SubModern Session: The Districts

Originally hailing from the small central Pennsylvania town of Lititz, The Districts have called Philadelphia their home for quite a number of years now.  A few weeks before the release of their fourth full-length record, I had the opportunity to chat with frontman Rob Grote, bassist Connor Jacobus, and drummer Braden Lawrence at their studio, Tunnel Vision Sound, about the new album.  They also performed a special set of songs from it as a three-piece for our latest SubModern Session, which you can listen to in the player below.

This is a bit of a different sounding Districts record.  It’s clearly the work of the same people, but you’re going for some sonic left-turns?

Rob Grote:  Yeah, it feels to me like there’s a lot different sounds that we’ve done at various points, kind of like melted down into one thing or something.  Plus I guess some new stuff going on as well.

There are some dancey moments, like "Cheap Regrets," and some quieter moments.  Things you might not expect on a Districts record.  So, it was a goal to mix things up and get out of your comfort zone a bit?
 
Rob:  Sort of.  I don’t know if it was necessarily a goal, so much as when the songs were beginning to be written, there wasn’t totally an agenda for them to be Districts songs or not.  They were kinda just songs coming out of left field in general.  There wasn’t a total plan for what the record would be.  I was writing a lot of songs and demoing them out more.  Kind of the lack of an expectation of what they’d be, just let them come together in their own way and incubate more freely.  

And recording was kind of a go out into a cabin in the woods situation? 

Rob:  Yeah.  We started at Headroom in Philly and a lot of them have elements of demos from my room even before that.  So it’s kind of a big collage of stuff happening, but yeah, the bulk of the work was done in Red Hook, New York, in the Hudson Valley, in this cabin.  It was awesome.  Nice to get out there. 

Was it important to seclude yourselves from all the outside distractions?

Rob:  Yeah, I feel like it was helpful.  When we’re here, if you’re working at a studio near home, you go home at the end of the day and you lose focus.  Then you come back in the morning and you’re trying to wake up.  But if you’re living in the woods and recording at the place you’re sleeping, you can just kind of round-the-clock be in the zone.    

You have ideas at like 3 in the morning and run down to record them?

Rob:  I don’t know.  We slept pretty well.  I feel like we’d stay up pretty late and then sleep well. 

Then I saw the name Dave Fridmann listed as a mixer for the record, who is pretty well known for producing The Flaming Lips and MGMT, amongst others.  He does very psychedelic stuff, and I can hear an element of that in this album.  What led you to working with him?

Rob:  Before we ever worked with a producer, we had like a two person list of who we would want to work with, who were John Congleton, who we worked with in the past, and Dave Fridmann.  On this record in particular, a lot of the musical themes of the record were this kind of dreamy thing going on, that just felt like he would knock it out of the park and really know what to do with it.  I got his e-mail from someone we worked with and he was really friendly.  Sometimes when you look up to someone’s work, you don’t always know what to expect from them as a person.  He was super-personable and nice, and great to work with.

With all of these new sounds on the record, what can we expect from your live shows on this tour?

Rob:  Instrumentation-wise, aside from Breshon [Martzell] adding some of these keyboard parts in, it’s pretty similar to what we’ve always done.  I think it translates well to how we play live, despite being a pretty thickly layered record.  Whenever we take a song like that and do it live, we see what are the most impactful parts that we need to have and focus on giving the performance.  It’ll have a lot of the dreamy stuff from the record for sure, which will be new, but also kinda just put it out there and give a good old performance.

Sadly most of you will have to wait to see The Districts play these songs live as their tour was cut very short by the coronavirus pandemic, but be on the look out for rescheduled dates near you at TheDistrictsBand.com.  In the meantime give a listen to their SubModern Session performance here and check out You Know I’m Not Going Anywhere, available now on Fat Possum Records.

By Josh T. Landow