Morningwood

Morningwood
An interview by alexander laurence

Morningwood are just one of those bands that makes you want to listen. You
might think that it’s for you, but you end up loving these songs and humming
them all day. I saw them opening up for Gang of Four. Gang of Four is some band I
loved when I was a teenager. But what I remember about this gig was how great
Morningwood was. The band is mostly just two people: Chantal Claret (vocals)
and Pedro Yanowitz (bass guitar) and whoever want to join them.

There is no doubt that “Nth Degree” and “Jetsetter” are great songs. Their
videos are fun as hell. This is a band with a sense of humor. There is an
amazing vitality to their live shows. You just want to be part of the fun. I saw
them play a few times last year. They opened for Kasabian and Gang of Four.
They played at the San Diego Street Scene with White Stripes and Garbage. I
recently saw them with Head Automatica. They are coming back to the States on a big
tour with The Sounds. This will be one of the most fun nights this year. I
look forward to it.

I got to hang out with Chantal and Pedro in their hotel. I was waiting for
someone to pull a prank or throw a TV into the pool. Luckily I emerged unscathed
and they had to rush over to do the gig. When we began the interview, Chantal
was looking at the bands Myspace page.

AL: I noticed that you are adding some friends to your Myspace page. Does
anyone not get added?

Chantal: Most people get added to the band’s page. I have my own personal
page too. If anyone I don’t know writes to me a lot, they get blocked.

AL: You had some members from the bands Spacehog and Cibo Matto. What
happened to them?

Chantal: They are not in the band anymore.

Pedro: Two people left the band when we were doing the record and we were
waiting for the record to come out. They had cancer. Just kidding.

AL: Some Morningwood is mainly you two and whoever joins the band?

Pedro: We are a two-headed rock monster. But we have recently added Alfredo
Ortiz of the Beastie Boys. He is a percussionist. He is an old friend of mine
and now he is part of the family. He is going to be on this journey with us.
Right now we have our guitar tech, Jeremy, playing guitar. He is in another
band.

Chantal: He has been playing with us longer than he was ever the guitar tech.
He is still listed on my phone as “Jeremy the guitar tech.”

AL: Is Morningwood going to be like the Eurythmics: just you two and a
supporting group?

Chantal: We are looking for the right lover but we are dating right now. It’s
like getting married when you are in a band. We want to be a foursome. We
have to sit someone in there until we know it’s right. It has to perfect.

Pedro: We have to fuck a lot of people to find the right lover.

AL: Sean Lennon figures into the beginning of Morningwood. Lennon was in Cibo
Matto too. And you had a few members of that band in your band?

Chantal: We had two guys from Cibo Matto in the band at first. Pedro has been
friends with Sean Lennon for a while. Sean went to the same high school that
I went to. He went to Dalton long before I did. It was a small scene.

Pedro: It is a school in the Upper East Side for rich kids.

AL: I thought that you went to PCS?

Chantal: No, but my best friend Paula went there. I don’t know how I knew
Sean. I used to go out a lot.

Pedro: It was his birthday party. He had a bunch of mutual friends over.

AL: He didn’t form the band?

Chantal: No. He didn’t put us together.

Pedro: We were all very drunk at his Mom’s house at the Dakotas. That was
when I met Chantal. After that we just got into it. We started our friendship and
then started playing.

AL: Do you think if a spot opens up for Sean Lennon, he could join you?

Chantal: He is doing his own thing. His new record is awesome.

Pedro: He gets Morningwood and he likes it.

AL: Were you in some other bands?

Chantal: Morningwood is my first band.

Pedro: I was in some other bands but I don’t want to talk about it.

AL: Did you have any non-musical jobs?

Chantal: After school I wanted to be a director.

Pedro: I was the drummer for fifteen years in a bunch of other bands. Right
after college I joined a band and have never worked a fucking job in my life.

AL: How did you get from meeting at the Dakotas, to saying we a re a band,
and trying to play some gigs? Do you do some demos?

Chantal: I have a rehearsal space in New York that is insanely expensive. All
the songs came to fruition as demos. All the songs would start in Pedro’s
bedroom. Then we would go to the rehearsal space. We would go into my mom’s
gallery. That was in 2002.

Pedro: We would play live. We had a lot of cover songs.

