April 24 2008
A Quick Chat with The Mint Chicks
posted by Steven Shaw at 11:04 am
The Mint Chicks rummage through the goodies at an Oregon Goodwill store
Winners of Group of the Year and Album of the Year for Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No! at last year’s New Zealand Tui Music Awards, the Mint Chicks departed NZ shores at the end of 2007 for Portland, Oregon, downsizing from a four-piece to a three-piece after the departure of bassist Michael Logie. The band, comprising brothers Kody and Ruban Nielson and drummer Paul Roper, is back in New Zealand to play a series of shows, starting tonight at Tauranga’s Coliseum, followed by the Kings Arms, Auckland on Friday and the Wellington Homegrown festival on Saturday. After that they tour the country, starting in Dunedin and heading back up through Christchurch, Nelson, Wellington again and Hamilton. (Dates and venues are listed at the bottom of this post.)
The trio has been settling well into Oregon life, but they’re in no rush to be the next big thing. Portland just seemed like the right fit, according to guitarist and songwriter Ruban Nielson. “We spent a couple of weeks there in the middle of last year, he says. “We had this idea that we might want to escape for a while and do some stuff. We went through about 36 states but Portland just seemed like the right place and looked kind of right. Easy to fit in there I suppose.”
The Mint Chicks are re-inventing what they do, he says. “Not just musically. We’re turning into something else other than just a rock band. We’ve been working on new things, transforming into something that’s closer to a TV show. An internet based thing. It’s not a TV show, it’s an episode of web content, involving music and animation and taking the focus off us and putting it more on characters that appear in our artwork.”
“Rock stars are something our parents’ generation came up with. We’re coming out with something that’s more from our era. We have a big visual thing and have always done our own artwork, so it’d be cool to use it, rather than it being used just for decoration or promotional devices. All the stuff we make, we want to incorporate into one thing, and then take the emphasis off just the album, which is just a baby boomer structure, and turn out something that comes out way more frequently.”
Major labels aren’t the only ones having trouble dealing with the internet as a medium, he says. “Equally I think punk and underground communities haven’t risen to the challenge either, which is kind of compatible with the best things about punk – the democracy of it, cheapness, the DIY aspects. Now there’s all this freedom but punk labels are still stuck on issuing vinyl records. They’re scratching their heads just as much.”
That’s not to say the Mint Chicks are ignoring songwriting. The move was largely to give themselves enough space to be creative. “The most recent wave of songwriting I did in Portland, I just sat down and wrote a bunch of songs in one session and tried not to labour over any particular song. The great thing was that the songs just kind of came out, I wasn’t trying to push them in any way. Make sure they come out really simple. Kody has a whole lot of things he’s been doing as well.”
“When I write them, they’re basically an acoustic pop song. The process of arrangement is a really big deal for us, transforming them for the band. When the song is translated into the version we’re going to play, that’s when we do things that are less traditional. We don’t pressure ourselves to make them the songs sound weird – but the latest stuff, more than ever, is like that.
Nielson says that a management structure is in place for the band in the USA, but they’re not putting heaps of pressure on themselves to really achieve a whole lot of stuff quickly.
“That’s part of the thing that’s really cool about being there, that we don’t have to face up to that stuff. We’re holing ourselves up in the basement, writing heaps, making it more about music. It helps to make it feel like we don’t have to tick off a whole lot of boxes. But things are happening quickly anyway and it’s a bit of a worry. It’s cool to make some money back here and pay the bills back in the States. The longer we get to do that the better.”
The Mint Chicks NZ tour:
Thursday 24 April, Coliseum, Tauranga
Friday 25 April, Kings Arms, Auckland
Saturday 26 April, Homegrown Festival (Indie Stage), Wellington waterfront
Thursday 1 May, Refuel, Dunedin (two shows: All Ages early, R18 late)
Friday 2 May, Al’s Bar, Christchurch
Saturday 3 May, Phat Club, Nelson
Thursday 8 May, Bar Mode, Palmerston North
Friday 9 May, Bar Bodega, Wellington
Saturday 10 May, Yellow Submarine, Hamilton