I met with Errol and Christina in an Arcata restaurant on a sunny day in April to talk about their newly released album as well as their views on music. Here are exerpts from that conversation.

 

EG - What's the title of your album?
EP - The new album is called "Like This".
EG - Let's assume no one knows who you are yet. Tell me about the musical style that you're trying to get at.
CF - The way that we play live and the way that we record have become two totally different entities.
EG - Why is that?
CF - When we play live we start out with a lounge-y set because it's been traditional to do that, and plus it's a piece of us that we really enjoy exploring.
EP - And it's good warm up.
CF - … and you can get into your belly with that music and the lounge-y stuff quiets the restaurant or the club, the venue, then we rock! The rock that we do we have not recorded. The only people that know that side of us are the people that have been to our shows.
EG - So are you trying to be different live as opposed to the studio, or is that just what happens?
EP - It's just what happens because it's a different art form. You're dealing with layers; you have time to perfect the notes. Its not like you've got to improvise and it has to be done right away.
EG - When you go into a studio are you concerned with getting as perfect a representation of a song as you possibly can?
CF -Yes, I am!
EP -I don't think about it like that. I want to go in with the band and record a good basic in-time track of the music and the rhythm, then we take a month or two to develop the secondary layers, the vocal harmonies and the secondary musical lines and the extra percussion.
EG - So, you're actually creating songs in the studio?
EP - We don't have all those layers set up before we go into the studio. We usually will go in and record the song the way we would normally play it, but I won't put in the solo right away. I'll play a rhythm track all the way through where the solos would be. Christina will sing her own vocal line, but then she'll work out harmonies to it and I'll work out a second guitar track or my solo. Then we'll go back in and lay them down and see how things spin and some we'll throw out if it doesn't work.
EG - Christina, are you creating melody lines or are you creating lyrics? What's your job?
CF - Errol plays the changes. Errol's, like, 'check this song out'. He's playing the notes that he's written and then I just sing whatever I like on top of that. So, yeah, I do the melody lines.
EP - So Errol is giving you as much freedom as you want ...
CF - Oh, yeah, he doesn't give it to me, that's just the way that it is. I'm not even taking it because taking it implies that it's something that doesn't belong to me. The nice thing about Errol is that when he starts to play something he's putting it on the table and he gives it up like it doesn't belong to him. He brings to the table as ' this is ours'.
EP - Right
CF - Which is what makes it work with us.
EP - It's the same way when she's singing. If I play something that she doesn't like she'll tell me "Let's work on that", or I do the same thing. If I hear a vocal, if she's singing and I hear a line that's bad, I'll think of something and I'll show it to her and maybe she'll use that.
EG - Is this a co-production?
CF - Oh, totally. Even things that he'll suggest that I do with vocals and me suggesting things that he does with his guitars. Errol and I were there for all the mixing and mastering together. Every single song on there is absolutely us united.
CF - We actually recorded our rock and roll stuff for this album and we nixed all of those songs. When we're playing live you get that all-over body high that the music gives you. You know what I'm talking about. The crowd gives it to you, too. But the only way that you can get that when you play your own music back to yourself is if it's just in there and it penetrates you. Well, none of that rock and roll penetrated us. There's something about the methods of recording that has not worked for us with rock and roll.
EG - When you write your lyrics, are you addressing specific people, are you writing out of your imagination, or is it a combination of things? Where does your lyric come from?
CF - A lot of them have the mask of being fiction, but all of that is based on my experiences, so there's always an element of nonfiction to anything that I write. In the first album, most of the stuff that I wrote for that was stuff that I wrote when I was 18 or 19 years old, so the only world that I had experienced so far as far as writing was concerned was my own. Through the freedom, support and encouragement that I've gotten with Errol, I've explored other avenues of writing and gotten into playing with sound and words as much as playing with the story line, which is more effective for the jab right into somebody's heart and pulling out their guts.
EG - Is blues changing?
