by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
When Blonde Redhead took the stage on an unseasonably warm evening in Los Angeles this fall, the crowd greeted the trio with sustained applause. It’s well deserved. The band – comprised of Kazu Makino and twin brothers Simone and Amedeo Pace – was touring behind Sit Down for Dinner, their assured, compelling new album which arrived nearly a decade after 2014’s Barragán.
It’s not like the band has been idle. They’ve welcomed a Numero Group reissue of their first two albums and released various singles and tidbits in the interim. Kazu even released her first solo album, but when the band planned to reconvene to begin recording what was to become their tenth album since forming in 1993, life got in the way. A lot of it.
In spite of – or perhaps due to – the isolated nature of the album’s creation, Sit Down for Dinner presents a band very much still connected to one another. Long known for reinventing themselves and their sound, Blonde Redhead returned with a melody-driven, complexly rhythmic exploration of what makes life worth living.
On a wet December morning, Post-Trash caught up with Blonde Redhead drummer and percussionist, Simone Pace, who spoke with us from his home in upstate New York. Pace apologized for his demeanor; he’d just returned from tour to a flooded basement and had enjoyed perhaps one glass of wine too many the previous evening – now he was feeling a bit under the weather. As the storm dumped rain on the woods out his window, Pace shed some light on the making of Sit Down for Dinner, the unexpected role a canceled tour with Tool played, and the best feline cameo on an album since someone spent their pandemic doing this.
Photo Credit: Charles Billot
Post-Trash: You can track the evolution of Blonde Redhead through the different rhythms on the albums. Early on, there’s a post-punk, almost math-rock oriented approach. By Lemons and Butterfly, the rhythms begin to incorporate more samples and counter-beats. Sit Down for Dinner felt like another evolution. What’s different about the rhythms of this album?
Simone Pace: I listen to a lot of Brazilian music from the 70s. I moved to New York, after finishing school, to study with this drummer from Brazil, his name was Portinho. So those influences may be coming out slowly. But there are a lot of different influences. For a song like “Snowman,” for instance, the inspiration for the rhythm came from the Black Uhuru, do you know them? Black Uhuru, no, the reggae band?
PT: I don’t! But I’m glad you brought up “Snowman,” because that’s one of the examples I cited of the album’s rhythms taking on a new vibe.
SP: Black Uhuru came from that world where a song would have a repetitive rhythmic idea and the whole song was built around that. So, for “Snowman,” I was wondering if I could get away with that concept and it worked well, I think. For “Melody Experiment,” I was listening to a lot of Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions right around the time my daughter was born. I loved the looseness and the elasticity of the music…the way it makes you feel. It's also related to Brazilian music, in a way that there is so much of that question and answer in its grooves and awkward tempos.
PT: Yeah, the outro of “Melody Experiment” sounds particularly complex. How did working with Mauro Refosco [percussionist on “Melody Experiment”] influence moments like that?
SP: Well, he’s David Byrne’s percussion player – he’s a good friend of ours – and we wanted him to be part of this record. He added a great deal and he’s a good engineer as well. We kept one song “If” from the Italian session but most of the other songs we re-recorded at Mauro’s studio. For “Melody Experiment” I played the groove and Mauro played the hi-hat, and additional percussion. Ame [Amedeo, Simone’s twin brother] and Kazu weren’t there that day and I really wanted to give that song a chance because I really liked it. So, I constructed a temporary form, over Ame’s guitar sample and built the song on the spot. Then, we just started working on the proper form and developed it.
PT: Looking in the liner notes, it does seem that this album was constructed differently than previous albums, there seems to be lots of different times and places. 2019. 2020. Italy. Upstate New York. Some studios, some houses. That's a far cry from just getting into one studio and recording live. Was this new for you to make a record that way?
SP: My pure and magical idea of making records is for us to go into the studio all together, and just spend a month there. I love that process, but for Sit Down for Dinner, it was impossible because of all the restrictions COVID created.
PT: Yeah, how did that all unfold for y’all?
SP: We were supposed to go on tour opening up for Tool (in early 2020). So Kazu – she was living in Italy on the island of Elba at the time – came to New York. Then the tour got canceled, Italy got locked down, and she got stuck here. So, Kazu and Ame moved into a rented house upstate [Upstate New York] and worked on music together up there. I couldn’t make it there at first as there kept being exposures, and if you felt sick….it was a mess. Later on, we rented another house and did some recording there, and I ended up recording some drums at home by myself. It was chaos but we made it work.
PT: And you did end up going on that tour with Tool. How’d that come about?
SP: Each member of Tool picks an opener and it was Maynard’s turn. (James Keenan of Tool), he likes our music, and he asked us. It was a great tour, to be honest. We didn't have to worry about filling up a room. We didn't have to worry about what are we going to eat. Everything was catered. Everything was on time and the shows were great and in huge arenas so it was good fun and an exceptional experience.
PT: Dinner sounds important to the band. The author John Dunne famously sat down to dinner with his wife Joan Didion and died. So, this idea of sitting down for dinner made me think about the moment right before death, and that we're sort of always in that moment, because we don't know when our time is going to come. So that's what the album title meant to me. What does the album title Sit Down for Dinner mean to you?
SP: Well, yes, Kazu borrowed the title from the book [Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking] but when I first heard the title it made me think of us, because as a band, we’re food crazy. Both Japan and Italy are amazing culinary places. Growing up in an Italian family dinner was so important. I remember my mom screaming ‘dinner's ready!,’ and everybody would just run, because she was the best cook. We all look forward to sitting down for dinner, whether we're working, on tour, recording, whatever. In fact, everybody's always thinking about when do we eat? What should we have? What should we drink? That moment is crucial in the whole work process because it's the moment when you let go of everything and relax. Yeah, we always end up sitting down and having a meal together still after so long!
PT: I’m going to lean into your interpretation rather than mine. I have just a couple last questions and one is kinda silly. Is that a cat purring at the end of “Rest of Her Life”?
SP: That’s Penny! She’s sitting right next to me. She’s a rescue. When we were recording upstate, she was at the house we were renting. You can tell, though, that she’s a city cat, because her left ear is chopped. In the city, when they find street cats and need to fix them, they catch them, do the procedure and then chop a little piece of their ear so they know it’s done and there is no need to catch them again. Penny must be from New York, then moved upstate with the woman who was renting us the house.
PT: New York City transplant who moves upstate. Sounds familiar.
SP: [laughs] Yes. So Kazu really liked her, and the woman said she could keep her, so Kazu took her home. But then, I think Kazu felt bad because Penny really likes to be outside. I would babysit her when Kazu went to Paris to see friends or to Japan to see her father but then when she came back, she would say that Penny’s better off there in the country with you guys. She's been here since a couple of years at least. And she's the best a real sweetheart.
PT: So, you’ve been a band for over 30 years. What’s next for Blonde Redhead?
SP: It still feels like there's more to do… more records to make. If I think about how long we've been together it blows my mind. But I think the band is still quenching our creativity in a lot of different ways, so we are sticking with it for now. I can't tell you what's going to happen in the future, but I was happy to get this album out, tour on it and surprisingly, see how well accepted we still are. We still feel very lucky about it.
PT: Last question. What’s for dinner tonight?
SP: Tonight? Ah, that's a good question. We had a Japanese curry a couple of nights ago and there's quite a bit leftover so, we might have that with some rice. Maybe some shrimp before that, and then some curry, and then that's it. I'm the cook here. I always try to make something special for everyone even if I’m alone.