Entire Cities

WL 349

Sunday, February 4 - 11pm

Purveyors of: Alt country, but not the kind you hate

Here’s a handy tip for you kids out there: don’t try to interview six people all at once in a clamorous bar with a half-assed Dictaphone that your parents gave you for Christmas in 1999. Find a better way than to sit down with Simon Borer, Lauren Schreiber, Stefanie Bruce, Paul McCrady and Dave Missio at The Smiling Buddha while Skeleton/Me is doing his sound check. Some of them will already be half-drunk and you will be too distracted by their snappy banter to take effective notes. Evan Dickson learned this lesson the hard way. To be frank, he probably would have lost his marbles if the warm, rootsy melodies of Entire Cities hadn’t dragged him out of the abyss on that wintry Tuesday night.   

You are a huge band. Give me a quick timeline of how the band started.

Simon Borer: Entire Cities started when me and Josh were thirteen and wanted to play in a band together. Skip forward about eight years and we still hadn’t done it. But I got together with a fella named Ben Pullia who plays with Camping Knife right now.

Lauren Schreiber: Why are you promoting people who aren’t here?

Simon: Cuz he’s good, shut up. Uh, and we got together and played some weird, psychedelic, Animal Collective stuff. And then Lauren moved in next door to me. 

Lauren: Essentially, I moved in and someone offered me a show cuz I played ukulele songs. I said yes and it was a week before the show and I still hadn’t thought of any songs. Simon was my next-door neighbor, so I asked him, “If I have a show do you want to have a band?” We had our first rehearsal on April 19 and our first show on April 20. So initially it was Josh and Simon and me...

Simon: And a gerbil.

Lauren: And a gerbil.

Simon: On drums. It was more like a suitcase with a kick... thing, plus a cymbal tied to the back of a chair and a snare drum.

Stef Bruce: Are you guys talking about Gerald?

Lauren: No, we’re talking about gerbils.

Simon: So that was us and then... who joined next? Raise your hand.

Paul McCrady: I don’t know.

Lauren: Stefanie was dragged in kicking and screaming for, like, months.

Why were you kicking and screaming?

Dave Missio: She wanted everyone to beg for her.

Stef: I don’t know. I guess cuz I felt, like, shy? And I’m not, like, a band person? I didn’t even know how to play the saw and I didn’t even have any mentor to tell me if I was doing it well.

Lauren: Simon and Stef are roommates and we all are neighbors. Stefanie is dating Dave. Possibly not by the time this goes to press. The gerbil played violin and ran away.

Simon: Which is why we’re only referring to him as “the gerbil.”

Lauren: And so we replaced him with Jasmine.

Simon: If you ask me, we fuckin’ upgraded.

How do you deal with songwriting? Too many chefs in the kitchen?

Lauren: We have no chefs in the kitchen.

Dave: Simon writes the songs and the rest of us come up with stuff.

Simon: I write some words and some chords and some melodies. Then I usually bring it to Lauren, Josh, and [drummer] Paul [Weadick] and they make it good.

Lauren: Then we bring it to everyone else and they make it loud.

I once suggested to Lauren that you are an alt-country band. She... took exception.

Paul: I think I described us that way and she almost beat me up.

Simon: I think I’d agree, except I fuckin’ hate alt-country. I’m not saying there aren’t some great bands that fit that category, but I’m saying that for the most part [alt-country] bands are really contrived and fetishize this bygone era... 

Paul: What we’re saying is we’re mainstream country.

Lauren: We’re working on something with Garth at the moment.

Simon: I don’t know. We’ve got some twang in there...

Lauren: ...which I tried to have removed. Nobody knows what it is. It’s twang orchestral.

Simon: Tworchestral?

So what’s going to happen at Wavelength? Any surprises?

Paul: Now we have to.

Lauren: On April 20th we played our first show ever with all the members of We Take Lovers – we were opening for them. 

Simon: But they weren’t We Take Lovers.

Lauren: They weren’t We Take Lovers, but all the members played that show, in two different bands, in fact. We opened for them and now they’re opening for us and as far as I know it’s their first show. So it’s a weird mirror thing and they did something special at the end of their set that we’re gonna do at the end of our set.

Paul: We’re gonna play everything backwards!

Simon: Are we doing the coffee thing?

Lauren: Yeah we’re doing a really interesting single that’s going to be unique to Wavelength. It’s going to be a numbered Wavelength exclusive.