Music > Interviews

Interview with Edward Sharpe

11/06/12

There’s an honesty to the music of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, an honesty akin to the kind only achievable at birth – or rebirth. It’d be the latter that Alexander Ebert, lead singer and founder of Edward Sharpe would have arrived at after his transformation in perspectives when he left power prog rock group Ima Robot as a drug addict, moving house, leaving his girlfriend, checking in to rehab and finding consequent solace on a friend’s couch. Writing a novel about a messianic character in the throes of a fall from grace, he unearthed an alter-ego Edward Sharpe. Stumbling serendipitously upon the figure of Jade Castrinos outside a coffee shop, sounds began to flesh out the character, until we get the cherished band who have spoken directly into our hearts with their now two albums. You know the kind of story – it’s the magical mystery kind…

What making your heart quicken this evening?It’s our friends Crash’s birthday so… we’re doing a little thing today, we also had a really good sort of recording interview today in which I declared the difference between pessimists and optimists, the difference between cowards and courageous folk and that was a pretty intense moment. And that’s about it - just another grey day over here in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Alex it seems only right that it’s 11.30pm in the evening in Norwich and we have been drinking and getting tattooed and it made me wonder what your perfect Friday night was?Oh boy, well it depends on what kinda mood I’m in, sometimes the perfect Friday is just resting in bed watching Netflix or something, or sometimes some of the best times are hanging out with friends and playing music and laughing and telling stories, y’know, just smiling a lot, probably my favorite past time.

You’re playing Latitude Festival, which is very close to us. You had to call it off last year but I imagine – and I haven’t gotten to see you live yet - but I imagine your set works just perfectly for a festival atmosphere?Yeah, the Latitude folks are awesome and super creative, so it sort of pushes our limits and in general the festival atmosphere is very fun for us to participate in and I think the music plays well too.

And are you fully integrated with the UK festival tradition of rain, mud and booze?No, no, I don’t know much about it, nor do I want to necessarily; I know that it’s an all or nothing experience so I know that in order to really get down I have to throw myself in entirely. But y’know, I can do that, I know that festivals are at their funnest when they are experienced full tilt and not in the VIP section or something.

Now talking about your relationship with the UK, I was really heartened to read that your favorite album is Sandinista by the Clash, has your musical spectrum always stretched across continents?Yeah, the first thing I was really exposed to when I was little was Pavarotti and actually I had a statue of Buddha, which I thought was Pavarotti. I guess it doesn’t always matter to me. I’m super into anything African basically and y’know, Cuban and a lot of the Brazilian sort of tropicalia, anything that’s good that strikes my sort of fancy. And I think that most all folk music from around the world is severely good; it’s usually outrageously good, all the folk, local folk music from around the world.

It has such genuine roots doesn’t it?Always just powerful, powerful and simple.

I read that when Edward Sharpe came to life, you aimed to write music for people that was the soundtrack to their lives. I’m very happy to say that ‘Home’ was my wedding song last year; it was my first dance song. I’m sure I’m not the only one - did you imagine that you would be making such string connections with peoples lives?I did imagine that, I used to imagine it all the time; that was always one of the goals, and I think especially when… I knew for instance that when we wrote ‘Home’ and when we recorded the demo that for me this was something that had been missing in music for a long time, a giant gap in music that I didn’t know was there but then was suddenly revealed to me because now this song was here. It was a sort of genuine, erm, back and forth duet without any sort of irony or bootylicious quality. It is just a love song, a friendship song, a beautiful song. It was really an eye opener for me and I felt that, and felt that it would be for a lot of people. So I guess in some ways I did imagine it and it wasn’t shocking to me that it resonated with other people too.  I have got great wedding stories about ‘Home’. My favorite one is that it was raining and ‘Home’ wasn’t the first song or anything and no one was dancing and ‘Home’ comes on and the groom and his best man look at each other and they both start grinning and they run out into the rain and start dancing like wild and everybody starts pouring out into the rain and dancing. And the whole wedding party are in the rain dancing; I thought that was such a great… so great to be a part of people’s lives in that way and to accompany them in their spirited moments.

I don’t want to focus on Edward Sharpe as a character too much because I see the rest of the bands huge significance but when I read that he was a character that kept getting distracted by girls and falling in love I wondered is Edward Sharpe a hopeless romantic?That was sort of my stance a while ago, I sort of felt that I was deemed distracted by my alternate self by relationships a while ago and it’s sort of a funny subject to me, so I was writing a novel about this character named Edward Sharpe, so that’s how the name Edward Sharpe came about. But I guess, no, I wouldn’t say I’m a hopeless… well, fuck, I don’t know. You come to earth and you want the full gamut of experience of feeling love and pain and so I do, except without so much of the pain hopefully. But ironically love is nice pain, so that’s good too and I guess really it’s finding the love within yourself to transcend the emotional pain of living – that is really the ultimate story and then spreading that from yourself to others is then the rest of that tale. That’s sort of the story of this band I think, in a lot of ways.

