Folklore Interview, Video

A News Blog for Friends of the Elephant 6 Recording Company

Folklore Interview, Video

Published Monday, February 05, 2007 by Jeff | E-mail this post

Justin Laird recently interviewed Jimmy Hughes of Folklore (currently on tour with Summer Hymns) for his local radio station. I've taken the time to transcribe highlights, which you can read below. The band's newest album is The Ghost of H.W. Beaverman, which tells the legend of a ghost, those who see it, and the truth behind it, and features guest vocals from members of Elf Power, Gerbils, Masters of the Hemisphere, I am the World Trade Center, and more. They also have an EP, Carpenter's Falls, which they're selling on tour. I've also included a video from a recent Chicago performance by Jimmy and Folklore, shot by Chris Yetter (thanks Chris!).

JL: How long have these songs been kicking around? How long has this album been in the making?

JH: People just started playing with me about two years ago, but the songs, some of them have been kicking around as long as 4 or 5 years, and most of them got completed in the writing process about 2 years ago, and at that point, whatever friends were interested I said 'Hey, do you want to try playing these?' and we started practicing as a band. So 2 years becoming a band and probably another 2 or 3 before that. A slow writing process. I had writer's block for a while.

JL: Do you have any new songs ready?

JH: Yeah, I have about 4 songs that are written for the next album.

JL: Is it going to be another concept album?

JH: The concept is sort of similar--I've been kind of inspired lately by that movie, "The Day the Earth Stood Still," which I just saw for the first time recently. If you haven't seen it, it's totally awesome. And it has kind of an "Animal Farm" [element] to it too. So it'll be a little more fantastical--not fantastical; it's supposed to be sort of like a different prediction of when the world ends, what happens, and it's this concept of, if the world ended and the humans died, but the animals lived on, and how they progressed without the human element--

JL: Have you demoed any of those yet?

JH: No, I haven't. I'll put them up on the website when they get demoed, and we'll try to record them. But we're going to do a lot of experimental recordings too; we'll hopefully, as a band, get together and record sessions, and then those sessions will kind of become songs too, so, you know, do the writing that way, which we did a little bit on this album, but I'd like to do more of that, and then mix that in with songs that are written and recorded in the studio.

JL: So you think you're going to get to that by summer?

JH: We'll see. We home record, so we pretty much start as soon as we can, and just keep going at it 'till it's done.