The members of Wilmington, Del.’s Spinto Band have been playing together since the mid-1990s, when they were still in high school. A decade and a half later finds Nick Krill (vocals/guitar), Thomas Hughes (bass/vocals), Jeffrey Hobson (drums), Sam Hughes (keyboards), Joey Hobson (guitar) perfecting pop sounds on the recent full-length, Shy Pursuit, in their newly built recording studio, scoring films, starting a record label and searching for the perfect cup of coffee. MAGNET found Krill in the ether of the internet, where we conducted this e-mail interview.
“The Living Things” (download):
The band has recently built its own recording studio. In what ways does this change the course of the Spinto Band?
Having our own studio space has given us the opportunity to work on a number of projects like film soundtracks, or weird one-off songs. It is great, you know, someone could call us and say, “I need a theme song for my _____” and since we have the space set up, we can jump in and turn around a song really quickly. Also, I think it has made working on Spinto Band recordings move quicker. For a number of unpleasant reasons, we’ve taken a really long time between our last few album, but now I think having our own space will help us make our own recordings a little faster.
I hear an eclectic array of influences—old and new—on your records, especially the latest. Where do you fall as a music fan?
It is always changing … I think the only constant for me personally is the Beatles. Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Cuban and Mexican music from a bunch of the Smithsonian Folkways archive of recordings. I also just began listening to some old Les Paul recordings from the 1950s during a time when he was pioneering multi-track recording and doing tons or weird recording manipulations. I started listening to a bit of Public Enemy recently … there is some really exciting production on their early records. Oh, and the Penguin Cafe Orchestra has been getting a lot of spins lately too. So I guess it is kind of all over the place … and when you add to that the different types of music Thomas and Joe bring to their songwriting … I guess you end up with The Spinto Band.
One of the band’s strengths is knowing when to throw a bunch of instrumentation into a song, and then when to take it back out again. Is this innate or is it something you struggle with?
It is an aspect of production and arranging that we really love to play with. For one thing, Thomas is a master musical arranger, and has a great orchestration talent and sixth sense on when to add stuff and take it away. On top of that we all really like concise pop music and I think part of making that type of music is keeping the arrangement interesting by weaving parts together and not letting things get too tedious. You know, a really powerful musical part can sometimes become even more powerful if you take it away from someone and then give it back. The excitement of hearing it again makes the part more powerful than if it had just been playing continuously.
In these days of music making, is the Spinto Band self-supporting, or are day jobs necessary?
We were self-supporting for a while, but unfortunately during these long breaks between albums it has gotten back to the point where we have to pick up part-time jobs again.
Is Spintonic Recordings going to release music by other bands?
We’re not sure yet. If we do I don’t think it would be for a little while. We have so much to deal with regarding our own band that I don’t think we’d be able to release any other music right now. Plus we are still learning. We’ll just use ourselves as the guinea pigs for now.
There are great videos for the band’s songs, and already four videos for Shy Pursuit. What’s the process? Are you thinking of ideas simultaneously when recording or do the visuals come out after?
We are really lucky because we have a number of close friends who are extremely talented video and filmmakers. I should probably take this opportunity to say that everyone should check out the work of Phil Davis, Daniel Gray Longino, Nick Gurewitch, and Albert Birney. Anyhow, while we are making records, our friends just kind of naturally hear the songs as they are being made … so there is always kind of a dialogue going about videos. Sometimes we are very involved in the video making, and sometimes it is more hands-off. It kind of depends on how the director likes to work, and what is practical.
How is scoring films (documentary Biba! One Island 879 Votes and feature film The Beast Pageant) different from writing pop songs?
The biggest difference has been that, in a film, most of the time the song is kind of playing a supporting role to the visual and the dialogue, whereas in one of our songs, the song is 100{e5d2c082e45b5ce38ac2ea5f0bdedb3901cc97dfa4ea5e625fd79a7c2dc9f191} of the focus. I think you can kind of get away with some things in a film that I wouldn’t necessarily want to do in a pop song (and vice versa). For instance, in the documentary we worked on we realized that the arrangements should be way less dynamic than we would typically make them. As soon as too much crazy stuff started happening in the music, we realized it would start to distract from the speech in the documentary.
Where does the Spinto Band see itself in 10 years?
Can’t stop, won’t stop. I know I’ll still be creating music. Who knows if it will make a blip on other people’s radar or not? Hopefully we can ditch those part time jobs again.
How’s that new coffee pot working out in the studio?
Ha ha … I recently became a convert to the “pour over” coffee brewing method, so the coffee pot has been lonely.
—Jill LaBrack
