Interview by Jacob Zlomke
In 2008, Innocent Ghosts appeared from San Francisco band Geographer. It’s a choral indie-pop piece, deeply personal, with all the marks of a band finding their legs: stripped-down production, a sound not yet comfortable in its own strengths. But there’s a promising structure to intricate cello parts working closely with ambient synthesizers behind an earnest, if at times unsure, voice.
The band’s follow-ups, 2010’s Animal Shapes EP and 2012’s full-length Myth, make good on the promises made on their first record in fuller sounds and defter songwriting. For vocalist-guitarist-keyboardist Michael Deni, that growth has mostly served to fortify his confidence in his band’s abilities and given him room to breathe.
After Animal Shapes gained the band some notoriety in alternative music spheres, Geographer has hardly stopped touring for more than a month at a time and for Deni that means a concerted effort to stay in touch with what originally inspired him, and so many other artists, to create: questions about what life is and how he fits into it.
Geographer plays at the Slowdown tomorrow night with Tokyo Police Club and Said the Whale. Looking forward to that, Deni spoke on the phone with Hear Nebraska about the band’s trajectory and remaining relatable in an unrelatable lifestyle.
Hear Nebraska: My first thought when I saw Geographer was playing in Omaha was that I hadn’t heard from you guys in a while. It’s been about two years since Myth came out. What do you guys have in the works?
Michael Deni: We’ve got a new album completed, right now we’re shopping around for the best way to release it.
HN: There was a big shift for the band between Animal Shapes and Myth. Myth has a lot more guitar work and a much fuller sound. How have you continued that growth?
MD: For Animal Shapes, we were a pretty young band, figuring out how to do it. We hadn’t played that many shows really, but we had enough under our belts to see what would work and what wouldn’t work. We kind of made that album about playing it live. Every song, we just envisioned how it would be at a venue, on a stage.
For Myth, we concentrated more on the album itself, that part of listening. like what would it be like for the person in their bedroom. We took more liberties with Myth. It was a full length album, we had a lot more confidence. I wanted to write songs where a lot of them were different from each other, so it wasn’t all the same kind of idea.
There are a lot of albums where it’s the same kind of song over and over again and some are better than others. I wanted every song to have its own purpose and to be good at that purpose.
For the new one, I’ve never concentrated more on songs themselves before starting to arrange them. I really took a long time. We didn’t have any pressure from our label to release the next album, which I had been worried about. It was nice to take time to work on the songs and make sure that we weren’t putting anything out that we weren’t really proud of. I think it’s our best to date. It’s hard to say musically how it compares, it’s hard to talk about that stuff coherently. We’re just trying to make the best songs that we can.
HN: So if you’re thinking about the live performance for Animal Shapes, as you continue, do you think more about the album as it’s own piece of art rather than a companion to your live show?
MD: People are always telling you that albums don’t matter, that the only thing that matters is the live show. I don’t want to believe that. Live shows are amazing. One show can change your life, but i love albums. I love listening to them, I love thinking about the artist making them. That’s the artwork, that’s the work. The rest is like a party for that work and an advertisement for that work. The album is starting to become an advertisement for the live show, for the band. I don’t like that. The work should be the work, the show should be the show. The live show is way more of what you actually do. The album is the thing that you make. I really do enjoy concentrating on that really hard and trying to craft that.
HN: Right, and a show is temporary. A bad show is just a couple hours out of your life maybe, but an album is the permanent thing.
MD: All you hear is what you’d do differently. That’s why you don’t ever listen to it after you make it [laughs].
HN: After Animal Shapes, Geographer achieved this kind of critical buzz and anticipation. Is there any pressure that comes with that?
MD: I didn’t feel any pressure from that. We toiled in obscurity for a while in San Francisco and certainly the rest of the world. We were trying to get our feet on the ground. Seeing that people liked what we were doing was extremely encouraging. You do it because you have to do it, you do it because you’re compelled to do it, but you definitely want people to see what you’re doing. If you didn’t, you’d just do it in your bedroom and never show it to anybody. As soon as I make something, I want to share it. It’s for other people. You do it for yourself, but it kind of belongs to other people.
To see that people will care what I was doing really bolstered our confidence for Myth a lot, that we could go out on the road and play to packed houses.
HN: You guys do feel a lot more confident on Myth. Do you feel yourself growing more confident since then?
MD: After this new album, I don’t feel limited at all. I feel like I could do anything that could pop into my mind. This was the first album where I really wrote string parts. That was something I felt like I didn’t know how to do. Then I just did it and it worked out okay. I feel like now all of music is a tool for me, whereas before I felt like I could play the guitar and the synthesizer and Nate can play the cello. Now I feel like whatever we come up with, we can put it into an album. That feels good that we can stretch our legs as much as we want.
HN: Speaking of string parts, Nate Blaz plays cello with you guys, which for the kind of music you’re aiming at is sort of uncommon. How does the lineup affect your songwriting?
MD: A lot of times I write a part thinking about how Nate will sound playing it. Sometimes I’ll write a part actually for him and I’ll use some synthesizer cello sound and show him the part. But a lot of times I don’t think about. He can also play the keyboards and stuff. For other songs, I’ll write a part and maybe it sounds like something I’ve heard before and I think, well if the cello plays this part instead of a guitar, even that right there is something no one has ever heard before.
HN: Over the last couple years, Geographer has been out on the road almost relentlessly. When do you even find the time for new material?
MD: Between every tour, we’re home for a bit, a month here, a month there, a couple weeks. I hate to sit still. The blessing of that is I just write in my downtime. I’ll give myself a couple days, you know ‘you did a great job on that tour man you deserve to rest.’ Then like a day later I feel inadequate. I want to create something else. Unless I’m making something, I don’t really feel at peace.
That helps with the schedule for sure, because you kind of catch as catch can, but I do like to be home when I write. There are times when I’ve worked on stuff in the van. It’s hard to do that. I like to sit in front of my computer or my piano for like eight hours at a time. You can’t really do that in the back of a van.
HN: Whenever a band gets a couple releases under their belt and take to the road like you guys have, it seems like the next couple releases are heavily influenced by that lifestyle, you know, songs about being on the road. Do you think about that at all?
MD: A lot of bands start to write about touring. I listen to James Taylor, I love the second two James Taylor albums. But they start to sing about touring. I love listening to it, but it always struck me as kind of silly. Who can relate to that? Well, there are so many goddamn bands these days, probably everybody [laughs].
But you can sing about human things, not just your personal experience. Paul Simon said something like when you’re doing your first couple albums, you’re poor and you’re writing about being a poor struggling musician. Once that album makes it, you’re rich. Then you’re writing about being a rich person, which isn’t very interesting. We don’t quite have that problem, but it’s the same idea.
You want to stay in touch with life and humanity. I still feel like I’m wrestling in very different ways with the same questions. That’s the part that has changed most, the confidence of being a successful band, which I wasn’t when I was writing the first songs, and continuing on my own personal journey through life.
Jacob Zlomke is Hear Nebraska's staff writer. Reach him at jacobz@hearnebraska.org.