Alison Sudol’s soft voice creaked from the ear of my phone, sounding positively under the weather.

Christmas comes early this year when A Fine Frenzy makes a stop here in Sacramento at The Boardwalk on Nov. 13. In the meantime, throw another log on the fire and snuggle up to A Fine Frenzy.

You just released your sophomore album Bomb in a Birdcage that’s been doing quite well. Did you ever imagine or was it ever a concern that your next album would equal if not surpass the first?
I think that as an artist and as a person, whatever you do at that moment you want it to be better than what you did before. You want to have learned from the whole process and you want to take all that knowledge and the growth that you’ve made…and make something better. It was different in a sense that I made the first one [One Cell in a Sea] essentially in a vacuum. The idea that people were going to hear it was a foreign concept. This time, knowing that people would hear it—people who had bought the first album—there was a likely chance that they would buy the second one just to check it out, even. Just knowing that there was a built-in audience and ears on it before it was even out.

But did you have the mentality that you had to gain the respect of new fans while still maintaining the respect of the old ones?
Oh, well of course! I mean you’ve got to put out something good. You can’t think too much on it and worry too much; it’s counterproductive. Because once you start getting into the realm of trying to please people—I don’t actually know what pleases people except for being honest in music and trying to make stuff that I like to hear. That’s really the only gauge that I can trust at the end of the day. I mean, you never know if people are going to respond to that or not. Hopefully, as long as one is putting out something that one believes in with a wholehearted effort you can’t really go wrong there, because at least you know at the end of the day that you did your best.

You’ve said yourself that you’ve stretched your wings quite a bit more on this record in terms of what you can do sonically. Looking back, do you think you stretched enough? Too much? Do you see your songwriting getting louder and more electric seeing as how you’ve already proven you can woo the crowd with the more tender songs?
Actually, no. I never know which way I’m going to go until it starts going there, you know? I actually want to be more folk-y in my next endeavor, and quieter again. For me, it’s sort of more like a pendulum. I’m really quiet for long enough, and then I want to be really loud. Then I’m really loud and I want to be quiet.
Was it difficult to get into the right mind frame of writing and recording Christmas songs when it was the dead of summer?
You know, you’d think so. There was no doubt about what season it was. It was summer. It was hot. My house has the ability to feel quite Christmas-y year round. I live in like a seven dwarfs cottage, pretty much.

You made an effort to set the mood?
Yeah, I mean it wasn’t really an effort for that particular thing. That’s just how I like to be.I’m sort of a Christmas-year-round kind of a girl. Once I started getting into writing Christmas songs, they just fit into each other. I wouldn’t say it’s easy, because it’s definitely hard to write a Christmas song that doesn’t turn into total cheeseville.
I feel like opinions on Christmas songs are quite polarized. Either people want to gag when they hear them or they become tremendously sentimental and can’t wait until December to play them. I think the Charlie Brown Christmas album is something we can all agree on; was that a conscious decision? Choosing those songs?
The three songs that I chose for this—that we chose, because we really discussed it a lot as a band—were “Blue Christmas,” “Winter Wonderland” and the Charlie Brown Christmas song [“Christmas Time is Here”]. Each of them didn’t feel like the typical Christmas song and yet really personified Christmas for all of us in their own way. The Charlie Brown Christmas song, the hardest thing on that really was that it was done perfectly. Perfect. So we were like, “Wait. How are we going to do this without messing it up? It’s kind of hard not to go downhill from there.” But our version is quite different. The whole album is very much its own thing. Somehow, I don’t know how it happened, but somehow “Blue Christmas” sounds cheerful and “Winter Wonderland” sounds creepy. We just tried to put our own spin on it and bring out something different in the songs and tried not to make them gag-worthy. In the other songs, we do use some Christmas tricks, and there are definitely sleigh bells on here, but we tried not to use the typical Christmas shtick unless we did it 100 percent and did it knowingly.

A Fine Frenzy will performed at The Boardwalk on Nov. 13. Oh Blue Christmas will be available exclusively at Target on Nov. 3.

Post from: Submerge Magazine