Creeper Lagoon Plants "Garden," Preps New LP
By securing its opening spot on the Dandy Warhols tour, Bay Area fave Creeper Lagoon has finally emerged from the shadows of the studio, where the band has been toiling away on its new album, the group's first since 1998's acclaimed "I Become Small And Go.
In conjunction with the tour, Creeper Lagoon has just issued a five-song EP, "Watering Ghost Garden," via SpinArt Records. The band hopes the EP will tide fans over until the release of its second album, "Take Back The Universe And Give Me Yesterday," next year.
"We've been making this kind of opus record for the last two and a half years, since 'I Become Small And Go' came out," frontman Ian Sefchick recently told MTV News, "and it's just taken so long. We've worked with so many different producers in so many different studios. We're
actually [treating
this] like it's recording college for us, and we've got our own computer recording [equipment]."
"We've just been taking so long to do that," he continued, "and we've had so many songs that we were like, 'Hey, nobody's going to hear this stuff.' Because there can only be, what, 11 songs on a record, usually, and we've got hundreds of songs. So we picked some really good songs that we had that we didn't think were going to go on the record and put [them] on an EP." [Real Audio]
For "Take Back The Universe," Creeper Lagoon has been working with producers such as former Talking Heads keyboardist Jerry Harrison, David Fridmann (who collaborated with the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev), and Mark Trombino, along with a host of different engineers and mixers.
During its recent live sets,
Creeper has been
playing several songs from the "Watering" EP, including "Centipede Eyes" and "Big Money Struggle," [RealAudio] the latter of which was produced by Harrison and was being considered for inclusion on the LP.
"['Big Money Struggle'] was done in the sessions for the upcoming album," guitarist Sharky Laguana noted. "It was just one song. I guess we're not really very good at collectively figuring something out, but somehow we collectively figured out that that wasn't going to be on the album. I don't know exactly how we stumbled across that."
Sefchick added, "and
the EP was going to be even more mellow than it is. It was really going to be just demos that we put out, and then we decided to put a little more work into it, and it turned out to be fun to do that. But 'Big Money Struggle' was an exciting song, so we just stuck it right in the middle of [the EP], just a little up-tempo thing."
"Just as a kind of change of pace," [Real Audio] Laguana agreed.
Creeper Lagoon did indeed opt for a change of pace during sessions for "Watering Ghost Garden" and the forthcoming new album, as the band chose to eschew the samples and drum loops the Dust Brothers' John King grafted onto several tracks from "I Become Small And Go
"We're not really using samples very much these days," Laguana noted. "It's
mainly just us playing everything."
"But we're not really using the hip-hop beats," Laguana continued. "The thing we noticed, too, was that when we stopped using the samples live, it seemed like people enjoyed the shows more."
"And we still get laid," [Real Audio] Sefchick jokingly added.
Creeper Lagoon will wrap up its opening stint for the Dandy Warhols following an October 17 show in Minneapolis, after which the band may head back out on the road to support J. Mascis on his fall tour.
Creeper Lagoon's "Watering Ghost Garden"
is in stores now, while DreamWorks Records tentatively plans to release "Take Back The Universe And Give Me Yesterday" in March 2001.
Dates where you can catch Creeper Lagoon in the next few weeks:
- 10/11 - Toronto, ON @ The Guvernment (w/ Dandy Warhols)
- 10/12 - Detroit, MI @ St. Andrews Hall (w/ Dandy Warhols)
- 10/13 - Cleveland, OH @ Grog Shop (w/ Dandy Warhols)
- 10/16 - Chicago, IL @ Metro (w/ Dandy Warhols)
- 10/17 - Minneapolis, MN @ Quest Club (w/ Dandy Warhols)
- 10/19 - New York, NY @ Mercury Lounge - CMJ
- 10/26 - West Hollywood, CA @ The Troubadour
