Further into left-field: Future Islands interview

Feature by Joe Goggins | 29 Mar 2017

As the Baltimore outfit return with fifth album The Far Field, Samuel T. Herring gives us a glimpse into their biggest statement to date

“This is me being an insane person who can’t stop.”

Samuel Herring catches himself. Over the course of a breathless hour, he’s just run through pretty much every minute detail of Future Islands’ fifth full-length, The Far Field, and is now on to the next one, which doesn’t exist yet. He’s calling from Austin, Texas, where the band have just arrived for a slew of shows at South by South West, and suggests that perhaps it’s that he’s gone all day without eating – maybe that’s why he’s already riffing on the follow-up to a record that’s yet to be released. “My brain’s in some crazy place,” he says. “But we would quite like to have something else out in 2018.”

Instead, you suspect that it’s probably some combination of Herring’s ferocious work ethic and effervescent passion for his craft that not only has his mind racing but has also brought the three-piece to where they currently stand. Their last album, 2014’s Singles, followed a pretty classic template for a breakthrough record – after touring relentlessly and turning out a series of increasingly well-received LPs, they made the record of their career: slicker, smarter and shinier than anything that’d come before it.

It didn’t hurt either, of course, that high-profile television appearances on the likes of David Letterman and Jools Holland helped bring Herring’s wildly energetic and often theatrical stage presence to a worldwide audience, with performances of Seasons (Waiting on You) going viral and quickly leading to suggestions that perhaps he was playing up to the cameras a little. A cursory glance over old YouTube clips confirmed that no, he really does put that much in every night.

“Well, you know, there’s really something about sweating for your art,” he explains as he talks about his eagerness to be back out on the road after a year in the studio. “We toured for two years straight, and by the end of 2015, I think I was beginning to lose my mind a little bit.

“That said, I was only home for maybe six or seven weeks before I started to feel that pull again. It helps that it’s a simplified way of life, too – sometimes I feel more comfortable staying somewhere that doesn’t have all my records and all my books, and all the general clutter of my life. I like that about hotel rooms. That, and the fact that I don’t have cable at home. I can’t watch ESPN when we aren’t out playing shows.”

By the time the trio did wrap up touring for Singles, though, no amount of live sports could disguise the fact that they were a little bit burnt out. The success of the record meant they spent longer promoting it than they could have anticipated, and to put that into perspective, this is not a band that ever had a reputation for being workshy; when Herring talks about their early days, he mentions that they once did a tour that involved 49 shows in 47 days, and that when they first moved from their native North Carolina to their adopted hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, one of the key reasons for making the switch was in order to be closer (four hours by car) to New York City, so that they could play there more often. They did so 22 times in the first year after moving.

They were knackered enough that they even considered passing up the opportunity to play Jools’ Holland’s Hootenanny, despite the invaluable exposure it afforded. Even after they filmed it, their final PR engagement of the Singles era, they still didn’t have much time off, arriving home in mid-December and starting work on The Far Field in early January.

“We went out to a rented beach house down in North Carolina, in this coastal tourist town that is just deserted in the dead of winter,” recalls Herring. “We got out there and started writing. It’s interesting, because usually after you’ve been on the road for so long, there’s a lot of pent-up energy and maybe even grievances between the three of us, but as beat as we were, we just didn’t talk about it. We threw ourselves into the songs, and they became an outlet for that moment in our lives instead.”

The resulting record feels like their boldest statement yet, blending the old Future Islands (who always felt a little rough around the edges) with the gleaming pop version we saw on Singles. For the first time, the drums have been tracked live throughout, and flashy instrumental touches – the horns on Time on Her Side, for instance, or the strings on opener Aladdin – have been seamlessly worked into the palette, proving a neatly complementary set alongside Herring’s typically dramatic vocal delivery. It feels like the meatiest Future Islands offer to date. It’s a hefty proposition. 

