SARA SUTLER-COHEN: Glad we finally all found some time for this! Let’s get crackin’. I’ve seen you guys three or four times now, and every time I see you it’s a little bit different, sometimes you sing and other times you don’t. I’m assuming that you maybe tailor it depending on who you’re playing with?

DORANDO “PETE” HODOUS: Yeah, a little bit.

SSC: A lot of the stuff that I read tried to categorize you guys because, well, people like to do that. There’s a lot of people putting you in a metal genre, but it also feels like it takes a lot of work to listen to you guys, which is a compliment, but it’s work, because you’re playing to the attention span of people who are used to two minute songs. So I thought you could talk about playing to the short attention span and then maybe talk about how you negotiate that.

DPH: That’s where the dynamic aspect comes in, with our music moving up and down at the same time because two minutes is not enough for us to express all of our ideas. We can’t encapsulate it in like, a two minute bubble. We’ll have a riff that goes on for two minutes, but we expand upon those ideas and move into other territory.

BENJAMIN KENNEDY: And in a live setting it’s a lot easier because people don’t necessarily know that we’re playing a fifteen minute song. A lot of times people will be like, “I really liked the third song.” And we’re like, “Well we only played two.” In fact, that happened last night when people were confused about how many songs we played, even the sound guy. So, that works in our favor because I think someone who would sit there and know that it’s going to be fifteen minutes of music might find that daunting, whereas on the record, people know what they’re getting into. Sometimes people don’t want to invest that. Live, it seems to be okay.

SSC: That makes it kind of hard, doesn’t it? To sell yourselves, as it were?

BK: We hope that more often than not people are going to like it live and then pick up the record. If you know you enjoy it live, hopefully you’ll want to invest that time. But yeah, it’s difficult for us because our songs aren’t floating around the internet as much as some of the other stuff might be. In fact, The Stranger had that online thing where they post the music and it couldn’t handle that long of a song. You’re supposed to post your song there, but our song’s just too long and we had to edit it. There’s a lot of things like that we’ve run into because it’s a very short attention span world. Even the concept of an album is almost completely dead at this point. Everything is based on songs. And when your song is like, as much as an album….

ARRAN MCINNIS: My favorite albums are like, concept albums, so I’ll often go back to Bitches Brew, where the songs on that can go like, 40 minutes. The way I write music, I just like the music to be a journey itself so it will go through a lot of different moods. And, actually, for us as musicians it’s very challenging for us to pull it off, so to speak, so it’s like it’s always keeping us on our toes and it’s just making us better players, you know. We’re just starting out, too, so….

SSC: How long has this project been going on for?

AM: Like three and a half years.

SSC: What did it come out of?

BK: Pete and I were doing The Abodox.

DPH: Right, and we were all living in the same house. Dan had a show with this other band, and Arran played bass in that Golgothan Sunrise. The drummer, Arran’s brother Andrew, was going back east, but we just got together in the basement in our house.

AM: The four of us lived together but played in separate bands.

BK: We just made a bunch of shit up in like a couple of days.

DPH: It’s eventually what’s developed into the third song on the record [“Loadbath” on Power Hör], after a year and a half.

AM: For a year or so, I played bass, so we had two bass players, so Dan was getting crushed by two fuckin’ heavy bass sounds. Then I started writing songs and I was like, “Fuck – I wanna play guitar again,” because it had been two or three years since I’d played guitar, and it’s my instrument, so I relearned all the riffs on guitar.

SSC: Cool. Anything you want to add about audience, or creating your music?

BK: Well, we don’t generally craft anything with the audience in mind. When it comes to writing, we’re very self-indulgent. I mean, obviously we want people to like our music, but we’re writing the music we would want to hear.

AM: Yeah, I think that there is a growing demand for longer winded songs. A lot of bands are experimenting with it again and that’s kind of where I think it is getting more accepting.

DPH: The two minute, three minute songs, that’s just too rigid for anything truly progressive to happen in that time frame.

BK: We can’t explore all the moods that we want to.

DAN LAROCHELLE: Bands that have really short songs generally have kind of the same mood the whole time, and it’s hard to go anywhere. And if you do go somewhere, it’s not as organic and you don’t have as much invested.

SSC: Well, not thinking about your audience while you’re writing music is kind of original.

AM: Yeah, it’s definitely because we all love music, and we’re all very dedicated to it just for, sort of, personal satisfaction.

DPH: We write songs that we can triumph over ourselves.