EP - Blues is changing, but I don't think that anyone is hitting it anywhere near as raw as the old guys did. I love Hendrix and people like Robin Trower. They're bluesy but they aren't playing every progression as a standard blues progression. There's a lot of other stuff out there that I hear that is just as valid that's pulling a lot from blues but it's also pulling a lot from jazz or country. I never want to stop playing blues songs. It's one of my favorite things to do.
EG - How does your creative process begin?
EP - I'll be playing along with an album and I'll be doing my own solo and come to something, like "oooh", and I'll keep playing that one little part that I found, and I'll turn the radio off and keep playing and see if it develops into something. When I was a kid I would go to my room and just sit there and play my guitar for 3 hours. It's always been a kind of escape or meditation for me. So al lot of times when I'd do that because I'd have to think about things, I'd be concentrating on something else and I'd find myself playing something I'd never played before that was totally new.
CF - I think that the creative process comes from heightened states of emotion, whether it be happiness, sadness, anger, I don't care what it is, but when you're happy and you're at that heightened state of happiness (to Errol) what do you do? You and your wife go out for a bike ride, or you go for a walk or you take the dog out.
EP - For me, I don't feel the need to go sit there and dwell on the guitar for three hours when I'm totally content.
EG - When you have an idea and you go into the studio, does the recording ever end up being what you originally envisioned?
EP - It's partially that. I start with an idea and it tells me where it wants to go.
EG - I'm a big believer that there is a perfect part.
EP - There's not just "a" perfect part, I think there's millions of perfect parts. Everybody can play it differently and come up with a number of perfect parts, the thing is that in the studio is that you have to have discipline to tell yourself "OK that's enough", because you could sit there forever.
CF - Believing that there is a perfect part for every instrument is a blessing in that it lets you create effective clean material, however it can be a total curse because you can have poor relationships with your band mates if you are expecting things out of them.
EG - Christina, you're a math person. Do you relate math to music and, if you do, how do you relate it? Do you ever think about that?
CF - Yes, I absolutely think about that because I'm asked about it a lot. Here's the relationship for me with math and music. Stop for a second and rewind to when I was a kid and I took piano lessons. When you're taking piano you've got rhythms, just like in math you've got specific sequences that you need to follow but with music you have to get there on time. So not only do you have a very systematic structure, but also you need to get there to your (piano) keys. That's not the relationship that I experience now with math and music because now I'm a vocalist. Right now the things in life that turn me on is stuff that takes me out of my regular everyday thinking. Math does that and music does that. Both things force me to think differently. They force me to improve my mind and get out of the circle.
EG - I heard one song that really kicked in a groove on the album and then faded out.
EP - That's part of a 15 minute jam that we recorded and there's different points in the jam that, it was too long to keep the whole thing but we just wanted to grab the pieces from here and there and throw them in.
EG - How about the East Indian tune. Whose idea was that?
EP - One of the guitars that I just recently got was built by a guy in town here, Phillip Crump, a beautiful acoustic, and that was the first thing I wrote on it.
EG - Were you using sampled East Indian sounds or were you using the real stuff?
CF - We played all that ourselves.
EP - Brooks (Otis) played pedal steel at the beginning part, but I played everything else; mandolin, guitar, and, toward the end when it got into the Indian style, I played the tamboura track.
EG - Do you have any local Humboldt musician influences?
EP - Guitar wise, the two guys that have blown me away are Andy Widman, he plays with Red Hellion. I've always thought he was a great guitarist. And someone who's no longer in town anymore, Ron Work, who plays with Wasabi. Those are the two guys that really blew me away. Ron's moved, but he's still playing with Wasabi They're awesome. Their bass player is our bass player on the album, Matt Robinson.
EG - Well, let's do some shameless plugs. Where can we get your album?
EP - The best place to get it is www.cdbaby.com/epq
Email is [email protected]
The website is www.humboldtmusic.com/epq