Thirsty Thursday

The Black Heart Procession make the kind
of music you’d play if you were planning on killing
yourself in your ex-girlfriends house and you
needed a soundtrack to her discovering your
body. It’s lonely, sad, dark yet somewhow gorgeous,
but this is no soundtrack to teenage angst.
They’re not Hot Topic goth.

“Well, when we first started it was sort of a
break from what we were doing with Three Mile
Pilot,” said Tobias Nathaniel, pianist and half the
brain and heart of the Black Heart Procession.
“We didn’t even really intend for it to be a band
in the first place.”

“I’d just moved into Pall’s house and I remember
it was around the holiday time and I’d just sit
at home and write some music on piano,” said
Nathaniel. “He’d come home and say, ‘Oh, that’s
a cool idea. Let’s work on some stuff,’ and before
you now it we had ten, eleven songs.”

“After that it wasn’t long before we decided,
‘Hey, lets just go play a show’ and ‘hey, maybe
we can go record this stuff’,” said Nathaniel. “It
all happened really, really quickly. I think the first
record went from concept to finished and mastered
in about a month.”

The first album, 1, came out in ’98 and was
something wholly different from the prog rock
of Three Mile Pilot. Though Jenkins sang for both
outfits, Black Heart Procession clearly took after
the sorrow of Nick Cave, but with weirder
instruments.

“Some of our very early shows were just Pall
and I with piano and vocals and musical saw. We
used some unusual instrumentation, like waterphone.
It’s sort of like a metal jug with spires of
different sizes welded to it and you pour water
in to the jug part and bow it. You bow the spires
and swish the water around and it creates this
really eerie, nifty noise. We used a lot of unusual
stuff like that and we’d just get up there and
play.”

“[There were] some guest drums on a few
songs and we occasionally had drums live, that’s
kind of what the early days were like,” said Nathaniel.

“It evolved into a few more songs with
more drum-oriented stuff and we added a keyboard
player, but still keeping the piano and vocals
as sort of the primary instruments.”

And that’s pretty much how the process has
continued since the conception of the band, the
two of them bouncing ideas off each other and
holding down the core of the group as they bring
in ringers here and there to fill out their sound.
They’ve been together making music at a relatively
quick pace, putting out a new Black Heart
Procession album every few years, evolving from
quiet and moody, with songs that float in the air
like a dark cloud, to almost a gloomy pop band
on ‘07’s The Spell.

“I was gone from home quite a bit,” said Nathaniel
about writing and recording The Spell. “I
didn’t want that to happen again on this record,
so we just sort of took our time, took it easy.”

Six bypasses the slick, radio ready triumph of
The Spell by going back to the looser and more
atmospheric early recordings. The lack of a full
band lets you wallow in the lyrics, making for a
less anthemic record that still does a little stomping
here and there.

“It’s a bit back to some of our earlier roots,
it’s a different approach than our last couple
records where we had a lot of folks playing on
them,” said Nathaniel. “This record started out
as just Pall and I trying to come up with some
new ideas and see where we stood. It was different.
There was a bit more freedom… It allowed
us a little bit to experiment and try new things,
and also old things for Black Heart.”

Six was stitched together in two and a half
years, built out of 13 carefully constructed, labored
over, cherry picked tracks.

“This record, it took a little push and pull… so
I think once we latched on to the direction we
were going, these ones made a good sequence, a
good story for the record,” said Nathaniel. “We
did have thirty-ish ideas… we did quite a bit of
work, but we were very picky about the ones
that ended up on the record.”

As for the abandoned tracks, if they’re good
enough, they tend to find a home.

“We look at songs for the album as needing to
be of a specific quality, the ones that could eventually
be for EP’s we’re not so strict about. So if
anytime we need something for a compilation or
7-inch EP, we can just dig into the stock pile and
finish things up.”

“Two of them [songs scrapped from Six], we
resurrected and got finished for the Japanese
release,” said Nathaniel. “Where, you know, in
Japan they require two additional songs. Cause
they’re special, they always get two more songs
than everyone else.”

After more than twelve years of being in bands
together, Nathaniel and Jenkins are still finding
excitement in their profession and each other’s
company.

“Even though it takes longer now, those moments
of inspiration when you feel like something
cool is happening, they still happen, they
just happen less frequently,” said Nathaniel about
the early years versus now. “I guess it’s sort of
like a relationship. In the beginning everything is
really exciting, everything is wonderful. As time
goes on those moments are still there, they’re
just more spread out.”

Originally published in the Winter ‘09 issue of Ghettoblaster, a quarterly culture and entertainment mag.