do all of that stuff I think the band is going to be not less and less important but definitely less and less frequent. So, one day at a time. We’ve gotten most of the next record written, so hopefully that will be out and people will dig it and we’ll go from there. The first record actually came out yesterday on vinyl (in a pressing of 500). We are excited about that. That’s actually one of the goals of mine to put it out on vinyl, just to have it and that’s it, play some good shows. We are definitely a live band first and foremost so that’s what we do, that’s what we like doing.

BYT - Great, Thank you.

Thrushes play this Saturday at Artscape on the Metro Gallery stage at 3pm sharp. Also playing this weekend are Daniel Higgs (ex-Lungfish/Pupils), Teeth Mountain, The Oranges Band, Joan Jett And The Blackhearts, Juiceboxxx, Dave Nada, Pablo Fiasco, Mike Doughty (ex-Soul Coughing), DIPLO, Payola Reserve, Caleb Stine & The Brakemen, Ecstatic Sunshine, The Wailers and more! Unlike the other ‘Scape this weekend, this one is free, so if your not too hipster to be seen at the other, other ‘Scape, check em’ out.

Full Artscape schedule here:http://www.artscape.org/

More Thrushes here: http://www.thrushesrule.com/

• Feeling friendly?: http://www.myspace.com/thrushes

• You can purchase Sun Come Undone, Thrushes’ first full length here.

• And the Heartbeats Remix CD here

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