Supersweet

Interview

Department of Eagles

It's a big big world out here!

SUPERSWEET's Benjamin Pester decided to swoop down unexpectedly on multi-functioning music project Department of Eagles and listen in as Daniel Rosen and Fred Nicolaus talked sell-out tours, Grizzly Bear and a beatnik rise from difficult childhood ashes…

SS: Are you guys New Yorkers or just Californians living on the east coast?  
Fred: I like to maintain that California spirit.  
Daniel: I have a fondness for California. But always find it vaguely depressing when I go home.
Fred: I just like to stay in New York and idealise California.

SS: We take it that you voted?
Fred: We did, absentee. We actually voted in California for Obama. I’m sure it’s going to be great to start with, but then reality sets in and there are just so many intractable problems.

SS: Daniel – you’re involved in Grizzly Bear while the DOE have strong links with artists and filmmakers. How important are these affiliations? Is DOE the main project? What’s in the middle of it all? Tell us!
Fred: (Laughing) Daniel is kind of the middle.
Daniel: What makes this band hard to latch onto is that it’s not really a band. It’s more of a project. It’s not four guys making music in a room, it’s like two guys writing songs. And then there’s the other guys from another band playing on a record but they’re not in the band. It’s very confusing. 

SS: Is this how you plan to work? Project by project?  
Daniel: Well, for me I have Grizzly Bear, which looks like a band, feels like a band. We tour like a band. This is much more flexible and weird.  
Fred: It’s freer.  
Daniel: We more leeway to try out certain things. Bands seem to have set rules. There’s no band code here.

SS: But is there a master plan?  
Fred: No! There never has been and there never will be.  
Daniel: There was a three-year plan of finishing this record.  
Fred: The grand master plan has finally come to fruition!  
Daniel: We’re hoping to do some more. Figuring out what it means to do shows has been really difficult and kind of interesting. We didn’t want to do shows with just the two of us; we’ve been trying to assemble a band to tour with. 

SS: In Ear Park is clearly a personal record, but can we expect the elegiac feel of the album to continue into the next work (if there is any)?  
Daniel: I think that was specific to the record. I’m not really sure.  
Fred: Dan’s father was very sick. He’d passed away and a lot of the songs on the album are centred around memories from childhood. My songs on the album take the impetus from there also, but I think it was inspired by a very specific set of circumstances.  
Fred: If we do another record it’ll be inspired by something else so will probably sound different. That being said, I don’t foresee any raging party rockers, there are no ‘Hells Bells’ in our future. 

SS: So what’s next and when?
Fred: We’ll just leave it up to complete chance! One day we’re eating muesli in a hotel room, the next we’re in Brooklyn twiddling our thumbs.  
Daniel: I think hopefully some shows in the US in January, Feb, March. Maybe an actual strings of dates that could be fun. We’re also trying to get together a video. 

SS: We heard rumours of working with producer Chris Taylor.
Daniel: Maybe. I mean that’s the thing, I don’t even know. If we do another record it could be something different entirely. That said, I work with Chris all the time. I was working with him two days ago. I mean I basically live with him. But, it’s quite possible. [to Fred] I don’t know how you feel about that…
Fred: I think what we do tends to be so random it’s hard to predict. The next record might even be recorded in a broom closet. The first we did was produced in the same studio as the Killers debut but was so low-fi and crazy and it didn’t sell any copies. This record was made in the loft of a church, so I have no idea.
Daniel: We work in such a specific way that Chris and I that I find it hard to imagine working with anyone else. Who knows..?

SS: Are you happier touring or writing and recording?  
Fred: Writing and recording. Well, writing any way. We spent so long writing this album I consider it to be much more of a song-writing project.  
Daniel: This has always been writing, but there might be a really interesting way to make this into a live act. Who knows?  
Fred: Exactly.
SS: Exactly.

Words: Benjamin Pester
Photography: Ofer Benin