Darlingside

When we caught Darlingside‘s Americanafest set here in Nashville, it didn’t take us long to fall in love with the Massachusetts-based alt-folk quartet’s delicate harmonies and highly pensive lyrics. We chat with Darlingside’s Harris Paseltiner and Don Mitchell about writing exercises, playing hometown festivals and orchestral electronic music.

How do you guys go about writing your songs? Do you all sit down and write together or does one of you take the lead?

Harris Paseltiner: We write very collaboratively. We don’t release any music unless all four of us have signed off on each aspect of the music, lyrics and arrangement. Different songs have different journeys – how they get started and finished – but we really like a very collaborative process where we all pool together lyrical ideas, melodic ideas and build up the arrangements with each other in the room. It is a slow process to arrive at a finished product.

Don Mitchell: There’s a whole range on this album from songs where someone brought in a complete draft of the song and we only took the third verse and rewrote the chorus. S0 there are some songs like that that were spearheaded by a person, and there are other ones where two or three of us said, “You have 15 minutes. Write two verses for this song. Here are the prompts: you have to use the color blue and there has to be a unicorn in it, and you have to use a figure of juxtapose. Come back in 15 minutes with two full verses even if they’re the worst things you’ve ever written.”

Harris: We’ll often have a running lyrics sheet with everybody’s lyrical ideas dumped into it. There were times when I opened up the document a few months after we had brainstormed together and I couldn’t remember whose lines were whose. They’re all jumbled up and it becomes this group consciousness. It’s really easy to find the lines that pop out. There’s 100 lines, and two of them are really interesting and I can’t quite remember who wrote them, but it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that there’s two that really pop out. Sometimes it’s easy to return to the first draft that everybody dumps together and pull out the special parts and then build a song off of that.

You made the switch from being a five-piece indie band with a drummer to a four-piece folk band with minimal percussion. What led to that decision?

Don: It was sort of a combination of things. At the time, were playing fewer gigs with our drummer Sam, so as we were doing that, we were experimenting with more acoustic ways to play our old material and that was a fun new way for us to get closer to the original, vocal sound we had when we met in college in a singing group. That was part of it. Another part of it was that we were getting more interested in highlighting the harmonies. We were already looking at some of the arrangements and everything ended up working out around the same time our drummer was able to tour less and less. The band, in order to continue and keep evolving, needed to tour more. So it was a continuation of those two things. We wanted to focus on singing, and the one microphone thing was the easiest way to do our rehearsal. We let our audience in on what we do in a room, which is just standing in a tight, little semi-circle.

What do you think has been the highlight of your career as a band so far?

Don: Last summer we played at the Green River Festival in Greenfield, Massachusetts, which is right near where we started as a band. It’s right between Williamstown, where we went to college, and Hadley, where we originally lived as a band. So that festival was a big thing for us in the area, and going there and being received with bigger crowds than we were used to was an amazing thing. We played a main stage and there were a ton of people and it was great, and then we played the side stage the next day, and it was so intense, but it started pouring rain outside, and [this stage] was the only one that had cover. So everyone came under this tent, and we played this song called “Open Door,” which was unreleased. It wasn’t anywhere on one of our records. We found that pretty much the entire crowd picked up on the words of the song. One of us ended losing our voice, so beforehand I asked if they would help out on the high parts. It was the first time the crowd got jacked up during our performance, but in a beautiful, harmonious way. It just felt [great] returning to our local area and really being embraced in a really unexpected way.

Harris: I’m having trouble picking specific moment, but I love the feeling coming out of mastering a record and the experience of mastering a record. When you’re beyond the point where you can shift any of the mixes and beyond the point of changing any of the performances or any of the songwriting or lyrics and everything is totally done. That feeling of being at peace at the end of the process and being able, for the first time, to sit and more objectively get that kind of look at the work is, I find, a moving experience. There’s a Hebrew expression I grew up singing at Passover called “Dayenu.” It means roughly “this would have been sufficient” or “this would have been enough for us.” And I kind of feel the “Dayenu” moment whenever we’re in that mastering lab. Everything from here on out is icing on the cake. We get to just enjoy riding this out and going and playing it and sharing with people. That moment, it feels like being complete. Those are high points for me.

Who are your favorite songwriters?

Don: I don’t really I have movies that I think of as touchstone movies, and I think its the same with songwriters. I don’t think as much about “What’s my top five?” I think more about which artists have, at some point, been influential. One for me is Loudon Wainwright III, who I sort of discovered indirectly through his son Rufus Wainwright. He was one of the first folky, lyric-based songwriters. He did that thing where a song could be really silly, but also really tragic at the same time. That was an influential thing for me. It doesn’t always need to be one thing or the other and it doesn’t always need to stick to one emotional experience, but it can operate on multiple levels. And also he does character songs. He does songs where he’s a giant, singing from a giant’s perspective. Most of the time I still write in a perspective pretty close to my own, but he sort of freed up a number of things for me that way.

Harris: On an arrangement front, an example of a record I love is Odessey and Oracle by The Zombies. There’s a very, very democratic sharing of the vocals on that record. You can hear all the different guys singing in the group. There’s a huge range of light and dark, uptempo songs, downtempo songs, major and minor, and it’s very orchestral the way its arranged. It’s sort of chamber pop thing, like The Beach Boys and Brian Wilson’s Smile sessions. It’s got these complex arrangements that come across with a simplicity and an elegance in melody that you can hold on to clearly as a listener. I just love the arrangements on those records stylistically. They all hang tight together from start to finish, track to track. There are, of course, great records that sustain song to song, start to finish, but the ones you hold on to are the ones with a huge dynamic range.

When you played here in Nashville for Americanafest, you guys did a great rendition of The Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979”. How, as a band, do you choose what songs you’d like to cover?

Don: When we go to choose cover songs, it’s usually a pretty organic process. We usually happen to talk about this song or played in in the van over the stereo system and say “this would be fun to cover.” We say that all the time. If there’s a critical mass of people who are really  into it, yeah, it takes us a lot to learn a song because we’re very particular about arrangements. We’ve been playing “1979 for quite a while…that is one that I would always come back to and put on in the van. That’s how that one came about.

Harris: I like to cover songs that are simultaneously dark and light at the same time. That song occupies a middle space where you can’t quite tell if you’re being uplifted or the exact opposite, and I find songs like that rather intriguing.

If you could collaborate with any artist living or dead, who would you choose?

Harris: I’d say Bernard Hermann. He did soundtracks for Psycho and a bunch of those Hitchcock films, Taxi Driver, a bunch of stuff. He got into electronic music really early, like orchestral electronic music with things like theremin and mellotron. I just think that bridging the gap from electronic to classical, and also incorporating his cinematic approach, would be fun.

What’s the most perfect song ever written and why?

Don: I think Eleanor Rigby. I think that is a perfect encapsulation of a sort of dark but upbeat song. It has pretty simple lyrics, but they’re given a different meaning by the arrangements of the string quartet behind it. I think that’s a perfect, simple distillation of the mood of songwriting at the time.

Harris: A lot of the best songs for me are the things that exactly nail the mood of what the songwriter was trying to capture in that moment. There’s some great songs that go for being very focused and small. Often at times, at least for me, Nick Drake cuts about as deep as it goes. Those aren’t songs that really try to tackle everything, but hit the nail on the head for having a certain feeling at that time. There’s a song that he wrote called “Road;” I think it’s so simple and so deep. There’s not much to it, it’s just a very moving little piece of music. Something about it takes me in whenever I hear it.