Interview: Little Barrie

Staff writer Megan Ammer spoke with psychedelic rock act Little Barrie’s vocalist/guitarist Barrie Cadogan about the band’s fourth studio album, Shadow. They discussed how quickly the album came together, the album’s rumored theme, and what the band plans to do with their new release.

So Shadow is the band’s fourth studio album, and it sounds unlike anything the band has done before. How are you feeling about the album and the creative freedom that’s in this one?

I think it is different than the last record we made or the ones before. It’s kind of darker and it’s kind of moodier, I think, in its sound. We experimented with different kinds of guitar sounds. We still wanted to capture the out-of-bounds life and I think we achieved that more in this record than we did before. We wanted to capture the performance element as a group in these recordings. We recorded quicker than we’ve made an album before as well.

Yeah, why did you need that sense of urgency with this album?

Some of it is due to financial reasons, a lot [of bands] these days don’t have the luxury to spend a long  time in the studio to make a record, so it was some of that. But also it was fitting it around other commitments that we have, you know. Also the studio we recorded it at is very popular and it’s tricky because of demand.

Yeah, because you recorded it in 17 days, so were you only given 17 days or did you just record it faster than you thought you would?

We had 17 days because after that someone else was in the studio. We recorded it in eight, mixed it in eight and the last day was mixing it somewhere else. So the whole thing was done in 17 total.

So if you recorded in eight days recording, did you spend 12 hours a day in the studio or how was that process?

We tend to work from around midday to about between 10:00 in the evening. Not really long days compared to other people in the studio, but we got quite a lot done, I think. We got through it pretty quickly. I think we’ve got a good relationship with the (studio) engineer, Seth, because we’ve worked with them before. The more you work with people the less you have to discuss. I think because we already had that experience of working together, each time we work together again it becomes more free flowing.

So you guys were also involved in the process of the mixing for the nine days too?

Yeah, me and Virgil were at most of the mixing, I was at all of it. We sort of described what sort of lead we wanted to take it to a certain place and (they) would call us in and ask us what we think and that’s how we did it. It was mixed pretty quickly, like two tracks a day and sometimes more.

Shadow has a theme of motion – why is that? You said you added a more performance-based sound to this album. What other things did you use to make it be about movement or motion?

That’s been picked up on and stretched out a little bit. There’s a motion theme to some of the songs lyrically, but it wasn’t deliberate, some of it came out. We’re interested in making music for a movie; that’s something we’d like to do. With this album we weren’t making a sound for film, because there wasn’t one, but it was the bit of the idea of fitting it with some kind of moving image. So there was a bit of that in there. Also, we experimented with different sounds to give it a darker mood and some of those things came into it as well, so maybe the motion thing is a combination of some of the themes of the songs but also the idea of moving pictures as well. Kind of a naïve idea to sort the score of film that doesn’t exist, but we wanted to capture it.

Where do you think this album is going to go?

We’d like to take it and play anywhere. We thought a lot with the last album, but after a while you want to do something new. We’re really looking forward to it. We just returned from a tour of shows on the East Coast of the US and that’s the first time we played a lot of those songs in front of people. The response was good. It’s nice to do something fresh.

Do you see a major difference in the audiences in the UK and the US, especially with the songs you just played?

In some ways, the two are a little different, but I think it varies from town to town. In the UK the audiences can be a bit reserved: I think people are a bit shy there. But, there’s certain places in the UK you don’t get that. A lot of these songs haven’t been heard by people yet, so you’re playing a lot of new songs. But we just really want to play and the response is really good.

What are the plans for summer? You toured a lot with the last album, are you going to tour a lot with this one?

Yeah, we are. We haven’t got any huge blocks of tours booked at the minute, but we’re going to be doing more later on in the year. We have a few things over the summer, but we’re going to have some dates for the West Coast in America in October, we’re going out to Desert Stars Festival and some of our own shows as well. We’ll do more touring in late summer into autumn.

Alright, well that’s all on my end. Anything else?

We’re really looking forward to getting out and playing the album. I think with this album we’ve captured the band as it is. We feel like we’ve learned a lot since the last record because we toured so much and we’ve grown a lot. We’ve grown together with it.

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