INTERVIEW: Danish rockers Mew go visual for new album
Mew, consisting of frontman Jonas Bjerre on vocals, Johan Wohlert on bass and Silas Utke Graae Jørgensen on drums, have always been a visual band, but for their latest album, they have upped the visual quotient considerably. To develop the songs, Bjerre pictured a series of visuals, which helped him write the new tunes for the appropriately titled album, Visuals.
They worked at a studio in Copenhagen and completed their work in less than a year. This time frame is actually quite fast for Mew, especially since it came on the heels of their last studio effort and tour.
The new album features such songs as “Nothingness and No Regrets,” “The Wake of Your Life,” “Candy Pieces All Smeared Out” and “In a Better Place.” In press notes, the adjectives used to describe the songs speak to the album’s eccentricity and variety: slow-building, discordant, captivating, nostalgic and contemporary.
Fans can check out these new songs and Mew’s legendary visual accompaniment on their upcoming tour, which includes dates in Thailand, Malaysia, China, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, Israel, Sweden, Finland, Latvia and Japan. No U.S. dates have been announced yet for the coming months.
Recently, Hollywood Soapbox spoke with Bjerre about Visuals. Here’s a sample of what he had to say:
On the future plans of the band …
“We’re going to be releasing a new record obviously and touring a lot, and quite excited about the album. It’s quite different, I think, but I always say that. But I think this album is quite different in many ways from what we’ve done, and we always try to do something new within the framework of what our band is. It’s quite thrilling for us because we’re used to being away for a long time and almost kind of hidden away, and this time it’s quite fresh.”
On how the album came together …
“It was a mixture of things. We had a bunch of stuff that we kind of had been trying to work on a few years ago, these parts that we really loved but that didn’t really fit anywhere, and we kind got them to work differently on the tour. We usually don’t really write so much material on tour because you’re in the tour bus, and you’ve got a pretty heavy schedule with the sound checks and all this. But we were kind of really excited to be on tour, really good energy in the band, and we just kind of was sitting having a glass of wine after the show listening to demos and started coming up with some new parts. And then when we finished the tour, we didn’t feel quite as slammed perhaps as we usually do. Usually when you finish an album cycle, you’re pretty beat, and you want to take some time off. But we were kind of really excited about the material and just wanted to go straight into writing, so it happened quite fast, especially for us as a band because we usually take forever to make an album.”
On returning to Copenhagen to record …
“The last record we also did in Copenhagen, at least most of it. It’s different. … There’s really good things about going away as well. I don’t know if we’ll make the next one in Copenhagen. It was just kind of we’d just come home from tour, so we already kind of been gone a lot. And it was nice being home, and we did a lot of writing over the summer. And Copenhagen is really nice in the summer, so it felt like the right choice.”
On whether he sees common themes among the new songs …
“I’m not sure if it’s completely a conscious decision, but I think that we always try as we’re writing to sort of incorporate all the different moods and feelings of where we are as a band and as persons, and get all the facets of what’s going on in the music. I think our music often has this little bit of a duality in it and even the way it sounds. Maybe the lyrics are kind of really sort of sad, but then the music can be uplifting at the same time. …
“We knew quite early on that we wanted to call it Visuals because I had this idea of what if each song is kind of like a picture in itself, or there’s a visual inspiration for it. So that was something we kind of kept in mind, although I don’t know exactly how much it influenced the songwriting,but I think that it definitely helped us provide some kind of guideline as to what the song should feel like and sound like.”
On developing visuals for the live show …
“A lot of the older movies I’ve made, they really sort of earned their place. I kind of update them a little bit. Sometimes I change little things, but a lot of the old ones, like the ones that I really spend a long time on, they kind of remain almost the same. But then obviously there’s a lot of new songs, and they all have new visuals. And I really try to make them sort of connect with our ideas. … It’s a really exciting thing to do because it gives it more facets. There’s more ways to experience it. It’s a fine balance. I always, always think about [that] you don’t want to force certain images on people either because that’s the beautiful thing about music is you can sometimes close your eyes, and it kind of invokes images in your head. … There’s something nice about creating these otherworldly places on screens because it kind of takes you somewhere else a little bit. It’s a form of escapism maybe.”
On his musical upbringing …
“I realized pretty early on that I wanted to do something creative. First, I wanted to be a librarian because then I could just sit around and read books all day. I thought that would be cool, but then when I saw Yellow Submarine with my dad, I remember that made a huge impression. The way that you have animation and music so tightly bound together, that was really something that excited me. That always stayed with me, this connection between images and music and also animation.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Mew will release their new album, Visuals, Friday, April 28. Click here for more information.
