The Making of THE RUNNERS FOUR by deerhoof - featuring greg saunier, satomi matsuzaki, john dieterich and chris cohen

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Intro:

Dan Nordheim: You’re listening to Life of the Record. Classic albums, told by the people who made them. My name is Dan Nordheim. 

Deerhoof initially formed in San Francisco in 1994 by Rob Fisk, with Greg Saunier joining him one week later. They signed to Kill Rock Stars, and in 1995, Satomi Matsuzaki joined as lead vocalist. In 1997, they released their debut album, The Man, The King, The Girl. After their second album, Holdy Paws, was released in 1999, Fisk left the band and guitarist John Dieterich joined later that year. They released Halfbird in 2001 with Reveille following in 2002. At this point, Chris Cohen joined the band and they released Apple O’ in 2003 and Milk Man in 2004. For their seventh album, they decided to record for several months in their rehearsal space, resulting in a double album. The Runners Four was eventually released in 2005. 

In this episode, Greg Saunier, Satomi Matsuzaki, John Dieterich and Chris Cohen reflect on how the album came together. This is the making of The Runners Four. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Hi, this is Satomi. I sing and I play bass in Deerhoof. 

Greg Saunier: This is Greg, I play drums in Deerhoof. 

Chris Cohen: This is Chris Cohen. I, uh, used to play guitar and bass in Deerhoof. 

John Dieterich: Hi, this is John Dieterich, and I play guitar in Deerhoof. I remember it was like, we did an all nighter. And it was like five in the morning, and it was just starting to get light out. We were in the Tenderloin and I would look out the window and there's a guy peeing on the street exactly as we're finishing the record (laughs). I just remember, it was a very strong…

Chris Cohen: What did that make you feel, John? (laughs) 

John Dieterich: It made me feel like I wanted to go home. That's what I wanted.  And go to sleep (laughs). 

Satomi Matsuzaki: I remember that, you know, when we were mixing, you know, Runners Four at the very end and, you know, like we totally finished and maybe, John, you saw this guy peeing outside cause it's Tenderloin, you know, and then I remember Chris and I went out to get juice or something to the corner store and we were, it was morning and, you know, we were like, “Ah,” you know, like, “So nice it's over.” I remember that. 

Greg Saunier: I seem to remember not leaving the chair in front of Pro Tools for 13 hours. I did not go to the bathroom or eat or nap, 13 hours straight, that I remember thinking that at the end and it occurring to me that I must have set some record.  

Chris Cohen: That is sad. That's a sad story.

Greg Saunier: Yeah, I mean, I don't know what you were expecting, Dan, this is going to be nothing but sob stories for this whole thing. 

John Dieterich: Weeping, immune systems crumbling (laughs). 

Greg Saunier: We had one reprieve. Which was, we were invited to play Lady Fest Honolulu and given the opportunity to stay for an extra two days. And it was like, basically we saw the sun for the first time in several months, cause it was winter. So the sun was rising late and setting early. And we would go in there to a windowless practice room the entire day. It was like a full time job. 

Chris Cohen: Yeah I remember it almost like it was like a whole year or something. Do you, does anybody know actually how long we did that? 

John Dieterich: I don't. 

Greg Saunier: Green Cosmos came out the same dang year, so it couldn't have been the full year. 

Chris Cohen: Okay. 

Greg Saunier: Just felt like it (laughs). 

Chris Cohen: Yeah I mean, I think it was more than just winter though. I mean, I remember. Oh yeah. I don't know. I felt like it was just kind of like. 

John Dieterich: It was like eight months or something. But we just decided like as part of the idea, like, “Okay. Like basically nine to five, Monday through Friday, we're going to go in there and do this.” And then of course, people are working on stuff on the weekends as well, because it's like, you know, that's your only time to have any time to yourself.  

Satomi Matsuzaki: I think The Runners Four was a heightened time. We didn't even have time to talk about anything other than the music, you know. That's what we did, like just a stretch like we get home and work on music and then go to bed, you know. So other than that, we were with Chris and John the whole time, like yeah boot camp, you know, it's just, yeah, so much focus.

Greg Saunier: I mean, I'm so proud of it. And I think that we managed it really well as four people. And had any of us not been as easy going as we are, I think it would have never worked and it would have been a total catastrophe, but I still have feelings of regret, you know, of lost time, of lost life. I don't want to overdo the metaphor, but you know, the bootcamp, but it did have a feeling of like, you put your life on hold. It was madness. 

Chris Cohen: Well, Greg, you were the first one in the band. 

Greg Saunier: I was the second one in the band, but the first one currently present at this podcast. 

Chris Cohen: Did Rob started without you? 

Greg Saunier: Yeah it was a harmonica solo. 

Chris Cohen: Oh, I never knew that. 

Greg Saunier: Yeah, do you remember Epicenter? 

Chris Cohen: Yeah. 

Greg Saunier: He made five, duplicated five copies. Brought them to a wicker basket that sat in Epicenter. I'm not sure if they were free or for sale, but I was immediately interested. Then it was nice, and then Satomi joined.  

John Dieterich: I don't know how I've never heard that story before. I've never heard of Epicenter even. 

Chris Cohen: Epicenter's gone. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Oh yeah, Epicenter was great. My favorite, yeah. 

Greg Saunier: It was like Valencia. You know, San Francisco, like punk rock record shop. 

John Dieterich: I think it was probably dead by the time I moved there.

Greg Saunier: Yeah, it was great. Then Satomi joined. We were practicing in our kitchen at the time. Even in those days, a rent could sometimes be challenging and paying two rents was completely unconscionable. So yeah, chopsticks on drums, bass through a practice amp. And then Satomi joined. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Yeah (pause). And then John joined. 

Chris Cohen: (laughs) Yeah, we gotta fast forward.  

Greg Saunier: This is gonna take all day if we go like this, come on. 

John Dieterich: So I moved out to California in 1999 and…

Greg Saunier: Tell the veggie burger story. Tell the veggie burger story. 

John Dieterich: And I am not telling the veggie burger story. 

Greg Saunier: Awww. 

John Dieterich: Okay, there was a veggie burger when I was moving out. We were in Montana. And I went to a restaurant and I ordered a veggie burger. And it was a hamburger with lettuce and tomato. But yeah, I moved out in ‘99. And yeah, basically, I was going to school out there and that's where I met Greg and we just started playing music, after class for each other and would start, you know, it was right when Rob and Kelly were about to move to Alaska. So that's sort of how I jumped in. 

Chris Cohen: And this was, John and Greg were students at Mills College. Yeah. I was not a student there, but I was auditing this class there that was taught by Fred Frith.  

Greg Saunier: Wait, is that true?  

Chris Cohen: And somebody was like, “Oh yeah, that guy from Deerhoof's having his senior recital.” It was like after this class. And I was like, “Oh cool, yeah, I'll go check that out.” And I went and I was really, I was so into it. And then,  

Greg Saunier: Wait, wait, wait, was that my, my, uh? 

Chris Cohen: That was yours, Greg. 

Greg Saunier: What? I had a broken leg. I couldn't even play drums at that thing. John was playing drums. 

Chris Cohen: I think, okay, yeah. 

John Dieterich: It was both, but it was mostly me.

Chris Cohen: I remember you both playing, yeah, but it was in the classroom and it was just like the, you know, just a great, just in a classroom. I was so blown away. And then I was like  just became like the number one Deerhoof fan and went to every show. And then I just pestered them with cassettes of my band, 

Greg Saunier: Which at the time was Dyna Thought Imagination Band.

John Dieterich: Oh, that's true. Yeah. 

Chris Cohen: Right. And I got Deerhoof to play some shows with us. Well, John, you went to Spain or something for two months. And I got Greg and Satomi to join The Curtains. 

John Dieterich: I went to Europe with Gorge Trio. 

Chris Cohen: Oh right, Europe. Yeah so there was like a little lull for Deerhoof and I was like, I swooped in and got Greg and Satomi to join my band. And then when John came back, John and I started playing together in Natural Dreamers. And then you guys, Eventually, let me join. 

John Dieterich: Let you join (laughs). 

Greg Saunier: I think an invitation was extended. 

Chris Cohen: Yeah. But I mean, we were already, we had a jam sesh at John's house where we did like some free improv. 

John Dieterich: I have those recordings. 

Chris Cohen: I have those too. Yeah. I have CDRs of it. We should listen to it together.  

John Dieterich: I transferred it off of DAT a few years ago. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Oh, I remember like, you know, when John joined the band, like, you know, he was like a, kind of like, “Can you please join the band?” kind of feeling. And like, you know, with Chris, I feel like you are already in the band when I just kind of like turned around like, “Whoa,” you know. 

Chris Cohen: I just snuck in.

Satomi Matsuzaki: No, no. It's, it was so like, you know, we were so integrated, you know, we became friends. 

Chris Cohen: Ah, that's nice. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: You were just there, you know.

Greg Saunier: It was like magic. 

Chris Cohen: Yeah, I just worked my way in. But I really, yeah, I just, I loved Dearhoof so much. It was my dream. It was like my life dream to join. 

John Dieterich: We were already all at the same shows anyway. We went to every show Chris played with his band and then he would come to all the shows. 

Chris Cohen: Yeah, we came together in what year was that? 2002 or something.  

John Dieterich: I don't know. 

Chris Cohen: It was right before Reveille came out. Reveille was recorded. You guys were in the process of finishing Reveille when I joined. And then we did some touring before, like when that came out.

Greg Saunier: You know, we were working really fast. Like I said, a minute ago, Green Cosmos came out earlier the same year that Runners Four came out and Milk Man came out only a few months before Green Cosmos. It all ran together. I mean, we were putting out music at a very fast clip. And one of the side effects of doing that is that you can short change the creative process. Only the ideas that can be explained really fast or learned to play them really quickly.  that kind of, you know, meat grinder process or whatever. And this one, we were absolutely adamant, I think it was the three of you, were adamant to me about, you know, “Let's slow down, take our time.” And like, I tended to write songs that I could teach the three of you really fast. And like five minutes later, we had a take and it was done. You guys were like, “What about songs that take longer to develop? And we have to play them a while before they start to take shape. And we aren't totally sure what it is we want yet.” And I think it was, yeah, a chance for that kind of personal expression, like more secret expressions, things that were underneath the surface that hadn't gotten a chance to really form in our more rushed pace before that. 

Chris Cohen: I don't know if you all will agree with this, but I felt like at the time, like Deerhoof was like, I had this sense of like, “Oh, we're kind of on the rise and we need to like, we're going to like, step it up, step up our game. And I remember this whole talk about like double album. We got to like, really, you know, we're really trying to prove ourselves or something. It was really, we had this kind of like, I mean, the mentality of it is hard for me to get back. It's hard for me to  relate to that now. But at the time I really think just whatever age we were at and the timing of it, it felt very like we were, you’re just like desperate.

