Orouni Interview Part Three
This is the final installment of the interview. In this last part, Orouni again discusses great music but also talks about the creation of his songs as well as literature he enjoys reading.
Kirstiecat: Are there some current bands and musicians right now that you’ve recently gotten into?Orouni: Yes! Most of all, I want to speak about Toy Fight. They recently released a new song, “The Soldier”, which is wonderful. They also have this song, “Victim’s Hairdo,” which gives me bellyache and makes me want to cry every time I listen to it. So much emotion contained in it… They are so good! You should go to their MySpace page, be prepared to be heartbroken, and play their songs. Their keyboard player has another project (among others) named Please Don’t Blame Mexico and he writes wonderful pop songs, you should definitely check this out as well.
These days, thanks to mp3 blogs, I discover the existence of something like seven new bands everyday, one or two of them being great. But it’s very hard to remember them all. So on the electronic/disco/beats side, I really like Cansei De Ser Sexy and Ratatat. On the recent indie pop side, I love Islands (and went to their concert in Paris, it was awesome), Tilly And The Wall (their songs are so energetic, I love “Bottoms of Barrels”), Mates Of State (Bring It Back will be one of my top records of 2006), Tender Trap (“6 Billion People” is full of incredibly catchy tunes). I’m also looking forward to Phantom Buffalo’s new record, because their first LP Shishimumu is a marvel to listen to.
Lately, I discovered a Turkish musician, called Bülent Ortaçgil’s (check this MySpace page made by a fan). He composed songs of great beauty (Nick Drake/Cat Stevens style), unfortunately for him he sings in Turkish so he is not known at all.
To finish with, I would like to mention Milk & Fruit Juice, on myspace, there is one track where he layers voices and ends up sounding like the Beach Boys, this song is wonderful.
Kirstiecat: When you write songs, do you usually write the music component first or the lyrics first?
Orouni: Most of the time, the music comes first. Sometimes, it’s the chord progression, sometimes I’m walking down the street and a melody pops by. Then, the hard part is to find the chords that go along with it, and I’m rarely satisfied. It seems that some melodies want to exist by themselves. So I let them go away. But it’s great when I can find a melody and chords that fit together.
As far as lyrics are concerned, sometimes I figure out a phrase, made out of a few words, I try to remember it when I find it cool, and I keep it for later use. It’s not always associated with a melody. When it is, the words may be nonsensical, or I don’t see how I could insert this particular line in a song, so I have to forget it. But the usual way is the chord progression, the melody, and the lyrics. I think there isn’t any song where I wrote lyrics before having a precise idea of the music.
Actually, in an ideal songwriting world, you should never write one apart from the other. I truly believe that one the key things that make the beauty of a song is the combination of lyrics and music. I don’t have any particular example, but I once read an interview of Carl Newman (main songwriter of The New Pornographers), where he said that when writing a song, he would imagine things like “okay, on this note you should have an o sound, and then the verse on this chord should start with a p”. So perfect lyrics must not be in a particular language. I think Carl Newman takes the closest English words compared to what he actually wants 
Because he also admits that due to this phenomenon, he writes lines that sound very weird, sometimes he even wonders if he can sing them, though they fit the melody. But I was totally amazed by what he said. I thought “This guy drives the songwriting process to such an extremity” and then I also thought “well that’s maybe why his songs are so efficient”.
Kirstiecat: I’m really curious as to what kinds of literature you enjoy reading as well. Who are some of your favorite authors? Do you ever feel inspired by what others have written when you write lyrics?
Orouni: I once read an interview of Michael Stipe where he admitted that he hadn’t been reading a book for ages. He was a lot into movies and music, but no book. When I read that (I was probably in my R.E.M. period, I’m a huge fan of Out Of Time, Automatic For The People, New Adventures In Hi-Fi and Up), I thought “well it is also cool not to read at all, then”.
I say that because I want to feel not guilty for not reading a lot these days. But I used to read, and for instance Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis is one of my favorite books. I guess it influenced me on “Experiments On The Threshold Of Pain”. It’s like the Velvet Underground’s lyrics, it’s very dark, very cynical. I also loved Perfume by Patrick Süskind, because there were comparisons between the senses of smell and hearing, and I found that very interesting, because I usually do comparisons between hearing and vision.
So I may disappoint you, but no, I’m not that much inspired by literature. Actually I’m not really interested in reading fiction stories. I’m more interested in real life. For instance, a painter’s biography will inspire me more than a novel.
Kirstiecat: My favorite song of yours right now is a song called “The Lamppost.” It’s an interesting effect at the end of the song that really draws me to it. Have you ever considered using more of this effect?
Orouni: I usually call it “reverse tape effect” but I cannot cheat readers: we are in the digital age ( i.e. no more tapes), so basically this is a sound played in reverse. One of the earliest songs where you can hear it is “I’m Only Sleeping” by The Beatles, on Revolver. I read that John Lennon incidentally discovered this effect after playing a tape backwards while he was probably on marijuana or something. They also use it in “Strawberry Fields Forever” (actually it’s Ringo’s drums played in reverse, and they always sounded like knife sounds to me), and for instance Radiohead also used this effect on “Like Spinning Plates” and I think The Weakerthans also built a song based on that process. I guess many other bands did. And though I’m fond of it, I decided not to use it anymore after “The Lamppost,” because I didn’t want it to become a recipe. It would be like “I found something great, let’s use it on every song on the record”. So in a nutshell, this effect is just the “mariachi” guitar chords of the intro played backwards, thus looping the loop.
You can read Orouni’s responses to previous interviews here: