Naomi, Kurihara, and Damon in Rio, August 2002

from Correio Braziliense, by Carlos Marcelo, January 21, 2002

CM: Do you remember how you met each other? How wold were you and where you were when this happened? The first attraction was caused by music or by books? Did you were friends before became lovers or things happened at the same time?

Naomi: Well, we went to the same school since we were children, but Damon is a year older than I am, so we didn't meet until high school -- until we were about 15 years old. We didn't get together until we were about 17 though -- two wasted years!

Damon: When we met, I don't think either of us would have called ourselves a musician. In fact, even today we wonder sometimes! Although there was always a lot of music in our lives -- both our families have musicians in them -- we didn't start making music ourselves until much later. We still sometimes feel like the amateurs in our families, because we were the ones who didn't practice for our lessons as children. Thank God for punk rock!

CM: How the songwriting works? What come first, music or lyrics? Who writes the music, who writes the lyrics? Do you decide previously which will be the theme of that song?

Naomi: Usually Damon has a bunch of different riffs on the guitar that he fools around with for a long time. Then, if it sounds promising we develop it further, singing a bit to it and sometimes ideas for lyrics come at that stage. We both tend to work on the lyrics, and we are both very critical of each other's ideas! But when we find something we both like, usually it works. We don't usually decide the theme of a song in advance.

Damon: We used to work more by starting with the music, and developing lyrics only later. But over time, lyrics have become more and more important to us. Now, we find we can write more tunes than lyrics. And if the lyrics don't work, we abandon the tune. They have to come together, or not at all. It means we write fewer songs!

CM: Ezra Pound has a quote at More Sad Hits. Is he your favourite poet? Which are your favourite writers and why?

Damon: We read a lot, we even have our own book publishing company that we run together, so we have many favorite writers -- but if I had to choose one, it would probably be Kafka. Pound is very important to American poetry, but I wouldn't call him a favorite: he was a brilliant man with hateful politics, unfortunately. The quote on the cover of More Sad Hits comes from one of his letters, written to a publisher I much admire, James Laughlin of New Directions. We used it because it expressed so well a lesson we had recently learned.

CM: Turn of the Century, Life Will You Pass By, Memories, are some of your
songs with titles that brings feelings related to memory and past. Do you
feel a little bit disconnected with these hard, fast and furious times? Do
you feel any kind of nostalgia and try to express it at your songs?

Damon: It's true, the past feels very alive for us. We live in a town that is old for the United States -- Cambridge and Boston are among the oldest cities here -- and these are places haunted by their past, both their 17th-century origins and their 19th-century glory (now faded). We live in an old house. We don't have a television. And yet, we work with computers every day. I think the technology of our era shapes our work as much as the nostalgia we seem to carry around.

CM: You mentioned to me few years ago that you're now oriented to folk music. Why did you decide to gave up of rock''n"roll as a lifestyle - or you never really lived that during Galaxie 500 times?

Naomi: We've never really lived the rock and roll lifestyle except reluctantly. The most glamorized parts: the drugs, the seediness, has never really appealed to us. And, even in Galaxie 500, we toured by train, tried to stay in real hotels and basically keep our sanity. That said, being in a band you are always surrounded by the rock life whether you are choosing to participate or not, and, even now, playing more acoustic music, it is still the same lifestyle! But the great part that we love about the rock life, or just an artistic life in general, is the stimulation from your fellow artists, the hours of amusing hanging out that we manage to do, the travelling, and, of course, getting to play music!

Damon: It's not contemporary folk that interests us, but folk music from the 60s, which was really a branch of psychedelic music: Sandy Denny, Tim Buckley, Nick Drake, Pearls Before Swine, Dylan . . . I guess you could call it acoustic psychedelia. We love emotional singers, and I think that's partly why we appreciate Brazilian music so much: Milton especially. Our latest discovery is from Angola, so he sometimes sings in Portuguese, too: Bonga. Do you know his records from the early 70s? Amazing, powerful music. If only we could understand the words!

CM: Let''s talk again about books. Which bring you more pleasure these days, your activities as publishers or as songwriters? When you''re in a new city/foreign country, do you go first to a library/bookstore or to a record store?

Naomi: We go to bookstores in whatever country we're in, no matter if we can read in the language or not. We also go to the record stores, but less often to find the new releases than to find the older "classics" from a given country. And, I personally, try to visit every stationery store! I love paper and pens from other countries!

