Interview with Daisy the Great for The Big Takeover Magazine.
songs that you wouldn’t be able to replay all at once. Do you resist temptation to add things in the studio that you would not be able to replicate live?
KELLEY: We love all the tools of the studio. We love synths, we love experimenting, we love different sounds. But I think the foundation of the songs is that they can be played live. That’s really important to us. We love the idea that the melodies can stand alone, the lyrics can stand alone, the chords can stand alone. We know that whenever we add anything it has to be adding something to the song. But, we definitely want to play these songs live and have them be totally faithful to the recording we made. We wanted the songs to have a warmth and a realness.
MINA: Some of the overdubs added a lot of texture and layers. Catherine would have me sing haphazard harmonies on songs that we didn’t think we were necessarily going to use. And then we would end up using them for whatever reason. We know the essence of the song we were trying to capture. But then, sometimes a song would start and we would start jamming on it and it would feel very different than up he recorded version. And we’d end up changing the key of the song really quickly. It just depends on what we were feeling from the song in that moment.
As far as the vocal harmonies, you and Mina have such a strong natural blend. With all the breaks and harmonies, how do you find what fits and what might be too much?
KELLEY: A lot of it really is singing along and trying out a lot of different things. Mina and I try a lot of things and try to see. Sometimes one of us will have an idea or sometimes we just assume the other person won’t like it. But, at least with harmonies, putting them down is nice and then you can hear it in the context.
MINA: That’s right. You can always take something out and try it in a different way. Sometimes you have to play things back and listen. We definitely are always going for something that doesn’t sound like the Cales and Nash harmonies from the 60s that’s very distinct and very much separate from itself–really tangible. We really like to experiment with how we can make a harmony go down next to a melody and really make it shine against it.
That’s always part of the interesting part about our songs is hearing all the little pieces and how they are interlocking against each other. We could be singing the same line but then the harmonies will be answering each other. We enjoy trying lots of different things until it feels right.