Brightest Young Things

BYT:First things first, the question on everyone's lips is: What Happened to The Terminals?
MEREDITH: The Terminals are alive and in top fighting shape. We’re all writing the next full-band record and getting ready to play South by Southwest in March.

BYT: Wonderful. Now that we got that out of the way... lets get back on track with this...Traveling has been such a big part of your life lately...influencing Silver Sonya. Can you give us a brief trajectory of where you went and what you did?
MEREDITH: Basically in 2005 my wife and I left our jobs, put all our stuff in storage and traveled for a year. We backpacked around Italy, Greece, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Dubai, and took a five month trip around the US and Canada in our hatchback.

BYT:....what were some of your favorite places, some of your least favorite, and, of course, why...
MEREDITH: The North America trip was probably our favorite. You just can’t beat the open road and tent, though there are numerous reasons to go back to every country we visited.
I can’t think of any place I wish we hadn’t gone to, though I probably didn’t need to be in Dubai for a week. It felt a lot like Vegas, and I can’t do more than a day or two there.

BYT: So, lets talk about the album, all you are credited with on it are vocals and acoustic guitar. Why make such a sparse, minimalist recording plan? Was it a conscious decision to strip the initial music down to their bare bones? Was it scary to let go of full band support?
MEREDITH: It was strange not to have your Brian or Jon or Elizabeth there. Their input is what makes so many of MB&TT songs work. But I never felt alone because I knew I had Chad and TJ there.

It seems counterintuitive, but making the conscious choice to confine the record to just guitar and voice allowed me to get away from making a “guitar and voice” singer-songwriter record. The lack of resources forced the three of us to come up with different solutions, and sometimes those different solutions yielded remarkable results -- results I never would have thought of if I had a piano or drum kit there. If I had free reign, I know I would have fallen back into easy patterns and I wanted to avoid that.

BYT: You named the album after the recording studio it was made it, and that is where we also took that photo of you for this feature...how much do you think the album depended on the studio?
CHAD: Silver Sonya is a lovely studio with some nice equipment, but I don't think that matters so much. It's people. People make a studio work or not work. I think the main thing that is on view with this record is personal chemistry. We love Meredith. I think it shows. We look forward to every session; he just has a really great presence. He's talented, modest, sharp, calm, funny. And he has a terrifically androgynous name. What's not to like? And, y'know, he pays us. Which is nice.
Any job where you get paid to make records with people like Meredith is a fucking good job. I have a fucking good job.

MEREDITH: The final outcome of this record is absolutely a product of Chad and TJ. They had just as much input on this record as I did, so it didn’t seem right for me to slap my name on the front while they are relegated to fine print alongside the copyright info. Just by the nature of the album, their artistic stamp was going to be all over the place. From the outset I wanted to acknowledge that.

BYT:People compared this record to Elliott Smith, Jeremy Enigk etc... who can you consciously say were the influences here?
MEREDITH: Well, I’m a big fan of Jeremy Enigk’s first solo record, Return of the Frog Queen, and practically everything Elliott Smith did, so those are some obvious influences.

BYT: Always good to know people get their references right. Do you think it would have been different had it been recorded somewhere else? And how?
CHAD: Meredith could have made this record at Abbey Road, but then what would he have called it?
MEREDITH: “Revolver.”
CHAD: I think the main trait that distinguishes SSonya from other studios --- and it was key to making this record --- is a general irreverence. We don't have an allegiance to "hi-fi" or "lo-fi." We don't have a stance. We use what works. We're pretty confident, generally.
MEREDITH: It would have sounded very different if I had gone somewhere else, but I also think this record had so much day-to-day experimentation that it would have sounded different if we had started a week later, or if we hadn’t ordered Thai food one night, or if I wasn’t fighting a cold for a few days, or if a butterfly flapped it’s wings in the Amazon…

BYT: Obviously Chad and TJ act as almost auxilliary band members on the project...have you all worked together before? What was the work dynamic?
MEREDITH: We worked together on a full-band EP about two years ago. I loved how it turned out and knew I wanted to work with them again. Thankfully they return my calls.
CHAD: There is a tag-team aspect to the way we work with Meredith. TJ and I are rarely in the same room together at the same time. It's usually Meredith with only one of us. We have different strengths and interests, although we cross over to each other's presumed roles with regularity.