“We had to figure out if that was something we could pull off. When we first heard some of the string parts back, they sounded huge, and it freaked us out. We kind of felt like, 'they sound great, but they don’t sound like us.' We turned them down and eased them in. I think the important thing was to bring a bit of the warmth and dirtiness of our older material back, because I do feel like Singles is a little too pristine in places. That’s why the drums are kind of front and centre, they’re really the driving force, and this is the most we’ve ever sounded like a ‘rock band’ as a result, which is cool.”

Key to making that step was bringing in a big name producer; John Congleton’s work with the likes of St VincentWild Beasts and Swans in recent years has made him one of the most in-demand men in indie rock, although Herring notes that it was actually his work on Civilian, the third record by fellow Baltimore outfit Wye Oak, that brought Congleton to his attention. After being based in Dallas, Texas his whole career, the Grammy-winning producer was moving out to Los Angeles as the band were gearing up to record, and having told them he felt they had a potential classic in The Far Field, he booked time in a studio that’s no stranger to that concept – Sunset Sound.

“I remember William [Cashion, Future Islands bassist] having some reservations about working in LA,” laughs Herring, “because he didn’t want the record to end up with some Hollywood shine all over it, and we had to kind of convince him, 'I think it’ll be cool.' We wrote all these songs in Baltimore and North Carolina, there’s no way LA’s going to seep into them. It’s not going to be like the album’s coming out with us all wearing sunglasses on the cover.”

Congleton’s experience playing and touring in bands himself – he fronted The Paper Chase for 12 years before they split in 2010 – helped swing the decision in his favour; the band plucked him from a shortlist of seven or eight potential producers. “We did a 7" with Jim Eno from Spoon back in 2015, and we were talking to him about how, you know, a lot of producers haven’t been there and lived it and they don’t really get how important these songs are to the band. They sometimes try to take them away from you, and you end up with this weird separation anxiety. It helped that John’s toured all over the place as well as made tons of records; it meant we felt more comfortable with him. Well, that and the fact that he’s a goofball, and shares the same dark sense of humour as us.”

The connections Congleton had made through the sheer breadth of artists he’d worked with also came in handy, solving a years-long dilemma for the band. “The song Shadows, that was originally meant for Singles,” says Herring. “The problem was that it was a duet and we couldn’t decide on another singer. I think maybe we were casting the net a little too wide, and just kicking our feet and procrastinating; it didn’t necessarily need to be a woman, so we were coming up with all these lists of people who might do it. They were getting wilder and wilder; you know: 'Oh, wouldn’t it be great if we could get Kate Bush to do it? Or Grace Jones? Or Scott Walker?'”

With their time at Sunset running out, Herring reluctantly cut his vocals for the song at the behest of his bandmates; he was ready to let Shadows go, thinking it was too tied to Singles and that they’d never get the right singer for it anyway. As he sat listening to Herring’s take behind the boards, Congleton – who also produced Blondie’s new album, Pollinator – struck upon an idea.

“He turned to William and said, 'What if Debbie Harry sang the other part?' Obviously, we were like, 'Shit! That’s perfect, but do you really think she’d be into it?' And she was! She recorded her vocals in New York, so we’ve not actually met her, but I did have the surreal experience of sending some emails back and forth with her. It really made sense, because she’s singing from the perspective of this much greater presence, who’s pulling me out of the darkness – so to have somebody so iconic fill that role was what the song needed. I still can’t really believe it came off.”

Now, as The Far Field wings its way into the world, Future Islands are gearing up for another long stint on the live circuit. For Herring, that’s precisely how it should be. “It’s time to go to work. That’s how I see it. I know we should’ve probably stopped, and taken a proper vacation, but I don’t really know how to slow down; it doesn’t matter whether I’m in my room or sitting on a park bench, I’m always writing - if not for the band, then just random raps or whatever.

“And I did miss it – hanging about at home, I got a little fat around the middle! I want to be sort of beat up again. We have to keep pushing – we don’t want to lose our edge.”


The Far Field is available now via 4AD. Future Islands play Barrowlands, Glasgow, 27 April; The Refectory, University of Leeds, 28 April; and O2 Academy, Liverpool, 29 April

http://future-islands.com/