La Rocca
The Irish foursome chats with Venus Zine about tabloids, song-writing, and moving State-side
By Caroline Evans
Published: January 2nd, 2007 | 7:50pm
The reception on the other end crackles. Bjorn Bailie, frontman and chief songwriter of La Rocca, talks to me via his cell on a short excursion from Los Angeles, where he makes his home. It's the day before the launch of the power-pop group's debut album, The Truth, and the band members are on their way to Pasadena to get haircuts.
"If it cuts out, don't be alarmed," says the transplanted Irishman. A pause. "Unless you hear a crash."
Bailie and his band moved to California after signing a year ago with Dangerbird Records, deciding it was easier than having to constantly cross the Atlantic for business.
The album, which was written while the band was still living in Ireland, was produced by Tony Hoffer, who has also worked with Beck and Belle and Sebastian. Hoffer's previous work with eclectic musicians made him a choice candidate to record The Truth, an album that explores various sounds; from the sparkling U2-inspired pop of "Goodnight" to the spaghetti-western saloon stylings of the title track.
"'Goodnight' was the only song that was really changed when we started recording it," explains Bailie. "The song we had in Ireland was a lot bigger, I think because we have this huge-sounding chorus on it. But [Tony] suggested a quieter but cooler approach to it. We thought it would be more intense if we had these big backing tracks on it, but it got more intense by pulling the back out of it."
I begin to ask him about La Rocca's Sing Song Sung EP released last spring, but his cell dies before I can finish the question.
Half an hour later, Bailie has made it to a Pasadena cafe with more reliable reception. I go back to my last question. The Sing Song Sung EP is in fact a reissue of the band's 2003 release on Ireland's Wet Clay records. Why re-release it? "Our album got pushed back a few months and we just wanted to put something out. There are three songs on there that weren't on the Irish release. The two songs on the EP that are also on the album ["Sing Song Sung" and "Sketches"] really make the album. And the EP's really eclectic, like the album, and we thought it would be a good way to ready people for that."
Many of the songs on The Truth deal, naturally, with lies, deceit, and, well, truth. We live in a world of media spin, government corruption, and corporate fraud; Bailie, a former journalism student, chronicles his own truth-seeking on the album. "I've never been there, but the brochure's nice, says the staff are very friendly but the management lies" he sings on "Eyes While Open," while on the title track he bluntly asserts that "making up stories was all I could do, and you know that the truth ain't worth shit."
"People take what they read in newspapers and tabloids very seriously, but after reading what just one person has to say about it, they have to go and make up their own mind about it. You get tabloids that don't have any fleshed-out stories in them. In the UK, around 3 o'clock, bins are just filled with these tabloids because the stories in them are just so condensed."
Another theme of the album is writing ("All I have is this journal that I write, sketches of a twenty-something life," sings Bailie on "Sketches"). "Lyrics are something that all of us in the band are into," he explains, "and they're something that bands we like have always put a lot of effort into. And I think it's something that's really gone down, especially those ones that just have loads and loads of lyrics, like mid-sixties Dylan."
Though the album contains no ten-minute epics, Bailie acknowledges the large amount of content. "There are a lot of words on there, we didn't want to hide behind minimal lyrics. There's a lot of stuff in there, and you'll see that in the album artwork and the CD booklet as well."
But Bailie isn't perturbed by giving too much too soon. "We felt it was important, for a debut record, to give people a good idea of what they can expect. If they are going to judge you, they may as well judge you by everything you have."
Issue #35
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