An interview with Nightbird Casino

It’s generally a pretty democratic process. One of us might come to rehearsal with a riff or chord progression we’ve written, generally on guitar or piano, and present it to the rest of the band and if we like it, we’ll generally jam on it for a while and see if it coalesces into a song. Occasionally, someone comes in with a fully formed song and then we all kind of develop it into our own thing. We have a single we’re releasing in a few weeks – we just finished recording it – it’s called Radio Anxiety although maybe that will change. It started with a guitar riff – interestingly that original riff is now only audible for like, ten seconds, in the finished song. But anyway it started with that, and we all just kind of jammed on it, eventually a chorus just appeared from the ether, and then we took a piece of another song – a bass riff that our drummer had written actually – and that got slapped onto this song and became a bridge and so on.

The last part to be written is always the lyrics, that’s my homework. I rarely come up with vocal melodies or words when we’re writing as a group. Usually we finish an entire song, structure wise, record a very rough demo, and then I use that to develop a melody to, and eventually lyrics.

As far as themes, no not necessarily. Lyrically, I don’t write “about” specific topics or situations. Any given song could be an amalgamation of snapshots from my real life, observations of the world and other people, political commentary of some sort, puns and wordplay, even ideas from books I’m reading or have read.

Great question, I’ve actually never been asked this. I think it’s a combination of several factors. The first thing is definitely, is this possible to perform live? Several of our songs, especially off earlier albums, involve either full or partial orchestras. One track off Gregorian Nap, Cotopaxi, is instrumental, and is performed entirely by a piano and a full orchestra. Obviously songs like that are, for practical purposes, not able to be performed live, at least not at your standard gig, so to speak. Otherwise we try to play everything out at least a few times. If it goes over really well, we’re going to keep playing it. If it gets a lukewarm reaction – which tends to happen with slower tracks – we may play it less or not at all. As far as transposing them for live, it boils down to condensing the most important “parts” of the song. For instance, we may have a song with six or seven guitars layered in the studio. I’m just one person so I have to decide, is there one particular guitar part that’s most crucial to the song? Or is there a way I can combine these parts? That same process can take place for each instrument.