Kings of Convenience are an acoustic act from Bergen, Norway, built on the sweet harmonies and soft guitars of Eirik Glambek Bøe and Erlend Øye. The duo defined their sound —often compared to João Gilberto, Jose González, and Simon and Garfunkel— with their 2001 debut, Quiet is the New Loud, and refined it on 2004's Riot on an Empty Street (which featured guest vocals from Feist) and 2009's Declaration of Dependence.
Interview: 21 October 2009
It’s been five years between records. Why so long?
“Kings of Convenience has always been a slow project. We work when it feels natural to work. We don’t like to force anything. So, the fact that it took five years to make this record just proves that we want everything to come when the time is ready. Just writing these songs takes a long time. There was never really a break; we were working on and off through this whole five year period.”
What is it about your nature that makes this such a slow band?
“To me, it doesn’t feel slow, it feels as if we have been working very hard, that we have spent a lot of hours, days, weeks, months on this project. There was no way we could’ve done it faster. The songs we write are, in their way, like little biographies; you’re writing about experiences in your life. So, you need to have time to live a life that you can write songs about.”
The songs on this new record sound as if they’re almost lovesongs dedicated from each of you to the other. Do you hear that?
“[Laughs] Not quite! But I like it! I know there’s certainly no lovesongs written from me to Erlend, but I’m happy to hear that people can interpret them in different ways."
To me, the title, Declaration of Dependence, suggests that the album is about the relationship between the two of you.
“Well, it does reflect the situation of the band. But, it’s about the fact that we’re two very different individuals, living very different lives, yet there’s this bond between us, this musical bond, that we have to acknowledge.”
That what you’ve “built is bigger than the sum of two”?
“Well, yeah, that could be about the band. But it’s actually about another person.”
What did you hope to do with this album?
“We had a very clear idea that we wanted to stick to our old formula: 'Quiet is the New Loud.' We didn’t want to add more elements into the music. We wanted to make another record that was very stripped down, that had a lot of silence, a lot of space. Which could be a rhythmical record without any drums or percussion. A record that was just the two of us.”
Was that a reaction against Riot on an Empty Street, where some of the songs were more built up?
“When we made Riot on an Empty Street, we were a little bit confused as to what to do with these upbeat songs with drums and bass that didn’t really sit on the record. This time around, we were very happy to have a record that was made up of 13 songs without any drums or percussion.”
Did Erlend’s exploits in The Whitest Boy Alive give him an outlet for louder, more bass/drums-driven music?
“I think our side-projects have made us even more confident as Kings of Convenience, in both the music we’re making and in ourselves. We feel very happy that we can keep this very minimal and simple sound, and leave rhythmical rock music to other projects.”
You mention 'Quiet is the New Loud' as being an ideology of yours. Was the band formed with that as its identity?
“The idea we had was that it seemed, at the time —this was the late-’90s— that there was so much focus on production in pop music. There had been so much technological development throughout the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s, and all of it was so much effort spent on making the right sounds and having to fill up every little piece of space in the music. The focus on melodies and on lyrics was somehow lost. We wanted to take a step back, to the days when songwriting was the most important thing, by using as few elements as you need, and letting the melody and lyrics speak for themselves. That was the idea. And we stick to that idea.”
How did you arrive at having those beliefs? What backgrounds lead you to this?
“We met when we were 15 in school. We were the only guys in our class who liked to listen to old Pink Floyd records, so we found each other. We basically started playing guitar together from day one in our friendship. Neither of us knew how to play guitar; we were both rookies. I think I taught Erlend the first guitar chords he learned how to play. For the first ten years, people told us we were s**t. Then, after ten years, a few people started to like what we were doing.”
Did you think that you would be playing together for all these years?
“Yeah. It’s always felt like a really long-term project. We were always very aware of the fact that we were not part of any trend, or thing of the moment. It seems like a personal thing that we’ve been doing for our own sake, not because someone expects us to do it. Part of the reason for this is that we live in Bergen, a city on the West coast of Norway. We feel pretty isolated up here; far away from the world of trends and fashion. We’re doing the stuff we like ourselves without looking at what’s trendy.”
How did you feel, then, when Quiet is the New Loud came out, and media humans tried to turn your title into a trend?
“We felt alien to it. Music journalists tried to put us as these flag-bearers of a movement, with people we’d never heard nor met before. We still feel kind of lonely doing this. We feel like we actually have no one else to compare us with in contemporary music.”
When your music started to gain a following, did that realization change the way you thought of what you were doing?
“It’s funny: I’m trying to keep this feeling of the music being my own personal little thing, and the more people that come to our shows and the more interviews I do, the harder it is to keep this feeling. I think that the solution to this is make a record every five years, because by then there’ll be enough time for the interest to die down, and for me to get the feeling back that I’m writing these songs only for myself, not for everyone else.”
So, you’re already anticipating your fourth album’s arrival in 2014?
“Something like that. It’s definitely going to take a while.”
