I've already written about my fondness for local band El Le Faunt and His Traveling Circus. The group is a frequent (welcome) feature on the local live music scene, but this time they'll be celebrating a new record (despite the snow closing down the original show last Sunday).
Led by Thomas Maddux's growling, Tom Wait-inspired vocals, the Traveling Circus spins creepy tales of circus geeks, a man born with crocodile skin & a passion for music, and the heartbreak of being in love with a Russian ballerina. The new album, Damned, is appropriately named, given that every single song is about murder. Definitely don't bring the kids to this show, but do come prepared to a wonderfully dark show - full of some of the happiest musicians you'll ever see on stage.
Door are at 8pm, with a $5 cover. And - if you want to be able to sing along - the new CD is available now through Bandcamp.
Last week, I joined El Le Faunt and the whole Circus during on of their practice sessions - they took a moment (okay, a few) to chat with me about their music, books, and playing during a flood. And as a heads up - if anything reads like it might be said in jest, it probably is. These guys might sing about murder, but that doesn't mean they don't know how to have a good time.
This is only the first half of the interview - come back for the second half on Monday, along with a show review!
El Le Faunt is:
Thomas Maddux - Banjo, Chord Organ, Mandolin, Tenor Guitar, Ukulele, Vocals
The Traveling Circus Band is:
Cody D. Fitzpatrick I - Percussion
Thomas "TR" Reinert - Bass
Aleko Loughrey - Guitar
Jonah the Destroyer - Accordion, Saw
Turkeyes Laffity - Vocals
Tyler Nordmark - Brass
Michelle: I’ll start with the basics because you guys are – well, you’re not new on the scene, but there aren’t that many interviews with you guys, so I can really reinvent the wheel. How long have you guys been playing together?
Thomas: We’ve been playing together since March of 2010. We did our first show on May 18th at the 501 Club.
Michelle: How did you guys all come together?
Jonah: We all met through Thomas.
Thomas: Yeah, they all met through me. Through work, usually.
Aleko: I met him through a mutual friend – the artist for almost pretty much everything we do.
Thomas: Yeah – Whitney A. Streeter.
TR: I was the only one that wasn’t a musician.
Michelle: You weren’t a musician?
Thomas: We made him a musician for this.
Michelle: How did that go?
TR: You be the judge.
Michelle: How long did it take you to become a musician?
Aleko: I don’t know if you can really call him a musician yet…
Cody: Yeah, is he yet?
TR: Well, I bought a bass because I’d always wanted to learn how to play bass and then I started taking lessons at his [Thomas’] work. We’d goof around, I’d go over to his place and we’d play Bush songs and the Decemberists and things like that. At that exact time, he started El Le Faunt and was like, “You should be in it!”
Michelle: And just for a plug’s sake, the store is Merry-Go-Round?
Thomas: Music-Go-Round. The Music-Go-Round in Saint Paul.
Jonah: Ford Parkway.
Michelle: Anything else?
Aleko: We started practicing at his house at about nine o’clock in the morning. I’d never practiced that early. I’d never been in a band that said, “Hey, guess what? We’re going to practice.” “Great. When are we doing it?” “Monday, 9am.” I was like, wait – this is not going to be a rock band because rock bands do not practice in the morning.
Thomas: Or on Mondays.
Jonah: Jonah did not show up.
Thomas: Yeah, Jonah did not show up those days. When there was a photo shoot, he was there.
Michelle: So, what do you define your music as? Rock…? Not really?
Thomas: I wouldn’t…
Aleko: That’s a profanity. You cannot use the work rock in the context of this band. I’ve gotten my a** kicked a number of times for using that word.
Cody: Waltz and roll.
Thomas: I like to call it dark Americana, but whatever.
Michelle: What’s the idea behind El Le Faunt and His Traveling Circus? Where did that come from?
Thomas: One of my friends got drunk and gave us all animal names. He gave me elephant…because I was big and gentle?
TR: No, you were loud.
Thomas: And the Traveling Circus is because I love the circus. And they are very much a circus.
Tyler: What’s that supposed to mean?
***Jonah provides circus music***
Thomas: Get drunk with us at any show and find out.
Michelle: What kind of bands do you guys listen to?
Aleko: A very eclectic mix. We listen to a lot of different genres.
Cody: I’m Cody [drums]. I listen to Graham Parsons and Iron Maiden.
Turkeyes: I’m Turkey [vocals] and I listen to just about everything that’s not done horribly.