Greg Saunier: I mean, to me, I agree. It's hard to connect the resulting audio and songwriting to any idea of this being our bid for superstardom (laughs). 

Chris Cohen: I don't know. Well, I think all the Deerhoof albums are like that. 

Greg Saunier: Well, what you just said, Chris, made it sound like we knew it was going to be double before we even started, which I don't remember that.

Chris Cohen: Yeah. 

Greg Saunier: I trust you. 

Chris Cohen: Yeah, I remember talking about that. I think it was sort of like a plan. Like, we're gonna like really stretch out, everybody's gonna bring in their songs. We're gonna like try everything and sort of like I remember, you know, like you and John were listening, and Satomi probably too, you're all listening to like all this like 70s Miles (Davis) stuff and you're like, “Oh, we're going to really stretch out.”

Greg Saunier: Oh that was all Satomi. 

Chris Cohen: Okay. Yeah, so I just remember a lot of talk about Miles and like, “Oh, we're going to really, we're going to like really get into like stretching out and playing and a lot of…

John Dieterich: Live-Evil.

Chris Cohen: Kind of open up the palette of sounds with, you know, effects that we had never really allowed or never just never used. I remember just, that was a conscious thing before we started,  as I recall. 

John Dieterich: And I think I just remembered, I think most of the time, almost all the time, everything was recorded on headphones. So that not only were we in a windowless space, but we were also like, we, we weren't really like, I mean, it was just, everything was…

Greg Saunier: It wasn't just headphones, you guys were on pods. 

John Dieterich: Yeah, amp simulators.  

Greg Saunier: Satomi and John were both playing guitar. Chris was on bass kind of at the other end of the room, with a mic on it, but the guitars were not audible to anyone else in this rehearsal studio. It probably just sounded like a big drum solo, you know, every day for eight months, 9 to 5. 

Chris Cohen: Right. I mean, I think the thing about the pods, if I remember correctly, it was like, that was what allowed us to do it in a practice space because we didn't, you know, we were like, we're not going to have any separation. 

John Dieterich: Yeah, exactly. 

Chris Cohen: Right, that was what let us do it at the practice space, which was, by the way, this practice space was called Soundwave. Is that right?

John Dieterich: Oh, yeah. Nice. Well done. 

Chris Cohen: It's called something else now, but it's still there.  

Satomi Matsuzaki: Wow. 

John Dieterich: And we, I don't really understand how we did it. Cause we shared that space with No Doctors, didn't we? 

Chris Cohen: What it was, we were really, it was the 9 to 5 thing. Cause it was just, the practice space was pretty empty. Yeah, we would go in there when no one else was there. And yeah, I don't remember ever being, there was never a struggle for a time in there. Yeah. It was like, you know, John and I, we lived in the same building, and we would like get in the car. John was the only one with a car in the band and like, we would get in your car, go to the West Oakland BART station, pick up Greg and Satomi. And I would be carrying your iMac on my lap every single day. We brought the iMac back and forth to the practice…

Greg Saunier: (laughs) Whose? 

Chris Cohen: John’s. It was one of those ones. Like, remember the ones that were like a dome and then this, you know, it had kind of like a neck on it where the screen is sticking out of this dome.

Greg Saunier: Oh yeah, that thing. 

Chris Cohen: And it was like swiveling around, you know, and it was just that was like in my lap Greg and Satomi would get in the back seat, West Oakland BART every morning at like 9am. But it was very like every day was the same. It was like yeah, you know, it was just like really like a job. I mean, I think we had like a work ethic, like we sort of maybe felt guilty about quitting our jobs or something. And we were like, we have to  make this real or something. 

Greg Saunier: Which we had recently done. You're right. 

Chris Cohen: Yeah, we recently quit our jobs. So we were like, we were going for it. 

“Chatterboxes”

Greg Saunier: “Chatterboxes,” it was like, you had this demo and the sound on the demo was so nice. And then I remember we tried it for like ages in this space. I'm like, “This sounds nowhere near as good as what John just did at home.” There was something about the crackle of the distortion on your original thing that we just struggled forever to try and recreate and then finally we got it in the end and there was this like (makes distorted noise), kind of going.

Satomi Matsuzaki: John made the melody line and also the lyrics so everything.  

Greg Saunier: You can kind of tell a John vocal melody (sings exaggerated “Chatterboxes” melody)

John Dieterich: Yeah. It's like almost completely unsingable. Yeah, that's always my issue. I end up writing things that are almost impossible to sing. “Oh no, but it seems fine. Like, you know, I can do it,” and I can't even really do it (laughs).

Greg Saunier: I was really impressed with your lyrics on that song. I thought they were very beautiful. They kind of reminded me, it was almost like, early impressions of your now wife's linguistics…

John Dieterich: That's what it was, yeah. Linguistics studies. 

Greg Saunier: Is that true? Is that what it was? We never discussed it. 

John Dieterich: No, that is true. Yeah. So my wife's a linguist and she had been doing these projects around language documentation and preservation work. 

Greg Saunier: Language loss.

John Dieterich: Language loss, yeah. And so it was sort of thinking about that. 

Greg Saunier: The song kind of has that sort of like, I don't know, it has like a magic twinkle. Of like a secret, and I think a lot of the songs ended up being about that. It was like speaking in code. We thought of ourselves as speaking in code to our own audience, like in a secret language that the authorities couldn't comprehend, you know, it would basically go under their radar. And that, yeah that idea of like a surviving secret code. So I think that's one reason why we wanted to put that song first, was it kind of like spelled out. I don't know, for me, it sort of spelled out that theme. Plus there were no drums on it (laughs). And it's like the album is so dang long that it was like, if we started with some heavy rocker or whatever, it was just going to like, people are going to be like, so tired (laughs). I mean, our first record, The Man, the King, the Girl, does start with an intro to the first song that's like, has no drums and it's, you know, has no beat, but the album did so poorly that ever since then, I did have an inferiority complex, I admit it, Chris, you were right. It was like, “Boy, the first song had better be a barnstormer.” So yeah, this felt like a big risk. This one doesn't grab you by the lapels, you know, right from the first track. We were trying to be brave. 

Chris Cohen: I mean, I think the music of our, you know, who we perceived as our peers at that time also was pretty aggro and loud and full all the time, you know? So, I mean, just to put it in the context of music that was happening in the Bay area and stuff, I think, you know, maybe this felt like a more, it felt like a bigger move at the time, maybe than it would seem now.

John Dieterich: Totally. 

Chris Cohen: It seemed like a different to do that, I guess. 

John Dieterich: And I also think that that was part of the idea of the record too. Like, not only are we going to have this long record, we are going to have to have all these different peaks and valleys or whatever, but also like sort of, it was very intentional that we wanted to explore different aspects of ourselves. Like it was okay to have something without drums. It was okay to like basically kind of take the blinders off.

Greg Saunier: We wanted to like slow start and like slow pace beginning. “You're going to have to settle in.” It's kind of like the beginning of 2001. It's like, “Okay guys, this is not going to be a fast paced movie,” (laughs). You know, like kind of, “Relax, slow down your breathing and settle in because it’s going to be a longer story.” 

“Twin Killers” 

Greg Saunier: When we play it now, like, “Okay, and I come in with the first snare drum hit and Satomi does a big jump, you know, and I remember one time we played at a music festival in Seattle. I had just bought a new snare head that day because the old one was starting to get old and I was worried that it might break. So I got a completely new head at the, at some music store in Seattle. And we set up and we get on stage. It's so exciting. There's a huge crowd and we start with “Twin Killers,” okay.  And it's building a building and then BANG! And then I hit the snare, Satomi does the jump, and I hit the first snare hit instantly, the head's broken. One hit, one note, and then we had to stop the show, find a new snare drum, or like, put on a new head, or whatever. Like, basically it's meant to be very loud. And I think that at the time we struggled so much with how to make the drums or the band sound loud in our mixes. And we were in this completely deadened, like carpeted,  you know, practice space. The sound didn't travel anywhere and it had no character whatsoever. And it's like, we were so deep into it and had overworked all of this stuff to such an insane degree that I think we thought we were making a really heavy sounding drum sound. And I listen to it now, I'm like, (makes snare sound) “tink,” You know, it's like, the drum does not, it does not sound like Def Leppard, or, you know, Metallica. It just sounded like nothing. 

Well, the intro was John's (sings intro riff). That was all John's thing. Then it just got pasted on and it was like almost unrelated, you know, in a different key, a different tempo, a different emotion, you know, and it's like, “Oh, this will be perfect” (laughs). 

Chris Cohen: Right. But I do remember it coming together pretty quickly. 

Greg Saunier: Yeah that one was fast.

Chris Cohen: That one wasn't super hard. 

Greg Saunier: Actually, I remember. writing the chorus at home. Satomi and I had a TV at the time. And I remember there was some awards show, it was like the Grammys or something. It was one of these kinds of things or like the Country Music Awards or something, and you know how those are. It's like somebody sings a song and then there's a special guest comes on and takes one verse or whatever. And it's like, not someone who was on the original song, but then, you know, they're there because they're accepting an award for some other thing later in the program and everybody stands up and cheers. And I remember just thinking like, maybe it was like Sheryl Crow was playing, and I remember switching the TV off I didn't know the song and I wanted to switch it off before I had memorized what her song was. And I'm like, “Okay,” like the sound of Sheryl Crow is swimming around in my head. I'm like, “I want to write a song that would be perfect for an award show.” And that's how I made up the melody of the chorus. It was like the kind of bluesy thing. And then people ended up covering it, you know, it's like there was, some really good covers appeared online that really touched me a lot because I felt my fantasy of the song was somehow understood, you know what I mean? It became what I sort of hoped it would be. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Yeah, that's from my middle school, I had, you know, twin sisters, friends, who kind of, you know, stopped hanging out with me one day.  And I was feeling, yeah, I still, you know, it was very strong memory, you know, so I'm like, “Oh it's gonna be fun to write a revenge, you know, song. 

Chris Cohen: Yeah, Satomi it's like you're it's like you're “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins. Supposedly that's like this revenge.

Greg Saunier: Diss track. 

Chris Cohen: Yeah, you and Phil. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Yeah. 

“Running Thoughts”

Satomi Matsuzaki: I remember like one day, like, I don't know what, but I come in late or something to this recording session. And then you guys were playing “Running Thoughts,” that drum and bass part. I'm like, “Oh, that sounds so cool.” You know, maybe I just went to bathroom and then, I don't know. But yeah, it was really cool. You know, the bass and drum felt so good. 