Damon: Music and books have always been passions of ours, so we have worked to make them a part of our professional life, too.

CM: When are you planning to release a new album? Which will be the
differences to the previous ones? Do you have already new songs?

Naomi: Right now, we are finishing up mixing a Live album that we recorded with Michio Kurihara, the lead guitar player from Ghost who appears on our last record. We toured with him, as a trio, in the US, as well as in Europe and the UK, and it was a wonderful experience, so we thought it was important to document it. He's an amazing musician and it the shows were very intense. It will be out in the US in May. As for a new album, we never know when we will feel inspired to do it, or when we will have enough songs. We are not prolific-- we are always throwing songs away.

CM: You have at More Sad Hits a song called This Changing World. At the same record, you wrote a song called ETA that mentioned a plane go down. What changed in the world ten years from now? And you, as songwriters and human beings, which were the main changes in a decade?

Naomi: When we wrote ETA (which is used in the USA to mean "Estimated Time of Arrival" -- NOT the Basque separatist group!) it was the early 90's and indeed there was a lot of economic despair, not to mention the Gulf War. But in recent years, when singing the line "the times are hard, or so they say" I always thought, well, I guess this is an old song, the economy is booming now. But now, times are hard again, and we are in the midst of another Bush-administration war, so I guess some things, unfortunately, don't change, but return.

Damon: If anything we feel more political now than ten years ago. After September 11, we started organizing musicians for peace -- we started a website, http://www.musiciansforpeace.org, to share information and to take a stand together against war.

CM: Only to finish, could you make a comment about each one of your three albums, and giving, if it''s possible, a suggestion of a book that in your opinion, has the same atmosphere of this album, a book that people could be reading while listening to your album? Which one of the three albums fits best as a introduction of your work as a duo, in your opinion?

Damon: Well, this is a challenge. Let's see: More Sad Hits is for me like an album that we dreamed rather than sang, because when we made it I really didn't think we would ever make a record again. And then suddenly we had. So I would say something confusing and dreamlike to go with it: how about Borges?

Wondrous World is a record that I think of as very wordy -- I think when we wrote those songs, we wrote the lyrics a little more like folksongs than we usually do, they are not so much embedded in the melodies as accompanying them. So maybe something wordy and folky: how about the 60s novel "Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me," by the folksinger Richard Farina?

Playback Singers has a lot of love songs. So I would say love poetry, in your own language: please choose your favorite!

With Ghost is a record we made with friends. It is a very happy record for us. A friend of ours recently told me that she thought that if there had been an evil spell on us in any way, we broke it by making that record! I think what she meant is that she could hear us enjoying ourselves. How about the Greil Marcus book about Dylan and the Band making the Basement Tapes? Maybe that's presumptuous -- but we all have to dream!

As for which record would best serve as an introduction, I would say the newest, because it best represents who we are now. But fans of Galaxie 500 might want to start with the first one, since it's the most related to that time.

CM: Which were the last songs and records that you''ve listened to and
thought: wow, what a great song/record, I'm really excited about it!

Damon: "Bonga 72" and "Bonga 74," which I mentioned earlier. It is so exciting to discover a new singer that you love. As for our contemporaries: I like the Englishman Richard Youngs very much, especially when he sings (some of his records are instrumental only). Dana and Karen Kletter, twin sisters from the U.S. who recently made a very special album, produced by the folk-music celebrity Joe Boyd, called "Dear Enemy." And of course Ghost, our friends from Japan, the best band in the world.

CM: And what about Exact Change? How many people work with you? Which will
be your next releases?Are you fully satisfied with your work?

Damon: Exact Change has two employees -- us. Until recently, we also had one part-time assistant, but it's been a tough year in the book business and we had to let him go. We publish a lot of Surrealist and other avant-garde fiction and poetry -- you can see our complete catalogue on our website, http://www.exactchange.com. This past year, we were very proud to publish the composer Morton Feldman's collected writings. A number of upcoming projects are also by artists: the filmmaker Chris Marker, the painter Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, Picasso . . . Many of the books we publish are translated into English from French, but we do have one author who wrote in Portuguese: Fernando Pessoa. Do you know his work? We publish his novel, "The Book of Disquiet," and next year we will publish another prose work of his, "The Education of the Stoic."

It is difficult to run a small press, because selling books is a difficult business. But we love working with these great texts.

Come to think of it, it's no harder than being in a band!