Nathan Larson On A Camp, Film Scoring & Working Standing Up
MALMO, SWEDEN; HARLEM, MANHATTAN: We caught up with Nathan Larson, rock guitarist and bassist (Shudder To Think, A Camp, Hot One), film score composer and record producer/engineer, just after he’d touched down in Sweden for A Camp’s European tour in the Spring. Before its U.S. release, A Camp’s new record, Colonia, had already gone Gold in Sweden, the native country of lead singer Nina Persson and singer/songwriter/guitarist Niclas Frisk.
“The record’s huge in Scandanavia,” Larson qualifies, when asked about the scale of A Camp’s tour. “It’s also doing really well in Europe, getting a lot of radio play.”
A Camp’s (l-r): Nathan Larson, Nina Persson and Niclas Frisk
Generating at least some of the immediate buzz overseas is Persson’s pop-star status for fronting The Cardigans and Frisk’s popularity from his days with rock band Atomic Swing, but Colonia is also a legitimately long-awaited record. It’s the follow-up to A Camp’s critically acclaimed ‘01 self-titled debut, which was never released stateside, though at the time and ever since, Larson and Persson — who are also married — have resided right here in NYC.
Frisk joined them in NYC last winter to make Colonia, which Larson produced. They recorded it with Geoff Sanoff in a few NYC studios including Stratosphere, Loho (now closed) and Magic Shop as well as Mission Sound and Larson’s own studio in Williamsburg, mixed it with Alan Weatherhead at Firehouse 12 in New Haven, and released it in the U.S. on Nettwerk. And, A Camp finally toured America in May and June, performing Colonia‘s exalting glam-pop melodrama to still-relatively virgin ears. We recently chatted with Larson about A Camp and other musical pursuits:
Q: So this is A Camp’s first U.S. release. Tell me about how you’re getting Colonia out there?
A: All you really want out of a label is for them to get your record into stores, put up some money for marketing, and allow you to work with your own connections (i.e. publicists). It’s all about drawing from all your past experiences and pulling a great team together, which we were able to do. It’s a real positive for us, as a band, that there are all these really experienced people, former employees of record labels, who are floating around working as freelancers now. You can hire these amazingly experienced people to work your project. You create a virtual record company around the record company, to sort of augment it. And then you dissolve it once the project is launched and out there.
What about your tour? Do you have a drastically different touring band for the big shows in Europe, as opposed to the ballroom venues in the States?
Yes! In Scandanavia, we’re bringing a gospel-style choir with us, and we’ll have keyboards, bass, drums, guitar, vocals. It will be a relatively stripped down tour in the States. We’ve never toured the States, much less put out a record.
The goal is to get over the hump and get to the festivals, which is where you make your money. You end up losing money doing these tours, but you have to get out and play to hone what you do, make contact with your fans and the people, and then you do these festivals and they pay really well, especially in Europe. You can recoup the money playing one festival in Europe. So, we’re doing those many weekends this summer and that’s going to be the way we support ourselves.
And have you scored any films lately? How do you integrate that work with being a rock star?
My favorite recent film scoring project was for a movie called The Messenger, which is coming out this summer. I also did a big Hollywood movie and a couple documentaries, which were pretty cool. I squeezed as much work as possible in to that period of time between finishing Colonia and getting ready to head out on tour.
Nathan Larson produced Colonia and recently scored the feature film, The Messenger.
Where do you do the majority of your film scoring work?
For the most part, I work in my studio in Williamsburg, which is really like a punk rock rehearsal space. It has no proper acoustics and there’s like metal bands playing next door. But we’ve been renovating our house up in Harlem and I soundproofed one of the rooms there to be used as a studio, which will up my game a bit. Nina and I were really too concerned with the aesthetics to make it a truly professional studio though (laughs) — it’s a turn-of-the-century brownstone and we really didn’t want to mess it up!
I consulted with some people, including Geoff Sanoff, who recommended the best materials for sound-proofing, and we put it in the ceilings and the floors and between the walls.
