Murder By Death is a busy band. The band will be visiting southern California next week and is currently touring all across the country. Luckily, I grabbed fifteen minutes of time from lead singer and guitarist Adam Turla during a stop for gas in the boondocks of Mississippi. Here he explains some of the direction behind the band and their work, the evolution of their sound over the past decade, and his thoughts on modern music.
Why did your vocal style change so much from your first two albums to your last few?
The main thing with the first two albums is that we were just so young when we made them and I was still learning how to sing. Sarah (Balliet, cello/keyboards) was saying she heard an interview recorded from that era and my speaking voice alone was much higher. I think it’s a question of making an album when you’re 20 years old versus 29. Part of it is I also took voice lessons in 2004 and they asked me “Why are you straining your voice trying to sing high? You have a low voice, you should be singing low.” I finally learned how to sing properly in my accepted range and it helped a lot. I went from finding singing a very challenging and frustrating thing to my favorite part of making music.
This might be a tough question, sort of like “Which child is your favorite,” but which of your albums is your favorite to perform and which was your favorite to write?
As far as my favorite to perform, I think it’s the ones people are most excited to hear. I just love a good rowdy show where people are just wild and rowdy. To me, playing live is really about what kind of response I can get from an audience. For a favorite song to play, for sure, is “I’m Comin’ Home” from Red of Tooth & Claw as that album has a lot of good live tracks that are really upbeat.
In terms of writing, writing is such a frustrating thing because you’re sitting there thinking “Be creative! Write! What can I write about?” You have your songs that you feel really made it and songs that never made it that you try to record and you try and try but they don’t work out. There are always songs that never come out the way we wish they would, and we don’t bother recording those. If we don’t feel good about something, we’d rather not put it out. In terms of writing for the last record, it was interesting; I was in the back country woods of the Smokey Mountains just camping by myself for two weeks and at times it was really good and at times very lonely and depressing.
A lot of your work is based on classic stories and epic poetry. Are there any classic stories or anything you’ve read that does inspire you but you haven’t been able to put it to music just yet?
That’s a very interesting question. I’ll be reading something and think that there is something more to it. Whenever I’m reading or watching movies or history channel or whatever, and we see something we think is interesting and fits into the universe of Murder By Death, we make a note of it. Like “Oh that Chinese folklore is really cool!” and sometimes you can work it into a song and sometimes you can’t. It’s hard to translate a concept into a song and you kind of have to let it happen naturally.
We actually started writing a song this morning based on the weather and I was thinking “Hmm, I wonder if this will work and be on the next album…?”
Do you find yourself writing on tour or in the van?
Not really, no, I mean there are one or two songs per album that I wrote on tour. But I specifically write when I come up with an idea and on tour I’m not usually thinking about writing, as I’m thinking about the next show…there is so much organization going on. We have to book the hotel, or get to a bank, make sure we remember all the songs, whatever it is to try and get from one place to another.
What’s the biggest show you’ve ever played and do you have any musical festivals in the works?
The biggest show we ever played was, oddly enough, we played at the bike rally at Sturgis with Reverend Horton Heat. We were so pumped about that and thought that was a cool, unique thing. There were about 7,000 people there. We don’t play huge shows very much, we’re very much a bar and theatre band. We never opened a big tour or played a stadium show, we’re just not one of those bands. We’re kinda in the seedy rock n’roll bar or theatre.
We’re playing a couple festivals this summer but we don’t do a ton of festivals. I don’t know why that is, I don’t know if it’s because the bands that play festivals are not only huge but they tend to be bands of the moment. They get a lot of press and we’ve never been a trendy band and I don’t think we get a lot of attention in that format. I like playing outside if the weather’s good. Every summer we play like five festivals but I don’t think we’re doing any big festivals this year. Not sure yet, we might have a couple.
Ten or eleven years ago, when you started this band, did you think your style of music would be popular enough to be "mainstream?" Bands like Arcade Fire and The Decemberists didn’t fit in then but bands with more grey area seem to be getting more attention.
Yea, it’s kind of interesting, as I never know what’s going to become popular because like Arcade Fire has only been around for five or six years and we played with them on their first tour. With them, they have a sound that makes sense to me: they are catchy, they have some good songs, they have a good live show. But did I think The Decemberists would be big ten years ago? Yea, I would have been very shocked, I’m still shocked that they have thousands of people. I just didn’t realize that this many listeners were looking for literary indie.
(laughs)
Where I think it is right now, for better or worse, I think what happens is that indie rock has become the pop music of today. The bands that are more vanilla or friendly to…like your mom can listen to it; it’s not like what we considered accessible ten years ago but it’s not offensive. They are not going to challenge people by being too aggressive, they aren’t like The Monotonix or Anal Cunt, you know? It’s still acceptable so in that sense, it makes sense.
It’s still kind of rooted in Adult Contemporary…
Yea, maybe that’s what it is. I hadn’t even thought of the term but that’s totally what it is.
All of your albums are just at about the 45-minute length. Is that a conscious length or do they just end up that way?
Way to notice that.
(laughs)
In my opinion, this is just a personal thing, but every album has to be at least 35 minutes but when you break 50, I think you’re getting to “Filler Town.” I can’t think of many albums, besides best-ofs, that hold it after 50 minutes. It’s the classic bane of every rap album where “Oh my god, how many more fucking random tracks can I…” Just put your best stuff on there. I’d just rather put up ten songs that I really feel good about.
On a specific song, do you try not to make them too long? My favorite song is nine and a half minutes, and you only have two at that length, why is that?
“End of the Line” (from Who Will Survive, And What Will Be Left of Them) is really like five and a half minutes and then it has an outro to the album which is a bunch of cellos. It’s kind of like two songs because we don’t do the outro when we do it live. I think if you’re going to do long songs, you better be killing it with that long song. We’ve done songs that end up being two and a half minutes and we talk about “Is it too short? What do you want to add? Well, I don’t know.” There is no point in me extending a song if it doesn’t benefit the song.
I know you get asked about your cello all the time, but I imagine using classic literary ideas works well with a cello. Did you discover this while working with it?
It’s probably the most dynamic instrument there is and it has the same range as the human voice. It has that versatility where you can go dark, you can go beautiful and it invokes a lot of other feelings that another or different instrument might not do effectively. She’s been in the band since day one so it’s been a learning process on how to work together. On each song the cello basically plays lead guitar, unless we do “Guitar-cello-monies.” Or if I’m going to take a lead and she plays something chord-like, but we try to decide so there isn’t too much conflict in the frequencies and style.
Finally, does singing “As Long As There Is Whiskey in the World” guarantee you a free drink every night?
You know, I think just the general tone of the band and amount of drinking songs guaranteed that years ago but that song probably didn’t hurt. That’s a song I wrote like six years ago I didn’t know what to do with it. We finally figured out a way to play it that was more interesting than the way I wrote it.
More Info: Head to Murderbydeath.com for tour dates and tickets!
Comments