Ready to Receive: Parts & Labor Reveal New LP

Is it a moog? Is it a keyboard? Or is it just a bloody bagpipe? Don't trouble yourself. B.J. Warshaw of popular Brooklyn instrument recylists Parts & Labor dissects their forthcoming album - comprised of literally hundreds of samples sent to the band by the public - track-by-track and especially for you.

-

Satellites was one of the last songs Dan [Friel - keys / vocals] wrote for the record. We had been talking about starting some future record with a very long and slow build because a lot of Parts and Labor songs tend to come out guns blazing from the onset. One of the other things we were toying with is stretching things out, playing with open spaces more and having longer movements, so this was a really good choice to bring that idea in straight away.

I wrote the music to Nowhere's Nigh this last summer when I was up in Vermont for a friend’s party. We were up in the country at his parents’ house where they have this old family piano, I sat down and started playing those chords. I wrote the lyrics while we were on tour a few weeks later that same summer, so it’s to do with driving around the country, the energy crisis and the endless monotony of American exurbia – things seem a little worse when you spend as much time on the highway as we do.

Dan wrote the lyrics to Mount Mysery about Donald Rumsfeld who moved into a house that used to be a notorious slave plantation and apparently Frederick Douglass was horribly tortured there. Donald Rumsfeld moved in and lives there now. It used to be called Mount Misery. So it’s a song about torture.

Little Ones: Our keyboards often sound like bagpipes and people often think there are bagpipes on the record, but in this case there actually are! That’s another one I wrote up in Vermont, it has this sort of lilting country melody to it that was challenging to bring into the Parts and Labor sound so we just went for this driving krautrocky rhythm underneath, with what I think is a really folky and pretty melody.

The Ceasing Now is another departure for us, it’s one of the slowest, more ballad sounding songs I think we’ve ever put on a record, which is very fulfilling but also a little daunting. I feel like it’s the most emotionally exposed that I’ve ever been on a Parts and Labor record…I’m interested to see how people respond to it. Basically, it’s asong thinking about the excuses that we make to not change our lives for the better. I think it’s really easy to get caught in ruts and it takes a constant mind activity to be aware of when you’re in a bad, repetitive state. I know I’ve been in plenty, especially involving awful jobs.

Wedding In A Wasteland is one of the older songs on the record; Dan had that riff for a really long time. He wrote it two years - maybe even longer - ago. I think he basically intended this as the love song on the album in the midst of things feeling really apocalyptic and dire!

Prefix Three is another really old song, we had been rehearsing this for Mapmaker - our last record - and it never came together so we put it aside. I like it, especially for the electronic beats I programmed in at the beginning, stitched together via various samples. I like the dynamics of it, in the way that one minute it’s driving, and then it drops back down before this big anthemic chorus for the end.

Solemn Show World: Back when I was touring with a band called Shooting Fires last February, we were travelling around upstate New York and shit was going really badly. We had an amplifier catch fire, the fuel pump on the van died, the weather was really shitty and during that tour the guitarist – Matt Lynch – was responding to this flier he had seen hanging up in Brooklyn. The flier just said ‘What happened?’ and had a telephone number on it. So he was leaving messages on this number, just saying what happened and then later on we put out the call for audio submissions for the Parts and Labor record. One of the people who responded was this woman who sent us a link to her website, which is a collection of all the cell phone messages that she had collected via hanging up these fliers and we found a call Matt had made. The day he made that call is the day I wrote the lyrics for Solemn Show World. So his call was placed at the beginning of the song and everything wrapped around full circle in a really sweet way.