Mi Ami

Were there any exceptionally good shows on your last tour?

I think our two best shows were in London and Krakow, we've always had really good shows in both those places. It's funny though because people have really different attitudes about like music and what music means or like the way music is perceived. People in London are really generally up on hip, new bands so they're like talking about going to see this and that person who has this one record out or some tapes or something. Really up on the new thing. Then you go to Prague and people are still really into like classic 90s like serious sort of like Fugazi/Shellac stuff. That's the legacy that's informing a lot of stuff there. This girl said to us the three best shows she'd seen were Shellac Nomeansno and us. I'm not saying our band transcends everything, but like there's these radically different perceptions that totally negate each other. The people in Prague and the people in London would probably hate each others' record collections. I don't really get into everything that's new and hip, but I also don't think the 90s was that great. I just like whatever.

How would you personally describe Mi Ami?

It's kinda a mystery to me. I don't even know what we're doing at all. I wish there was a scene we could say we're a part of. Like, "Oh we're in this new garage rock scene. Us and like 7 other bands." I dunno, those are like social circles and they're stoked by whatever captures the public imagination. I just feel like we're just doing our thing. Not on our own though, because we are connected to a lot of other bands. When I see other bands I feel like, "Oh what they're doing is cool." There's bands that I like that we're friends with. A band like Pissed Jeans. We're friends. I like them. They're an incredible band. But what we're doing is pretty different from them. I just appreciate it for what it is. Or These Are Powers. What they're doing is different from us and Pissed Jeans. The community we're a part of is more like friends who happened to have toured together.

Have you seen any funny attempts to try to categorise you?

Yeah well the thing that always confuses that me is that a lot of people who write about us talk about how it's like all these different genres mixed together. That's just like so contrary to my experience of what we're doing. I guess we play like rock music. We just don't think about genres. Some people feel like, "Oh, this is gonna be my garage rock project, so I'll write a garage rock song. Then over here I'll write more pop songs or like poppy garage rock or garagey pop songs." I'm just not really interested in it. I don't think that's a radical thing. Tonnes of bands don't fit in with genres in a particular way. Some people say we're like post-punk. OK, fine, whatever, but if you're really gonna be post-punk you have to be like, bum bum BAW bum bum BAW DUN DUN. Like funky bass and cutting in and out guitars. Like Gang of Four. I dunno, whatever. But like my experience of the band is not one in which we're like, "This is the African part (which everyone gets all hung up on), and this is the funky part, and this is the noisy part and blah blah blah." It's like, we're just jamming. To me it's super-unified. I'm not bummed that people are talking about it, but I'm sorta baffled that people are like this is the craziest sounding music. One reviewer was talking about our song Latin Lover and it's like it starts off with drums playing a pretty simple beat, the bass is playing a pretty simple, funky baseline, I'm basically just playing D. So it's like drums, bass, guitar, all in D, driving forward. This one reviewer was like, "It's the craziest electronic music." I'm like, did you fuck up and put Aphex Twin on by accident? It's not that crazy. I mean black metal is pretty crazy. I'm not saying we're like mild. I just dunno. Maybe everyone's listening to too much Animal Collective. The reaction we've had like, I'm thankful for it, but to me it's just sort of not even that unfathomable or like crazy with genres or whatever. It's just like a weird rock band.

What would you say that you like singing about?

If I have a rule for singing it's that I just wanna avoid like some kinda like political statement. By statement I mean like an order. I really don't like it when songs have a political agenda and it's like, "this should be your anthem." Or it's like aiming to convert you to a way of thinking, and in the song there's a very clear right and a very clear wrong. I know what I think is right or wrong, but I don't think it's interesting. In a sense to lay it out and be like, "Yes, I'm gonna try to convince you of what I think is right and wrong because I know I'm right and I know this other shit is wrong." I dunno, I'm like, "I think I'm right, I might not be right." To me it's more interesting and more relatable to hear songs that are about like a feeling. Like Gang of Four. One thing they did really well is that they are intensely political, but they're just sort of like examining feelings. That song At Home He Geels Like a Tourist. It's cool because you're not being like crammed down with like, "And here's how we're gonna fix the problem!" It's like, "Heres a bad feeling," and you can like hold it and examine it. It works so much better than like, I dunno, I can't even think of some like political anthem. Like, THE PRESIDENT IS BAD. That shit's boring. I like singing about politics or whatever, but I guess the same would apply about a song abut your ex-girlfriend or something . I don't wanna hear a song about how terrible a woman she is. That's so boring. I'd rather hear a song about the ambiguity of life or something. I dunno. Maybe keeping things a little bit ambiguous seems more honest because you never really know, you sorta sense and feel your way towards an opinion or an action or a stance or whatever.

How do you go about creating music?