I’m so excited that I have had the stream of the new album, ‘Here’ for a couple of days now - I guess when you were writing ‘Up from Below’ you were still getting to know each other, did that mean that the creative process for ‘Here’ differed? I read that it was gonna be a bit more of a Wu Tang operation?It was different in that everyone was participating a lot more equally and there was a lot more time spent on this album as opposed to just a couple of us doing a lot of it and then people coming in and out. As we needed them, most of everyone was present for a lot of it; if they weren’t recording themselves then they would be around supporting, throwing ideas in, whatever, so it was a lot more collaborative and I think that changes the experience of the recording process as it brings us closer together.

I was excited to read that Rough Trade are throwing listening parties around the UK for ‘Here’ this weekend, before its released on Monday. With that in mind, I wondered what’s the perfect environment, do you think, to listen to ‘Here’ in?Oh boy, I guess like a living room with some food and maybe some wine, a nice stereo system, maybe even listening on vinyl or something would be the nice thing to me. Maybe some rugs or a carpet or maybe even a fire, y’know, even though it’s the summer. This album to me is sort of a meditative sort of more subtle and in some ways it’s a very powerful album for me, I think, in its reflective sort of confidence, to be able to speak from a place with very powerful words I feel. In some ways it’s not really a party album, it’s more of a get together album. It’s the first half of one part of a double album and the second half will be coming out later on this year, in November, most likely. And that half is quite a bit more rambunctious, so for that album I would say, I don’t know, get together with your motorcycle gang blasting it out your stereo - it might be a different get together but this album is more of a get together than a party.

It’s interesting you mention listening to it on vinyl, ‘cause in an increasingly crisp and digital recording age you buck the trend by allowing real life, little smatterings of real life into your recordings, which has been really refreshing for me. Do you feel like you are an analogue guy in a digital world?In a sense, I feel a little bit of disgust at the aim of progress, especially aural progress; I think it’s a bit misguided and I think even visual progress is a bit misguided. I was watching Star Wars the other day, 1 and 2, and I was showing it to my girlfriend and it was so terrible. In Star Wars, because it’s the new edition, there’s these new DVD CGI computer-generated animals in the background and shit and that shit looks so fucking terrible with the real objects that were actually there as models. It just suddenly destroys the picture, like the image is just destroyed. And what’s really curious to me is who told them that that looked better, like what is their definition of better? I don’t know anyone that I have spoken to who says that that looks better than when it’s an actual model that’s actually there. Your sixth sense actually knows when something is there or not… anyway it’s an interesting and misguided direction that things have been going in and ultimately they believe that eventually it will be almost realer than the real thing. I think it’s gonna have to take another shape in order for that to happen. I think with listening and with audio, a similar thing is going on where things are getting produced nicer and better and cleaner, all in quotations, but the problem is we are losing some of the most important qualities of music that music ever invented, which is primarily dynamics and the ability to hear something soft and then loud and all of that. I think in our… almost retaliation in the other way, it’s almost to prove a point. You’re right, I will allow people talking to be in the back of the track or off time tamborines and the sound of the room to be there because in some ways it’s just to remind ourselves and everyone else listening that this is really happening. To us I think it’s refreshing, as well, to not succumb to the standards of a false sense of progress, or a sense of ‘professionalism’. It all has its place I think, you know, when it’s time to do something really, really clean, or get edits – I mean, people are editing drums now so that the actual drumbeat is in perfect order and that essentially just destroys whatever feel was going on during the time of the recording and I think eventually serves to dehumanise the music.

You once said “I became self-destructive, but that attitude isn’t sustainable, so I found my way back to brightness and more constructive ways to live, both reactions to the same thing: death.” Death is not something I personally ever quite believe, or can get my head round, but I wondered how you felt living in this supposedly apocalyptic age, according to the Mayan calendar?Hahaha, well I think in some ways it’s probably quite wise not to believe in death, but there is the disappearance and the transforming of things before our eyes in the physical world: the death of this conversation we’re having, the death of the day, the birth of the night, all of these things. I used to cry at every sunset because I was that emotionally disturbed by the death of things. It’s a tough call, but what I’ve experienced and what I would prefer is that we live on. What I’ve experienced, particularly through one friend dying and then communicating with me – because communication verifies in certain ways – I do believe the spirit lives on, and obviously the atoms live on, and the energy. As far as living in an apocalyptic age, I do take that into account when people are like, ‘are you gonna come back and play for us again?’ and my answer is usually, ‘well if the earth is still doing its thing…’ I think the most important thing is to try and seize the day, as they say, and try and remember that it really could be your last day on earth, and you should live your life to its fullest. It’s about doing what you can, and we can do so much.

Emma Garwood

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros perform as part of the Latitude Festival line-up from 12th – 15th July. For tickets, go to www.latitudefestival.co.uk.