by Daniel Colussi | Talking with Dave Hartley, you get the whole package. As a sideman (he plays bass in cosmic-Americana band War On Drugs) and frontman (of his own band, Nightlands, ostensibly the subject of this post), Hartley knows every angle of the music game, and then some. He’s all over the map. In addition to being a full on rock ‘n roller he’s also a total NBA freak (scope his WXPN basketball column here) and a gifted photographer. But Hartley never comes across as an over-achieving show-off. The 2002 James Madison University philosophy student of the year still strikes me as a totally cool, laid back guy. Oak Island, his second album as Nightlands, came out on the venerable Secretly Canadian label back in January. Its richly layered vocals sit atop guitars, saxophones, and motorik drum machines to form some kind of 21st century version of Beach Boys pop. Hartley describes the sound as “bedroom baroque pop.” It’s awesome. I caught up to Hartley and his band as they were driving through West Texas. Naturally, they were in the midst of discussing their spirit animals…

So what’s your spirit animal? I hit a hawk with a frisbee once, so we were talking about whether that makes the hawk my spirit animal or my not spirit animal. It was crazy, were were playing frisbee golf and we were a little high, and I threw a frisbee and it went the wrong way and it hit this hawk, like, square on…I swear to God. I felt bad.

Tell me about going from being a sideman in War On Drugs to crafting this strange Nightlands music on your own in your bedroom that you then took on the road as a four piece band. It’s really challenging, and really rewarding. It’s weird because I write the songs as I record them; it’s not like a sit down with a guitar and write a song and then go and record it thing. I kinda tinker around in my studio for long periods of time and construct the songs from the ground up. I’ll often start with a drumbeat or a drum loop or something. I like old drum machines, so a lot of times I’ll start with one and write on top of that and then start layering until I get something that connects with me. But then when you go to play it live you basically have to re-write the song. I’m really lucky that my band is really musical and they all sing. It’s really fun, actually, to see them put their mark on the songs. It’s really scary at first, but the process is very fun. I’m enjoying it.

I wonder, too, about transitioning from being a sideman to being a frontman, the guy out front… I’m starting to realize that it’s like anything else: you get better at it over time. Like the first Nightlands tour, which was a couple years ago: I didn’t really have any business being a frontman in a band. I kinda didn’t know what to say or when to say it; I didn’t feel comfortable singing necessarily. I still have so much to learn. The whole thing is just about being comfortable and being yourself. I’ll never be the kind of guy who runs around on stage and makes eye contact with everybody in the crowd. But I think you can be captivating in your own way. But you know I’m working at it. I drink less. In War On Drugs I can be as drunk as I want to be and still play, but I just have one drink before a Nightlands show. Loosen up a bit.

What’s also interesting to me is the amount of emphasis on vocals in Nightlands, transitioning from playing the bass to creating music with a lot of vocal presence and layers of vocals. I guess it’s just that singing is something I don’t get to do in War On Drugs. Because I love singing. I sing in a men’s choir in Philadelphia, and I sing in church choirs. I just love to harmonize. I grew up on the Beach Boys and Simon and Garfunkel. That’s just a huge part of my genealogy, musically. And I also think it’s really hard to do live and I’m really proud of my band that we work hard at it and sing really well together, because it’s just a rare thing when you see a band of four people who can sing really well together.

Nightlands is quite different from War On Drugs… Everyone’s always surprised because they expect the music to be an offshoot of War On Drugs and I think it’s partly deliberate that I just don’t want to make it similar to that at all because you know Adam does what he does so well, and it’s not my thing. We’re just different people and we make music in different ways.

I’ve read about how initially with Nightlands that you had this rigorous process of recording melodies that formed in your brain as you were falling asleep. I know that you’ve discarded this method now…I’m not opposed to it but I think that the first record was…I think I was really frustrated because I didn’t like anything I was writing and I would constantly hear songs in that twilight when you’re falling asleep, but also sometimes in the middle of the night or right when you wake up, and I would always think “I’ll remember that melody, it’s so memorable. I’ll record it tomorrow”, but of course it’s always gone, completely. So I just started recording whatever came out of my mouth the second I woke up. And it took a lot of practice and discipline because it’s the last thing you want to do when you’re falling asleep.

I was in Philadelphia for the first time a few months back and I loved it. Tell me what it’s like to be a Philadelphian, specifically a Fishtownian. I live in Fishtown. Jesse, the keyboard player in Nightlands, also lives in Fishtown. It’s a very interesting neighbourhood. I’ve been there about seven years. It’s gentrifying, but it’s still really cheap to live there, and I think it’s an extremely creative environment. I don’t know if you ever saw the video for Fell In Love With A Feeling [the first video in this interview], but that video came out of me going into the coffee shop and running into this guy David Kessler. I’ve had a bunch of experiences like that where I went to get a freakin’ espresso and I talk with someone, you know? That kind of thing doesn’t happen on Facebook. Well, actually…maybe it does. But you know, you can’t swing a dead hawk in Fishtown without hitting a genius songwriter. There’s just so many genius musicians running around there. It’s fucking crazy. It keeps you on your toes. Oak Island would have sounded like Rusted Root if I’d lived in the suburbs, you know what I mean? You’ve got to be challenged by people, and when I moved to Philly and started living in Fishtown, I had all these preconceptions. And then you meet somebody who’s a genius and they shatter that preconception, and then you meet another person who’s a genius in their own way and you get humbled repeatedly. Then you can start to rebuild.

There’s a Vancouver connection that I want to draw out: you play in War On Drugs and that band did a lengthy, lengthy North American tour with our own Destroyer… Yeah man! I love all those guys. That was a big turning point for War On Drugs. I feel like it kind of made men out of us. Because…honestly, I don’t think we were a very good band before that, and then we did that tour – it was so long, I think it was seven weeks – and it really was tough and we did it and we got better. People were coming to the shows because of the recordings at that point, and the recordings were always really good and then we’d just get up on stage and dick around. Sometimes it was great but most of the time it wasn’t great. Sometimes we’d all be in the zone and strike gold, but most of the time we weren’t a good band and people kind of scratched their heads. And Joseph Shabason, he was the sax player in Destroyer, he is a really close friend of ours now and he played sax on Oak Island. They’re like brothers to us now and I’m hoping to look up Nic [Bragg] and visit him at the record store [Zulu in Kits].

Nightlands and Efterklang play The Biltmore Cabaret Thursday March 14th. Tickets at Zulu, Red Cat and HighLife.

————————————————————————-

Daniel Colussi is the Music Editor of Scout Magazine and a contributing writer to Ion Magazine. A veteran employee of Zulu Records and tuneage aficionado, he DJs on an infrequent basis (about four times a year) and is a musician around town who plays in several ensembles.