Before Mew, did you have any early experiments with recording?
I did actually. The most wonderful present I ever got was when my dad bought me this beige Tascam 4-track. I still have it, but it doesn't work anymore. It had a high speed setting, so you could get better quality. In some ways that was always my favorite instrument. It was obviously a very small "studio," but it was a means to learn how to multitrack, and get different instruments to work together. There's a video on YouTube of one of our earliest demo versions of "Panda" that was recorded on that 4-track. It sounds pretty good.
Were you just recording your own songs or as a band?
We did some stuff as a band with that 4-track. I was very prolific then. It's very different now, but back then I'd write a song almost every day. I think the limitation of having four tracks was very good, because you just had to make it work. I'd have a vocal track, acoustic guitar, and then I had an old accordion that my grandmother gave me, and then maybe a track for some percussion. That was how we recorded in the beginning. I found out later that you were able to bounce down tracks, and that obviously opened things up a bit.
With your new education did you start to listen to music differently? Were there any albums that stuck out as particularly inspirational?
I loved The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour record, and Pet Sounds. Later I read how Brian Wilson saw the studio as an instrument, and a way of orchestrating things. Recording is one of my favorite bits of being in a band. It's wonderful to make it all come together like that.
You often double your voice with the piano too.
Yeah, we do that live as well. Nick [Watts, touring keyboardist] plays a lot of my melodies as I sing. It's nice; it makes me sound good!
Do you ever take into consideration how you'll play a song live when you're making production decisions?
No. We do have a lot of challenges with that, but it can't really interfere with making the album. We figure it out later. Having Nick helps — he's definitely a multitasker.
How did the Bang & Olufsen partnership happen?
We're not on Sony anymore. There was very little of our team there toward the end, and it felt right to move on. It just doesn't make sense for us to be on a major label, or even a traditional label, because times are different now, and a label's role has changed a lot. We're really trying to do everything on our own terms and finding the right partners to do interesting things with. The people at B&O Play are just very curious about how we do things, and wanted to do something with us. We talked with them for a long time, and ended up making a unique app. They're collaborators, but they aren't putting out the record. We're doing that with Play It Again Sam. One of the frustrations of being on a major label had been that territories, which we feel are very important to us, like France and Germany, have been difficult to navigate. Obviously we had some muscle there, because we were on a major label, but still, they didn't sign you, some guys in America did, and they might not like the band. If you have five people working for you at a label, and none of them understand what you do, you're kind of screwed. Even if they'll put it out, they won't really back it up. That's just natural, how it is, and I don't think that model works very well anymore, especially now that record sales are so low anyway. When we were considering labels, we wanted to make sure that the people who would be working with our music really wanted to, in all territories. With Play It Again Sam, we feel we've gotten that, and much more. It's been a pleasure working with them so far, and I feel like we're in good hands.
On June 12th, 2013, citizens of Copenhagen may have been confused at the sight of a small army of headphoned people, walking around parks, pointing their iPhones at trees, the sky, and under rocks. That day, Bang & Olufsen, along with Mew, had released a beta version of a free, unique app called "Sensory Spaces," which sends the listener in search of vocal, guitar, and drum tracks, that seem to be hiding in unlikely places, by directing them with audible "warmer" and "colder" cues. Oscar Lashley, of B&O PLAY, explains how it came about.
"We wanted to work with them because we feel we share some of the same beliefs about high quality and craftsmanship. Many of us at B&O think of Mew as a band that is uncompromising in their pursuit of symphonic excellence. It's clear that they pay attention to every single sonic element of their music. In their field they're more or less unmatched. Their musical versatility is impressive, and their harmonies give me goosebumps.
Our creative team worked closely with them to develop something new that reflected both B&O and Mew. "Sensory Spaces" was the result. It's basically a musical journey for the listener, that happens inside his or her own imagination. Using sound, and the built in accelerometer of the mobile device, the user essentially navigates through a sonic treasure hunt inside of an imaginary sound universe. We thought of it as a gift from us to fans of Mew. Of course those of us at B&O appreciate that it sounds particularly great through a pair of good headphones!
Michael Beinhorn and Mew
I had no prior knowledge of Mew before coming onboard to produce ...And The Glass Handed Kites, which is generally how I prefer to work with artists, anyway. Their music struck me as a rare combination of engaging, confusing, clever, and complicated. I was captivated, compelled, and saw my role as trying to adjust the ratios of those ingredients until they felt just right.
We did the recording at my old studio in Venice Beach, which was brimming with character, but difficult to maneuver around. Since I was handling a lot of the engineering, I was constantly running up and down the stairs to place and adjust guitar mics, snake cables through holes in the floor, etc. It was a great workout, if a bit inefficient.
Another feature of the studio was that it was apparently haunted. As we wound down to the end of the project, Jonas began staying there so he could work into the night. Arriving for work at the studio one day, I was met by an ashen Jonas who, by virtue of his Danish-ness is already quite pale. Utterly freaked out, he claimed that the previous evening he'd had an encounter. He'd been working in an upstairs room, and heard glasses clinking and voices murmuring downstairs. Sometime later, he heard a rush of heavy footsteps up the stairs leading to the closed door where he was working. In both cases, he opened the door in a state of terror, but no one was there. Whatever it was that Jonas encountered, no one else experienced anything similar, and it never happened again.
In 2012, my wife Jordan and I met Jonas and his then-girlfriend Agnete for dinner in Los Angeles. It was a pleasure to see my old friend after a few years had passed. However, I began to notice that whenever Jonas was addressing what he, Bo, and Silas were up to, his face began to flush, the pitch of his voice started rise and flutter and his eyes got really wild. This gave me the impression that he was quite stressed, which was even more obvious after he told me that they planned on recording their entire next album in their rehearsal studio, which, in a former incarnation had been an auto repair shop. They also intended on self-producing. At this declaration, I detected a palpable choking sound in Jonas' voice.
