It has been a busy year for the soft rock trio that make up Blonde Redhead, as they have been touring around the globe nonstop since they came out with their latest album Sit Down For Dinner. Albeit tiring, these three were born to perform and are always right at home on stage, working to one another’s strengths seamlessly. Blonde Redhead have had a seasoned career and with each new decade they have fine tuned their craft that has given way to an ongoing evolution with each new record.
What became their 10th full-length studio album, Sit Down For Dinner was released a year ago today and had been heavily anticipated by fans for many years. In fact, there is a nine-year gap between their last release, Barragán, in 2014 and Sit Down For Dinner. As described by the band’s lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Kazu Makino, the album’s title was inspired by Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. In it, Didion describes witnessing the premature death of her husband while sitting at the dinner table.
The entire album carries with it many practical and powerful messages on the theme of growing up and struggling through life’s phases. What Makino was really drawn to is the idea that life moves increasingly fast, so we have to try and slow down in order to take note of it otherwise we will have a much harder time adjusting when things inevitably change. The unexpected often happens without notice and quicker than we could ever anticipate, some for the good, some for the bad.
I sat down with Blonde Redhead’s drummer Simone Pace to talk about the success of their latest album, the past year of touring, and his take on the band’s three decade long legacy. Simone and his twin brother Amedeo Pace, who goes between guitar, keyboard, bass, and vocals, are the other two founding members of the band.
Tell me a little more about the title of the album and what it means to you, beyond the initial inspiration behind it.
Kazu came up with the title, and we all loved it for different reasons. To me, the idea of Sit Down For Dinner is something that the three of us always do together whether we’re on tour, whether we’re recording. Growing up in Europe, and then Kazu, in Japan, there’s a lot of strong traditions. Dinner was always a really magical moment because it’s the moment that you feel really good; you feel happy; you drink some wine, and you have really good food. It becomes a moment when you sort of stop whatever you’re doing, and you interact with each other in a different way. So it releases a lot of tension that maybe is happening from the tour or recording, and it’s an important moment for us.
How has the response for Sit Down For Dinner been since the release and as you have been on tour over the past year?
It’s been great. Obviously, it grows from the time we released it to now because people are starting to get to know the songs more, and that takes a little time, but the new songs are pretty energetic for the most part. People get very excited about them at this moment, which is great. It’s very good to be able to get a response for most of the songs, if we end up playing older songs. Sometimes people don’t know the song because, you know, there’s a lot of interchange between the crowd.
There’s some shows where there’s a lot of new people that come and just know us because of “For The Damaged Coda” featured on Rick and Morty and discovered us that way. So maybe they know the last two records, let’s say, but then there are also fans that have been coming from the beginning. So the age range is really interesting at the shows, and it’s really interesting because we’ve been around for so long. You never know how things are going to develop, how things are going to change, and you have to be ready for anything.
Walk me through the process of producing this album; did it differ from your previous works?
So, at the beginning, with the first couple records, we made the first one in two days and the second one in, like, three or four days. It took one day to mix both of those records. Then, slowly, we started getting more recognition, and the label was growing its budget. So, at that point, you start evolving and thinking, OK, let’s take a week for this record; we can afford to take a week, and then you’re able to experiment with whatever instruments are in the studio.
We did that with Misery using strings instruments and had a friend do all the string parts.
When you take more time, it’s very clear to see the growth of the record and what you’ve done. But, it’s almost like an intellectual growth as well as a musical growth, and everybody’s still learning. Everybody’s still wanting to experiment, and it’s a really intimate moment when you’re in the studio and you lose sense of time. Things flow out of you, and you don’t know where they’re coming from but it’s intuitive, you have to trust your instincts a lot.
In what ways do you feel the album represents your evolution as a band compared to your earlier albums?
The development was really clear for me until the success of 23; then things started getting a little strange. It started getting strange with Penny Sparkle because we had producers, so we were not so hands-on. Then also for Barragán, we had a producer that was very hands-on, so we were just absorbing other people’s inputs instead of just our own. With 23, we were on our own in the studio completely, which was great. Then for Sit Down For Dinner, it was chaos because it was during COVID, and we were stranded upstate. We had done a bit of a pre-production for the record in Italy, but we didn’t know if any of those songs were actually going to make it.
Then COVID got really bad, and Kazu couldn’t go back to Italy, where she was living at the time, so we were stuck here. That’s when we dove into the record, but it was hard because we had to wear masks, and sometimes somebody would feel sick. Amadeus and Kazu were staying in one house, while I was staying in another house. I would record things at home, and they would record things on their own. We knew the songs were good, but we didn’t know what the record was going to be. Slowly that happened, but it wasn’t all planned out. It was complete chaos, but it was also fun at the same time.
Finally, we mixed with Sam Owen, who did a great job in tying everything together and making the record sound really coherent. So thanks to him, I think we were able to put out a record that sounds like a record, not like an incomplete puzzle. If you ask me about the evolution to where we are now, I think it unconsciously evolved in a way that should have evolved but it wasn’t really planned that way.
Photo provided by Blonde Redhead, credit to Charles Billot
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