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Interview: The Polyphonic Spree

Despite their ominous new look—black military-style uniforms instead of those flowing robes they're famous for—things are looking pretty rosy these days for The Polyphonic Spree. They've fled the confines of the Disney-owned Hollywood Records for a more sympathetic indie, TVT Records, and they're on the brink of releasing a third album, The Fragile Army, that promises to be their most well-received work to date.

Spree frontman Tim DeLaughter was busy scoring a film when ARTISTdirect came calling, so instead we spoke to the Spree's unheralded second-in-command, Julie Doyle. DeLaughter's wife of 22 years, Doyle serves as the group's co-producer, co-songwriter, choir leader and unofficial den mother. Speaking with the breathless energy you'd expect from one of the architects of the Spree's euphoric sound, Doyle talked with us about her unique role in the band, the "Frankenstein-like" way in which The Fragile Army was recorded, and why it's gotten easier to take 20-plus musicians on the road—sort of.

I know that you were heavily involved with the creation of the latest Polyphonic Spree album, and that you appear on all three of the albums. But I guess what I don't know is: Were you part of the group from the very beginning? How would you describe your role in the group?

It kind of goes way back—we had a group [Tripping Daisy] before this group. I actually helped Tim put that group together. He and I, as far as production and songwriting goes, have always worked together, for years and years. And with Polyphonic—we had the idea for it, we sort of collaborated on the focus of it, and I actually probably did all the calling and putting people together that I thought would be good personalities to try this whole experiment out. So I would definitely say that Polyphonic I've had a lot more of a hand in.

And I guess anytime you have a band where one person is singing the lead vocals, the perception to the outside world tends to be that that's the frontman, that's the guy in charge—whether that's entirely true or not.

And it's not to say... I mean, obviously, Tim is very, very strong-handed in it. It's not like, oh, he is just the front guy and somebody else is doing it. It's not like that at all. And he is more of a songwriter than me. From the seed up, the melody, the direction—it totally starts with Tim. He and I, we're sort of a band on our own, and then we're a band with twentysomething people, if that makes sense.

How did the two of you write the songs for The Fragile Army? I gather that you and Tim wrote the bare bones of the songs first and then brought them to the rest of the group to do the arrangements?

Basically that's it. A basic song, pretty much arranged in terms of real rudimentary stuff like how it starts, when it gets to the chorus, when it gets to the bridge. But when you start layering on all the many levels of our group and our sound, there are many phases of arrangement. And that's the thing on this record; no one in the band, outside of the basic tracks—the drummer, the bass player and the guitarist—none of the players in the group had ever heard any of the songs except for one. We recorded in different places and we did it in phases. Even our pianist, Mike Garson—we'd met him on the David Bowie tour, he's Bowie's piano player—originally Tim was gonna play, 'cause we were without a pianist at the time and a lot of the songs were piano-driven, but he really wanted someone who had a real handle on piano, who could sort of take that instrument to a whole different level, and really color the songs in different ways. So Mike came in, and he had to learn a song at a time in the studio. And after that strings came in for three or four days, and did the whole album. And sometimes they'd nail it and sometimes Tim would actually hum what he was looking for—because Tim doesn't read music, he doesn't know theory, it's all very intuitive. But it's never ever been a problem in the group, ever; we've been so blessed because the people we've played with, they get it.

So then four days later, the horns came in—same process, learned a song at a time. They did, I dunno, about three songs a day. But yeah—before they came in, they'd never heard it. And each phase, after they'd leave—you know, some people were tracking to four instruments. Some people, like our flute player, by the time she came in to do her thing, she was getting to hear the rough tracks with choir on it. And the choir—we did all the choir to Tim's scratch vocals. At the very end... then Tim did his lead vocals. And I swear now, when we listen to it, and we think back to the process, we're like, "How did that work? What were we doing?" It kind of made it fun, because everything was super-unorthodox and I think it sort of shaped the album.

I can definitely hear the foundation of just a rock band under the tracks on this album more than I could on the first two.

Exactly. And that was the intention. Tim and I knew ages back—live, this band had become such a different energy than what had been captured in our recordings. It's not a good thing or a bad thing, it just is what it is. And it's kind of cool, on reflection—like on our first record, we'd only performed a couple of times. We weren't even really a band yet. And then six months after we finished that recording, we had some shows behind us—we became this whole other entity. And so people were always like, "Gosh, it's so weird, your album's one way, but you're like this live." And that was just something that happened that you can't plan.

Our second record is one of those typical transitional records where you're not really trying to get away from your first record, but you're definitely—you've been doing that, and you're trying to do something else. And it was written on the road, because we had more and more headlining shows, all of the sudden we were signed, we were traveling all over the world, and it was like—"We gotta have more material!" So by the time we actually recorded the second record, literally it was like, okay, we have to get off the road for four or five weeks, make an album, and get back to our schedule. So it's kind of like you just stop for a minute, you run in the studio for about a month, and you go, "What do we have that's new?" And you kind of record that. And Tim, on the spot, wrote a couple of songs that ended up on the album.

By the time that album [Together We're Heavy] came out, those songs were already old to us, whereas the first album, when we went to play out, everything felt new. So we just decided to take a break, kind of drop out, reinvent, absorb what was going on in the world, and not be so on a schedule. And kind of say, well, what are we doing? And does it feel purposeful? Because it wasn't feeling like that for a little bit.

And then we were definitely like, okay, what we want to do is write songs and record in a fashion that feels like the best moments of this group when we're at an all-time high and the energy is just, like, happening. Because we still didn't have a snapshot of that. And that's why we hired this producer to work with us, John Congleton, because he's so tasteful and he gets rock in a great way and has a lot of great spirit. That's what we wanted to do, and that's how Tim wrote 'em. We envisioned it like a four-piece band—if we can make these songs sound great and have purpose and carry the energy of a 100-piece band between four people at the basic roots, then it'll be a fun album to layer all these Polyphonic sounds on top.

What's the response been to the live shows you've done with the new material and the new black outfits? Is the vibe of the shows really different than before?

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