The Low Anthem

Providence folk rock trio, The Low Anthem, played an impressive set last Wednesday night at The Great American Music Hall (check out our recap). Before the show, Plastic Milk SF sat down backstage with frontman Ben Knox Miller and bassist Jeff Prystowsky to flesh out the band’s many influences, experiences and experimentations.

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Plastic Milk: Before you formed The Low Anthem, you both experimented with a lot of different genres. What about Americana really drew you in?

Ben Knox Miller: It happened totally unconsciously. There was no definitive moment. We didn’t sit down and come up with a band sound and then realize it. We just always played music and it slowly evolved.

Jeff Prystowsky: I mean, you know how it happens. You hear a song on the radio and you’re like, “Wow, that’s great. Let’s try to play that.” And then you’re like, “Hey, who does that guy listen to?” And suddenly you’ve got a new record and month later you hear something in that record and it’s just organic and it naturally evolves.

Plastic Milk: Are there any specific bands that really influenced you and your sound?

BKM: Yeah. There’s lots of bands and there’s lots of writers from Leonard Cohen to Tom Waits. John Steinbeck was a big part of the last record. Charles Darwin influenced the last record. I don’t know what genre he is [both laugh].

But you trace all those songs back and they kind of lead you back to the same place, which is Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams. Everything sort of diverged out from those two voices. The folk tradition and then the country tradition and blues kind of crept into that, with Elvis Presley segueing it into pop music. But yeah, I think everything comes back to Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie.

Plastic Milk: You formed the Low Anthem back at Brown University. How has your music evolved since then?

JP: Well, when we first started we were playing some very naïve and foolish and, in retrospect, very embarrassing electronic pop music. We had a drummer who was on his computer coming up with beats and we were called Hi, This Is Otis and then we were The Asthmatics for a little while. We used to play frat parties and did this great cover of “Hey Ya” that would then segue into “Hava Nagila” with everyone hopping around. We went through so many different versions of ourselves before we ever decided that we would try doing music professionally and get gigs around the Northeast.

Plastic Milk: You’re very creative with your instruments. I love in the Lake Fever Sessions version of “This God Damn House” where you whistle into two cell phones. The sound is incredible. What do you consider the most interesting or outrageous instrument that you’ve ever created?

JP: Well, there was the filing cabinet that we used for one gig.

BKM: Yeah, we put a speaker in a filing cabinet and dropped all these nails and pieces of old scraps into the filing cabinet and the speaker would play tones and it never worked all that well, but the idea was to create resonance in the cabinet and would get the thing sizzling. So it would become this gigantic percussive, tonal sizzler. It sounds much cooler than it ever turned out to be. We tried that for one gig and it went very poorly. But the filing cabinet’s on the record, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin.

There’s all kinds of stuff. I think pump organs are our big thing. Our sound. There’s a lot of organs and old wind-powered reed instruments, which we collect and patch up the insides of. There’s all these organs that are pretty bulky and no one knows what to do with them, so they put them up on eBay and we’re buying them up all over the country.

Plastic Milk: Now you mentioned that your sound is very organic, but when you are creating music is there a way that you try to stay true to the tradition of Americana or are you deviating from it. Do you keep that in mind when you’re composing?

BKM: I think that we have a great love for it and that sort of writes us in a natural way. We have a very deep respect for it, but we don’t consider ourselves to have a revivalist sound.

JP: Justin Townes Earl. His father is Steve Earl and he’s named after Townes Van Zandt. He has to carry on the tradition.

BKM: Or Rosanne Cash who’s put out a record of twelve songs that her father recommended and said these are classic iconic American songs.

JP: Yeah, so there’s people that really make a point of trying to carry on the tradition and want to embody that. We just love those songs and they crop up in our music in a natural way.

Plastic Milk: You’ve played some incredible festivals this summer (Newport Folk Festival, Glastonbury, Bonnaroo, SXSW). Was there a particularly memorable one – be it the location, the people or the fellow musicians?

BKM: Well, we got rained out at Bonnaroo. We had some really good festivals too, though. I think the best festivals we played this year were at England’s End Of The Road festival, which was beautiful – great booking, really good bands, really good vibe. And the Newport Folk Festival was the other great one. We had a great gig there because it was a hometown gig for us and it was an overwhelming amount of enthusiasm. Glastonbury was great too.

Plastic Milk: With this national tour and amazing critical praise, is there another album in the works or are you just living in the moment?

BKM: We’re living in the future [laughs]. We’ve been touring this record for so long, but the new record – we’ve been writing songs for it this whole time. We self-released Charlie Darwin last September, but recorded it eight months before that, so we’ve got two years since we last recorded. We’ve just been collecting songs and scheming for the next record. So, we’re sort of thinking ahead – not that this tour isn’t important

But you know what you should check out? Check out Stereogum. They’re previewing our new music video “Charlie Darwin” which is this cool stop-time animation. Really beautiful.

Oh, and we’re gonna do a headline tour next Spring. We’ve never done a proper US headline tour.

JP: And London.

BKM: And our biggest gig yet is coming up in London. For some reason, London was immediately responsive to our record. We’re playing a 2,000 capacity venue, which is so much bigger than anywhere we’ve ever headlined. So we’re excited about that too. It’s like a great experiment, because our sound is not a massive sound that can necessarily fill a space like that. We’re a little trepidatious and curious to see what will happen, but it’s exciting to have a chance.

By Kelsey Bryant

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Live! @ The Great American Music Hall: The Low Anthem