The Thermals are a Portland-based trio that plays anthemic, wordy indie-rock. Formed in 2002 by long-time collaborateurs/lovebirds Hutch Harris (guitar, vocals) and Kathy Foster (bass), they've released five albums. The first three —2003's snarling More Parts Per Million, 2004's so-so Fuckin A, 2006's acclaimed concept record The Body, The Blood, The Machine— were released on Sub Pop, with the next two —2009's raucous Now We Can See , and 2010's strangely-mellow Personal Life— being released by Kill Rock Stars.
Interview: 9 February 2010
When did you first start making any kind of music?
"I tried taking piano lessons from my dad, who was a professional musician, and then I tried to take saxophone lessons, but nothing was really happening. I remember feeling like I just didn't 'get' it. It was only when my dad got me a guitar that something clicked. Six months after I picked it up I started writing songs."
Who were your childhood heroes when you were starting out?
"Definitely Led Zeppelin, Guns n' Roses, and then Nirvana came out the next year, so it soon become nothing but Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Grunge was big for me; that was all going on when I was in high-school, back in San Jose."
Your first projects seemed very informed by the lo-fi movement: first Urban Legends with Guided by Voices, then Hutch & Kathy with the Mountain Goats. Was that where you were coming from?
"Guided by Voices were definitely something we were listening to a lot back then. We just played the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, and Kathy and I were remembering that we saw Guided by Voices there back in 1996. We loved them, and Sebadoh, and Eric's Trip. No matter what style of music we've been making, we've always leaned towards lo-fi."
Thermals albums seem to have swung from lo-fi, with More Parts Per Million, to hi-fi, with Fuckin A, back to lo-fi with The Body, The Blood, The Machine. Like you're constantly going against whatever you just did before.
"I think we just play lo-fi! Even if we try to have a really clean, hi-fi recording it still sounds lo-fi. That's just the style of how we play: really scrappy, definitely not perfect. Every record we've made we feel like it's taking a step up, it's getting more produced. I remember thinking The Body, The Blood, The Machine was like this totally produced, really professional recording when we made it, but then when I go and listen to it it sounds as ragged and scrappy as anything else we've ever done. I thought we were going to get called sell-outs, or something, but there was more than one review that complained that it was so lo-fi it sounded like we'd recorded it in some dingy basement. I think no matter how hard we try, we're always going to sound like us."
But if you're the same 'us' as Hutch & Kathy, why do The Thermals sound so different?
"Kathy and I have been in so many bands together, and it always seemed to go back and forth, from doing something quiet and folkie to being in a loud rockband. With The Thermals, we'd just finished the Hutch & Kathy project. We'd worked on that record for a year, that's all we'd worked on, recording it at home on our eight-track reels. After all that time, I wanted to really make something that was way more loud and fast and immediate, to work on a project that I could just finish quickly; do one day at a time, one song at a time. We spent a year doing that Hutch & Kathy record, fretting over every single sound, I just wanted to make an album as fast as possible. I wanted to just pick up my Telecaster and knock an album out. When I started writing songs, I was definitely thinking of a less indie thing. I was thinking way more like The Ramones. When we finished the album —which we recorded in our basement over a couple of weeks, for the grand total of $60— we were describing it as 'The Misfits meets Guided by Voices.'"
Was playing loud and raucous like going back to your grunge-rock adolescence?
"It was at first, but now we've been doing it for like seven years, it's all we've done for a while. Now that I'm not a teenager, it's a lot more work playing those kind of songs live. It's not easy. I mean, the songs are, technically, very easy to play, but you need a lot of stamina and energy to perform them. When we started the band, we were only 25, so we weren’t all that old at all. But, even still, it did make us feel like we were 15 or 16 again."
Did you write The Body, The Blood, The Machine as a concept record?
"Not at the very outset. I just wrote 'Here's Your Future' first, and as soon as I wrote that song, it seemed like there was a lot of places I could go with that. Writing all the other songs after that, I sketched out a very vague story, less as some rock-opera narrative, and more just as a way of making all the songs fit together. The concept was far less grand than other people seemed to imagine; they were really just songs about what I was feeling at the time, and the grim political state that America was in."
What themes did you have in mind this time, with Now We Can See?
"I was just thinking about death a lot. Most of the songs are about dying, or are written from the point of view of someone who is dead or dying. It made sense to follow up where The Body, The Blood, The Machine had ended, with a lot of death and destruction. When of the first songs I wrote was 'When We Were Alive,' which is written from beyond the grave, where everything in the song is past tense, has already happened. From there, it made sense that the whole album was going to be full of songs looking back on the lives of people, and the life of humanity, as a whole, on this planet."
Why such a preoccupation with death? Was it from being in your 30s?
"No, I think I've pretty much my whole life straight thought about death. It's always in the back of my mind. In some ways, that is the human condition. It's not an original topic for any work of art, it's something that's inevitable for everyone."
What about your next, apparently-already-imminent album?
"It's going to be called Personal Life, so that should suggest what some of the songs are about. But I can't really say much yet. We're still working on it, so I'm not really sure what we have at the moment. Let me get back to you on that."
