Signum: In terms of production, are you guys really hands-on?

Efrim: Totally, which is hard when we’re going to other studios; it’s hard for whoever’s working to have all these people looking over their shoulder and talking at once and smoking and stuff. But yeah, we’re really assertive with what we want.

Norsola and Sophie. Photo by Marshall Serna.

Signum: I think that comes through in the music, though; the impact is immense. Does each member of the band invest a lot in the exact end-product?

Efrim: I think more so for some than others, which is okay. I think everyone’s emotionally involved with this band on different levels. For some people, the studio, the recording is really important, thinking through the process and the framework is important. For other people, it’s more on an existence level, as a life. I think they’re both levels to be engaged.

Signum: For you, is it–

Efrim: It’s both, for sure. Yeah. I think it’s great. It’s good and I feel lucky that I’ve been able to invest as much of my heart into this… I just feel extraordinarily lucky that this group of people could manage to get together, and that we’ve been able to do this for five years.

It’s sorta harder, lately, to understand what it is that we’re doing. It’s just growing pains. It’s hard to negotiate sometimes. It gets difficult when we start playing halls and stuff. Whatever level we’re at right now? It’s just a bit odd for us. We’re still trying to figure out why it’s odd, and try to make it less odd, and how to negotiate that.

And every time we talk about this, we end up sounding like we’re whining, so let’s not.

Signum: I’ll make a note of that: ‘Don’t make him sound like Eddie Vedder.’

Efrim: [Laughs] Yeah yeah yeah! That’s it!

Signum: But it must be weird, because–

Efrim: Well, yeah, it is weird! And you should be able to talk about that it’s weird… it’s kind of fucked, the way that music is created and consumed, and it’s accepted that this is how it’s supposed to be. I mean, I don’t go to any twelve-dollar shows… so it’s difficult when that’s all of a sudden what you’re doing. You’re sitting on the other end of it. I think it’s normal to be like, ‘Okay, what is this that we’re doing? Why are we doing it?’ I think that’s healthy.

Signum: On the one hand, it gives you the chance to see something different, but that can be kind of threatening to one’s identity.

Efrim: Yeah!… It is identity. It’s a total fear, an anxiety of feeling that what’s being communicated has nothing to do with what it is that you want to communicate, and that you’re speaking with someone else’s tongue all of a sudden. And you can’t understand at all why you’re speaking with someone else’s tongue or how it happened, or why you have this feeling, and you can’t even trust the feeling, but you have it.

It’s hard, especially identity stuff is hard, because you spend your whole life fighting to have one, you know?

Signum: Mm-hm. Do you feel like your inner identity is being changed at all?

Efrim: Yeah, for sure. Which is okay; that’s growth. It’s all strange, it’s all strange… Most of the people in this band have spent most their lives positioning themselves in opposition to anything that was at all popular. Not even as a ‘cool’ thing, not like an indie rock thing… Now to be in a position where even this little crumb of popularity – which is a little crumb, we’re not enormously famous or popular or anything – but even that little crumb is like enough to make us all go into spasms of self-doubt and worry and anxiety.

But we should talk about something else, because that freaks me out. [Laughs.]

 

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