Show & Tell - S&T chats with Dave Terrana and Rich Andruska of the band pete.

DAVE TERRANA & RICH ANDRUSKA OF PETE
02.01.03

I've heard the band pete. referred to as "the biggest secret in the music industry" and "the best band you've never heard of." Both of these statements are dead-on accurate.

Not nearly as known as they should be, the music of pete. is emotionally affecting, passionate and evocative. To see them live is to witness music that is simply too big for the room it's played in.

Currently working on new material, singer Dave Terrana and guitarist Rich Andruska took time out to sit with us. We spoke about their creative process, the construction of a song and what makes a good song good.

Show & Tell: So what are you guys up to?

Rich: Working on new music is pretty much our main focus right now. We've all got little personal things that keep us away from that at times but we're just hitting it hard right now.

S&T: And you all write together? Do you say "meeting at 5:00 o'clock, rehearsal, we'll write a song?"

R: Everybody writes things on their own and the band'll write songs together but either way we work it all out together. We've got Pro Tools rigged up so we can fly things around and move things. It's a lot of looking into the mirror and making sure everyone's doing the thing that they need to be doing.

S&T: Now is that like creativity on demand?

R: That's the hard thing that you have to balance; trying to be creative and spontaneous and have that flow going but doing it while everything's still under the microscope.

S&T: We'll be spontaneous at 5 o'clock this afternoon.

R: Yeh, that's kind of the thing. It's tough, but I think we're getting back to being a little more spontaneous.

S&T: How's the new stuff coming out.

R: New stuff's coming out great, really excited about it. A lot of, what would you say, Dave?

Dave: I don't know what the hell it is [laughs].

R: Some of it becomes kind of intricate and we're trying to make the intricate stuff sound simple. And that's one of the tricks.

D: That's one of the things I think we've really gotten much better at. Taking a song and really crafting it, really knowing how to make that song work better. Y'know, making a song that's 3 minutes and 40 seconds that's like jam packed with good stuff and work and flow and even though it's intricate and maybe the time signatures get crazy, it just feels real natural.
You find these great melodies and chord progressions and then the idea is how do you craft it into a great song. I think we're getting better at that, at crafting them into songs. We've labored over a song for a few days.

R: A few weeks.

D: Yeh, and at the end of it you go, whoa, that's just a great 3 minutes and 40 seconds. From the very first second to the end it just works. Everything.

R: Sometimes the genesis of a song will be a certain way and you'll want to get away from that because it sounds like something else or whatever and it's really hard putting it somewhere else that really works for it. And a lot of times there's a lot of experimenting trying to figure out how those things work. And that's the tough part, making sure that it works right and it sounds cool and it's exciting.

S&T: You can't approach each song the same way.

R: No, absolutely.

S&T: Sometimes you have to work backwards, put a song together and then rip it apart to put it back together.

R: And that's happened. And then some songs, the way they came out is the way that they probably just should be.

D: Right.

R: And then it's of course deciding that. Everything's a tough decision. Maybe sometimes we're harder on ourselves than we should be, maybe sometimes we're easier on ourselves than we should be.

S&T: And how do you do that? You have 20 songs and you need to whittle it down to 12.

R: It's like weeding out your children.

D: Not everything you write is great. Maybe a small percentage of what you do is great. It's hard. We're not like Neil Diamond yet, we don't just crank out...

S&T: You're working on his hair pretty good.

D: Whoa ho, I was wondering when that was coming.

S&T: When we're taking pictures we'd be happy with one great picture per roll.

D: I learned that from my brother who's a photographer; he shoots so much and gets so little. And I think when we're doing music we're realizing that there's certain songs that are good... Yeh, it's good but it's not great or anything that's gonna move people. And then you'll come across a song and be like whoa...

R: Gene Simmons talks about that. He has a very punch card, workman's view of writing songs. Unplugs everything and just sets aside 8 hours a day and sits down and works on music. "I write 150 songs a year, one of them has gotta be decent."

S&T: I don't even see him as a musician anymore, more as a businessman. I'm going to sit down and write a song, sell a coffin...
it
R: If you sit down and try to write a hit song it'll never happen.

S&T: So what is your criteria for that to happen. This is good, this is not good... This is one that you'd want to listen to. The trend is...

D: Undeniable melody, an undeniable melody. When you hear a song and it just seeps into your head and you can't fight it off anymore...

R: Those are things you listen for. And you look for things that you love in music. It's hard to look at it from someone else's perspective or from a record label's perspective. As far as a song in its pure form you just look for great melodies and stuff.

D: I think there are people out there who can write a hit song, can sit down and say "I'm gonna write a real catchy hit song."

R: And that's good, I mean, if that lasts. The thing is with some bands they'll have a few hits, look unstoppable and then it dries up. Someone can seem like a hit machine right now but it can turn real quick.

Expectations can destroy a band or a label's faith in them. It's like Pink Floyd puts out The Final Cut and it sells 5 million copies but The Wall came out before it and sold like 20 million so it's a failure. It just doesn't make sense. You can't really, you never know when the hits are gonna come.

S&T: The climate needs to be ready for your stuff.

R: Yeh, it does.

S&T: How do you be objective about it, your children.

R: You can't, you try to be and you lie to yourself [laughs].

S&T: You can ask us, we're cut and dry.

D: That's why we asked you before, what song [from the demo they'd sent us] didn't work and you still haven't told me!

