Interview Kevin Dixon of Brief Candles

Brief Candles sterling 2006 release They Live We Sleep is a much-played favorite down at Decider HQ, especially on these bone-crushingly cold days when the band’s blurred guitars and sad melodies perfectly convey the isolation and loneliness of a long Wisconsin winter. In case that makes They Live We Sleep sound like a total downer, the record also includes a blazing cover of Flock Of Seagulls’ pop classic “Space Age Love Song” that’s nearly as catchy as Brief Candles’ originals. They Live We Sleep is so great that Decider is getting greedy for another Brief Candles record, so we checked in with guitarist Kevin Dixon in advance of tonight’s show at Y-Not III about the status of the band’s new album.

Decider: It’s been two years since the last Brief Candles record. What has the band been up to?
Kevin Dixon: We’ve been so busy playing shows that we really hadn’t had a chance to write songs. I think in the entire time that we had been playing all those shows, we had written one or two songs. So, almost a year after the last CD came out, we were like, “Wow, we should start writing something!” Our first CD came out in 2003 and our last one came out in 2006, and we were like, “OK, this time we’re going to really buckle down.” But our songwriting is so spotty. Our band is very democratic—everybody writes the songs, and everybody is responsible for liking them. So, if there’s a detractor that says a song is bad, it gets cut out of the set.
D: You and your bandmate Jen Boeniger are married. What’s it like being in a band with your wife?
KD: I like it. It’s not bad at all. For the most part Jen is pretty easy-going about things. It’s not like most married couples—if it were we’d probably not be in a band together. It’s been really nice, actually, because you can talk about guitar pedals with you wife. Or you can talk about how you want to change this on your amp, or on your guitar settings. There’s a lot to talk about.
D: Is it awkward having your wife around when you’re trying to pick up groupies after the show?
KD: Oh yeah, totally. I don’t think groupies happen anymore. I think it’s gone. Or maybe it’s just us. Maybe we’re just ugly. Jen has actually gotten hit on a couple of times. They’re all really weird.
D: Where are you at with the new record?
KD: We’ve been working on it for too long. We started in January, and recorded six of the 10 songs. Then I had a particularly nasty school schedule that semester, and we overloaded ourselves on shows and didn’t focus on what we were trying to do. And we lagged a lot. Then we decided we wanted to find someone to mix and produce what we were recording, which led us to get in touch with this guy named Adam Pierce. All four of us are really big fans of The Swirlies, and our bass player was talking to a friend of his in Chicago and he was playing him some Swirlies stuff. He was looking at the names on the record and he was like, “Oh, I know this guy. So, we got in contact with Pierce, and he happens to run a studio out in New York. He was totally into helping us with our record, so we went out there in November and mixed and did a couple of songs. We’re definitely going back to him to finish up the record.
D: How would you describe the new record?
KD: It definitely has a little more energy and a little more … I don’t know. It’s still coming out. I wouldn’t go as far to say it’s aggressive, but it’s definitely different. Somewhere in the process of going out there I thought, “We contacted this guy, why wouldn’t we let him decide?” I let him guide it and do whatever he wanted to do. I realized he’s a very reactionary guy, and what he was reacting to was the energy of the instruments. He focused in on that, so there’s not nearly as much reverb. I don’t know if he had any preconceived notions of what kind of music we were. He listened to the last CD, but never once did he ever bring up shoegaze or My Bloody Valentine. It wasn’t really in his vocabulary. It was more in terms of other stuff. I kind of like that.
D: What do you mean “other stuff”?
KD: The only thing he ever brought up was early Slumberland Records. He always talked in really vague terms. [Laughs.] He did the mention the Swirlies, because he was in the band and he knew, based on our sound, that that was an influence. I think we wear it on our sleeves pretty well. The Swirlies did some of the same stuff as My Bloody Valentine, but they always did it with more rock and less pop. It was a little bit more eclectic, because it was always more focused. My Bloody Valentine was always real cerebral and all over the place, and it’s beautiful and poppy at the same time. The Swirlies are more rock. They were on the same label as The Lemonheads.

The Swirlies, "Bell"

D: How do you feel about the “shoegaze” tag?
KD: Initially, we were like, “We all like Ride, we all like Swervedriver, let’s be a shoegaze band.” After a while, we began to realize that we liked a lot of other stuff and that that can be incorporated just as much as anything else. For the most part, whenever people come up to us and say, “Oh this sounds like that,” they’re pretty much right. We listen to all that stuff. We’re not the kind of people that would disavow knowledge of ever having heard it. I see bands say that sometimes, like they had this completely original idea that just happened to be done by someone else. It’s hard to do something that’s 100 percent original. Usually things are more a collection of influences. It’s how you put those influences together.