TV BUDDHA!!!!
Photo by Braeden Long
TV Buddha is an important band to Chicago's DIY scene, they released their latest EP "10,000 Buddhas" last December and I recently got the chance to talk with them about it. Here's how it went....
JR: Johnson Rockstar (occasionally referred to as Cole Hunt)
ES: Eli Schmitt
interview by reid isbell
I've seen you play so many songs in addition to the ones you recently released, how did you decide which songs to put on the EP? JR: These songs all kinda felt like they went together in a way. They were all written from a similar place. We've been playing them all for a while and kinda refined them down on the tours we did last summer. They felt like a cohesive representation of everything we've been doing over the past year. We have other, newer songs that we've been playing, but it felt like they were coming from sort of a different place or slightly more mature standpoint, so we thought that those were best left off of the current EP and saved for something that's packaged together with other songs of that likeness to kinda provide more cohesive packages of songs representative of different times and stages of the band. ES: I feel the same way. It was most natural to put these four songs together. It's been really beautiful to finally have these songs all together in this way when they've been so many different things. I was listening to these recordings back from when we played these songs for the first time in a garage in Bloomington, Indiana, with Soft & Dumb, and it was so cool to see how far these songs have come. At their core, they're the same idea, but there's so much more of a confidence and an expressiveness that has come out of these songs and it feels really nice to have a sentence become a paragraph.
How were these songs written? JR: These ones came from more of an improvisational sorta thing, like a jam sorta thing where me and Eli were playing together. Some of these songs, like the oldest ones- like for that show that Eli was just talking about, we did this mini tour of a few Midwest dates with the old Soft & Dumb and we basically needed to write songs for that tour, so we played together to figure some stuff out and that's kinda where "Sunday, Sunday" came from as well as "All Traffic Merges". ES: I think "Baby, Woah!" was a similar thing. JR: So they just kinda started as these ideas and, as Eli said, over the course of a year we really refined them and worked on them to turn them into songs that we actually feel confident in and happy with as their existence as discreet bodies of work. "Hudson to China" came a little bit later, that one was written before our first New York show last March because we were wanting to work on some new material for that show, but it kinda came out of a similar thing where we came up with one idea or one riff and then played it over and over until we narrowed it down and figured out what that song wanted to be in the end. ES: Originally that song was really short, I think we were totally going for some sort of really punk or GBV sorta thing and it was just the first half with the slide and toms and it just ended. But as we kept playing it I kept feeling that there's more this song wants to say, and it doesn't need to be as long as like "Sunday, Sunday" or "Baby, Woah!" are, but it needs some sort of extension. And so that's when we brought in the idea of having that really- it's a song with a slow death in a way that a lot of the other songs explode, but I really like the progression of that song a lot.
In relation to "Hudson to China" starting out as a punk song, do you get a lot of inspiration from punk music or punk mentality? ES: I think it's probably more of the mentality of it. It's not quite a traditionalist punk sorta feeling, but there's such- I think we're a really raw band and there's hopefully something captured in the band that feels almost like it could be reckless but it isn't. It's like a measured recklessness that I think some of the best punk bands had, where there's like an unexpected quality of the performance. JR: I feel pretty influenced by punk in a broader sense, kinda like what Eli was saying. It's like the mentality and ethos of punk and DIY. And that's kinda informing all of our things. But also as a music, punk is a genre I love with it's speed and catchiness and immediacy. That's sort of something that we're doing more with some of the newer songs, so that there's variety in the set because, of course, we'd love to make people dance. So yeah I do think it's a very powerful undercurrent in our music and kinda it's something that a lot of our influences pull from and it all melds together into whatever it becomes. I don't think we necessarily play to specific genres so much as kind of being different things and letting them kinda come together in a natural way as they do through us.
