Musicbeat

Instrumental health

Explosions in the Sky

Explosions in the Sky is one of those bands you’ve probably heard without realizing you’ve heard them. The Texas band’s dynamic, cinematic instrumental rock music conveys powerful, but unspecific, emotions, which makes them a favorite for movie and TVshow soundtracks. If you’ve seen All the Real Girls, Shopgirl, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, or the film or TVseries Friday Night Lights, among others, you’ve heard Explosions in the Sky. In advance of the band’s April 12 appearance at the Knitting Factory, we spoke to guitarist-bassist Michael James. I’m curious about your process for writing songs. Does it come from compositions written beforehand or collective improvisation? It’s both. There’s not, like, a set formula we have for writing the songs. Most of the time, it will start with somebody having an idea and bringing that to practice, and we all sit around and try to flesh that idea out. The idea can be in varying stages of completion. Sometimes it’s 10 parts in a row that makes a big statement as a song, and sometimes it’s one little guitar lick that can turn into a 10-minute song. So, we just kind of sit in a room and play, and then we all go home and daydream and play by ourselves and get ideas and generate them and bring them into the practice. So we just use every sort of creative tool at our disposal. … When you’re playing in a room full of people, you can’t really sit and play the same thing over and over again for 90 minutes or something, just trying to get it just right. That’s something that’s much more comfortable to do at your house, playing

music by yourself, and you can really finely tune details and inflections of by a guitar part that is going to take you Brad Bynum half an hour to get just right. Then, bradb@ you can take that in to the group setnewsreview.com ting, and that makes it a lot more fun to play together. When you play it in a group setting, does that change it? Oh, absolutely. That was something that was kind of hard for all of us in the beginning stages of this band, because we would all have very finely detailed ideas of what something should sound like and then you bring it to a group of people and of course that automatically changes. And if you’re not familiar with the people, and you don’t trust the people that you’re playing with 100 percent yet, it can be hard to let that idea go. But now that we’ve been a band together for 13 years, and we’re all best friends and kind of musical soul mates, there’s so much trust there, so it’s like, this wasn’t—the way that we’re playing the song now isn’t at all what I had in mind, but now it’s not my song, it’s our song. And that’s how it needs to be. That’s how we’ve always decided it has to be—completely a group effort, a collaborative affair to write these songs together. You just kind of have to let go. It’s kind of tough, you know, being a regular egotistical human being to let that go, but it’s something that’s worked out really well for us. Your music shows up a lot in movie and TV soundtracks. What is it about Explosions in the Sky that connects well with moving images? I don’t really know exactly. I think there’s definitely an emotional component to our music. We certainly don’t shy away from it. Our music is very overtly emotional and emotive. It’s not something we try to shroud in coolness or anything like that. So I think it’s very easy for people to get that from it. You don’t have to dig very deep to find the emotional core of the songs. Now, certainly you can bring—and hopefully everybody does bring—their own unique emotional perspective when listening to the music, which can be very deep and involved, but I think heart-onour-sleeves sounds lend to emotional images and that sort of thing. It can accompany those sort of things without taking too much away from what you’re watching. Ω

A democratic band: Munaf Rayani, Mark Smith, Chris Hrasky and Michael James are Explosions in the Sky.

Explosions in the Sky play at the Knitting Factory, 211 N. Virginia St., at 8 p.m. on Thursday, April 12. For tickets or more information, visit re.knittingfactory.com.

For a longer version of this interview, visit www.newsreview.com.