Greg Saunier: I feel like it was my lyrics. I don't know where I got the idea, like the speedboat. 

Chris Cohen: I think we had the title, Runners Four before. I remember “Running Thoughts” being like, “Okay, I'm going to keep,” you were riffing on what we already had for a title, I think. 

Greg Saunier: Okay. Right. Satomi had written a song called “Spiral Golden Town” that was about being a band in San Francisco. And I think I was like trying to, you know, maybe take the self mythologizing, you know, maybe a step further and like the band's actual existence into the lyrics of the song. And I think actually all of us ended up doing that with various songs on this record. A lot of the lyrics are actually about the band, you know, and about our ability or inability to get along and work together and stuff. And this one was more just like, yeah describing the band as these sort of like outlaws or something, you know, who traveled around and, you know, spit this secret code at people that the mainstream can't possibly understand, but that everyone who's present, you know, gets it. 

Chris Cohen: I remember I thought of that this song I thought of it as like Like Krautrock or something. I don't know why. Kind of just, yeah, it's like repetitive. 

Greg Saunier: Your part was repetitive. 

Chris Cohen: Yeah, I was kind of thinking of like I Can or something. 

Greg Saunier: For me, it was like the exact opposite of that. I was trying to play because  Jaki Liebezeit would play the same drum beat over and over for 10 minutes, you know, without the slightest variation. I was trying to do like fake, you know, Jack DeJohnette or Tony Williams or something like that. Yeah trying to do like maximum non-repetition, maximum syncopation of variety and try to play jazzy. I mean, we had, you know, what ended up on the record is like a three minute slice out of hours of like, droning on this one note.

Satomi Matsuzaki: Yeah, and then, John, did you play guitar for this? 

John Dieterich: Yeah, I had this like Casio, I think it was.

Greg Saunier: Cory….

John Dieterich: Oh, was it a Cory? I thought it was Casio. 

Greg Saunier: No, it was a Casio. Cory was the name of the human being who lent it to you. Cory (McCulloch) from Xiu Xiu, who was in Xiu Xiu at the time. 

John Dieterich: Ah, that's true. Yeah it was a Casio keyboard guitar with plastic strings and  that thing was cool. Yeah, like they had sounds that would just like sustain forever if you wanted. So we could, you could do like sort of organ tones and it had like 12 sounds or something. But I had totally forgotten about that. It's hard to play well because the articulation is really weird.  

Greg Saunier: And it doesn't have any dynamics. So it's like, if you even slightly hit the wrong fret or something, it's like, that one took so much editing (laughs). 

Satomi Matsuzaki: I don't remember, but Chris, didn't you say you wanted to play bass for this album? 

Chris Cohen: Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know if I really remember either, but I remember being really, I remember being really into the idea of playing bass. I definitely wanted to, but I can't remember how that started. 

Greg Saunier: I thought it was at your instigation.  

Chris Cohen: Okay. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: But because like, you know, Apple O’, you know, you guys played like twin guitar kind of, you know, just very together. And I think we wanted to do something different, you know, and you are just always like, you know, adventurous, like, “Oh, I'll try out this and that.” And I said, “Oh, that might be fun to play guitar, you know?” 

Chris Cohen: Yeah. That sounds right. 

John Dieterich: Right. And I think the, like the effects and stuff, I think that was, some of that was also like you Satomi, basically being, “I want to make some crazy sounds.”

Satomi Matsuzaki: Yeah I got fancy pod. 

John Dieterich: Like a floor pod, yeah. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: And I could make a lot of like funny sounds and stuff. So yeah. So that was experimental. And I think like Chris's bass playing so different from me, you know, it just brought out such a different rhythm. 

“Vivid Cheek Love Song”

Satomi Matsuzaki: That's mine. Yeah, I bought this small, Pearl guitar, acoustic guitar. And then, yeah, it was just my first try to make song with acoustic guitar, you know, and, I just wanted, I wanted to try acoustic guitar cause I thought that was cool. 

Greg Saunier: Phew, not a bad first try. 

Chris Cohen: Did I remember, Satomi you played out in the hallway? 

Greg Saunier: (laughs) That’s right. Yeah cause no one was there. It's like after 5pm, it's like after 5pm, this place turns into like a hundred heavy metal bands all going at the same time. But it's like, you know, at 9:30 in the morning, Satomi could literally be in the hallway. It'd be dead silent. Yeah. Why did we do that? Because the drums would have been too loud in the acoustic mic. What a beautiful song. I think I wrote the bridge. And again, it was just, rammed into the song. It wasn't written in response to your composition, but it was just something I had in a notebook somewhere that like, “Oh, this could work.” One thing I remember about the wah wah pedal on that was a thing you could do with these Line 6 PODS, these amp simulators, was  unlike a real amp where it'd be like guitar, then it goes through the wah wah pedal and then the amp, we could actually put guitar then through the amp and then through the wah. You're actually like wah’ing the mic and I remember Chris you were the one who made the suggestion like this is the way to get even more wah It would be like the most wah that anyone's ever heard. And of course it was like all that Miles Davis music from that period is like an homage to the wah wah pedal. Like every member of the band is going through at least one wah wah pedal, like absolutely relentlessly on every song. And so yeah, the wah was like a big thing. 

“O’Malley, Former Underdog” 

Greg Saunier: “O'Malley, Former Underdog,” Oh, I did, I did write. I wrote even the words on that one. This is one where it wasn't pasted together and they weren't different song idea modules being rammed together. But it was like the whole thing came as one thought. And that almost never happens for me. And I just remember feeling so lucky on “O'Malley” that I don't know, just like the entire melody from beginning to end just dropped as one gift in my brain. 

We were on tour in Japan, okay, and we played a NHK session, which is the nationalized, it's like the Japan's BBC, the national radio and TV broadcast. And we did a session and we shared it with Shonen Knife, who we'd been longtime fans, and it was so cool to meet them and to see that was my first time seeing them play live was in this studio and the songs were so catchy, like you've never heard more melodic, perfectly composed songs in your life, or at least that's how I felt. And I remember waking up the next morning early with all of these melodies running to my head. And I wrote “Milk Man” and “O'Malley” both in like 20 minutes, just like in my head on the scrap of paper, having been inspired by Shonen Knife. But Satomi had been telling us while we were in Japan, Japanese baseball games are really fun because the audience is. There's no sporting event crowd that's more willing to do things like the wave than a Japanese stadium. Like just everyone participates. And in fact, every player on the Japanese baseball teams had their own personalized song that when they would come up to bat, everybody in the stadium or arena or whatever, the stadium, would start singing this in unison. And apparently there was some baseball player called O'Malley, some American guy, you know, like Ichiro became famous as a Japanese player who played on American teams, but there were also Americans who played, unless O'Malley was like some Irish guy, I don't know, but…

Satomi Matsuzaki: No, he's American. 

Greg Saunier: He's American, okay. So he was playing on a Japanese team. And although Satomi didn't actually know his song, she just made one up. And that ended up being the kernel, the (sings) “O'Malley, O'Malley, O'Malley!” So it’s a, I wrote the song kind of as, like based around Satomi having sung this like sort of possible melody that could have been his melody or something like that. And I thought it was so adorable that somehow it found its way into this, into this melody that I woke up and had in my head. 

It was another like self mythologizing. Like we thought of ourselves as like this underdog kind of band, you know, that was never going to be number one, but that actually the desire to be number one was being critiqued. I don't know if this song came first or “Scream Team” came first, but the lyrics to that, but we ended up having several songs that were like, yeah, about sports or about like, it was like another version of a team. You know, one of the metaphors for a band was like a team, you know, and this kind of like, you know, all for one kind of vibe. 

“Odyssey” 

Chris Cohen: You know, looking back on it, I think that I just thought, this is kind of embarrassing to admit, but I think I just thought like, “Oh, Deerhoof, everybody sings high in that band” (laughs). Like, I just, I felt like I was trying to sing like you, Satomi. I remember immediately after Runners Four or like after, so I did this Curtains album, Calamity, right after. And that still was a little bit like that. But I remember like, after that being like, “Oh man, I got to like, get over this singing up high thing.” It's not my range. I mean, I'm actually, I think I'm a baritone really like that is totally not my range. So when I hear it back now, I'm just like, “Oh my God, it's way too high.” So I was not trying to sound like Brian Wilson. I could barely do that.  And I wish we had changed the key of that song. 

John Dieterich: Sounds great though. 

Chris Cohen: This one. I remember, I remember like the lyric was originally not, “Pirates on an odyssey.” I forget what it was. What the original lyric was. 

Greg Saunier: That wasn't the line? 

Chris Cohen: No, it was your, it was, I remember it was Greg, you being like, “No, it's got to be about pirates. It's you're a pirate. You’ve got to sing it.”  And it was just like, “Okay.” And I just did it, but I remember afterwards kind of wishing I hadn’t. I really, I wish I could remember what it was before. 

Greg Saunier: That's so cruel. 

Chris Cohen: But I just, I remember that this was just a thing in the air of like everything kind of having to like come back to this concept and it felt at times it felt kind of like a good idea and at times I felt like a bad idea, you know. But anyway, “Odyssey…”

Greg Saunier: Yeah but the lyrics must not have been completed because the subsequent lyrics in the song are definitely about pirates.

Chris Cohen: Well, no, that's the thing, I think they were. I think it it is about the sea and Odyssey and stuff like that But I think that's, I think that's probably why you said the pirates. I think it seemed natural. It probably seemed natural to switch that, but I think it was actually, I think I did have the lyrics. 

Greg Saunier: It was just sailors or something.

Chris Cohen: Yeah, I forget what it was. I was really into like, I was reading like Moby Dick and stuff and I was really into it. 

John Dieterich: Yeah, I remember that. We all were. 

Chris Cohen: But anyway, it just, it started as an acoustic guitar song and I think we ended up kind of using basically the acoustic guitar demo and just built it out from that. 

Greg Saunier: I think you replayed it, but we were so taken with the demo. We were just like, “Dude, this is so perfect and so beautiful and so heartbreaking that like, let's just not screw this up.”

John Dieterich: Yeah I remember you playing me, I think it was after a rehearsal one day or something, just going up to your apartment.

Greg Saunier: Exactly. And I remember being so jealous the next morning, being like, this is the most beautiful thing.  

Chris Cohen: Thanks guys. 

John Dieterich: But you didn't sing lyrics at all, though. It was just, I think you just hummed the melody. 

