It was a cool summer’s Sunday night in Chicago and where was the Tart? Well darlings, I’ve been looking forward to this An Horse/Telekinesis show for weeks and let’s get this out of the way right from the get go… they did not disappoint! I got there extra early, as I had been promised a brief interview with Kate Cooper and Damon Cox of An Horse, before the show. Schubas is a cozy place; I’ve been there many times, and back in the day it was a regular watering hole of mine. So I freely wandered around looking for the band and eventually found Damon who led me downstairs, to the rabbit warren of a secret room where the band hides before hitting the stage. What followed was a wonderful conversation with two people who soon began to feel like old friends. We laughed a lot—at each other and at ourselves—and I think I got a small piece of the “real” story of An Horse for you, my dears

Kate the Ballsy Front Woman

Here’s the usual write up of An Horse’s music, in brief: They sound like good alt-90s, grunge, pop/punk, full of yearning and heartbreak but not taking it too far over the edge into melodrama. They’re a combo of sweet vulnerability and anger, and for a young duo they make a heck of a lot of noise!

So I confronted Kate and Damon on this description to see how they would describe their sound.

Tart: Well, you’ve been described as a “ballsy front woman,” (we have a rueful laugh at this! Although it also seems to make Kate snarl a little too.) And also as, … this is my favorite quote… “a little too pretty to be punk, a little too raw to be pop, and a little too elegantly constructed to be rock & roll,” [from the great blog katta rokar] … you exist somewhere in the borderlands, are you comfortable with that?

Damon: We don’t think about what we’re trying to sound like. We’re not really trying to sound like anyone or anything. That quote is pretty close, we like pop music and also like punk rock and also like rock and roll. We just try to make honest music. We just try to be as honest with ourselves as we can.

(This honest theme keeps running through our conversation. I’ve noticed it in others’ interviews with them as well. They’re insistent on not being false or disingenuous and they convince me completely that what I’m seeing is simply the real thing, laid bare. It was perhaps the most delicate and revealing 20 minutes I’ve spent with complete strangers in quite a while, …. well, aside from some of my extra curricular activities, but we’ll disregard that topic for now!)

Kate: and that “ballsy front woman” thing… well is he a “ballsy drummer?” He’s doing the same thing. So that gets a bit annoying. I don’t care, I actually don’t read too much of that.

T: any woman out front is gonna get called that, no?

K& D: yeah, yeah

Two Babes in the Woods
I did some research on where these two came from, and well, I was surprised to find that what I wrote about them back in March when I first saw them was basically bullshit. It’s always nice to prove your own self wrong before someone else does, right?

T: The other story that gets told about you is that you were these two young kids that were plucked outta a corn field and stuck on a stage and “Oh my god, you’re fantastic!” Right? But you had a lot of history behind you, … each of you, in your own different bands!

K: People say we came outta nowhere, and we say, “No we fucking haven’t.”

T: you were working hard, both of you, very hard… I mean look at this, in Iron On , Kate toured with Tegan and Sarah as early as 2006…

K: yeah, yeah

T: and Damon had success with Intercooler and Mary Trembles, those are fantastic bands. I listened to some of Mary Trembles on their website last night, great music! So when you two come together, this collision is gonna be fucking fantastic. What do we expect?

D: Yeah well, it’s good that you recognize that. We’ve been playing in bands for… well I’ve been playing in bands since I was 16 and I’m 33 now. It’s not something that’s just happened and “Oh wow, they know how to play instruments!” But it is cool how we came together because it worked so well, I guess. And the An Horse thing has happened so fast so I can see how people can say that.

And, yes, they are happy to be recognized as accomplished musicians. But do not for a minute, my darlings, think that they are cocky in any way or expecting you to pay them some sort of attention for their accomplishments. These are perhaps the humblest musicians I’ve ever come across and musicians are a pretty cocky bunch generally. Yeah most try to pull off that humble attitude but not many can make this trained observer of human behavior believe it unless it’s genuine. I guess bloggers are a cocky bunch too, eh?

Kate and Damon Are Two Tortured Souls Charting Their Path Around The World

T: I’ve heard you say, no more, don’t join our band!

K: Yeah we’re very protective of that.

T: Any advice for duos? I mean with only two of you, if you don’t get along in a van all day… what the fuck do you do?

K: I guess you just sort of, I mean you have to find the right person. Then you don’t need advice. And we’re pretty easy going people, we get along.

