Add it Up: The Violent Femmes, 40-plus Years On (Part 3 of 3)

Continued from Part Two…

The 40th anniversary edition of Violent Femmes’ self-titled debut album had a bunch of demos as bonus tracks, but it also included many live recordings. Were you involved in the archival project of going through those tapes?

Gordon Gano: Mostly no. It did get sent to me to listen and approve. There’s a little bit of me that feels like, “We played it, so there it is.” I don’t have to listen to it again; I was there 40 years ago or whenever it was, and I can listen to it, or not. I know a lot of people get a lot of pleasure in something from the past that made them feel good and still makes them feel good. But I’m extremely not-nostalgic about the band; I think the whole point is now.

I know some of the thoughts and feelings of these songs when I wrote them, but I’ve played them all through the years. So when we play a song from our first album, it doesn’t take me right back to when we recorded it or when I wrote it. Because it’s been ongoing through all these years, and that seems right.

It’s been about seven years since the band released a new album, Hotel Last Resort. Is writing, recording and releasing songs still part of the mix for Violent Femmes?

I hope so. For the tour coming up, I want to keep putting focus on doing new songs. This time around we’ll have gained the benefit of playing the songs for an audience. It’s also having to make choices about what musicians and instruments we have at the moment: How are we going to get this song that no one’s heard before across the best we can?

That’s great for us, and great for the song. You start to learn how an audience responds [to it]. I don’t think that means the audience is always right, but I would take very seriously how they’re responding – or not – to something. And then, “Why are they not responding to this? What can be done to maybe help communicate it better?.” There was even something that happened after playing a song twice where Brian said to me, “The audience seems to think the song is over at this point,” even though it wasn’t. We weren’t trying to be cute and do a fake ending. We were still playing, but the audience spontaneously starting applauding. And that happened twice. And it was like, well, yeah, that’s where the song should end.

And it was interesting, because I had written a coda: We’ve gone on this musical journey, and now it’s come all full circle, and it’s ending. I thought this coda was very clever, because it was taking bits of musical themes and lyrics that have already happened throughout the song and then intertwining them and overlapping them and building to a crescendo. But the audience didn’t want to have to wait. The song was done. Here’s all my cleverness, but it’s all unnecessary. If we had just gone into a studio to record, we would have recorded all of that. It might have been an interesting recording, but the song wouldn’t have been as focused.

The group has disbanded and reunited on more than one occasion. What keeps bringing you back?

I guess there’d be two things. One is that there’s an audience there. I can speak for myself and Brian without any hesitation: We are so committed with music, and we are involved in music all the time. Only a small part of it is Violent Femmes. A whole lot of what we do doesn’t make any money at all; nothing. And that’s fine and that’s okay. But it’s great to have something that can. And that, for us, is called Violent Femmes.

The audience is there. People want to hear it. People want to come out and see a show of us playing, which is incredible and wonderful. But if we didn’t like it – or if we thought it sounded bad – I’m sure that it wouldn’t be happening. The thing is, it sounds good.

There was a time when we thought we were done forever. But an invitation from Coachella was passed along by our agent, saying, “There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell you guys are getting together, but I gotta let you know that this is what you’re being offered.”

When we got back to play a couple of times at a rehearsal – we hadn’t seen each other in a long while outside of a non-musical setting – it was kind of amazing. It just clicked right away; it just had this sound. It has a sound when Brian and I play together. What he’s playing and how he plays, and my songs and how I’m playing, and my voice… the way it all comes together has a sound. It has an energy that we appreciate; it really does sound good to us.