Chris Cohen: Yeah you know, I probably, yeah, I probably didn't have the lyrics until later on, but yeah, I wrote the song about the band and kind of seeing, you know, trying to make like thinking of the band as a family and kind of like, you know, trying on this band as a family, as my new family. 

I mean, I remember it as being sort of like a time when we were trying to really make it like everybody's band. 

Greg Saunier: Yeah. 

Chris Cohen: In a way that it maybe didn't necessarily always feel like that before. Like I had actually moved to LA shortly before we started this, before we started Runners Four. 

Greg Saunier: Oh, right. Oh God. 

Chris Cohen: And there, there was like, there was a time like when Green Cosmos was happening, I was living in LA and then there was like a time where like, “Okay, we're gonna start a new record. Chris, you need to be up here, like, every day to do this.” And it was kind of like a moment where I was kind of just deciding to like, “Okay, I'm going to like go all in on Deerhoof,” because you know, I had been doing other projects, we all had some other projects that we were doing at the same time too. And I remember this being sort of like, we were deciding to all kind of set aside everything else and kind of like go all in on the band. I don't know. Does that sound right to everybody? 

Greg Saunier: I had forgotten you were living in LA. How did I forget that whole chapter? 

Chris Cohen: It was like less than a year. But yeah.

Greg Saunier: But I mean, we demanded you to move back? What kind of people are we? It's like pure cruelty. 

Chris Cohen: I think it was just kind of like, “This is what we're going to do,” and, you know, I think you probably would have let me find some way to participate if I hadn't moved, but I knew that it wouldn't have been like what we were talking about, so.

Greg Saunier: Well, certainly not, yeah. But dang. 

Chris Cohen: I felt like I was like really going for it, like, “Let's see what this band could be for me, as far as bringing in my material.” And I was really hopeful, you know. 

Greg Saunier: Well, especially with the story about you being requested to move back for the sake of the band is like pretty intense, you know, and so the stakes are high. 

Chris Cohen: Yeah. It was very, I mean, I don't know if you all felt this way at the time, but I mean, I felt just yeah, I felt like it was just a very intense situation. There was just, it just seemed like, you know, there was so much on the line, just personally, like in our interpersonal relationships. And I just think I felt so much pressure. I mean, actually, like I remember thinking, you know, like if we don't start making money at this, we're going to have to stop or something. Did you all feel that way? 

Greg Saunier: Of course. I feel that way every dang time. What are you talking about? 

Chris Cohen: I mean, how much more pressure can there be? It's like this has to be successful. It was so insane. 

Greg Saunier: None more pressure. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Well, I think that John and Chris paid more rent than me and Greg, you know, I mean, our place was so cheap under rent control, you know, so really, yeah so we weren't worried about the, you know, paying rent.

Chris Cohen: But well, that was the first, I remember I was paying 600 bucks and that was the first time I had ever lived alone. And it did feel like a lot, I guess. But I mean, thinking about it now, I mean, it's a joke. But yeah, there was a lot of pressure on us. And I think also, you know, maybe, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember thinking sort of like, with Kill Rock Stars, that it was sort of like, “We’ve got to get them to take us seriously,” and, you know, like just kind of begging for attention in a way. 

Greg Saunier: Yeah I remember it was our first very strained sort of communication with them. The first time that that communication with Kill Rock Stars became strained and became stressful and that feelings started to get hurt, you know.

Chris Cohen: I don't think they ever really saw us as like, as a viable commercial band. I mean, I know that they supported us, but I don't think they had bands that were making them money. And like, I just, we were never thought of in that, in that way. And I remembered at the time thinking like, “Well, maybe we could get them to think about us that way.” But it never, I mean, I didn't think that that ever happened. 

Greg Saunier: I mean, hard to say, I mean, the big bands were Sleater-Kinney and Elliott Smith. And I mean, I remember so many times making concerted efforts to sound like Sleater-Kinney or sound like Elliott Smith. It would just always miss the target by an absolute mile, you know what I mean? But it's like, yeah, you're so right, Chris. I had forgotten about that. 

Chris Cohen: And I thought our music was going to be, I thought, I mean, I still think, you know, like that it was timeless. I was like, “We're making something, we're trying to be timeless here.” And like, make something really, I wanted to make something like really classic. 

John Dieterich: That was the pressure.

Greg Saunier: No, but that's a different mindset from, “I'm trying to make something that's going to sell a lot on the day it comes out.”

Chris Cohen: Right. I was just being naive. I guess I was just thinking, “Oh, you make something good and you're going to strike it rich.”

John Dieterich: I mean, that to me is every bit as stressful. I mean, it's like, you know, it's like if you're actually taking it seriously. Because if you're being that critical and our goal was to be that critical, not only of ourselves, but of each other and to sort of voice all this stuff that, you know, we weren't trying to be mean to each other, but we were trying to be honest, you know, and, and like really clear about how we heard stuff and I don't know, just, yeah…

Chris Cohen: I mean, yeah, in hindsight, I mean, having played with lots of other bands now and producing, you know, working with other bands, I've never encountered a band that was as hard on each other as we were during those days. 

Greg Saunier: Oh my God.  

Chris Cohen: Yeah, just a level of critique. 

Greg Saunier: And hard on ourselves, I mean. I just, you know, it's like we would do the 9 to 5, and then my work day would start. Then it's like…

Chris Cohen: Like mixing?

Greg Saunier: Open up the Pro Tools and start trying to mix it or trying to edit it. And it's like  people sometimes, you know, they come up to the merch table or something like that and be like, “Oh man,” you know, like, “Oh, Runners Four, that's my favorite album of yours. What was it like to, you know, to do that? It just sounds so joyous and stuff.” And it's like, I don't want to complain, I mean, everybody has their ups and downs in life, but I mean, I've told many people that, that like, if I had the option to not do it, if we were faced with like, “Okay, let's make this record.” If I was once again faced with that choice, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. 

John Dieterich: Yeah, same.

Greg Saunier: The psychological toll, you know, and the toll it took on our, on our relationships, which I think have recovered, but like, I often feel that I missed my twenties, you know, basically, and a lot of it was spent in front of a computer saying to myself, “This isn't good enough.” And I would never recommend that process, that type of goal, that type of ambition to anyone. I mean,  it's like, I don't know, what can I say? I mean, I think the record came out great and I love it, but  it's not a question of that, but…

Chris Cohen: We had a good days too. I mean, not to paint such a totally dark picture. I think like just going song by song, some of these songs, I remember like doing, “Vivid Cheek” and “O'Malley,” and “Running Thoughts” too. I remember some, a lot of those times were really, were really like, I felt alot of joy. And just pleasure at seeing like “O'Malley” was a song that I was just, you know, I remember it was like, just digging our teeth into that was so fun. Cause it was just, it had so many, the changes went by fast and there's just a lot of different parts to sink our teeth into. And it was like, I just, I loved just playing that bassline was so, I remember just being, it was so fun for me. And I really felt like in my mind, I was living out this fantasy of like being a great session player or something, which I know I'm not, but it was like in my mind, I was just like, I felt like we were making something that was great. And it felt, you know, I just felt so lucky to be able to be part of that. 

Greg Saunier: Yeah. You're so right. 

Chris Cohen: There was a lot of good times too. 

John Dieterich: Totally. 

Greg Saunier: Yeah, I mean, I remember I had a lot of fun doing the piano overdub on “Odyssey.” I forget where we were.

Chris Cohen: Oh, Greg, I know where that was. We were in the hallway of Soundwave. Not the hallway, but where you walked in the entrance, there was like a little foyer where there was like this shitty old piano. And we, I remember…

Greg Saunier: Totally out of tune. 

Chris Cohen: And we did it with the laptop, just sat on top of the piano and you recorded it with the mic in the laptop, the built in mic. You were like, “Yeah it sounds great!” That's how it was done. It was crazy. 

Greg Saunier: No, it was so out of tune that we, you know, we had to put like a lot of effect on it later to sort of mask how detuned it was. And yeah, it ended up being really cool. It was like this watery sound. But yeah, we were so scared somebody was going to walk in. It literally was the foyer of the building. Oh my God. Yeah. well, there you go, “Odyssey.”

“Wrong Time Capsule”  

Greg Saunier: “Wrong Time Capsule,” I remember making up the riff to that. For some reason, I was on the phone with Ches Smith in my apartment. Ches Smith, who, you know, now he's like a very well known jazz and session drummer, plays in Mr. Bungle, who's he play with now? Anyway, Ches Smith. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Ceramic Dog. Marc Ribot. 

Greg Saunier: Oh, of course. Ceramic Dog. Marc Ribot. For some reason I was on the phone with Ches and I was sitting in a chair like I am now, and I was holding a guitar in my hands that I was just sort of absent mindedly, like moving my fingers around. I came up with that riff and I was so happy with it. I thought it really sounded like some weird, like sci-fi Keith Richards or something. And I remember it came together really fast when we recorded it. It might've been one try and it just like totally clicked. 

Chris Cohen: I always loved your lyrics, Satomi. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Oh, thank you. But this was Greg's lyrics. 

Chris Cohen: Oh, really? Oh, I always thought Satomi wrote them. I always loved these lyrics. 

Greg Saunier: Yeah. Thanks. It was sort of similar thing to “O’Malley.” It's like, “Don't sacrifice your, you know, basically don't sell your soul to the devil. You know, don't sacrifice who you are in order to achieve success.” But then it was also like this idea of the, of the, okay, what was the time capsule? It was instead of a person in the past leaving a time capsule for people in the future. It was exactly the inverse. It was a girl in the future, probably a post-apocalyptic, somewhat destroyed future that was difficult now to survive. Sending a message to the past,  what not to do.  

Satomi Matsuzaki: Terminator. 

Chris Cohen: If you're in an underground rock band (laughs). 

Greg Saunier: Skull and crossbones, you know, “Don't do what you are about to do, because I'm gonna end up basically struggling to survive, you know.” So it was “Wrong Time Capsule,” it was like, “don't do this.”

Chris Cohen: It's about capitalism.  

Greg Saunier: Capitalism. You got it. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: America. 

Chris Cohen: I mean, I thought it was really taboo, like, I mean that's what I loved about when I first discovered them, I was like, “Finally a rock band that sounds like real rock to me,” you know, the rock music that I grew up listening to. And it was so, it just seems so like no one else is doing that. Like no one else is admitting that they like this or coming from this place. So it made me feel super connected to the band. And then I guess it's probably just our age or something too, right? 

Greg Saunier: I mean, I love that you say that I feel like it was more complicated. I think that  most of the allusions, at least prior to you joining, to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Kinks…

Chris Cohen: And the Troggs.

Greg Saunier: And the Troggs were coming from me, not John.

John Dieterich: Not me.

