And are you concerned with balancing the visuals and music? Because I heard that that was a concern with Rings Around The World when you released that CD/DVD.
In what sense?
In making sure that when you’re pairing visuals with music, that proper attention is being paid to the music and that the visuals aren’t necessarily overpowering the music so the music just becomes a background track.
There’s something to be said for having a video playing rather than people staring at five sweating Welsh people and sometimes it’s nicer to look at an animation or something. It is funny, it can be very comforting to hide behind a projection, although we haven’t used projection for a while now.
But we’ve got experience with it doing two albums there where we had the visual representation for every song, we worked with a lot of friends who made films and they were quite mind-boggling projects then to take. We got a collection together that kind of features film material for every album, which was great to do, but I think we missed being able to just go to a studio to record the album quickly and put it out quickly. Maybe someday we’ll have the time and patience to do another visual project.
So your decision to not release DVDs with the past two albums—was that because of time constraints?
Not constraints, but the lack of immediacy, where those albums were taking seven months of recording and mixing because we were making surround sound mixes as well. To make surround sound visual projects were the right things to do, but we kind of miss the immediacy of recording and doing things spontaneously. That’s the mood we’ve been in for the past two records—to record quickly. Our last record took 40 days from start to finish and we were able to release it within a couple of weeks of finishing the record. Whereas if we were making 12 films in surround sound mix, it would have taken until next year probably. So I think at the moment, it’s immediacy and spontaneity.
You’ve also released some solo albums?
Yeah, yeah.
Your debut solo album was all in Welsh, but Candylion was multi-lingual. Was there any reason for that change?
I write in both languages and around the time of the first album, I had a batch of Welsh-language songs. It was a fairly spontaneous record that took about a week.
By the time the second one was coming out, I had a batch of English-language songs written on an acoustic guitar that seemed to sound like a record, like an album. And yeah, I think only a couple of them were Welsh.
Yeah, it wasn’t particularly preconceived—that language record—although it helps with continuity. The music often goes on wild tangents, so sometimes having one language on a record helps to make it a lot more unified. I go through phases of thinking that and then sometimes I enjoy the shock of being hit by a different language on the same album. I’m still trying to figure that one out.
Do you find that your style musically changes at all when you’re writing in a different language?
Not consciously. Some of the Welsh-language stuff I’ve written seems to be more mournful somehow than other ones I’ve written. There are very melodic and happy songs in the Welsh language as well, but a good portion of mine are kind of mournful. But it’s mostly something I’m not conscious of.
Super Furry Animals will be playing at Highline Ballroom in New York on Sept. 11 and at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, NJ, on Sept. 12 and at All Tomorrow’s Parties in Monticello, NY, on Sept. 13. For more on SFA, head to superfurry.com or myspace.com/superfurry.