Aleko: I’m Aleko [guitar] and I listen to everything from Burt Bacharach to NOFX to Barbra Streisand to Dolly Parton…lots of punk rock.
Cody: NOFX?
Thomas: That was Cody, wearing an Alice Cooper t-shirt.
Jonah: And he is currently single [referring to Aleko].
Aleko: Says who? How do you know?
Jonah: I listen to just things that are not horribly definable like They Might Be Giants and earlier jazz. The other band I’m in, Cantankerous Folk – have to plug that – is very much like a ragtime, gypsy kind of thing.
Tyler: I’m Tyler Nordmark [brass], I play trumpet. I’d say my sound is someplace on the spectrum between Miles Davis and Gustav Holst. Someplace in there.
Thomas: Fancy pants.
Aleko: Those guys are all right.
Tyler: I listen to a lot of other stuff too.
Thomas: ELO.
Tyler: ELO is awesome.
Aleko: Don’t be ragging on ELO.
Thomas: I listen to a lot of Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, Tom Waits, obviously.
Jonah: Thomas was a ska kid too.
Thomas: Yeah, in high school both Jonah and I were in ska bands.
Cody: I was too.
***murmurs of agreement, raised hands***
Michelle: Okay, so we have what – five of you in ska bands?
Thomas: Yeah, five of us in ska bands.
TR: Umm, I didn’t listen to any of those that Thomas listed. Ever. I listened to a lot of late 70s, early 80s metal and a lot of 80s new wave bands, too, like Duran Duran. It’s all over the place. I like a lot of pop music, like CSS.
Jonah: I always enjoy Capt’n Geech and the Shrimp Shack Shooters.
Thomas: I like Fetcher Magellum and his Jermajesties.
Jonah: Alas, Alas.
Thomas: Yeah, Alas, Alas is really good.
Jonah: That’s actually us not making any fun – Alas, Alas is really good.
TR: I liked Hardcore Crayons a lot.
Aleko: They were a good band – really good musicianship. I was really impressed. There’s a really good local band called Slutly.
Thomas: Besides the name, they’re really good.
Tyler: Goondas. I love the Goondas.
Jonah: Buffaloes Buffaloes Buffaloes.
Thomas: Dark Dark Dark.
Michelle: Any other bands with three repeat names?
Aleko: Chick Chick Chick.
Thomas: Chick Chick Chick is really good – Exclamation Point Exclamation Point Exclamation Point.
Aleko: Megadeath Megadeath Megadeath.
Thomas: Big Country Big Country Big Country.
Cody: Next question.
Michelle: Thomas, you do most of the songwriting, right?
Thomas: Yes.
Jonah: All of it.
Michelle: What are your non-musical sources of inspiration? You tell these stories – do you go outside of music for inspiration?
Thomas: I've always been really fascinated by Russia, so I read a lot of Russian fairy tales. I get a lot of things from that. I also just like seedy dark things.
Jonah: Hey Thomas, is there a theme on this new record?
Michelle: Hey – you’re stealing my questions.
Jonah: Sorry.
Michelle: That’s okay. So – is there a theme on this new record?
Thomas: Yeah, the new record is eight songs, all about murder. It’s a concept album about murder.
Michelle: Now you’ve heard Murder Ballads [by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds], right?
Thomas: No, actually, I didn’t hear about Nick Cave’s album until after I released this one. And I always feel really stupid.
Aleko: Have you ever heard of Murder, Inc.?
Thomas: No.
Aleko: Now you find out what he really listens to, because you just start naming things that he can’t recognize. Then you about where he’s at.
Jonah: I’m familiar with murder in different ways than the rest of the band.
Thomas: Yeah, Jonah was a mortician. I brag about having a mortician in the band all the time.
Michelle: That could come in handy for when…hopefully it never comes in handy.
Aleko: It comes in handy when you’re trying to creep out girls at the bar, I will tell you that. If there’s a grenade lurking around us and we’re trying to get rid of them, just start talking about embalming someone.
Michelle: Okay – define grenade.
Aleko: Grenade is a lurker who’s following you around and wants to get on you, but you are not really feeling the energy.
Thomas: Also known as a creeper.
Aleko: So you need to do something to put that fire out, like put out the grenade.
Jonah: Or jump on that grenade.
Aleko: So we throw Jonah on them.
Michelle: Do you guys suffer from many grenades?
Aleko: Not too many. There’s a lot of hot women…
Thomas: I think the band is made up of grenades. Everyone here is a grenade. Or a creeper.