AM: Right, to actually challenge ourselves and make it hard. We’re also just influenced by a lot of different things and it just kind of comes out.

SSC: Do you want to add anything, Dan?

DL: Well, speaking of influences, we’re also pretty heavily influenced by a lot of cinema and such, but a lot of more…there again, almost going back to the short attention span thing. It’s not like mainstream cinema, like the SAW series isn’t a big influence on our songwriting, let me put it that way. We’re collectively into pretty obscure stuff.

AM: Slower moving, not like stuff that’s constantly trying to catch your attention.

DL: More abstract.

SSC: Like what? Example.

DL: Well like [Alejandro] Jodorowsky is a perfect example.

AM: [Werner] Herzog influences our music as well.

SSC: Okay, in terms of influences, I wanted to talk about psychedelic music, because you are sort of in that genre. Besides the fact that the music went along with psychedelics, what it demands is the kind of investment not just of time, but it’s asking people to think. What it’s asking is to have a critical relationship to the music and then with the two-minute chop songs, which are great – however, there’s only so much you can do with “Walk,” right? You know what to expect, you know what the story’s about, you know how you’re supposed to respond to it. With metal especially, I don’t care if it’s doom or thrash or whatever, you know what your behavior is supposed to be when you’re listening to that music. When you guys were playing [the other night at Seattle’s Tractor Tavern with The Accused], the audience was just stunned. So just comment on that a little bit, your influence from psychedelic music, which I’m assuming is there.

AM: Oh, it’s huge.

SSC: Who are you influenced by, and why, and are you sort of trying to engage the audience, and what are you asking them to do when they’re listening to your music?

ONE OF THEM: Smoke a joint[laughter].

AM: I really think that when I’m playing I definitely move out of my body and go to a place where there’s not a lot of thoughts going on and that’s what I hope that people can grasp out of it. Just leave what the fuck your daily existence is and just go inside yourself for a minute. As far as influences, just today I was watching The Making of Electric Ladyland by Hendrix, and I always go back to that shit, and I’m blown away even more every time I listen to it. I go back to the early ‘60s Cream, early Pink Floyd. I saw a Syd Barrett documentary recently and it just blew my mind--then, King Crimson and Yes. They wore capes and I’m like “Fuck yeah you wore some capes!” I love all that stuff.

SSC: I think that psychedelic music almost got people back to that moment in the parlor listening to Mozart jam for two hours.

BOYS: Yeah!

AM: It’s like just sitting down and listening to records front and back and usually the B-side of the record was bad ass, like not commercial. Now there are so many bands out there, but there are always clones. Every day I feel like I discover more rare ‘70s shit, that I’d never heard of before, that I’m equally blown away by--Mountain, Deep Purple, for sure right now.

SSC: Dan, anything to add?

DL: Yeah, I’ve kind of been having the same experience where I’ve just been finding tons of killer bands from a long time ago. I guess I’ve sort of given up on looking for new music because there’s just so much untapped stuff out there. There are a lot of new bands that I’m into, too. I’ve been listening to a lot of The Wooden Shjips, who are label mates of ours, [Lesbian is on Holy Mountain Records] and they’re this killer psychedelic like really good Doors-meets-Spacemen 3 kind of shit.

AM: That’s a good description.

BK: They’re very drony.

DL: The Gris Gris is a current band that ‘s really good, too. Kind of like a 13th Floor Elevators kind of thing.

BK: We’re playing this festival in The Netherlands in April with tons of killer shit.

AM: Celtic Frost is the headliner [Roadburn Festival, April 18 – 19, 2008: roadburn.com] and I just saw added today Cult of Luna, which, they do some interesting shit, I think.

SSC: Anything to add here?

DL: Well, I’ve been discovering a lot of bands that I wasn’t aware of. A lot of older stuff, but there’s a lot of new stuff. Once again, label mates of ours. There’s a band from Santa Cruz called Mammatus and I’ve been really into them.

SSC: I do want to get some background about each of you. You all came together here in Seattle, but are you all from Seattle?

DL: Arran and I moved out here together from Portland, Maine a little over eleven years ago.

SSC: What brought you guys out here?

AM: Pretty much just a change, but also the music thing going on. Dan was in many hardcore bands as the front man. We moved out here with our guitars.

DL: And a duffle bag.

AM: We didn’t really play music together for the first five years we were here--just bits here and there. I guess I don’t know what really brought me out here. I just wanted a change in my life.