I remember last time we talked Cole said you wanted to sound like if "Pharoah Sanders joined the Velvet Underground produced by Phil Spector", has that changed at all? JR: I think those are three big influences on us, especially the Velvet Underground, and pulling from these traditions like spiritual free jazz on one hand and sugary pop on the other and then having VU as the middle ground, who was a band before us that pulled from a lot of these things and combined pop with the avant garde, and that's just kind of the path that we hope to lead down as well. So really taking what they did and applying that with our own lived experiences and contemporary times and creating something new out of that. ES: Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot recently too with the band and I think that we've always had this tag of being an American rock band, and I feel like, especially with the lyrics on the new EP, I feel like Cole taps into something very American, and that may just be his influence with the Beats and those sort of melodies of words, but I feel like there's almost a folkness to the music. Maybe it's not just American rock music, but there's a spiritual folk core in the music. Or maybe I'm just totally talking out of my ass on this. JR: I think lyrically for me America or Americaness is one of the biggest inspirations I find. I think America as a concept is super fascinating and a lot of my favorite writers have kind of been within that same vein, whether that's the Beats or David Berman. It's kinda this analysis of Americanism, and not a judgement of Americaness, because I think that's something very common in either intellectual or artistic circles, kinda a highbrow view of America and a disapproval of America or American culture, whether that's informed by more traditional European backgrounds or otherwise, but I think there's obviously a lot of things wrong with America and American culture, but as a culture it's not worse or better than any other culture. So I think it's just something very fascinating to examine and try to look at through a literary lense. A lot of what I'm inspired by for a lot of lyric writing and poetry is not only American landscapes but also just the people of America and the different cultures. And it's also something that we got to experience while on tour, seeing all these different parts of America, some that I've never seen before which I think is very rewarding and enriching in that way.. just learning more about this crazy place. And I always feel the most inspired when I'm in airplanes, because looking down at the expanse of America, especially over the Midwest and how flat it is, and seeing the patchwork of it all just really inspires something for me. So I think a lot of what I write about is an interrogation of Americaness and what it really means to be an American. ES: And I feel like a lot of the influences we've been naming for the record, like the Velvet Underground and Pharoah Sanders, are very American music. I think in their music there's this very loud, taut, wirey energy that feels frenetic while also kind of seeping out into things, it kinda feels like it speaks to a certain Americaness in their music that it's hard not to listen to and feel these pure human emotions that I don't think would exist in that music if it hadn't been American, you know?
I think you would both be good presidents, I think you have a love for America most don't.. I got some more serious questions now:
What's the best TV Buddha karaoke song? ES: "All Traffic Merges". JR: Yeah, that one's a duet.
If you could swap lives with one musician, who would it be? JR: The Weeknd. ES: Bruno Mars.
So would you wanna be pop stars? ES: Yeah! JR: That's the goal. ES: Why do you think we do this?
What movie would you live inside of?... Pirates of the Caribbean. ES: We just watched that. I used to be obsessed with that movie. I wore a pirate outfit for a month straight. JR: That's so sick. I went to the pirate version of Medieval Times and that was awesome. The orange pirate was our dude... I was thinking I'd live inside of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs because I loved that book when I was a kid and it'd be fun to eat meatballs from the sky. ES: Maybe The Creature from the Black Lagoon. In one version I'd be the creature, in another I'd be the woman, and in another I'd be a fish that just chills.
Who would you most likely to be spotted with in public, Jonathan Richman of the Modern Lovers or Phil Spector? JR: I think we'd be more likely to hang with Jonathan Richman. ES: Chubby Checker. Ever think about him? JR: Can you do the twist?
Kim Fowley or Alice Cooper? JR: I'd want to hangout with Alice Cooper, that'd be sick. ES: I just heard that Alice Cooper was the first person to help restore the Hollywood Sign in LA and he bought the H. And noone else cared about it, but then he started the trend and he saved Hollywood.
Gummo Marx or Chico Marx? JR: I like Chico. ES: Groucho.
Ariel Pink or Jar Jar Binks? JR: I'm going Jar Jar Binks, that dude's chill. ES: I'm going Jar Jar.
What was TV Buddha's New Year's resolution? JR: Get more gains. ES: I'm tryna get more flexible.
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