Quasi’s
twosome of lead vocalist, keyboardist and guitarist Sam Coomes and drummer
and vocalist Janet Weiss are prisoners of expectation. As veterans of successful
indie bands (Coomes formerly with the Donner Party, Heatmiser, as well
as Elliot Smith’s backing band and Weiss currently with Sleater-Kinney),
both Coomes and Weiss remain shackled critically as a side project--even
after 10 years of writing and performing together. But fortunately for
both, Coomes and Weiss have begun to hit their stride with Quasi.
2001’s The Sword of God, an excellent mix of songs that refocus
on the band’s strengths of moody lyricism and harmonies coupled with British
Invasion-era roxichord organ riffs and rapid-fire drum fills, marked indie
rock’s finer guitar playing of recent memory. (Imagine Built to Spill covering
The Kinks and The Zombies.) With the release of Hot Shit--the dynamic
duo’s sixth full-length release overall and third for Touch and Go--in
early September, Tidal Wave’s P.J. Osborne spoke with Weiss before the
start of the band’s forthcoming U.S. tour.
Tidal
Wave: What constitutes a song?
Janet
Weiss: I really have no opinion about that. Songs can be a lot of different
things.
TW:
Are there any key elements that every song should have?
JW:
Sound, I guess. Other than that, it’s pretty wide open. [Speaking] as a
musician, I try to keep that definition as vague as possible.
TW:
How do you know when you’ve written a good song?
JW:
Well, sometimes you don’t (laughs). But sometimes it just feels a certain
way, and it feels exciting. That’s really about as close as you can get
to self-critique; it’s how the thing makes you feel when you play it.
TW:
Do you feel limited in any way performing as a duo?
JW:
Yeah, definitely. Sometimes out of those limitations something good will
come. Now I often play the keyboard while I’m playing the drums just so
that different parts can be played, and there can be some kind of bass
going while we’re playing [live]. The limitation of not having a bass player
caused me to start doing that, and I think that is a positive thing, but
there are some songs which we can’t even play [live], because there are
too many instruments on them, and it wouldn’t really come across as a two
piece. There are limitations to any side, I think.
TW:
The album’s title is an odd, if not funny one. How did the album’s title
come about?
JW:
Sam just thought of it up. He had the song title first, and he ended up
suggesting it as an album title, which I thought was a great idea.
TW:
The songs off the new album seem to be the loosest batch of songs you’ve
recorded since the Early Recordings. Would you agree?
JW:
Yes. I would agree. I think our live shows have the element of looseness,
and we kind of felt that our last couple of records didn’t represent that
part of us, so we really tried with this recording to leave the rough edges
in and have the feel of it to be different from the last records. It’s
hard to describe the exact ways in which we did that, but I think it somehow
came across. We left some little mistakes in, and as we were recording,
we just kept stressing feel over form. We wanted something less perfect
and more alive.
