After gaining notoriety in the Albany/Saratoga Springs area due to their vibrant and unique live shows—Melanie plays the drums standing up while singing, oftentimes adding a flute into the mix, while Rich plays the guitar—the duo is about to make a splash nationwide as they head into their first two-and-a-half month long West Coast tour in an effort to spread their music to a new fanbase.
The duo played a CD release show April 6 for their brand new album “Coming into Frame” at Putnam Den to a sold-out crowd, and SIRSY was on top of their game as they proudly played all 10 tracks from the new record. Melanie’s powerful voice alone is worth traveling to see, and combined with Rich’s upbeat guitar riffs, SIRSY is one bandwagon you’ll want to get behind fast.
Saratoga TODAY got a chance to speak with the duo on multiple topics before their show, from their experience recording “Coming into Frame” to what it’s like living on the road.
ST: So, tell us about your new album.
MK: Well, we just released an album called “Coming into Frame,” and it’s a little different for us because it was the first time we really gave over control of the production of the album. Basically, Rich and I have mainly produced or co-produced all our other albums, and this time we worked with two guys, Paul Kolderie and Sean Slade (Hole, Radiohead, Dresden Dolls, Pixies) who are very well-respected in the music industry and have produced just a ton of great people and won GRAMMYs and stuff, so it was a big change for us. You feel a little nervous when you go in the studio with people like that and you know they’ve worked with people like that—you feel intimidated. But they came from the angle of, “Let’s find the best version of SIRSY we can get and get it on the record.”
They also didn’t make us follow a lot of rules that other producers have had us follow in the past—when you record a drum track, you usually record with a metronome [Editor’s Note: a metronome is a device used by musicians that marks time at a selected rate], and we recorded several tracks without a metronome at all just because the song needed to speed up or slow down at certain parts to get the energy of the song.
ST: Was it the producers’ idea to record without a metronome?
MK: They came to see us live at Putnam Den and got a good feel for our energy and personalities and then tried to capture that on the record. In the past, it’s been difficult to capture that part of us in a studio setting, because it’s a very controlled setting and there’s no crowd and we’re layering the parts, but they really wanted to capture that live essence.
ST: So, how long did it take to make the new record?
RL: It was really quick. We got together for a session and did four songs in five days, and then a couple months later we did the other six songs in a couple weeks.
MK: The pre-production took a really long time because we were in charge of that part. When we write a song, we usually turn in a fully developed and produced song idea, but some of the songs that got picked were just acoustic guitar and vocals—there’s a song called “Gold” that when we were writing we didn’t know where we were going with it, so we just turned in a guitar and vocal line and it ended up being one of the best songs on the CD. We actually wrote 25 songs for the album and there are only 10 on it.
ST: Do you still get to perform the songs that didn’t make it on the record?
MK: We can perform anything we want live. The label is really cool and says we can perform whatever we want, even if we’re not making money off of it, so that’s great. There are some fan favorites that didn’t make the cut, but we are performing those live and the label told us we can put those on a later album. But they’re really marketing this album, and it’s kind of our first big splash with the record label and they wanted us to put our best foot forward—they just wanted to show the best of us they could show.
ST: You’re about to tour farther than you usually do, right?
MK: In three weeks we’re going out to the West coast for the first time, and we’ll be out there for almost two-and-a-half months. It’s exciting for us to play the West Coast because we’ve never done it before.
RL: The driving and the hotels get a little old, but we’re kind of used to it. The cities are further apart on the West Coast—there are some days where you drive eight hours and then load in and play a gig, and the next day do the same thing over again.
ST: What’s the hardest part about being on the road for that long?
MK: The hardest part for me is the stuff you take for granted in your normal everyday life, like eating and sleeping. It’s really hard to sleep in foreign environments and when you’re keeping this crazy schedule, that’s really hard to do. And then when you’re trying to eat healthy—we found ourselves on this last tour buying vegetables at the grocery store, and then we’d go into our hotel room and we’d be washing lettuce and vegetables in the bathroom sink, and you kind of have to get over the fact that it’s a bathroom sink.
RL: For me, one of the hardest things is when I wake up in the middle of the night and I have to pee and I have no idea where the bathroom is. You get in a zone when you’re in your own house and you can walk in the dark, but many days I’ll wake up and I don’t know where I am, it’s dark and it gets a little confusing…maybe that’s too much information.
Visit www.sirsy.com to find out more about the band.