How do you typically compose and record?
I really like working in Pro Tools, because I can be mobile. For example, I finished these last few movie projects on the road, working in hotel rooms on my Mbox while we were off doing promo for this record.
So, I’d recorded everything in Brooklyn, but in terms of editing and moving things around for soundtrack work — honestly, you can do so much with just recording a whole bunch of material in the same key. My formula, which seems to work well, is that I do three pieces of music. Once I’ve locked in one piece of music, I do three variations on that and then I just stack as many different instruments as I think might work on top of each other. I record as much as I’ll possibly use and then move things around and edit from there. Like, one cue in the movie will be a cello solo’d with some kind of pad, but those two elements are taken from a 32-track session.
So you record tons of stuff and then pare down?
Well, I do try to stick to the methods I developed in the earlier part of my career that was spent working to analog tape. I really do try to keep myself to 24-tracks at the most, and preferably 16.
Any other essential tools or methods to your film scoring work?
I read something Brian Eno wrote about standing up while you’re working, which I’ve noticed is actually big in Scandanavia too. Eno’s theory is that you do less and therefore you do less bullshit. So, I started doing that — I raised all of my stuff up to chest height and it does seem to do something. You work faster.
Also, as far as making a commitment to sounds, I don’t like recording MIDI information and then changing sounds later on. I think it’s nice to commit to something from the beginning: I like this sound so I’m going to record it. I think it’s better to make decisions as you go.
So, is there any particular style of film you’re drawn to or prefer to work on?
Apparently there is, because the stuff I generally work on is either super political and there’s some sort of a dark or violent undercurrent. There was a point in my life where I’d decided I was going to do movie scores. I had some friends who were doing it and they encouraged me to move out to LA, and so we did it. My wife and I rented a place out there, and I was really open to it. But then you realize when you get there that there’s a very clear track you can get on, this track that’s wide open to you once you’ve done a successful movie.
Like, I did Boys Don’t Cry in 1999, and for three or four years after that, there was this whole track of mainstream Hollywood work that was open to me. And, it’s a track that leads to all of these really mediocre but very, very high grossing, high-paying jobs like American Pie 3 or Halloween 6 or whatever. Some of these movies do have their own merit, so, I gave it a shot — I did this big-budget Hollywood movie.
What was that like?
It was a funny experience — I realized pretty quickly that the director and I lived in two completely different worlds. The film involved the Vietnam War, and they wanted something that sounded “Asian,” which is ridiculous and unoriginal at best.
I’d remembered hearing this dude playing the Erhu down in the NYC Subway. I rode around looking for him and found him on the N/R platform at 34th Street. I tried to talk to him but he couldn’t speak English. But there was a Village Voice, and Boys Don’t Cry was still playing, so I was pointing at the movie ad and saying, “I do music for films.” Eventually, some people came along who were from this guy’s part of China and they translated. And so he ended up coming with his nephew to my studio in Williamsburg.
So, this is my big Hollywood film score: this guy comes in and I decide the best way to do it is to have him play everything in D. He’d never worn headphones and his nephew’s like ‘no, don’t worry, he has perfect pitch.’ Turned out this dude had played with the Beijing Opera. So, I just sang these melodies and the guy did his thing and we recorded a whole bunch of stuff into Pro Tools.
For the drum element, I setup Kevin March (Guided By Voices) with a couple floor toms, a bass drum and mallets, and he played along, and that was the whole score!
So, they went for it?
Totally! I had to present it to this whole committee of people. And typically, you’d present a demo and then do a big, orchestral recording at the stage. But I’d never done that, and I’ve yet to do that. So, I played the director a scene with the music I’d recorded. He liked it and said, “Oh, it’s going to be great once you’ve recorded it.” And I was like, “No, this is it. This is the recording.” And he sat there for a few minutes, and finally said, “Great!”
Visit A Camp at http://www.acamp.net and to get in touch with Nathan Larson, email him at: natolarson@gmail.com.