AL: At that time in New York there was all this focus on New York bands like
The Strokes, Interpol, and Elefant. Did you know anything about that?

Chantal: We weren’t paying attention. We were enjoying each other’s company.
We were just trying to play shows. We weren’t thinking all the time “Hey,
let’s get signed!”

Pedro: We were so into having our heads up our own asses.

AL: All those bands at that time were wearing suits and saying, “Hey look at
us, we are cool.”

Chantal: I will play with them, physically, but I won’t make any music with
them. I will fuck them but I won’t play that music.

AL: What was the reaction to your first shows? Did people take you serious?

Chantal: Yeah.

Pedro: We were outside of all of that scene stuff and hipsters. We were the
underdog to all of that. We came from left field.

AL: You were popular with the hipsters?

Chantal: We weren’t making music like that. We were never hipsters or trying
to be. When we started, a lot of the guys had been in bands before. So we were
never considered a big band or a hipster band. It was a generational thing.
Even though we were starting out like babies at the beginning. We were a
struggling band. People can’t get their heads around that we were all friends and
natural. They might think, “It’s contrived!” But it has nothing to do with
that.

AL: Did other bands discover you first? Maybe they wanted you to tour with
them?

Pedro: We have never been asked to tour.

Chantal: None whatsoever. A lot of bands get scared of us. They don’t like to
tour with us because our live show is so energetic. We have been denied some
tours because we are so entertaining. We can dwarf some other bands.

AL: Many people have seen you supporting Gang of Four in Fall of 2005.

Chantal: They asked us to come along with them.

Pedro: That was a case of us being awe of them.

AL: Did you lobby for that slot?

Chantal: That came out of nowhere. I remember sitting in a van three weeks
before. I can’t remember what tour we were doing. I said: “Hey guys, we should
cover this song.” I played them “Damaged Goods.” I was trying to convince
them all. Then we were going to do a small tour of England. Then I got a call:
“You have just been asked to be direct support for Gang of Four.” I couldn’t
believe it. That was a case of them getting the CD, no hype or buzz. They got
the music somehow and loved it and they asked us to do it. It was the biggest
honor ever.

AL: Gang of Four was happy with the results?

Chantal: Yeah. I got to sing, “Damaged Goods” and “I Love A man In Uniform”
with them every night.

AL: Gang of Four had some onstage joke: “Morningwood. I don’t know what it
means. I think it has something to do with lumber.”

Chantal: They said that? That’s awesome. Dave Allen came to the show in
Portland with his whole family.

Pedro: We were either going to be Morningwood or Morninglog. Gang of Four is
the best band ever.

AL: Did you play the San Diego Street Scene last year (August 2005)?

Chantal: That was fun. We were the first band onstage on the first day. It
was like “How did we get on this bill?” I remember not having any water
onstage. There was hundreds of kids. I was having a panic attack. I got to get the
singer from Kasabian naked.

AL: A year ago you toured with the Music and Kasabian.

Chantal: They are sweethearts. We have toured with a lot of British bands.
They are nice.

Pedro: That was our first tour after finishing the record.

AL: Had you played a lot of shows at that point?

Pedro: We played a few years in New York. We did a tour with The Fire Theft.

AL: How did that happen?

Chantal: We had the same manager. Emo kids don’t understand rock and roll.
They all cry after they masturbate. They saw me onstage. They were like “Why
does that boy have lumps on his chest?” They couldn’t grasp the concept of a
woman being onstage.

AL: Where did you play your first shows at?

Chantal: The first few years we played at Don Hills, Pianos, and Knitting
Factory. That was it. We played some parties too. We never made it over to
Williamsburg. We have played two shows there in our career. We are not a Brooklyn
band. I only go over there to Brooklyn if I am getting laid, doing a show, or
doing karaoke. I don’t hang out in Williamsburg. I get panic attacks in the cab
on the bridge.

AL: I noticed if you listened to your record, it’s more like a heavily
produced pop record. But if you see the band live, it’s more like a rock band. Care
to comment?

Pedro: There are two sides to the band. We tried to capture the live energy
of the band on record. We like to build tracks on the record. The live show is
a different thing. It would be impossible to reproduce the record. We have a
lot of guitars on those songs and samples. There are only four of us onstage.
We try to do the best we can.

Chantal: We make up for it with loudness. Loudness and titties.