Greg Saunier: And I don't think that I realized how unhip it was. It's just, that's like music that I actually liked. And it was music that I thought it had proven itself as standing the test of time. And so I thought like, “Oh, well, if you want to make like an album that's gonna do well, like, obviously model it on something that has previously done well.” And so, but the song like “Wrong Time Capsule,” it's like, you know, I'm not playing the guitar on that song, it's John playing the riff, and like, that was not a common ground that we had or have at all. 

John Dieterich: Not at all. We do now. It's like, I feel like, but at that time for sure, like when I first joined Deerhoof, I had none of that. I didn't know, I mean, I didn't listen to the Beatles. I didn't listen to the Rolling Stones, but you know, I started listening to the Kinks through you all.  

Chris Cohen: But you liked metal and stuff, right? 

John Dieterich: I loved metal. 

Chris Cohen: Didn't you like Judas Priest? 

John Dieterich: I mean, at that moment, actually, I was kind of already over metal, but like, I would never would have considered myself a fan of classic rock, you know? I mean, I liked Zeppelin, but it was, you know, it's just, I had horrible taste. Like, it's funny because I think I still do, like, I remember going into a recording studio with Ed's (Ed Rodriguez) and my old band and the engineer saying, “Oh, so do you know the Who?” And I was like, yeah, I know that song, “Eminence Front.” 

Chris Cohen: That's a good song. That's a good song. John, you have a good taste.

Greg Saunier: It's an awesome song. Yeah that keyboard part. 

John Dieterich: No, I love it. But I mean, but my point is, Like I just didn't know this music. I didn't, I wasn't exposed to it. Like when people were listening to that, I was like listening to very different things.

Chris Cohen: So I remember, Satomi, you and Greg were really into Free, that Free stuff. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Me? No, I don’t think so. 

Greg Saunier: Well just that song, “Alright Now.” 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. I never thought that was funny when I was in Japan. I think, you know, I thought I joined a noise band and then turned into rock band.

Greg Saunier: Oops. Thumbs down. 

Chris Cohen: Satomi, what about Ozzy? You're like, you're a big Ozzy fan? 

Satomi Matsuzaki: No, I liked metal. Yeah. Ozzy. Yeah. 

Greg Saunier: You were into Metal.

Satomi Matsuzaki: I saw Ozzy in..

Chris Cohen: I mean, that's classic rock. 

Greg Saunier: With Zakk Wylde. The Zakk Wylde era.

Satomi Matsuzaki: Zakk Wylde, yeah. 

Chris Cohen: Then after me, you guys got Ed (Rodiriguez) who's, who's basically like Zakk Wylde come back. He's the 21st century Zakk Wylde.

John Dieterich: Yeah he can play all that stuff. Totally. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: You know, I came to San Francisco and stayed with a friend who I became friends with in Tokyo when, and then this bond called the Caroliner Rainbow. And he let me stay and like, you know, he was like kind of a, how do you call it, like a guardian, you know, mentor. And then he was like, you know, do you want to join this band called Deerhoof? They're looking for a singer. And he played the 7-inch and that came out from Kill Rock Stars or something. And it was a noise band. You know, just crackling noise, you know, and sometimes screaming, so I'm like, “Oh, that's cool. I love noise.” You know, I like Merzbow, you know, C.C.C.C., and like, you know, Masonna, and all that kind, Keiji Haino, and, you know, I came from that kind of 80s, like, Japanese, you know, noise people, and I thought I joined a noise band. So I didn't expect I sing like melodies and stuff because, you know, I didn't know how to sing, you know, how to play any instruments. But, you know, I learned over time. 

“Spirit Ditties of No Tone” 

Chris Cohen: That's a John tune, originally.

John Dieterich: Yeah I had made a demo, a really insane sounding demo to a dance hall beat, like drum machine beat that I don't remember where I even gathered that, but I had some, like some CD or something of beats of like electronic beats. And I recorded the demo to that. It really is crazy sounding. I have it somewhere. It's like all DI guitars, like really compressed DI guitars. They actually sound really cool. 

Greg Saunier: But it was all out of order. It was like, we heard it and you had this like, at the very end, there was this like little coda where it faded out or something that lasted like three seconds and we were all like, “John, that's obviously the main part. That's the best part of the whole demo,” you know, so we turned that into the main, you know, it was that part was just the weird like. It was an outro fade thing. 

John Dieterich: Yeah, you're right. I think it was better like that actually. 

Greg Saunier: What?  God, man, you and Chris both now. It sounded like it shouldn't have been “pirates on an odyssey.” We got to go back and redo the whole dang record. I can't believe this. This is shocking. 

Chris Cohen: This song took about a week. We spent like a week on it. 

Greg Saunier: Yeah, it was really, it was hard. It was really hard to arrange. The drum beat was super hard. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: I thought the demo sounded so, so pop, you know, like because of the electronic sounds and like really like chunky and, you know, fun, you know, and then we played and then it was not fun anymore. So I'm like, how can we make it so close to the demo, you know? And so that was my whole goal and I wasn't happy for a long time and I remember we like, you know, tried so many things. 

Greg Saunier: Well, I just couldn't get the beat. I mean, I couldn't nail it. I was just too sloppy, you know. I could not get that electronic precision, you know. You ended up playing a kind of a sampler. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Sampler, yeah. 

Greg Saunier: On a lot of it. You played both guitar and sampler on that song. Kind of went back and forth. I'm sure the version on the record was pieced together from zillions of takes, you know, and like different arrangements, you know, like, I don't think it's actually that you went back and forth between guitar and sampler. I think it was that. One day we were trying it with you on guitar and then we canned it and said, “Forget it, it's not working. Try it with the sampler.”  And then we ended up like splicing together moments from from each. Yeah, it was just really hard to agree on the rhythmic feel. I think we all were trying really hard, but yeah.

Chris Cohen: There was a while when it was like kind of seeming like bossa nova. 

Greg Saunier: Yeah, exactly.

Chris Cohen: And it was like it went through some bad periods and then it got good.  

Greg Saunier: Yeah we got it in the end. 

John Dieterich: It's a funny song, I think. It's funny.

Greg Saunier: I remember we were on tour at some venue, some small venue, maybe in Chicago. That had a cafe in the front and the cafe had like a little library that had like some books on the shelf, you know, not very many and one was like some kind of like poetry anthology that I opened to a random page and it was "Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the Yeats (John Keats) poem and I was just like, “What? These lines are incredible,” you know, this period of English poetry where everything was like as arcane as possible. And it was really hard to figure out what in the world they were talking about. Like my favorite album then and now probably is a weird record of music of ancient Greece where people had tried to recreate from just these few remaining fragments of notation that existed from that empire a millennia ago, tried to recreate what the music might have sounded like and like rebuilt the instruments and stuff. And it was totally a hopeless task. And so it's this idea of, it is sort of like a time capsule, but this one's not a reverse time capsule. It's like exactly what Yeats (John Keats) is talking about in the poem. It's this being is like sort of forever frozen on the side of this urn painted on, and it's a musician. And like, what in the world does the music actually sound like? None of us knows, you know? And it's like from so many centuries ago. And like, you have to use your imagination to even guess what the music might've sounded like. And that's what Yeats (John Keats) was doing in the poem. And then so I sort of hit on that phrase and then Satomi wrote all the lyrics based on the sort of concept of that. It was sort of like a rewrite of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Yeah and then that's why it goes into that long period of near silence at the end. 

“Scream Team” 

Chris Cohen: I mean, I don't think we were trying to be tricky. I think it was just like, I mean, I'm actually, so like remedial that I'm not even like a 4/4 person. It's just like, that was the way that it came out. And I couldn't have even, I learned how to count music like recently,  you know, back then I was, I couldn't even really count. Just living in the moment.

Satomi Matsuzaki: Me neither. I'm like, I played, you know, I still like in Deerhoof, I, you know, I play songs and I asked Greg, “What's this rhythm? Is it five?” And then Greg doesn't answer me.  

Greg Saunier: Why not? 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Yeah, because you can play so you don't need to count. So I'm like, “Okay, I'm not going to count,” you know?

John Dieterich: I think what it is is oftentimes, Satomi, like the way you count, like it'll, to me, it'll feel like you're counting, like you have your own sort of language of counting. It isn't consistent from one song to the next. Like, so each song would have like a way of counting that is logical, which totally makes sense, but it's like, it's difficult to communicate, like, cause I could give you my number, but it's not going to mean anything to you.

Greg Saunier: The way Satomi would count “Scream Team” would be, “One, two, three.” 

Satomi Matsuzaki: (laughs) Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly how I remember like songs, like, you know, “One, two, three - four, five, six.” (laughs). 

Chris Cohen: This was something that I think during this whole session, all of these sessions that came up a lot was like everybody having their different systems. Of learning things and like, something that I still, I think I took away from this and I really think it's important is like, is just like letting people do it their own way and not trying to like, that's something I learned from Deerhoof and I think at specific at this time, it was just like, it's going to be danger if we try to like, you know, the language about it is not important. It's about internalizing it.  And just sort of knowing it, knowing it in your body, which is like, we don't talk about it. Cause if we talk about it, everything's going to fall apart. And that was very useful. 

Greg Saunier: Yeah. A hundred percent. 

John Dieterich: I mean, that's good advice. I think, I mean, that plays into just living in the world and having relationships with people in the world. And like, you may not be able to understand the world in the same way that the person you're talking to is, but, you don't have to, you know, inflict your way of thinking necessarily on somebody, but you can still have a conversation and learn from each other.

Chris Cohen: Words don't capture everything.

Greg Saunier: Well, exactly. And even if they did, we don't necessarily speak the same language and yet play together and something happens in which the parts, the four parts are interdependent. And really kind of five parts if you count the vocals, but something is happening simultaneously in which we each are living in our own bubble. I'm saying in the songs, you know, like in the songs on Runners Four, it's like, everybody's playing kind of soloistically. and trying to make it so that if it was just their part isolated, which we did actually after the record came out, like there was a remix page that we had. So it was each stem, you know, it was before stems became a popular thing, but it was like, we wanted it to be that you could listen to each person's part isolated and it would still sound like an interesting finished music composition, you know, it wasn't just there to like accompany or back up somebody else. It was like, it was, it's definitely its own life force, its own entity. And yeah, it was not exactly what you said, John, you know, wasn't forced to square with someone else's. 

Chris Cohen: It's kind of embarrassing to say, but I think I was trying to write a song. Like, I was like, trying to write a song that I thought Deerhoof would like. It was like, kind of my idea of a Deerhoof song. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Yeah, it was fun. It was so different. Yeah, so different from what we've done, ever. 