They do get along. I watched them throughout the evening. Both onstage and off they checked in with each other the way best friends do. “How’re ya doing over there, Damon?” Kate asks, in the middle of their set as she’s tuning her guitar. He answers monosyllabically, “fine, fine” and gets a laugh from the audience. He comes across as not very talkative on stage but off I think you could get him going a blue streak with the right topic and a quite room. They often speak of how they just seem to fit together, I think it’s very true. Before leaving the room during Telekinesis’ show, Kate tells Damon she’s going. Before he leaves, he does the same. Sure there’s a merchandise table to watch, but there’s a third person there to take care of it as well. Throughout the interview I can see how they give each other room to talk, the gleam that comes into his eye when he pokes fun at her for not following her rules about spending too much time on the computer, the smile she gives him, even as she swerves away from what will be a playful smack on the arm, when I suggest they go hardcore. This kind of relationship is so much there in the music, in the harmonies, the timing of their songs and the give and take between percussion and guitar. They depend on each other, equally. It’s a very real mistake to think that Kate is the emotional one who writes the songs and Damon simply backs her up on drums. This is a collaboration between two people who finish each other’s sentences and therefore write each other’s music.

T: I read that you sometimes bring a song to Damon to make sense of it or to polish it up?

K: Yeah to get ideas, … on a CD … and just to do stuff and go away and listen to it and then we come together to construct it.

T: Do you get words first or a kind of melody first?

K: It kind of comes all at once…usually I write some things down and come back to that book when we’re cleaning everything up and the stuff that’s come initially I don’t like and I swap stuff over and usually it’s just kind of like a diary. And people say, “You write about tortured stuff,” but no, I just write about most days. (we chuckle here, to think that most days are so tortured!)

T: … and that was what was going on…

K: yeah

An Horse: The Next Black Metal Band

Rearrange Beds was clearly a break up album. I’m very much wondering what is next for this young band, with experience under their belts and with quite a bit of road traveled as a group. What’s next?

T: You can’t write another breakup album, come’on

K: well I might! (she takes great glee in the idea of this! …evil woman that she is. Oh do not challenge Kate!)

D: She’s trying to get into another relationship right now so she can breakup with them and write another record (he has a huge smile on his face at this point; he’s puffed out his chest and you can see how he absolutely loves to tease her)

K: no I’m trying to get into another relationship now so they’ll dump me terribly

D: naw… there’ll be something to write about… there always is (getting serious here)

T: But in which way will it be different? Will it be different in sound?…in lyrical topic?

K: It’s going to be different in that we’re much more comfortable playing together, we’ve developed as musicians. But it’s not going to be vastly different since there’s two of us and we’re not going to get a keyboard player or anything like that.

T: You’re not gonna go screamo on us or anything are you?

K: You know what? Maybe! We might go Black Metal, we’re into Black Metal…

T: I heard you were into Metallica, that scared me a bit, to be honest.

D: Well we said that as kind of a joke, to be honest. But I think everyone at one point has listened to Metallica. I listened to Metallica a lot when I was a teenager.

K: And you can’t deny that because that’s formative… and in the record store we used to listen to a lot of stuff and you can’t listen to everything you like all day,… you run out of stuff. So you gotta branch out, you know, and well… they’re historically a very important band. We saw them live at SXSW… it was pretty cool!

T: I get so pissed off about people who are snobs about music. You can get something out of almost any kind of music.

K: Totally, totally! And I hate when people deny stuff that they like. I liked some shit bands when I grew up, but I still appreciate what they did to me back then. I wish I could say I didn’t like them but you know I really did.

T: I loved all those girl bands.

K: Oh really like what?

T: I loved the Spice Girls.

K: Oh well, they were actually really good. (Oh god, thank you for saying this! I do still love the Spice Girls)

D: And well that was all you were exposed to when you were a kid is top 40 music. There’s a certain point you get to when you start discovering bands or looking for a different type of music but up until a certain age that’s all you listen to, or that’s all I listened to, top 40 radio and shitty compilations on vinyl even.

K: …especially pre-internet (we all nod solemnly in agreement, each pondering our old age…. well, maybe me more than them, to be honest!)

Kate and Damon Think They’ll Do This Music Thing Until The Stock Market Goes Up A Little More

You know, there’s one thing that I am absolutely certain about indie musicians. Not one of them is in it for the money. And An Horse is no exception. I knew Damon had said this before but I wanted to hear it anyway, just humor me.

T: So what if this An Horse thing fizzles out? What then?

D: I never had a plan B, it’s always something I wanted to do, is be in a band and play music, and this band is pretty cool.

K: …keep on truckin… (this got lots of laughs from all three of us) and we’d be doing this anyways, even if we were home in Brisbane

D: Whether we were in different bands playing to our friends or to a thousand people I think we’d always be doing it.

K: And for the last ten years we were doing it, …. My siblings do other things… like, they run to exorcise their demons…. And I play music, that’s just my way.

Final thoughts before hitting the stage…

D: Chicago is great, Chicago has been good to us. And we’re very excited to start this tour!

K: We’re excited to be playing with Telekinesis, we love them. And we’re really lucky because every time we’ve been on tour I feel like we’ve been with fantastic people.

D: Well, we try to make it happen that way.

K: Well, like attracts like, right… if we were assholes we’d probably tour with assholes.

No, Kate and Damon, you’re certainly not assholes.

We all agree, have another good laugh and chat a bit more with the tape recorder off and I wander back upstairs to hear the awesome tunes of A Lull. Once An Horse got on stage I kicked myself for not talking more about their live performance. It was seeing them do “Little Lungs” back in March, that sealed the deal for me. I had heard the album four or five times before I saw them play in March and I liked it. But I didn’t love it yet. On stage that night I became a lover. The energy they bring to their music is very real and immediate. It wins you over if you’re wavering in any way. And to love An Horse is to be loved back. My evening with An Horse on Sunday was wonderful and magical and full of more conversation after the show. I can’t wait to see what the future holds for such talented, lovely people who just so happened to rock the fuck outta Schubas that night.

A Lull, who I WILL be posting on soon! Skinny Fingers go buy their album!

Telekineses, who were wonderful, especially this song! Coast of Carolina yeah, buy that album!

Mary Trembles, who once was the home of Damon Cox. Not My Fault you can still buy their album!

Camp Out, And you know I have An Horse posted here as a widget to buy their fantastic debut album.

See An Horse on Tour
Jun 8 2009 8:00P, Pike Room w/ Telekinesis, Pontiac, Michigan
Jun 10 2009 8:00P,The Horseshoe w/ Telekinesis, Toronto, Ontario
Jun 11 2009 8:00P, Club Lambi w/ Telekinesis, Montreal, Quebec
Jun 12 2009 8:00P, Iron Horse Music Hall w/ Telekinesis, Northampton, Massachusetts
Jun 13 2009 8:00P, Union Hall w/ Telekinesis, Brooklyn, New York
Jun 14 2009 8:00P, Mercury Lounge w/ Telekinesis, New York, New York
Jun 16 2009 8:00P, Kung Fu Necktie w/ Telekinesis , Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Jun 17 2009 8:00P, Black Cat Backstage w/ Telekinesis, Washington DC, Washington DC
Jun 18 2009 8:00P, Local 506 w/ Telekinesis, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Jun 19 2009 8:00P, The Earl w/ Telekinesis, Atlanta, Georgia
Jun 20 2009 8:00P, The End w/ Telekinesis, Nashville, Tennessee
Jun 21 2009 8:00P, Off Broadway w/ Telekinesis, St Louis, Missouri
Jun 22 2009 8:00P, Slowdown w/ Telekinesis, Omaha, Nebraska
Jun 23 2009 8:00P, Hi Dive w/ Telekinesis, Denver, Colorado
Jun 27 2009 8:00P, Rescue Rooms w/ Silversun Pickups, Nottingham
Jun 28 2009 8:00P, Thekla w/ Silversun Pickups , Bristol
Jun 30 2009 8:00P, 02 Academy w/ Silversun Pickups, Birmingham
Jul 1 2009 8:00P, Stereo w/ Silversun Pickups, Glasgow
Jul 2 2009 8:00P, Academy 2 w/ Silversun Pickups ~moved from Academy 3~ ,Manchester
Jul 3 2009 8:00P, Digital w/ Silversun Pickups ~moved from Audio~, Brighton
Jul 5 2009 8:00P, The Windmill, Brixton
Jul 6 2009 8:00P, 02 Academy w/ Silversun Pickups, Oxford
Jul 7 2009 8:00P, Heaven w/ Silversun Pickups, London
Jul 8 2009 8:00P, Camden Barfly, London
Jul 10 2009 8:00P, White Light @ The Lexington, London
Jul 11 2009 11:30P, Hultsfred Festival w/ Kings Of Leon, The Killers, Franz Ferdinand, Peter Bjorn and John & more Hultsfred
Jul 17 2009 8:00P, Slottsfjell Festival w/ Kaiser Chiefs, The Streets, The Wombats, Foals, Turbonegro & more