They bake in their music videos, love books, have fringes and wear pretty dresses: Au Revoir Simone are one of So Much To Tell You's favourite bands. Three friends - Erika Forster, Annie Hart, and Heather D'Angelo - began making dreamy music together in 2003 as part of a keyboard club in New York, and now have several albums under their belts (they recently released a remix album called Night Light). It's all swoony loveliness and whimsy with an undercurrent of something a little sinister. I had an email chat to Heather - she's the one holding the candle in the photo above, and also has a blog - about the band's creative process and working with friends.
PS. Here is the music video of my favourite Au Revoir Simone song.
Zoe: Do you remember what you first thought of the others when you first met them?
Heather: This sounds overly romantic, but I first saw Erika from across the room at a bar. She's very striking and therefore impossible not to notice. I was intrigued by her ethereal mystique. When I realized she was fairly new to the city, it made more sense. She had an unsullied, angelic, refreshing naivety about her that I probably had once too but by the time I met her, it had been beaten out of me by N.Y.C living. When I first met Annie, I thought she was intimidatingly cool. One of those crafty girls who knits, fearlessly rides her bikes through the streets, is vegetarian, grows her own organic garden, and majored in women's studies. Many of my initial impressions were right, and many were also wrong. She's taught me a lot.
Zoe: Why did you decide to start the band together?
Heather: In 2003 we got together to form a keyboard club. Little by little, the project transformed from being a club to a band. The timeline of our progression is marked by many, little milestones in our career like naming the band, playing a show, creating a Myspace page, signing to a Japanese label...and it all culminates with our third album on our own record label. The entire process was so seamless and organic, it took being confronted with the task of filling in the occupation line on my landing card for me to realize that I had somehow become a professional musician.
Zoe: How do you create your songs? Do you sit around with a bottle of wine or cup of tea and have a creative brainstorm together, or each work on your own specific thing?
Heather: Often tea, very rarely wine. Sometimes one of us will come in with the skeleton of a song, and other time we create a song from the ground up. But regardless of how the song originates, we all work on them together until they have the Au Revoir Simone stamp of approval. This takes hours of experimentation, editing, and brainstorming. We all write the lyrics too. Once you bring a song in, it's no longer yours, it's the groups. I can't imagine being in a band where just one person does all the writing, not only because of all the pressure in having to be the sole song writer, but also because there is something really beautiful and fun about letting your idea blossom in someone else's mind. The songs I write rarely sound like how I imagined they would once Annie and Erika have contributed to them.
Zoe: What are the best and worst things about working with friends?
Heather: It's similar to getting involved romantically with a friend. There's the potential for something better than what you ever could have had as just friends, but also the threat that you could ruin the friendship if the romance doesn't work out. I think that's why band breakups are notoriously dramatic.
Zoe: Do you do any special 'friend' type things when you’re away on tour?
Heather: We're such "special friends" at this point, I often suspect that anyone who experiences and observes our tribe firsthand must feel like they've been beamed onto another planet and are in the midst of aliens. We speak our own (often nonsensical) language, we have our own eccentric rituals, there's too much to go into. I think that’s why we're always being asked if we're sisters, despite how absurd that question is if you've ever looked at individual photos of us. We don't look anything alike. Or, we look as similar as all women of European ancestry do. The insistence that we must be related is testament to how we've morphed into an indistinguishable unit due to six years of constantly being together.
Zoe: Do you spend much time together when you’re not working or touring?
Heather: We have so little time apart from one another, when we do have some free time, we spend it with our other friends or with our families. We all regret that we don't have enough time to give to our loved ones, so our time at home is pretty sacred. That's one of the hardest things about tour. It's impossible to keep up with your friends in the capacity that you used to. Life happens to your friends while you were away, and so you weren't there for breakups, hookups, engagements, births, even deaths. You miss out on huge, important chunks of your loved one's lives. I was a much more reliable friend when I had a desk job.
Zoe: You all have a similar whimsical, pretty aesthetic: is this deliberate?
Heather: There's no artifice here. What you see is what you get.
Zoe: You guys have worn Lover quite a lot. What are some of your other favourite labels/designers?
Heather: Lover is awesome. I have a blue dress by them that I'm completely obsessed with and I've been wearing it constantly on this tour. I wish I had one in every color! I also love Samantha Pleet, Agnes B, A.P.C, Philip Lim, and Vena Cava, to name a few.
Zoe: Who are your favourite well-known creative friends?
Heather: Jean-Benoit and Nico of Air are definitely on my top ten list. Lesser known but should-be-known would be my dear friend, Alexa Wilding. She's a lovely singer and lady.
photos from au revoir simone's myspace
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