Chris Cohen: That's cool. 

Greg Saunier: How come? 

Satomi Matsuzaki: I don't know, because it's kind of like, kind of, for me like, kind of rockabilly or something. 

Greg Saunier: Well, you were doing that kind of Chuck Berry thing on (sings riff) “doo doo doo doo doo doo” on your guitar part. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Yeah, it was, Chris thought it was easy for me to play that part, but I struggled so much.  

Chris Cohen: It's a lot of downstrokes.  

Satomi Matsuzaki: Yeah, and I mean, people really danced when we played that, you know, live, and it's really, yeah, dance tune.

Greg Saunier: We get that one requested a lot. We really should relearn it.

Chris Cohen: I forget, John, did you sing some of that? Or did you sing all of it? 

John Dieterich: Yeah we all sang, right? 

Greg Saunier: No, no, we all took turns. Everybody had a turn. Yeah you did the part, (sings) da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Wasn't that you, John? 

John Dieterich: No, maybe that was. That was Chris? I can’t remember. 

Greg Saunier: No, that was me. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Oh, that was you.  

Greg Saunier: Yeah, yeah, that's you. Did you sing? That was all of us in harmony. No, but that was you, Chris. Yeah then it was me and then Satomi and John sang something. Yeah, I don't remember. Oh, John, that was sort of like revenge on your unsingable melodies than Chris gave you that. 

John Dieterich: Yeah. That was hard to sing. Yes. 

Chris Cohen: Yeah, that's not one of my prouder moments.

“You Can See” 

Greg Saunier: That one felt very fused, between you and me writing it together. And I remember feeling so proud of it. This is, “You can see.” I struggled with it for months in the computer, I couldn't figure out the form. Like we didn't know whether to start with (sings melody) or whether to start with (sings melody) you know? And finally it started to make sense. And then we had the idea of yeah, I think I sing first and then you sing second. That was another one where John played the Casio, that weird keyboard guitar thing. It sounded so cool. 

John Dieterich: I love that song.

Greg Saunier: But the words were so interesting. I mean, it was like almost a short story, you know, like about this, it was very sci-fii, like completely invented plot from scratch. It was not a, it wasn't like a normal topic for a song. It wasn't just like another love song or something. It was very specific, like this very precisely drawn character in lots of detail who discovered that he had this strange visual ability that no one else had and it was like a blessing and a curse and he didn't know what to do with it. The kind of like it was sort of like the Cassandra complex, you know. 

Chris Cohen: I just looked up the lyrics, I can't even remember it at all. It's amazing. Oh My God, it’s like another person wrote it. 

Greg Saunier: Yeah, man. It's genius  No, man, you nailed it. 

Oh, and that was the first time Deerhoof ever had three part vocal harmony on any of our songs. And I remember that, that moment near the end of the song where you, me, and Satomi were in three part harmony that would make my mom's arm hairs stand up (laughs). That was her favorite moment of all Deerhoof music was when we hit that three part harmony. It's only like two notes or something, but it's just like sounded so lush by comparison to our like, you know, like scrawny, like super raw, like skeletal and abrasive music or whatever. 

“Midnight Bicycle Mystery” 

Chris Cohen: It wasn't like doing it in a real studio, like would have occurred to us. I mean, we never got a budget ever. It wasn't like we were like, “Oh, maybe we should go to,” I mean, it was just, this was the only way that even presented itself, I think, as far as like recording over multiple days. 

John Dieterich: Right. If we went into a studio, it's usually like a day or two and it would just be like blast through everything and then take it home and mix it.

Greg Saunier: Somebody got a free day, basically. 

Chris Cohen: Right. Yeah and those would be songs that we had played on tour night after night and could just go into a studio and, and track. But then this was like, we were going to create new music from, you know, from scratch together. So there was like no other way to do it, I don't think. Unless we had like a bazillion dollars.

Greg Saunier: Yeah it was the, There's a Riot Goin’ On model. I think that was another thing we were talking about constantly, like, “Oh, home studio, basically, you know, just record in the house and look how different the music turns out.” "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” like the difference of the two versions when it's like, “Oh, we're in a studio for two days and we got to make this pop record.” And then it's like, “We're in the quote unquote studio, which is my living room for like two years, like totally fried and like everything's so personal.” And it's all about the personal interactions and weird, the type of musical brainstorms that come up at four in the morning, you know, when you're not on the clock, and nobody's watching and you're kind of in secret. We wanted to get that, that vibration, you know. 

John Dieterich: We were probably only like a mile away from that studio.

Greg Saunier: Yeah, exactly.  

John Dieterich: Which I don't think I realized at the time. I don't remember like having that thought. 

Greg Saunier: Yeah, that's so ironic. Totally. It was like a local Oakland, you know, legend.  What was the story we eventually heard that somebody had bought Sly Stone’s, eventually bought that console, the board that he had in his house, years later. Of course it needed servicing (laughs). It was in very bad condition. And when they opened it up, the layer of cocaine dust that was sitting on the bottom shelf of this, you know, console was like, I don't know. We didn't do that. You guys probably had coffee. I maybe had tea. 

John Dieterich: I had a lot of coffee. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: That was my lyrics. But was it collaborative thing? 

Greg Saunier: That song was sort of two totally different things smashed together. The first one was, that was, that was a bassline of Chris's, I think when we're talking about “Midnight Bicycle Mystery.” 

Chris Cohen: Oh, right. Yeah. 

Greg Saunier: Where I think you made up something to sound like that seventies Miles stuff. And then we would kind of like jam on it for a while. And then we were like begging John to play like John McLaughlin and play some like really dissonant chords. And then, Satomi was playing the sampler in that session, and then we just, it was another thing where we just recorded like two hours of this jam and then whittled it down to about 30 seconds, you know, for the intro of that song. I seem to remember that it was, an example of a thing that often happened in Deerhoof, and it had to do with using the free version of Pro Tools that I was using is that we'd record it, I'd make a rough mix and something would happen and I’d erase or lose or think I no longer needed the original session and then we're just stuck with this rough mix that doesn't sound very good and like then just struggle for months like trying to, like it would have been so much faster to just go back and rerecord it. But it's like “No no, no, this was this moment, this magic moment that's never gonna happen again, and I gotta find some way to preserve it.” And, you know, this sort of like compromised recording, I have to find some way to restore it, you know, to sounding good. Yeah and then you wrote a story about what was it like a stolen bicycle or something?

Satomi Matsuzaki: It was, yeah, like my mom's ghost story. Yeah so she thought somebody was coming after her. And then bicycle, midnight, you know, and then she turned around and there's, you know, turned the corner and then turned around and there was no one, you know.  So that's the story. 

John Dieterich: Hence the mystery. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Based on true story. 

“After Me the Deluge” 

Chris Cohen: That was recorded at my place.  

Greg Saunier: Chris's entirely. 

Chris Cohen: And we all played guitars. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: And the hurdy gurdy.  

Greg Saunier: Yeah, you had a harmonium. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Oh sorry, harmonium. 

Greg Saunier: I don't know why, but that part we did, we did at our house. Yeah, that was later. Yeah, you overdubbed it and I remember how much you wanted to play the harmonium on something, and it actually turned out really nice. I felt like you were sort of just hitting random notes, but it ended up being kind of like, it just fits so beautifully with the chords. 

John Dieterich: I love the sound of that, that song. Just like that combination of like the acoustic guitars with the harmonium. 

Greg Saunier: Yeah, it was totally cool. 

John Dieterich: Great sound.

Greg Saunier: And then the drums were just like some frying pan or something that Chris had in his kitchen. Yeah, you can hear it. You can hear it very clearly. It's like a mixing bowl or a frying pan or something. “After Me the Deluge” was another line that came out of that book in Chicago in that cafe. It was a very fruitful visit to that cafe. It was some line that, was it like Louis the 14th or something had said, you know, it was some like historical thing from the French monarchy times or whatever. And he was maybe talking about revolution, but, you know, we were very concerned. I mean, the other big recurring motif in the record is the Noah's Ark and the flood, all of which has to do with time capsules and saving the past for the future and has to do with, you know, pairs of things and obviously floods, you know, calamities, before and after and also fools, you know, the, the Noah being the, the mocked village idiot who, you know, has the Cassandra complex and is cursed to be able to see the future. And nobody believes him, you know, he builds this thing that seems completely and utterly pointless. I mean, that's exactly like what we felt we were doing. We were village idiots like wasting our time in a windowless practice space, like all day, every day for months. And just like trying to build this ridiculous thing that we thought served a purpose. But, you know, we felt a little bit like, we didn't feel like we had enemies at all. The Bay Area right then was an incredibly supportive music scene. And I think we always felt quite well loved, but I think we did have a desire to prove something, like Chris was saying, if, if to the label, then nothing else, or maybe prove to ourselves that we could do something that we didn't think we could do before. 

I think, you know, it's kind of like a romantic song, a sort of song about a romantic relationship that sort of has, similarly, a sort of before and after quality to it, you know, and things seem really easy and innocent at first. And then things become harder once it becomes possible to experience pain in the relationship for the first time and to realize you're capable of hurting each other, you know, it's sort of like something clicks there that you can never go back to the time period before you ever hurt each other's feelings.

You know, I think that our, you know, me and Satomi's relationship suffered as a result, regardless of whether we fought. It was the question of, the band took precedence, you know.  It's a difficult thought to go back and sort of process. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: I don't actually remember, like, having so much fight with Greg, though.

Greg Saunier: Good. Phew. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: During this. We were too, we were too busy to even fight. We had to eat and we had to, you know, sleep and like, you know, that took time. 

John Dieterich: I mean, also like it wasn't just recording as well. It was like we'd go on tour then on these intense, you know, long tours. I remember because I remember it would often be, you know, we'd like finish with the tour and I had the car or I would be, it was a rental or something. And I remember dropping off Greg and Satomi in San Francisco. And it's like, we all just spent the lastmonth completely together a hundred percent of the time. And then they're going up into their studio apartment and I'm just like, Oh my God (laughs). You know, it's just like, but we got, I mean, we did pretty well, you know. 

Greg Saunier: I think so too. 

John Dieterich: But it's like, it's just, it's a lot.

Chris Cohen: And you know, kind of like to what you were saying, Greg, I think that our relationships got to the point where we were inflicting, you know, we were like inflicting pain on each other, but also getting closer. 

Greg Saunier: Right. 