Michelle: I know this is probably a slightly unfair question, because you guys are all really busy based on your Facebook status updates [insert – the interviewer is not a grenade. She promises.], but what are you guys reading right now?
Jonah: The Planet Simpson, which is about how the show The Simpsons has influenced pop culture. It’s pretty much the book about The Simpsons.
Aleko: I’m reading On the Road with the Ramones, which is a really in-depth…
TR: Not Jack Kerouac.
Aleko:…nope, I’ve never read that one, not about Jack Kerouac. But the Ramones, yeah, I’ll read about them.
Thomas: I’m reading a collection of poems by Leonard Cohen. I don’t know if that’s the name of it, but I bought a Leonard Cohen poetry book and I’m reading it at work, on my break.
TR: The constant joke it that I work at a bookstore and I don’t read. But I actually am reading something at the moment. I know it’s pretty rare – actually, I’m reading two books right now. One is The Demon Thief, it’s a young adult book about demons…
Aleko: It’s a junior fiction book? I love those junior fiction books!
TR: No – it’s actually really violent. I would never let a kid read that. And then I’m reading a Star Wars book, Red Harvest.
Thomas: Ooh – that’s a good one.
TR: You don’t know what it is.
Thomas: No, everyone’s talking about it at the Half-Priced Books in Highland.
TR: Yeah, it’s good so far. Lots of action.
Tyler: I’m reading this book on the history of Himalayan mountaineering. And at the school where I work I am reading James and the Giant Peach, for the second time in a couple months, which I like a lot. My buddy, who I’m reading to, called is Peach and the Giant James.
Turkeyes: I’m reading The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick.
Cody: And I’m reading shaky Neil Young’s biography and the recently released autobiography of Mark Twain. It’s really long.
Michelle: Is it good?
Cody: Yeah. In his will, it said that it would be released 100 years after his death, so there’s a lot of things about his contemporaries that he didn’t want to get out while he was still alive.
Jonah: More importantly, while they were still alive.
Michelle: So, Damned comes out on Sunday. What do you want listeners to take away from the album?
Aleko: A new CD.
Michelle: Well, right. Obviously, once they purchase it, take it home, and listen to it…
Aleko: A new poster by Whitney Streeter.
Jonah: I think we can find some more plugs…
Cody: I think she means figuratively.
Thomas: I don’t know – I never really think about that. I do it for myself – I just do it to get out my winter depression.
TR: Let it be known that the albums are totally different from the live shows. People go to our live shows and buy our CDs and are like, “Wow – it is so different.”
Michelle: How so?
Thomas: On the recordings, I play most of the instrumentation and when I bring them to practice, I try to have the band take the skeleton of the song and add the flesh and meat to it. I really want the live show to be a bigger spectacle, something that people will think about and want to go see, whereas the CD is more my artistic expression of what music is to me.
Aleko: However, the new record is a much closer approximation of the live sound than the first one was, no question about that.
Thomas: Well, the first album was recorded by myself before I even knew I was going to play a live show.
Jonah: Why don’t you go into the story about how you started El Le Faunt as an idea?
Thomas: El Le Faunt got started five years ago as Flat of Engals with Richard Arnold who now plays with the Cheekymon Martyrs. We were going to do a dark, folk-based band. Then he joined the Black Thorns and from there went on to the Cheekymon Martyrs. It got put on hold and then with winter depression of 2010, I wrote and recorded the first album in about two and a half weeks. I played it for Cody, and Cody loved it and wanted to play drums on it, so we ended up re-recording his drum parts on it, released it and then he and I played one show. Al [Aleko] and I played a show together, eventually the whole band got together and we created El Le Faunt and His Traveling Circus. We did a show on May 18th and have been doing it ever since.
Michelle: [to Cody] How long have you been drumming standing up?
Cody: Since I’ve been drumming. The way that I joined the band was I went to Music-Go-Round and was looking to buy some drums for my own recordings because the shaker in the tambourine wasn’t cutting it. I went and Thomas was like, “Listen to this new stuff I’ve been doing.” I heard it and it was this really, really dark vaudeville-type of music with a terrible 80s-sounding drum machine over it. I was like, “These drums sound terrible, but this is amazing.” And then I didn’t even ask, he told me, “You’re my drummer.” I had to tell him, “Thomas, I’ve never played drums before, are you kidding?” But he took a big leap of on me and also TR – he wasn’t really a bass player before – and then all of us were just like, “Hey, if you want to do this, let’s do it.”