BK: I grew up in LA.

DPH: I’m the only one [from Seattle].

SSC: Anything you want to add to that, any bands you’ve been in?

BK: Well, I think Golgothan Sunrise and The Abodox are both hugely influential on Lesbian just because that’s what we were doing when we started.

DPH: If you look deep enough into it, if you’re familiar with Golgothan Sunrise, you can hear those different influences coming through. Same with Arran’s other bands. He was in She-Level, which is like, all clean and very prog-y--rad shit--and Jan Michael Vincent Car Crash.

AM: For me, going back to guitar playing in Lesbian was like going back to Jan Michael Vincent, which was short songs but very weird and weird combinations of music so you never knew what you’d get.

DPH: I remember when I was going to school in Eastern Washington and when I first discovered Jan Michael Vincent Car Crash. Playing in The Abodox for so long and the kind of stuff that we write is shorter, lots of parts, very technical type stuff, and then when I first heard that [JMVCC], I was like, “Oh, this is it!” They were doing it the way that we thought we wanted to do it.

BK: But they were doing it on the other side of the country and we had never met.

DPH: When I came here, when I first met Arran he said, “Oh I used to be in this band, Jan Michael Vincent Car Crash.” I was like, “What? I just found that online, that shit is amazing!”

AM: We only played out in Seattle for about a year before we broke up.

BK: The first time I saw you guys it was your last show.

SSC: Say something about the Swarming Hordes.

DL: Yeah, we were all influenced by the Swarming Hordes. They’re a local band that’s no longer with us.

DPH: Like old school Maiden and Metallica and all your favorite old school shit, like, rolled into one, two minute song.

BK: But like, faster, with no vocals.

SSC: Let’s talk about your upcoming tour.

AM: I’m excited to play Boston and Portland, Maine. We’ll see a lot of our friends.

DL: I haven’t played live music in Portland, Maine for like 13 years.

BK: We went to South by Southwest earlier this year and that’s really the only other tour we’ve done, and really that wasn’t even a tour, it was more just like supporting shows to get down there. We made long drives and played LA and San Diego and The Bay Area at Annie’s Social Club. We’re going there again in February.

SSC: And I saw on your MySpace site [myspace page] something about a European tour? Is that the gig in The Netherlands?

BK: We got asked to play the festival. We haven’t decided exactly what countries to hit, but we’re hoping to get down to Italy and back. We don’t really know what the plan is. We seem to have gotten a lot of response from Italy for some reason, in a couple of magazines. We got good press there.

SSC: Well that’s part of the answer to another question I had for you guys about if you had found any fan bases outside of the States and where are they.

BK: There’s a lot from almost everywhere.

DPH: There’s a lot of stuff from Poland, Mexico, Italy, the UK.

BK: Definitely Australia and not as much from the Asian countries.

SSC: So no shows at Kobe Hall yet?

DPH: Not yet, that’d be epic.

SSC: You guys are signed, yeah?

AM: Yes, Holy Mountain. It was just for the first album. He’s out of Portland, Oregon now. He was out of San Francisco for a long time. The biggest thing he’s probably done is Om. That Wooden Shjips is probably his best selling album. He’s fairly new, he’s only been doing it for three or four years. It’s all very diverse but it’s all very psychedelic.

SSC: Are you touring on your own?

AM: We’re touring with Conifer from Maine. They’re kinda heavy, kind of experimental. They’ll be playing all our gigs with us.

SSC: So are you gonna change your set list every time, you know, depending on who you’re playing with?

DPH: We have two and a half hours of material at least, and most of our sets end up being two songs--like, two out of nine.

AM: The Earth show that you saw on Sunday, those two songs were just instrumentals.

SSC: And that went with the mood of the show.

AM: Since we can, and since we have diverse material in our genre, it’s nice to be able to do that.

DPH: We’ve done the opposite thing too, like played a show where we tailored our set to what the other bands are doing.

AM: [At the Melt Banana show] we got a lot of “Uh, when’s it gonna end! Get it over with already!”

SSC: Well, that’s what I was talking about, you know, it’s like an investment to listen to your stuff. Okay that about wraps it all up, then. I know you’ve got your last Seattle gig tonight before taking off on your East Coast tour. Good luck and we’ll see you back in Seattle!

Lesbian recently concluded their East Coast tour, very successfully. Please visit their website or their myspace page to stream the entire album and get a taste of the Lesbros for yourself...