Chris Cohen: Like as, as relationships do become more risky, the more you give. And I don't necessarily agree with the saying that we were easygoing. For myself, I don't think I was easygoing and maybe to just respond to the thing about like, whether or not it was, was it a success or something? I mean, to me, it was not a success in a personal way because I felt, I mean, I left the band afterwards. It was a success in the bigger scheme of things in terms of me finding out for myself, you know, like what my role might be in this group and sort of, you know, Like you're saying when you were talking about “After Me the Deluge,” it's sort of like, there was no going back to the time before that where we were a little bit more carefree with each other, or a little bit, I think we were a little bit gentler with each other before this record, and then afterwards it was kind of like there was no way to go back to that, having taken it to the point that we did. So  I just, for me, I mean, I don't think I was easygoing. I was actually, I felt very,  very raw and like very, you know, there was a lot of painful, I have a lot of painful memories of it as well. And like you said, it's not something I would, maybe it's not something I would choose to like repeat, but I don't have any regrets about it of course. And I mean, I'm glad that we did it. And the nice thing about recordings is that you get to walk away from it with this thing that you can keep forever, that you can just kind of, you can pick a part as long as you want. So it's, it's nice to have, really. 

Greg Saunier: You can reissue on double LP again and again. And do podcasts. 

Chris Cohen: Exactly.

Greg Saunier: Analyzing. Yeah, no, it's incredible. It's incredible. I mean, just to have this conversation. We never did a debriefing, we just went on tour (laughs). 

Chris Cohen: Oh yeah. You know, that reminds me, something I wanted to mention. I believe it was the same year. The Metallica documentary came out. I feel like we were all talking about Some Kind of Monster during the making of this record. Just to throw that in there, I feel like that was in the zeitgeist. 

Greg Saunier: Oh my God, yeah. Still my favorite movie. 

Chris Cohen: I almost like cried watching that movie. It just, it was so triggering. 

Greg Saunier: Oh God, yeah. 

Chris Cohen: And real. We all like kind of lived through something kind of like that, I think doing this record.

Greg Saunier: And so many bands do. That's why it's such a great movie. It's just a, it's a myth. It's what every band experiences. 

Chris Cohen: Right. Minus the therapist. We didn't have that. And maybe if we did, maybe things would have been different.  

“Siriusstar” 

Satomi Matsuzaki: “Siriusstar.” I was kind of improvising on guitar, you know. 

Greg Saunier: I mean, for me, the star of the show is like all the noise that Satomi played on on her guitar parts. These crazy, like, delay, you know, noise stuff. 

Chris Cohen: Yeah, and I think you did that live, right? 

Greg Saunier: Yeah, we were reacting to it. That was not an overdub. So that's why the song is like, so like unstable sounding. A person who was just starting his music career in the Bay Area at the time was Devendra Banhart. He sounded at the time a lot like a Tyrannosaurus Rex, you know, the early Mark Bolan stuff. He'd sing in this really high falsetto and strum these chords really quietly. And you couldn't really hear what lyrics he was saying. It was like the shyest  persona. I don't even remember seeing him on a stage. He’d play at like a bookstore or something like Adobe Books or something. And, we were all, I remember us all being really charmed by his music. And I think I was trying to write a song that sounded like Devendra. So I was like trying to like make this, this sort of like high melody with these like really simple chords, you know, on the guitar. It kind of turned into a lot more (laughs). New sections kept getting tacked on that one section ended up being really heavy and did kind of sound like Zeppelin. And then there was like a quiet part was like something I wrote on an airplane, I think. And then, (sings guitar part) was completely John's and then (sings guitar part) a separate song of John's was those were two totally separate ideas of his and then (sings melody) was something that I wrote after watching a movie about like, it was like set in Renaissance times or something. And so I was like, it was supposed to sound like Renaissance music. And somehow it all just, it sort of went together. 

“Lemon and Little Lemon” 

Greg Saunier: “Lemon and Little Lemon,” I never wanted to ask what the lyrics were about, because it was like, so clearly a kind of pair of people who were sour either with each other or with others. And, you know, that had a large size differential. And I kind of always wondered if that was a portrait of me and Satomi. 

Chris Cohen: No, I don't think so. I mean, there was actually a lemon that I mean, I remember that I found this lemon that had, it had a little baby lemon growing inside of it. And that was really where the song came from, but I guess I just sort of  spun it out into some sort of story about a dysfunctional, some sort of dysfunctional relationship. I mean, looking back on it, I'm sure it was, there were probably pieces of, you know, my own experience and probably, I'm sure everybody I knew or every relationship I observed had, you know, would go into something like that, but I don't think it was about anyone specifically. But yeah, there was a real lemon. 

Greg Saunier: It's like one of those where you just, your heart melts when you hear it. And it was just like, that was the one actually, Chris, not “Odyssey,” this was the one where we just,  anything we could do to retain the keyboard that you had recorded on this demo. It was like, “We are not redoing this keyboard. It is too good. The sound is perfect. The tempo is perfect.” The feel on it, it just, wherever the mic was in relation to the speaker, it just like, it was too perfect. It was like a time capsule. We kept the demo keyboard, but then recorded the whole song, like half a beat later over it was so weird, we had such a hard time with it. That one, I just remember like going absolutely ape, like trying to get the timing right. And, you know, that was just a Pro Tools nightmare. It sounds really natural in the finished song. It sounds like nothing. We just tossed it off or whatever, but it was like so much like microsurgery or whatever, trying to get this thing right. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: I had a hard time singing that song. 

Chris Cohen: Yeah, it was hard. It was a terrible, it was not well written in terms of the range. Like it was not like we didn't arrange it well, I feel like.  

Satomi Matsuzaki: No, I think it was great. It's just, I couldn't hit the like really low, low note, I think. 

Chris Cohen: That's what I mean. It just, the range was like too big. I don't know. It was not something I could have sung well either. 

“Lightning Rod, Run” 

Satomi Matsuzaki: That's John. 

Greg Saunier: Yeah, it's completely John's. And he wrote the lyrics. It's funny that John's not here now. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: I don't think he likes it now. 

Greg Saunier: Really? Why? 

Satomi Matsuzaki: I think he told me. Yeah, he thought that, yeah, he doesn't like it. I mean, not the music, the lyrics. 

Greg Saunier: Oh, God, no. Those lyrics were, what can I say? A lot of these lyrics really cut to the bone. And it's one thing to feel that a song is about a real person. It's another thing when it's like, “Wow, a song is about a real person and I might be at least among the real people that are  being mentioned or implicated in this thing.” But, like, I think that John saw himself as a lightning rod within the band and that I think what he was expressing was a desire to escape where there was a lot of electric and possibly harmful energy, you know, flashing around amongst the four of us and that he was, of the four of us, perhaps the most calm or the most peaceful or the most,  the least likely to be in an actual argument. And he sort of had a habit of staying quiet and not being as confrontational when a conflict would occur. And it didn't have to be like some horrible serious conflict. It could just be like a disagreement, like I want Ab and you want Bb or whatever. But like he would, sometimes felt like he had to make peace by just sort of acquiescing to other people's wishes. And I think the song was maybe a fantasy of escaping that, you know, that was more his way that he suffered in silence and that these lyrics were sort of an expression of the repercussions of like holding stuff inside, basically, you know,  

Chris Cohen: But to be fair, John is not here, so…

Greg Saunier: (laughs) So that could be completely wrong. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: So we don't know. 

Chris Cohen: We should give John a chance to rebut. 

“Bone-Dry” 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Oh, is that “Peppercorn?”

Chris Cohen: Peppercorn, yeah.

Satomi Matsuzaki: (sings) Peppercorn. Peppercorn. Peppercorn. 

Chris Cohen: I think that was John, I feel like he did a lot of it by himself at home. 

Greg Saunier: Yep. He definitely did the keyboard part. That was like a demo. Yeah, this is sort of like, “Lemon and Little Lemon.” It had this, you know, keyboard part that was very constant that we kept and built the whole song around that. I mean, there were no drums, so it wasn't as difficult as “Lemon.” So this one was more like a John solo project. 

Chris Cohen: I think this was another, like, “Oh, it has to conform to the concept.” I remember “Bone-Dry” somehow being imposed on it very late in the game. I mean, I still, I actually just now, I thought the song was called “Peppercorn.”

Greg Saunier: Right, yeah. 

Chris Cohen: It was known as “Peppercorn.” So and I think it's like, that was a very John thing to write a song about. Like, he's just going to write it about like this spice.  

Greg Saunier: No, but it wasn't about spice. It was about Chinese medicine. It was Chinese herbal medicine. 

Chris Cohen: Right, but it didn't, I think because it didn't connect to the themes that we had set out for this album that I think it's somehow I remember “Bone-Dry” somehow becoming, I don't even know what, how that connects to the concept. 

Greg Saunier: Because if the whole album is about a flood, then…

Chris Cohen: Oh, right. “Dry,” right. Okay. So, yeah, I remember that kind of came about late. 

Greg Saunier: I mean, looking back, the song definitely fits in just fine. I mean, it's like the whole idea of the tradition of Chinese medicine and it's surviving the millennia, you know, and being a way that kept millions and millions of people healthy over thousands of generations, or at least hundreds of generations. You know, we're living in the Bay Area, it's kind of like land of the new age, you know, there in California. And, you know, I think he lived near a Whole Foods or something, and it's like, you know, this stuff was like constantly in conversation in people's minds and trying to adopt bits and pieces of, you know, non-Western mental and physical health systems. And yeah, I don't know. To me, it fits even without the, even without the title change. 

Chris Cohen: Oh yeah. No, there's no question. I mean, to me it fits too. I just think it's funny that we're still after all these years, like we're still trying to like write the one sheet for this album and try to fit it all. Like, of course it fits. I mean, it was John's song. I mean, it was very, it came from the heart and it's like, it was a part of this time and it's, you know, there was no way that it didn't fit. But it's funny that we had to do so much work to try to sort of make all this stuff into like a concept.And I think that speaks to something in our mindset. Making this record was like, “It has to be cohesive or whatever. We didn't believe it. We didn't believe that it actually could really be cohesive in real life. We had to sort of make it, by brute force, come together in a one sheet. 

Greg Saunier: I think that analysis is absolutely accurate. 

“News from a Bird” 

Chris Cohen: It was just free improvisation, right? 

