After the Former Ghosts show at the Duke Coffeehouse Friday night, Freddy Ruppert headed over to Whiskey (you know, that bar undergrads can’t go to…) and wrote about the experience and a lover’s spat on his blog:
I don’t remember much of last night.
We played in Durham.
I went out by myself afterwards and drank way too much. I do remember that I had a decent Old Fashioned at this place called the Whisky.
On walking back to Jamie’s place I got in an insane text war/conversation.
I remember finding myself sitting next to some glass doors of a huge office type building firing off crazy drunk texts that no one else in the world ever fires off.
Then the security guard came out and yelled at me “what are you doing here man? you need a taxi or something? you can’t be here. what are you doing?! Get out of here!”
And I yelled back “I’m in the middle of an insane text conversation with the girl i was insanely in love with! What do you want me to do?!”
To which he replied “Oh ok, It’s cool man. I understand. Do what you need to do. It’s alright.”
Then he went back inside.
Jamie Stewart’s most recent post is abstract in a sort of tour diary sense, so who knows what he did.
Freddy Ruppert (This Song Is A Mess But So Am I), begrudging Durham transplant Jamie Stewart (Xiu Xiu) and Nika Roza (Zola Jesus). There’s a supergroup. Former Ghosts will be coming to the Duke Coffeehouse tomorrow in support of their excellent debut album Fleurs, out Oct. 20 on Upset the Rhythm. I talked to Freddy Ruppert about his new project as he was heading to Phoenix for the first official show of the tour.
How did you all come together to form Former Ghosts?
Me and Jamie had always talked about doing a synth pop-inspired project. Both our schedules were always so busy that we weren’t able to get together until recently. So, it’s something we’ve always wanted to work on together and always wanted to do. As far as Nika’s involvement in the band, I’m insanely in love with her voice. Like, I’m a big fan of the project she does–it’s called Zola Jesus. I just originally wrote her to sing on a song because I like her voice a lot. She sent the song back, and I was just completely blown away. And I just asked her if she could join the band because I’d be bummed if I didn’t get to work with her ever again because her voice is so great. That’s kind of how we all came together.
Former Ghosts is a pretty drastic departure from This Song Is A Mess But So Am I, so how did you approach this record?
This Song Is A Mess kind of ran its course for me, and I couldn’t see myself doing that anymore. It got to a point where I felt like I was just dwelling on my mom’s death instead of it being a kind of cathartic thing anymore. I needed to move on from that. I kind of just put music completely aside and wasn’t doing any kind of music. Former Ghosts kind of started with falling in love with someone and writing songs for them, and then it kind of evolved into this project. As far as the sound and stuff, I’ve always been kind of interested in music that follows a pop structure. I wanted to do something that was more in a pop vein, but still had influence from a lot of early ’80s pop bands like on 4AD–things like that kind of inspired the project.
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In a lot of ways, Mission of Burma’s latest LP reminds me of Superchunk’s Leaves in the Gutter EP, released earlier this year. Although the Chapel Hill indie rock band has never seen an album reach quite the level of critical acclaim as the Boston band (and comparing Superchunk to a Matador release is mildly heretical), both bands are are storied. And on their third post-reunion album, Burma is doing exactly what Superchunk did earlier this year: churning out classic tracks and reminding us why we ever liked them in the first place.
To be fair to both bands, neither was quite “churning out” tracks. But neither album charts new territory. And that’s totally fine. After all, why would we care about a post-punk band 30 years after their formation if they never gave us a reason to care in the first place?
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