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February 19, 2008 12:06 pm
When the Raveonettes burst onto the American music scene in 2003, it was at the crest of a wave of rock ‘n’ roll fundamentalism. The Strokes had shifted the zeitgeist with a post-punk revivalist debut laced tighter than a corset, while the White Stripes were busily paring back several generations’ worth of blues-rock evolution. The Raveonettes’ Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo approached things slightly differently. In their gloomily methodical Danish way (Dogme, anyone?), the duo gave the Buddy Holly and Ronnie Spector sounds of midcentury pop a kinky, shoegazing makeover. Their latest album, “Lust Lust Lust,” released today, boasts more than a few Raveonettes’ trademarks—all the songs are cloaked in feedback, for instance, and most clock in at under three minutes—but there’s a new openness to the music, both in arrangement and spirit. As they prepare to embark on the U.S. tour in support of the album, Wagner and Foo talked to Style.com about long-distance work affairs, finding love, and, naturally, lust.
You guys always struck me as a band that worked fast, but “Lust Lust Lust” comes after a pretty lengthy hiatus for the Raveonettes. Did the time off affect the music?
Sharin Foo: Where I hear the difference is in the energy of the songs. The other albums, I think we were both feeling, like, now now now about our lives; everything was happening all at once. Whereas this is a more introverted record, you know?
Sune, you’re the songwriter—do you agree with Sharin’s analysis?
Sune Rose Wagner: Well, it’s a fact—our lifestyles changed. For me,
slowing things down gave me an opportunity for introspection, as Sharin was saying. All the songs on this record come out of questions I was asking myself, about how hard it is to find love, and why, once you think you’ve found it, you go back and have second thoughts. Is this what I really want? Is this it? Is this love?
Or is it just lust…?
SRW: Right. I mean, lust is a powerful thing. Which makes it a fantastic theme for a record, because you can ask a million questions and never find an answer.
Did you know going in that this was going to be a concept album about lust?
SRW: Not consciously, no. Sometimes I feel like finding the record is the hardest part of the process—like, you try this and you try that, you write all these songs and then, at some point, if you’re lucky, you stumble across one song that feels right. And for me, that song was “Lust.” I heard it and I knew that the record was in there; it would have to be about the stuff going on in that song.
You two lead quite separate lives at this point—Sharin, you’ve moved to L.A.; Sune, you’re based in New York. Did you reconvene to make the record?
SF: No, we kept things pretty separate, which is how it’s been for a while. Basically, Sune shoots me stuff, I listen and tell him what I like and what I don’t, and we navigate forward. Part of what makes the album feel so personal, I think, is that rather than working out of a big studio, Sune recorded most of it at home, and so that meant I was laying down my vocal tracks remotely, too.
Doesn’t that ever make you feel disconnected from the music?
SF: It’s not the working separately, because that’s just how we work. But I will say that it took me a longer time than usual to relate to these songs, because they are more personal to Sune. Like, “Expelled From Love,” which is just so devastating and beautiful and lonely. That song breaks my heart, but it didn’t come from me—and the irony, of course, is that a song like that is exactly why I’d been encouraging him to write in a more personal way. At the end of the day it’s the most personal songs that wind up feeling the most universal.
Now that you’re touring the record and spending more time together, does that change the way the songs come across?
SF: The songs always seem bigger live, but aside from that we actually work quite hard to re-create the album when we play. There’s a reason a song is the way it is on the record—we stopped when it was perfect. And so even though Sharin and I could have a surprisingly excellent jam band, because we’re good at that kind of thing, we pretty much just go out onstage with the goal of not messing up what we’ve already gotten right.
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