BYT: Describe a typical day of working on "Silver Sonya"
CHAD: On this record, my chief role was transfiguration; contextualizing what TJ and Meredith had recorded. It was often my job to contort the natural sound sources into unusual and sometimes "synthetic" textures. Can I tell you how much fun this is? I got to be the kaleidoscope.
MEREDITH: I swear we were trying out so much that there was never a typical day. We would record and mix almost at whim, depending on what struck us that day. One day we might spend hours recording guitar and vocals and little mixing, then the next day we would spend most of the time mixing and then, as an afterthought, beat the guitar with a mallet.

BYT:Now that you look back on the recording process, is there something you wish you had done different? How close is the finished product to what you set out to make?
MEREDITH: I never knew what the finished product was supposed to look like, so I had no real notion of what the final product “should be.” I knew I wanted to stay rigid in the concept in order to stretch myself, and I think that was accomplished.
CHAD: I'm not much for regret. As an artist, you have to be careful of what I call George Lucas Disease. Y'know, he makes "Star Wars," this classic, charming movie, beloved the world over... but all he can think is "I wish there were more alien creatures in that bar scene." So he goes back 25 years later to tinker with the original movie and, y'know, inject some CGI into his 1977 film. And when you see the changes, all you can do is sigh and think "Well, I hope George is happy now..."

There's a cliche about art: great works aren't finished, they're abandoned. I have found it very often to be true. Records are a document of the time in which you made them. At some point, you just throw up your hands and say "That's it, we're done."

You may have lingering criticisms, but you take those misgivings and apply them as wisdom for the next project.

BYT: Do you feel the album reads better as a whole (since it is somewhat of a concept process) or do you look at it as a series of singles? (especially in this day an age when the idea of an album as a rounded, collective piece of work is almost dying out, people just purchasing individual songs etc...)
CHAD: We're in an age now when the word "album" feels antique. What the hell is an "album" anyway? People put their iPods on "shuffle" to accompany the act of dishwashing.
If any one song from this album came up on your "suffle," I think it would stand on its own and cast a spell. That being said, this is an Album album in the old-school, sit-down-and-pay-attention-to-it sense.

BYT:Lots of great local records were produced at Silver Sonya over the years....who are some of your favorite local acts, people you make a point of going out to support?
CHAD: We work with a lot of great artists here, some famous and some less famous. Some, like Meredith, in transition. I don't generally have favorites. Or maybe I do, but they change from hour to hour. I have a special, enduring place in my heart for the artists who work in areas of subtlety and understatement. It takes bravery to have a sense of restraint and delicacy; the world rarely rewards you for these traits. (Witness Nick Drake, etc.)
The band I'm thinking of now is a DC band called Roofwalkers. They don't traffic in rock'n'roll histrionics. You have to "find" their music, but if you do, there's a whole world there.
MEREDITH: Roofwalkers, Beauty Pill, These United States, Le Loup, Georgie James… I think there is a ton of exciting and disparate music coming out of this city.

BYT: True, its been a great year for DC music, we feel...speaking of which...We're doing all these year-end wrap ups on BYT and so we're asking all of our December interviewees....what are some of your favorite songs/albums/show of 07? Things our readers may have missed but really shouldn't have?
MEREDITH: Oh crap. This is where everyone finds out how uncool I am. The truth is I haven’t listened to a lot of new records this year. I found myself dipping back into a lot of old CDs I had dismissed for whatever reason (Paul Simon, Eels, Final Fantasy, Juana Molina, etc.) and a good number of podcasts. That said, I love the Panda Bear and Battles records.
CHAD: I've never met these people, but there's a small, independent label called Samadhisound. The music tends towards postmodern texturalism and so far, everything that they have released has been uniformly excellent. Very high art. I highly recommend checking that label out. No bad records yet.

BYT:Aside from the CD release on the 27th what is next for Meredith Bragg?
MEREDITH: Well, it looks like the whole band is going on tour in March and we are in the middle of writing the next record.

BYT: And finally, we are going to stream 4 songs from the album (of your choice) in a little listening party mode.
So, pick the 4 songs and tell us why you picked them (sort of liner note style) in a few sentences each.

MEREDITH: Here goes:

My Absent Will: This is the song that most people point to as their favorite, so it seems like a natural choice.

March: I love the Steve Reich-like note loops that Chad came up with here. I really think it makes the song and it’s a good example of what a skilled producer can craft from humble materials.

Plinian: The world needs more songs about volcanoes.

Twin Arrows: On an abandoned section of Route 66 in Arizona there is an old boarded up travel-mart with two giant novelty arrows sticking from the ground. The place had been neglected for years and is quickly being reclaimed by the desert. I doubt those “arrows" will be standing in 10 years.