Local band returns home for Pack Howl
Roman Candle formed in Chapel Hill in 1997, a family band in the truest sense: brothers Skip and Logan Matheny playing alongside Skip’s wife, Timshel. After 10 years in town, they picked up and headed off to Nashville, TN, leaving behind their best friends and favorite restaurants. Earlier this year, the band released their first album in three years, Oh Tall Tree in the Ear (Carnival Recording Company), to outstanding reviews: PASTE magazine gave the effort 89 of 100 stars. WKNC General Manager Mike Alston caught up with Skip as he was readying for the trip to Raleigh to play the Pack Howl concert Friday night on Lee Field at 7 p.m. Additionally, WKNC Promotions Director Kieran Moreira, also known as DJ Special K, will be interviewing Roman Candle Friday at 2 p.m. on his show on WKNC 88.1 FM.
Technician: Hey, Skip. Anything keeping you busy these days besides the band?
Matheny: I’ve been interviewing people, I started this series on americansongwriter.com called “Drinks With” where I interview songwriters about songwriting, an artist talking to artists. I’ve been doing Q&As with [songwriters] and I try to stay out of the way and let those guys talk.
Technician: What do you think about playing a homecoming show and opening for a comedy tour?
Matheny: Yeah, it should be great — the only thing we would have hesitated at would be if they had wanted us to play two hours and have people slow dance or something.
Technician: It’s been three years, right, between the last album [The Wee Hours Revue] and the newest one [Oh Tall Tree in the Ear]?
Matheny: Yeah, the other one came out in 2006 on V2 [Records, a subsidiary of Universal Music Group].
Technician: So I want to talk a little bit about the album. You wrote a lot of this when touring with The Wee Hours Revue, right?
Matheny:Yeah, we started writing it….we’d had almost three years where we were shelved on a major label before “Wee Hours” came out, so we had a ton of time to write music while we were waiting for that record to come out …Once we started to travel in support of that record, we went to England in February 2007 to play some shows and sort of stuck around and wrote in a converted horse stable in east Yorkshire. We started writing in a more organized, intentional fashion on the next record, which would become “Oh Tall Tree.”
Technician: When the songs come to you, you want to get them down. Did you intend for the three-year delay?
Matheny: Three years — that’s the speed the music business runs. In 2007, V2 totally closed down as a label, which kind of left us as free agents, which is an easier thing if you’re the White Stripes or Moby or an established name and it’s easy to find a new label. At that stage we’d been burned by just about every label situation we’d gotten into …Hollywood Records, and then V2 got bought by bankers and had to close down. For the most part, we just had to figure out what we wanted to do creatively and organize that …that’s always come first for us. And then once we had that down, then we could go and figure out the business side of it. We were looking for new management and a new lawyer and all kinds of stuff at that stage. So it was really fun to stay in England and write that way …We were able to start writing and come back and record a little bit at home with the album sort of organized in our head. Then we all moved to Nashville, and we started to assemble a new bunch of folks to work with, started chatting with people. That kind of stuff just takes forever. Now we have a great label situation and we’ve put out 3 EPs and an album this year. Once you have all the connections in place and the team you like working with, you can start working quickly. So far so good with this team.
Technician: At a certain point, you must get a little jaded by the business aspect as a musician, so how do you guys define success?
Matheny: I think, no matter what goes on, success for us is making good art; at least what we think is good art. Seeing people’s reaction to it, and playing live, and getting journalists’ reactions to it is all a lot of fun, but on a very basic level we have to decide that we like what we’re doing and then put it out. If that’s going well, then everything else is going well. The whole other side involves money, and it’d unbelievably wonderful to make a living off of what we’re doing.
Technician: It’s becoming more elusive for bands everyday, isn’t it?
Matheny: Oh my goodness, yeah, I mean, it didn’t just start that way in the last six months or anything. We knew going into this record that we’d have to define our own version of what we want out of this before we get started. If we were looking to set some sights on money, we’d be disappointed. Sometimes we do make a little bit of money, but you know, everybody’s still got their day jobs. There’d be another level of success which would be, “we can quit our day jobs,” which would be great, but we’d rather kind of make the art that we want to make. We had our first boy when the first record came out, and we tour with our kids, it doesn’t slow down anything we do. We’ve adapted our art to our family.
Technician: That’s another cool thing, you guys moved to Nashville, and you take the family on the road. How is it different touring and making music with your closest family members rather than stepping away from them to do that?
