About The Bravery (by Sam Endicott, lead vocals):
I grew up in DC and my life began with punk rock. I was all about the "harDCore" scene. Fugazi was my favorite band; I've seen them over 100 times. John is from Santa Barbara. He surfs. He grew up on SoCal punk rock and 60's reggae. He has an unsettlingly encyclopedic knowledge of early Jamaican reggae-Desmond Decker, The Wailers, The Skatalites, Baba Brooks, all of it. John and I met at art school in upstate NY. We spent years just fucking around on whatever instruments we could find. We played everything from jazz to country to metal to rockabilly. We just loved being around music.
In the early 00's we moved to Chinatown, NYC. We started going out to the underground dance clubs, and it changed our lives. Eighties night at Don Hill's in the West Village - it revolved around that. There was this new sound coming out of NY - very synthetic music made in a very organic way. It was computer sounds, but made at home in the basement. It reminded me of the DIY ethos I grew up on, but with these tremendous new sounds. The Electroclash stuff, Peaches, The Rapture, the DFA, The Faint! We thought, what if we took these new sounds and combined it with a real live rock n roll band? Something where the sounds are taken from the electronic world, but you still feel like you're listening to humans with instruments playing it. That was the idea.
I started writing songs in my apartment above a bar called Magnetic Fields. I had never sung a note or really written a song before, but there was something about this sound that moved me. They would start as more straight-forward guitar songs, and then John and I would "remix" them; And then that "remix" would be the final song. I didn't know what to write songs about, so I just wrote about the thoughts in my head. It turns out I seem to be looking for something. It became very spiritual for me, a way of expressing my desire to transcend, to find something more. Face my fears, my demons, stand up to the negativity in my life, and find something greater. So we named the band The Bravery; we thought it was fitting. And it had a nice ring to it.
Michael and Mike were old friends, also from the DC area, who moved to NYC around the same time as John and I. Michael is half-anglophile, half jazz cat. He listens to The Kinks and Oasis, and learns Django Reinhardt solos note for note. Mike is all about rockabilly. He listens to Hank Williams III and Stray Cats all day. We were all looking for a band, and eventually we ran into each other. They liked the sound John and I were working on; strangely it seemed a very natural fit. Anthony moved to NYC right around then too. He had lived in Boston, studying percussion at Berklee College of Music. I had heard about him through a friend of mine who used to bartend with him.
We started playing shows around NY. There would be 15 people there; somebody's brother, somebody's girlfriend, somebody's roommate. It was fucking awesome. We spent all night every night out at the clubs, listening to what was going on. We didn't see the daylight for a really, really long time. We burned CDs of our album and would hang outside the records stores giving them out to people. We taped up fliers on every inch of the Lower East Side.
The crowds got bigger. We'd be at a bar and suddenly our CD would come on. We did a residency at a small club called Arlene's Grocery - every Thursday night for a month. Our shows started selling out. People started giving us their cards. And then, suddenly, Zane Lowe at Radio One in England downloaded our song off Myspace and started playing it on the air. We thought. 'what the fuck?'
So we figured, England is where it's at, man. We flew to London, rented a flat for a month, and did a residency at the Metro. Every Thursday night for a month. They all sold out. People started taking us to dinner. People started flying us places to play for people. In late 2004 we signed a record deals with Island/Def Jam in the states and Polydor in the UK.
And then a bunch of stuff happened.
[The Sun and The Moon] was conceived as a two-album set; the same 11 songs, but recorded in two completely different ways. One side would be more positive, more organic than anything we'd ever done before. The other side, the most synthetic, raw, amateurish thing we'd ever done. The sunny sun side, and the dark moon side.
Then things got really confusing. Polydor refused to release a two-album set, on the grounds that it was too unusual. This was not the first time we had disagreed with them, and it was getting to the point of being unbearable. Suddenly, no label was willing to pay for the second half of our album. So we thought, fuck it, we'll just record it ourselves again. After completing the Sun side, we began touring again, and simultaneously recording the Moon side as we traveled. We'd do it in the back of a bus, in a hotel room, on a plane, anywhere. When we finished the Moon side of the album, Island/Def Jam was surprised and excited and agreed to release it. But we just couldn't find agreement with Polydor anymore.
And then a whole bunch of stuff happened.
We finished touring last summer and immediately returned to the world of writing and recording. There was a new sense of vigor and excitement. We'd never felt more excited to be making music. The songs were darker, stranger. I have often written about rage and violence, but I never put these things into the music before, like it was something I preferred to pretend didn't exist. But, more and more it was bubbling to the surface.
There is a real sense of renewed energy, of creativity flowing like never before. So we named the album Stir the Blood, a line from the song "Jack-O'-Lantern Man;" it's an expression which means to awake passions, get the blood moving. Also, the name reflects the dark, even violent undercurrent to many of the songs. |