Greg Saunier: Totally free improvisation. That was undoubtedly from the same day as the end of “Spirit Ditties” and just a different part of the improv and it's the result of us improvising, Although, it's not purist. It's not exactly as played. And particularly because of the fact that the guitars were direct into the computer through these amp simulators, there was zero guitar bleed,  zero. So that was a Pandora's box of endless possibilities of scooting stuff around and like, “Oh, this guitar lick is really cool, but it would sound better pasted over there.” And so that was one of the things that was very time consuming on this was that although we played it live for the most part, and it sounds played live in the end result. In between those two things, it was endless amounts of tinkering and fixing of stuff, not really fixing. I mean, that's the one thing we didn't do. We didn't fix any mistakes. It's almost like we exaggerated them. It's like, we just had this obsessive need to try every possible combination of everything. And, you know, one chord that, John played in one song that sounded cool would end up getting pasted into a completely different song, but it was just like such a magical moment, but we need a sound like that on this other one. And because we'd been working on the songs for so many months, we were very, very familiar with every section of every song. Like it wasn't new to us anymore by the end. We had an intuition about the big picture, you know, that you don't always get when you're working really fast, but it's like, if you, it's like when you become really, really familiar with, you know, like the contours of your own face. You know, maybe you're shaving or like putting on makeup or something like, you know, your face so well. That's sort of how the album felt by the end. It's like, “Oh, I remember there was that one noise, that one cymbal hit that I did on that outtake. And that would be perfect right here in this song. I know just where to put it.” Cause you, you know, the landscape so well. 

“Spy on You” 

Satomi Matsuzaki: I don't know. It just, to me, like the music sounded like what I was singing about. I always make lyrics after music is done, so the music inspires me, you know. I played the tremolo. Yeah, so that's why, like, “Oh, this is a spy music.”

Greg Saunier: No, but you wrote the song at home without the tremolo, didn't you? “Spy on You?”

Satomi Matsuzaki: I know, but then, yeah, that's true. So the tremolo came after. 

Greg Saunier: Words and melody were simultaneous. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: The music you guys write, you know…

Greg Saunier: No it's all you, Satomi. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Those songs. Yeah, “Spy on You,” I wrote the whole thing. I liked the “Spy on You” lyrics, yeah. 

“You’re Our Two”

Greg Saunier: One of our biggest arguments in the band, and we talked today a lot about inter-band conflicts, our biggest conflict was over whether Eyes Wide Shut was a good movie, and just, you know, Kubrick's output in general. And Chris was always, always, tirelessly trying to sell me on some other auteur and he was trying to get me off the Kubrick stuff. Look at this. I mean, here, look, it still has not ended. I just read, I'm in the middle of this book and then I just got the Kubrick biography for the first time. It's still like an obsession with me. And Chris was really doing the hard sell. “Greg, you got to get into like Hitchcock or you got to get in somebody.” And I wasn't buying it, but for a time we were trying to, what's that guy's name? It was the, you know, Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog. You were trying to get me into Werner Herzog.  And we watched Aguirre, Satomi and I watched Aguirre at home. And the soundtrack,  it was Popol Vuh, right? 

Chris Cohen: Yeah so it's the soundtrack on those Herzog movies in that era.

Greg Saunier: And kind of a weird, kind of like, you know, real seventies, like not Tangerine Dream, but something kind of like that. But really dark sounding, you know, such a dark movie, this Aguirre and kind of something evil lurking. It's like Tangerine Dream, but quite evil sounding. And I remember just like, again, just feeling like I liked John's riff, but it was something about it. It asn't quite emotionally grabbing me enough. And something about the Aguirre soundtrack. It had that weird, like this major, minor, major, minor back at just the same chord, but done major. And then minor alternating that I seem to recall. I haven't heard it since we watched the movie back then, but I seem to recall, like, that was a big thing. Like. In one of these like, you know, late night, you know, kind of delirious states. John's riff and the Aguirre soundtrack kind of merged in my mind. And I  came to practice one day with some like, “Oh, we got to do, it's got to have like more reverb and sound kind of like more like haunting,” you know, or it was just like a kind of really plain rock riff when John wrote it and then it ended up sounding like, I mean, I love the song now. It's like, it became a very haunting thing about basically about the apocalypse, you know, about the flood. It was all about, he wrote all the lyrics, but by this point, in the process of making the record, a lot of the songs were done and we knew the flood theme was there. And so he wrote lyrics completely around that, that kind of myth. 

Chris Cohen: I'm just remembering some other riffs. There were some other riffs, like, I think I didn't I bring in (sings) Da da da da da da, da da da da da da. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Uh, maybe. 

Chris Cohen: I think I wrote that on piano, if I remember correctly. 

Greg Saunier: I don’t even remember this part of the song.

Chris Cohen: It was like a riff. Is this the right song?

Greg Saunier: No, that's not the right song. No, that's "Rrrrrrright." You're singing "Rrrrrrright.” You're singing "Rrrrrrright.” 

Chris Cohen: Oh, that's "Rrrrrrright?” 

Satomi Matsuzaki: That's what we are talking about. 

Greg Saunier: No, we're talking about “You’re Our Two.” 

Satomi Matsuzaki: Oh “You’re Our Two?” 

Chris Cohen: It's funny in my mind, those two songs are like the same song. I apologize. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: I thought we were talking about "Rrrrrrright” too. 

Chris Cohen: Carry on. 

"Rrrrrrright”

Greg Saunier: Yeah, Rah, rah, rah, rah, rah right. That's  a play on Mount Ararat, which is in present day, like Turkey or Syria or something like that. Ararat was, you know, historic. 

Chris Cohen: I think it's in Armenia. 

Greg Saunier: Oh, it's in Armenia. You're right, you're right. Yeah, it was theoretically, historically, the one peak that was above the flood water of, you know, historical flood that people think the biblical myth was based on or whatever. So it's “Ararara Right” (laughs). But yeah, I feel like I didn't have much to do with this one. I felt like Chris, you and John made up, no it's kind of the three of you. I was gone or something. You guys came up with this incredible…  

Chris Cohen: Yeah, it started on piano. 

Greg Saunier: Really? 

Chris Cohen: Yeah. I remember I wrote it on Don Garcia's grandma's piano and then it just was like that bass riff. I was thinking of the Stooges. I was trying to do like a Stooges kind of bassline. 

Greg Saunier: And Satomi's got her big guitar solo in that one too. We all stop and it’s just a big noise thing. Yeah that was so cool. And that was one where, you know, where we changed tempos in the middle of the song a lot. That was another like, sort of time travel vibe, you know, it's like, “Oh, you can slow time down and speed it up.” You know, we were like trying to play with it that way and not be locked into this machine. Bend the machine. You know, that was like something we were trying to do all the time. Bend the machine. It's like, instead of everything being on a grid, you know, we were not recording to a grid or a click track. Everything was like very, yeah, human, animal, animal sounds. 

We probably turned it in two or three times. I mean, that's what we typically did. We'd like realize like, “Wait, throw that one away. We got to mix something again.” But I didn't hear it for a long time. And then our booking agent lives in Houston, Texas, Eric Carter. We were on tour and we were staying at Eric's house in Houston and he's a big record collector and he had just bought the new Queens of the Stone Age and we had just received a test pressing of The Runners Four. This is how I remember it, anyway. And I was so excited because we had mixed the record, A/B’ing it with Queens of the Stone Age, with that actual record that (sings) do do do do do, do do do do do, whatever that song is. This was back in the day of the volume wars. Everybody was trying to make their record loud. And that Queens of the Stone Age hit song was so loud. The mastering was so loud and just like, I spent so much time trying to make The Runners Four sound as loud as that song, digitally. And then lo and behold, we get to Eric's house and what does he have? He just bought the new Queens of the, it wasn't that new at the point, but he had just bought that Queens of the Stone Age record. He puts it on. It's like, “Wow, Eric, you've got an incredible stereo. This sounds thick, huge. This is like totally banging.” Then he put on The Runners Four and we're all like, “Huh?” It sounded so scrawny and tiny and quiet. And like, all the instruments sounded like they were being played with pencils or like, you know, toy guitars or something. I was just like, “What did we do?” I just had like the most demoralizing experience. And then of course now, for me, that's its charm is that we thought we were making a huge rock record, you know, and it just sounds so not that it sounds so idiosyncratic and just mixed in the weirdest way and just like nothing about it makes sense. It was people who spent too much time working on it and had lost all perspective, you know, didn't know what instruments sounded like anymore. That was my post release experience. 

Satomi Matsuzaki: I thought it was a very weird mix, but, you know, even at the time, but I still like it, you know, I get so many compliments, you know, even nowadays. And, you know, I think it's a, you know, me playing guitar and Chris playing bass was such an interesting, you know, combination. And I had more freedom with the singing because I didn't have to keep the rhythm with drums. So  like, I think the live shows, I don't know, I felt more different, you know, like my favorite toy or something. It's kind of, it's still fun. 

Chris Cohen: Yeah, I mean, I think I was most excited about then playing the songs in front of people. I mean, the record, I was really proud of the record. I mean, I thought that we did what we set out to do, which was to kind of go crazy in the studio. And we really did that. And then I was just excited to, to like do it in real life. I remember just being excited about, “Oh, we have this great material to like take on tour.”

Greg Saunier: For me, it's not a high point musically. I remember all of our records extremely fondly, and I think they sound cool. But it was maybe the most extreme version of a certain type of, like, allowing ourselves to become very obsessive and time consuming and on no budget. And I think that that, for me, feels double edged, when I talk to younger musicians. And they even sometimes tell me they're inspired by literally that record, you know, I'm like, you know, “Be careful because it's like, you know, we nearly drove ourselves mad doing it.” 

Chris Cohen: To me, it's not like a high point per se but it's I think it really, it sits well to me. In its time like I think we managed to put something down that was real at that time, and I mean, I'm very proud of it.

Satomi Matsuzaki: Me too. I was so proud of it, that I'm proud of it. Like I didn't miss any little parts, you know, during the making of the record. You know, sometimes some people, you know, like one of us take over too much or something, but The Runners Four was the real team effort, I think. I'm really proud we went through together. 

Outro:

Dan Nordheim: Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about Deerhoof. You’ll also find a full transcript of this episode and a link to purchase The Runners Four, including the recent double LP reissue. Instrumental music by Charlie Don’t Shake. Thanks for listening. 

Credits:

"Chatterboxes"

"Twin Killers"

"Running Thoughts"

"Vivid Cheek Love Song"

"O'Malley, Former Underdog"

"Odyssey"

"Wrong Time Capsule"

"Spirit Ditties of No Tone"

"Scream Team"

"You Can See"

"Midnight Bicycle Mystery"

"After Me the Deluge"

"Siriustar"

"Lemon and Little Lemon"

"Lightning Rod, Run"

"Bone-Dry"

"News from a Bird"

"Spy on You"

"You're Our Two"

"Rrrrrrright"

Written, performed and recorded by Deerhoof

℗ & © 2005 Kill Rock Stars

Episode Credits:

Intro/Outro Music:

“Shiloh” by Charlie Don’t Shake from The America Is Our Office EP

Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim

Additional mixing and mastering by Jeremy Whitwam