There's a lot of jamming. There's always been a live dynamic. If you sorta scroll through our catalogue you're not kinda find a lot of like Frank Zappa-esque changes or like quirky songwriting little like turnarounds, stuff like that. Really we like get in the zone and build it up. We take care to write the songs in ways that seem fluid and stuff, but there's not a lot of like funky little breakdowns where we bring in the clarinet and shit. It's really just like jamming and then kinda fumbling around and something starts to come together. In some ways that's limited, but in some ways it's very free. That's always been how it's been for me. It's like practical and tactile. You don't spend a lot of time worrying about minute details you just build a song and strip away the things that aren't strictly necessary.

Has it changed over time, like with the old LP and the new one?

In a sense yes, and in a sense no. Practically speaking, the band didn't do anything differently. Like we didn't say like, "Now we're gonna change a bunch of stuff." But we'd been touring a lot inbetween the records. We started to write the second record before we went on tour, but then we went on tour for like 12 weeks. So when we got back the songs we'd written we'd been playing every night so they were like super developed, and then it was like writing more was really a breeze. I feel like mainly the difference between the two is like the first one, I like it, but there's parts that I hear that's like us trying things out and not being sure of what we want or what our bands about. On the second record, by the time we went in the studio, we knew exactly what we wanted. There was a very clear feeling of our identity. That's a really exciting feeling, but it's almost scary too because it's like what do we do next. I dunno if you heard, but our bass player's leaving, so we're gonna have to change the whole thing up again. I don't even know how we're gonna do the third record. In a way it's sorta like, not good timing, but it's like I'm glad we got this record out. We're talking about how to not get stuck in a rut. Once you do something that feels like full, you can do it again and again and again, but you have like diminishing returns. We know how to play together and we've already nailed the dynamic, so how do we push that? That was a lingering question in the air.

What's with the Bob Marley thing?

I dunno when it started exactly, but there's been sort of a general obsession with like Marley, hippies, and like I dunno if its just like a California thing, or a feeling of like there's a real charge to the Marley image which is like a combination of like disgusting and hilarious. He's so much of an institution that it becomes this weird like totemic image of power. In a way it's like Marley the man, the musician, is like somebody. He was a person with a talent and something to bring to the table. But the world of like commerce and like business drew a circle around him and has like taken him and made him theirs. So like now Bob Marley isn't Robert Nesta Marley any more he's like Bob or Marley, the patron saint of bullshit. Now for me it's like as an artist you get to draw a circle around that circle. You can take the image and like reimagine it and play with it so it's not an image of a man but like an image of like a commercial logo. Like this twisted idea of a brand that's there for a person whose also a musician. Tonnes of people listen to his music, but like so many more people could identify his face. People can identify him and what he represents without hearing his music. I don't quite know what I think of Marley, but something about him has this like weird, hilarious, but like potent power to it.

What's the coolest thing you've been able to do through the band?

There's so many things that've been really amazing. This is kinda boring, but it has a lot of meaning for me. When I moved out to San Francisco from Washington DC a couple of years ago, I didn't think I was gonna be in a band like this ever again. Like a rock band or a band that plays a lot of shows. I wanted to play a lot of shows, but I felt like, "Ah, it's probably not gonna happen." So for a while I was playing guitar and working on music at home, and I was at school for music, and I knew that music was really important for me, but I didn't know what I wanted to do with it. Then I met Damon, our drummer, and we started a band and there was this incredible like weight lifted off my shoulders and the horizon opened up and I began to feel like that this tiny, limited, little world view I'd been walking around with was a prison of my own imagining and that I had this incredible friend and like partner to play music with. Then when Jacob joined he really completed the band. What we've done compared to other bands is very, very small, but to me it's like huge. To be able to play to people who care about your music is an amazing gift.

On the more hilarious side, I don't even know. We haven't opened for any like huge crazy bands. I dunno, it's always kinda a trip when you go to Europe and you play a festival and you're off in the side rooms, then you move to the main room and there's like 3,000 people waiting in line for 2manyDJs or something like that and its like, "What are we doing here?" I dunno, honestly, I have to be like really earnest and say like being on tour, playing to people who are excited about it, getting involved with a bunch of labels, especially Thrill Jockey and Touch and Go, two labels who we grew up with and are so respected, playing with your friends is a really wonderful feeling. All that stuff. It's not very sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but it's like the best. It's a beautiful charge. Like being in a band is a lot of times really boring. A lot of bands are bullshit and don't need to exist. A lot of bands are out there like kicking around and not giving the audience anything or not giving themselves anything. It' just sorta be something to pass the time with. Even when you are in a band that has an audience and they're psyched and you really go for it, there's still a lot of times where being in a band is kinda boring. People wanna know, "Have you got big plans for the next album?" It's like, "nope." Or, What are you gonna do when you get home?" "I'm gonna watch TV and relax." Not that exciting, but it is still like exciting because you feel that like inbetween all the drives, and waiting, and stuff you have to deal with, and the effort you expend trying to get a show together or write a song, it has this like tremendous meaning.