Matheny: It’s just really, for us, the best way that we work. We’re all good friends to start with, and we all like the same artwork, so making art with those people — there aren’t nice fences set up between family and art, and jobs and life itself. It’s in the same big room, making a big mess. We’ve been doing it since we were really young, and we don’t know any better. It’s worked out so far, our family all has the same kind of artistic instincts.
Technician: I noticed when you said you guys all had similar interests, you mentioned all being inspired by a Rainer Maria Rilke poem, that’s very specific. Matheny: How does the songwriting process work, as a family process?
It’s a very organic, family kind of thing. One of us will bring something to the table first …like with the Rilke poem, we were rolling around our little collection of books before going to England in 2007 and grabbed that book. We started reading that book, and I started reading it all the time, and talking with Logan [Matheny], and it becomes kind of an organic thing with the three of us working together, whether it’s a song or an idea that we get behind. It’s different for every song, to be honest. Sometimes I’ll be working on a lyric in a separate room, and Logan and Timshel will be working on another idea that’s 20 times better than whatever I’m working on, and it took me leaving the room for that to happen. It’s unpredictable, but it seems to work out.
Technician: My favorite song on the new album has to be “Why Modern Radio is A-OK,” which you were quoted in your Daytrotter session as saying is “not a particularly sentimental song,” which I found funny. What’s the story behind that song?
A good friend of ours, Thad Cockrell, was sleeping on our couch for a few months back in 2003 or 2004. We were both working on records with Chris Stamey at the time. I met Thad through Chris…we also did a live record with Thad and Chris in 2004 in Carrboro that hasn’t come out yet.
Technician: The North Carolina roots reveal themselves!
Matheny: Yeah, we still consider ourselves a Chapel Hill band even though we live out here. Anyway, we were hanging out almost every day. I put on a Neil Young record, There Comes a Time, and he turned around and had big tears in his eyes and said, “Cut this record off man, I fell in love with this record. This is heartbreaking stuff.” He was really kind of upset by it. So we obviously cut the record off and put on something emotionless. I felt really bad about it, I ruined his night. Then that song just kind of came in my head, and I had the lyrics for a while, maybe two or three months, before we wrote the music. Normally, it doesn’t work that way, usually the lyrics come second.
Technician: It seems like that song was a chance for you to give a nod to some of your favorite songwriters, who may have influenced you.
Matheny: Yeah, it was fun to get in the names of some folks and songs we really like.
Technician: You guys are playing Homecoming for N.C. State, but it’s also a homecoming for you. As someone who lives in the Triangle, I brag on the Triangle music scene all the time. Talk a little bit about the transplant to Nashville, even though you do still consider yourselves a North Carolina band.
Matheny: Yeah, we obviously do miss the Triangle and miss, specifically, all the restaurants and the people that we love in the area. We don’t have any regrets, we moved out for a reason and it’s worked out well. All we were trying to do is really get a fresh start. At that stage we had been on three labels, a manager, a lawyer, and a booking agent, all of which we had to kind of amicably part ways with. So we were looking for a fresh bunch of people to work with that ideally didn’t live in different time zones. When we lived in Chapel Hill, we had a manager who lived in Atlanta, and a booking agent that lived in Los Angeles, and al awyer that lived in New York. When you’re a young band and you need people there to work hard with you and match your energy …sometimes that works out for people, but it didn’t work out for us that way. When V2 shut down that was the last straw, we just said, let’s pick up and find something new. But it’s hard to leave a place with so many friends and, like I said, with a routine at our favorite restaurants. And Nashville’s got some great restaurants, but there’s not replacement for Carrburrito’s and some of these places that we got really used to.
Technician: If you had a homecoming, who’s the group of people you would want to pull on stage with you?
Matheny: For our last CD release show, we had Chris Stamey and Ivan Howard and Django from The Old Ceremony. Logan tours with the Rosebuds quite a bit. We’d love to play with Thad Cockrell, and Nick [Jaeger] and Jeff [Crawford]. Those are the people that pop in my head first.
Technician: You went to Carolina, and you’re playing this show before NC State and Carolina play each other in football. Any conflict of interest?
Matheny: Not really, I mean N.C. State kids probably all hate Carolina kids. Carolina kids, if you’re making a stereotype, all hate Duke kids. I love N.C. State, those kids are nice …there are idiots anywhere you go. I’d like to think I’ve moved past it, but when basketball season rolls around, I realize I haven’t.