Thomas: I’ve been burned before so many times in band situations and I wanted to make sure that when I was casting the circus that I was playing with people that I would enjoy spending time with more than people who might be the best-suited for the job. Plus, it creates more of the motley crew aspect of the Traveling Circus. Everyone comes from a different background.
Michelle: And you can tell when you watch the show on stage – you guys have fun. And it’s odd, because you sing these really depressing songs and everyone just smiles all the way through.
Thomas: I had a very fun time recording this album in the basement of this guy’s house I’m living at, Don Strumsky, and I’m sitting there recording the vocals. I’ll do a bad vocal outtake in the El Le Faunt voice [dark & disturbing, very reminiscent of Tom Waits] and then I’ll go, “[in the geekiest voice possible] Oh geez, I got it wrong again.” I think all of us just have fun playing it because it gets out that angst and leaves us with happiness.
Michelle: So, you’re going to make an album of outtakes?
Thomas: No.
Cody: El Le Funk!
Thomas: We are recording an album – the whole band – and it will be an El Le Faunt and the Traveling Circus album [currently, all albums have only been El Le Faunt] this summer, called Ten in One, where everyone will actually be recording the album, not just me and it’s going to be a really cool production. It’s going to be done at Good Enough Recordings, in the Good Enough Studios, which is owned by Cody Fitzpatrick [the drummer].
Cody: That’s me. You pay me money, I record your band.
Michelle: Will that be all new material?
Thomas: No, we’ve been adding the songs in the live shows. A lot of people define us as circus-genre music, but it really only that one album that really has anything to do with that circus – and it’s not even on there.
Jonah: Probably about half of the songs people will have heard.
Thomas: “Crocodile-Skin Man,” “Jean-Paul Geek” – people have heard “John the Giant” … “Poor Sonja,” “Stitches the Clown.” I think at one point we performed “Vasja the Dog-Faced Boy.” Left to record is “Ann, the Bearded Beuty,” “Ronato the Magic Carpet…”
Aleko: Which is about a real person.
Thomas: Yeah, he’s the only non-fictional character I’ve ever written about. It’s actually about a guy who lives here in Minneapolis, Ron the Magic Carpet. He has no legs, he glides on his hips – scoots on his hands.
Aleko: But a lot of heart.
Thomas: We are not doing Ron justice right now.
Jonah: It’s more like he lifts himself up on his hands and then moves forward.
Aleko: Let’s talk about Ron’s act.
Thomas: Ron’s act is that he likes to have women wearing high heels walk all over him, because he is the magic carpet.
Aleko: Ron’s performs with Moustache Jones and the Straight Razors…
Thomas: As well as the Lovely Creatures Cabaret.
Michelle: What’s been your most memorable gig, so far?
Jonah: No, that one is easy. Eclipse Records, when the power went out.
Cody: I like the flood.
Thomas: I think that Eclipse Records was, both times, the most memorable. The first time at Eclipse Records the power went out halfway through our set, in which case we rushed the audience and performed acoustically, right in their faces. We were like a foot away.
TR: My mom was scared. She left.
Thomas: Yeah, we scared away Tom’s mother. And then the flood – the second time. The most memorable part of that show was – yeah, we played in the arcade – but the main venue had a back room that was a garage. One of the other bands, Last Known Whereabouts now known as Very Small Animal, pulled up and the drummer couldn’t open his doors because the water was over his door mark in the alley. So he climbed out the window, stretched out over the back seat and then threw them 15 feet to get to us in the middle of the garage, which was half full of water. We would catch the drums and set them down. We ended up setting up in the arcade because the mixing board had water pour all over it. It was like a pitcher-pour, onto the mixer.
Turkeyes: I thought I was going to die on the ride there. It was just insane.
TR: I like the Fine Line. That was the first time when we each had room.
Michelle: You guys never have room.
Thomas: There’s seven of us.
TR: We never have room to move around at all and we’re a very animated band, when we get room.
Thomas: That was also one of my favorite shows.
TR: It was cool, because we got to run around…it felt freeing.
Tyler: I like the one we played at Stanley’s.
Cody: If you’re a male, do yourself a favor and go to Stanley’s. They have the best urinals in the entire state.
Thomas: Yeah, the urinals are from 1918.
Cody: I felt like royalty.
Thomas: Beautiful pearl inlay.
Aleko: It was quite impressive.
Michelle: I’m going to have to check these out.
Aleko: Ladies too – step in there.
Thomas: There were ladies stepping in there the whole night, actually, because there’d be some guy outside going, “Yeah, you’ve got to check this out,” and then a girl voice would be like, “Oh my!”
Cody: Hey, that guy was me.
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