THE RAVEONETTES INTERVIEW: "CM: So why do you limit your writing and recording so much? (No hi-hat or cymbals, all songs in B minor, no more than 3 chords per song, no more than 3 minutes)
SF: Actually it came about because Sune was traveling around the States in ’99. He kind of got fed up with living in L.A. for quite a while. He was really tired of the whole music scene in L.A. and New York. He went out and listened to a lot of bands and I think he just had a reaction to that whole sound at that time. He wanted to just be really simplistic again and go back to basics in a way. At first it was a reaction and it wasn’t like he sat down and wrote down all of these rules. It kind of became apparent to him a while after he had been writing all of these songs. He was like, “Wow, I’m writing in the same key and they all have the same chords.” He just really wanted the simplicity. It was a reaction towards over produced, pathetic music (laughs) and pretentious maybe. Then it became like a game for us. When we started recording it was like, “Hey, let’s do it different. Let’s try and not do the typical thing. Let’s try to not have a hi-hat.” Then it was just a really interesting thing during that creative process of making the album. We had to find sounds from something else. We had to find that high-end sound from other things. So we have a lot of percussion and metal banging a lot of times. That’s why I think that even though it’s recorded in such a simple way, it has this huge sound to it that gives it that “wall of sound” sound. Though it’s totally different from the way that Phil Spector would make a wall of sound with tons of musicians and three drummers…this is like really basic. There’s like some sampled drums, two guitars and a bass. So it’s really simple, but it has that full sound.
CM: And of course when things are that stripped down, you can’t hide. If the song’s not there, you have nothing.
SF: (laughs) Oh, yes. We draw back from the great songs of Buddy Holly."
