Introduction

Fresh from recording in Portland with producer Tucker Martine, Camera Obscura are back with the follow-up to My Maudlin Career. We caught up with Lee from the band to discuss the making of fifth album Desire Lines and what they’ve learned in their 17 years together.

Questions and answers

Hi Lee, where are you today?

We’re in Glasgow just now. We have one day off before we fly to America tomorrow.

You’ve just completed a UK tour, haven’t you? How was that?

Yeah, it was just a small UK tour of five shows but they were good fun. You always worry a little bit if you’re playing too much new material… And people either start throwing things at you or just leave. (Laughs) The new songs seem to be going down pretty well though, and they’re really fun to play.

Desire Lines is arriving four years after My Maudlin Career; did you always intend to take your time with this record?

Well, that was partly enforced due to personal circumstances with individuals in the band. Though I think the feeling now is that it took a bit longer than we intended but that it was possibly a good thing; we had been touring for a couple of years up until the point at which we stopped playing in 2010.

I think in terms of the actual recording, we’d recorded the previous two albums in Sweden in two-and-a-half maybe three weeks all-in, and we didn’t want to do that again. The intention was to spend more time in the studio and on tracking, giving the songs on this record more room to develop.

What did you choose Tucker Martine to produce the record?

We were recommended Tucker by a friend who lives in Portland. And the idea of going to another city always appeals to us anyway; it’s good to be away to work because you don’t get distracted.

I think Tucker was a bit more methodical than [My Maudlin Career-producer] Jari [Haapalainen] and, because of that, there was maybe a little more time taken over the basics than there had been before. He was very relaxing to work with too; he’s this very measured, Southern gent.

Portland’s a notoriously creative city. Do you think that recording there had any impact on the process at all?

I think that area has always been quite musically-creative. It’s quite like Glasgow, in the way that it’s this quiet, post-industrial city with lots of warehouse spaces, so it’s conducive to that kind of creativity. Having said that, it did rain all the time, so it’s not like we went out that much! Being stuck in a studio all the time, I don’t know how much it did actually rub off on us, but it’s definitely a fertile environment for music.

So you didn’t get chance to go catch any of the local bands?

To be honest, when you’re listening to music all day, the last thing you want to do is go watch it live. When we had weekends off we did really geeky stuff, like drive up to the coast in Oregon, to the town where ‘The Goonies’ was filmed. That was a highlight for me!

So what was the goal sonically for Desire Lines?

I know that Traceyanne [Campbell, singer] thought that the last couple of records were quite frantically recorded, in that they were just packed with so much stuff; strings and horns and all this other instrumentation. So there was always the feeling that we wanted to get away from that, and write a more measured, quieter sort of record. And we wanted to get away from that 60s feel – those 60s-style arrangements – and maybe do something a bit more modern… Maybe move into the 80s. (Laughs).

Neko Case and Jim James star on the album too, right?

Yeah. Jim James sang on the song ‘Troublemaker’. We never actually met him: he recorded his vocal in-between the tracking and the mixing with the producer. And Neko flew into Portland and we spent a couple of days with her, which was good fun. She tried to do as much as she could really, so she’s on a few more of the songs: ‘Do It Again’, ‘Every Weekday’ and a couple of others.

I think everyone was a bit scared of Neko because her voice is amazing; I certainly know that Traceyanne was slightly intimidated by the idea of this amazing singer coming in, in case it was slightly overpowering. But, in reality, it wasn’t like that at all.

Can you tell us about some of the lyrical preoccupations on the record please?

To me, lyrically it feels like it’s all just a bit more grown-up, and a bit more measured. I think there’s a bit more maturity to Traceyanne’s songwriting: all the big, life-changing things that happen as you get older are reflected there.

Do you have a favourite track on Desire Lines?

A couple of the sparser songs, maybe ‘New Year’s Resolution’ or ‘This Is Love’. They feel quite different for us, and they’re the epitome of what we wanted to achieve on the record.

So you’ve been together for 17 years now: how have your motivations and ambitions changed since you started out?

I don’t think there was ever a plan. It was so long ago I almost can’t remember why we formed the band in the first place! (Laughs) We just wanted to make music on our own terms, and being on good, independent labels has helped that along.

From the beginning, journalists and commentators have always lumped us into this Glasgow scene or Glasgow sound, but there was never any intention to be a part of that. I think that stemmed from the fact that Stuart Murdoch produced one song on the first album; afterwards it was reported that he had produced everything we ever did, which isn’t true. Going to Sweden in 2005 was an attempt to get away from all that. Plus we’re influenced by music from all over the world, not just our fellow Glaswegians.

On ‘Every Weekday’, Tracy-Anne sings, “We might not storm the charts completely but we’ll do our very best.” Is commercial success something that matters to you?

I think we’re not blasé, but we’ll do things on our own terms when we make records; we would never allow people from labels in the studio making decisions for us, but working with really good labels means that they’ve always respected our independence. So in that way we have a clear idea of what we want to achieve.

I think we’re quite realistic as well. It can be quite hard if you don’t have loads of blog-hype or money behind you but I think good music will always succeed regardless of hype or money, so we can only make the best music that we can. We would never make music for other people, and that’s the key.

A band’s shelf-life seems to be much shorter nowadays. What do you think it is about Camera Obscura that continues to capture the public’s imagination?

I think that the shorter shelf-life thing is more of a UK phenomena. We spend a lot of time in the States and it feels like bands can carve out a longer career in the US than they can here. I don’t know whether it’s the fact the UK’s tiny, or whether it’s something to do with the music press over here, but frames of reference for music in the US seem to be a lot wider than they are here. So that allows space for bands to exist for longer, and to develop in the first place.

In our case, it wasn’t like we suddenly burst into the public’s conscious, sold a load of records and then disappeared. We were allowed space to develop, and we just gradually sold more records.

If you could offer one piece of advice to young bands starting out now, what would it be?

(Laughs) Yeah, I’m kind-of getting a bit more cynical as I get older, so maybe I wouldn’t want to be too honest on that question. I’d say, don’t do it for anyone else basically, do it for yourself.

So what’s the plan for the rest of the year?

Well Traceyanne is pregnant and due in September, so we’re going to tour the West Coast of the States – the first half on our own and the second half supporting She & Him – and then we finish that in the middle of July on the East Coast. After Indietracks at the end of July, that’s us pretty much done for playing live until Traceyanne feels better, or capable, or ready, or whatever happens with pregnant women!

Finally, what new records have you been enjoying recently?

I usually spend a lot of time listening to older music, but I did like the new Barbarossa record on Memphis Industries, and I really liked the Goat record last year. And then there’s a band from Africa called Orchestre Poly-Rythmo who had an album out maybe a year or two ago which featured Nick from Franz Ferdinand. That was great.

June 2013