S&T: Blockhead [one of the tracks sent over].

D: Yeh, that's on the outside of what we do.

S&T: That one didn't really sit well. But the first song on the demo, Tearing Me Out... You were saying about a melody that just sticks? That one doesn't go away.

R: And that's another one we really had to work hard on to get the music to be right. Because choruses are in three and the verses are in four and you go back. Getting those transitions and getting the music to work...

D: And now it feels so natural though.

R: It started out as kind of a strummy acoustic song, you'd never guess that. A lot of our songs start out that way and they evolve over time. Like Burn on the first record, to make that transition from an acousticy song that Dave wrote to a band song that has music behind it, that took years because we weren't signed. But now we have to speed up that process and we go from A to B and instead of years it's a very short time. A lot of bands do their first albums and it's great because they had 10 years to do it. And the next album they have a year to do it while they're touring. Trying to get from A to B faster and that's a real hard thing. That's one of our struggles right now. It takes as much time as it takes. A song like Tearing Me Out, you wouldn't believe how it sounded in the beginning. But the melodies are all the same and that's why we worked on it, the melodies were great and we really loved the song. So we really worked hard on making every turn of the song work. As best as we can.

S&T: Lyrically is that all you [to Dave]?

D: Didn't we work on it together [to Rich]?

R: I think that was yours.

D: It doesn't matter anymore. Honestly it doesn't really matter anymore to me what's what as long as it comes out right. I don't think there's an ego in this band about where songs come from as long as they're good. If I'm feeling like, "I can't do this on my own," I always want the band to be involved in what I'm doing. If I just get a spark in my room, all of a sudden I come across this good melody... There's this thing that we're working on now, this new song. I brought it to the band but we're really trying to figure out what to do with this song because it seemed like it had really cool melodies, [pete.'s bass player] Lars takes it home and comes back with, "I did an approach to your song, I hope you like it. It's really kind of out there and it's not what you're expecting."

I've learned not to say no, I want to say yes. He brought it in and put a spin on it...

R: Took it somewhere else.

D: Took it to this other great level and it's so cool. The great melodies are there but it's built on... I'm always open to everybody having their hand in the music. If everybody has their hand in it then they feel ownership to it and it becomes more a band song.

I don't consider anymore that I have a song. To me it's pete, it's all pete. I know these songs only come to their completion and realization when everybody puts their hand on it.

If we keep that openness about it there's always a possibility of getting great things from it. If everything is compartmentalized, it's like bullshit.

S&T: Do you ever get good songs but you're like it's just not a pete song?

D: Oh my God, all the time. How many tapes do you have of outside the pete realm songs.

S&T: "We're going to play it in our side project bob."

R: Bob and Joe and Bill.

D: I think a song like Blockhead, we know it's outside what we normally do, of what our vibe is and I think it's one of those things like, Is this a pete song?

R: And we struggled with that one, we recorded it a couple different ways.

S&T: And maybe it just might not be done.

D: No, it's not done and we're not crazy with the outcome.

S&T: When I listen to your stuff there's a vibe beyond the music and the lyrics that I get.

R: I think it's kind of mechanical. It's not like us. We've struggled with the last record, making it somewhat scientific and working on the music really hard and making all the parts work but having it still feel like it's not that way.

S&T: The music is evocative. Kris calls it haunting. And that song doesn't...

D: It doesn't bring shit out.

R: It's not like us at all, I think that's why we wanted to do it.

S&T: Lyrically, is it something that just comes at the end? Do you get what a song is about while you're making it? Is it just "I have to fit words in here?"

R: It can happen any way really.

S&T: How about the first song on the demo I heard?

D: Tearing Me Out, [with an english accent] it was like a butta'fly that flew on me shoulder and I just played.

For me it was just about finding this rhthym or the chords that sound good and all of a sudden I just started humming this melody and Tearing Me Out just comes out of my mouth. We'll go back to tapes and be like, "Okay, you were humming this thing and all of a sudden you sang this" and we need to go back and fill lyrics in where they're missing and we start formulating what the song is about.

Let's put it this way, I have never written a set of lyrics and then put music to it. It's never happened.

R: A lot of times it works phonetically.

S&T: "And all of a sudden you sang Chicken Lips."

D: Sometimes we'll be listening back to something we've done and I said, "Chicken Lips" like some sort of tourette's thing and he'll be like, "That was cool, you said ‘I've never been hip'" and I'm like, "No, I said Chicken Lips but I like ‘I've never been hip' much better!" [laughter]

R: We'll have sessions like that. It'll be a month since he sang something and we'll listen to it and both write down what we think he said. And we'll come up with a composite of what he said. Other times it's really obvious, it's the chorus, "this is the one I wanted."

The lyrics still have to be good. That's the problem. We work so hard on lyrics... We beat the shit out of each other over the lyrics! Especially when a song is in its done form and you have most of the melodies set up and most of the lyrics in place.

Writing a song can be a struggle sometimes because you want to work on the best stuff and make it as good as possible and that just takes a lot of time. There's a lot of tedious minutiae, making sure everything's the right way, melodies are this way and these parts go together. Unfortunately it's not as easy as it sounds.

S&T: Actually, it doesn't sound that easy at all! Thanks for the insight, guys, we're looking forward to hearing the new album.

R: Us too!

interview by scott sisti