AL: How did you figure out what it was going to be like when you perform?

Chantal: I figured it out by being bored. I have a video of me performing
when I was five years old. I have the same stage persona as I do now. I am doing
the same identical thing. I had all the same moves, except licking titties.
But actually I was sucking on titties back then too. Nothing has changed.

Pedro: Sometimes you go see bands and nothing is happening.

AL: Some bands look bored.

Chantal: They are not enjoying the music they are playing. It’s our job to
show the audience what they are capable of doing. If we are liberating and the
audience can feel that, then it’s okay. If the band is doing nothing, and
standing there looking cool, then the audience is just going to stand around.
People do emulate what is going on the stage. People pretend that there is a fourth
wall there. There is not. There is no fucking wall. We are in the same room
with each other. Just because I am onstage doesn’t mean I have pretend that we
are not inter-acting.

AL: You are like a cheerleader.

Chantal: Yeah. I am a rock and roll cheerleader.


AL: You recorded the album in London. How did that come about?

Chantal: We didn’t have a lot of money. We were eating a sandwich a day. We
knew that we needed to get out of New York. It was distracting. We couldn’t
focus.

AL: Sean Lennon always knocking on the door.

Pedro: We did it in London because we were working with Gil Norton. He wanted
to be close to his family. He made all his records in London. So we were
excited to go there, rather than LA.

Chantal: If we were in LA the label would drop by all the time. But we didn’t
hear from the label till toward the end. They wanted us to send them
something. I wanted to send them a tape with scary haunted houses noises. Here is your
record.

AL: What neighborhood did you do the record?

Chantal: We stayed at some fancy hotel in St. John’s Wood.

AL: Abbey Road?

Chantal: We were right next to there. We recorded at RAK studios. It was
amazing. Radiohead did The Bends there. We were there for a day a few weeks ago
and Bryan Ferry was doing a new record.

Pedro: There have been a bunch of famous records done there. The Libertines
and The Zutons. You hear the drums and you recognize the sound from the
Radiohead record.

AL: How did you write “Jetsetter?”

Chantal: I was in London. Pedro was on tour with Money Mark. I woke up in the
middle of the night with the melody and lyrics. I spoke to him on the phone
that night and he had written the music. He played it to me over the phone. I
thought “Fuck, I have the perfect thing for it.” When we got back together it
worked out perfectly.

AL: How did you do the videos?

Chantal: We worked with this team on both videos called Worm’s Eye. We like
them because they like what we want to do. They are creative. “Jetsetter” was
more a collaboration. “Nth Degree” was more their idea. They had the idea to
do that with album covers. They wanted to do that for a long time. We talked
about what records would be put into the bin. There are a bunch of rare
records. There is a Serge Gainsbourg record and one by the Zombies.

AL: Now that you have done this video, do you ever want to come out onstage
as one of those bands?

Chantal: We always wanted to. We had a strong desire to come out as those
bands that we were dressed up like. We need more money to do that. I don’t want
to confuse people because we are a very new band. We are a versatile band.

AL: Do you have songs for the next record?

Chantal: We have just given birth to this first one. But we did have some
songs that weren’t right for the first record, that we know will be on the second
one. I am pretty sure those songs will be on the second one, unless we find
God.

Pedro: We like to keep people guessing. We might write a bunch of stuff at
the last minute.

AL: I see Morningwood as the next Radiohead.

Chantal: So that means our next record will be the best one. I like the
second album by Kings of Leon.

Pedro: The next one will be rocking.

AL What about the third one?

Chantal: That is when we all grow beards.

AL: As long as Man is around, there will always be Morningwood.

Chantal: I always read these interviews with the Rolling Stones. They asked
them in the 1960s if they will be around. And they say, “Fuck no. We will be
dead and buried.” They are sexy motherfuckers. I met Ron Wood. I smacked his
ass.

AL: So where do you see yourselves in ten years?

Chantal: In a tour bus.

Pedro: I hope we are together in ten years. And I like bands like The Clash
who decide to stop. I think we will do Morningwood as long as we are friends.

AL: So, Chantal I heard that you don’t hang out in New York anymore.

Chantal: When I am home I watch movies. I am on Myspace. I might go out one
night a week for drinks. I do it right. I get a lot of excitement in one night.

WEBSITE: morningwoodrocks.com