Pavarotti and actually I had a statue of Buddha, which I thought was Pavarotti. I guess it doesn’t always matter to me. I’m super into anything African basically and y’know, Cuban and a lot of the Brazilian sort of tropicalia, anything that’s good that strikes my sort of fancy. And I think that most all folk music from around the world is severely good; it’s usually outrageously good, all the folk, local folk music from around the world.


I read that when Edward Sharpe came to life, you aimed to write music for people that was the soundtrack to their lives. I’m very happy to say that ‘Home’ was my wedding song last year; it was my first dance song. I’m sure I’m not the only one - did you imagine that you would be making such string connections with peoples lives? I did imagine that, I used to imagine it all the time; that was always one of the goals, and I think especially when…-I knew for instance that when we wrote ‘Home’ and when we recorded the demo that for me this was something that had been missing in music for a long time, a giant gap in music that I didn’t know was there but then was suddenly revealed to me because now this song was here. It was a sort of genuine, erm, back and forth duet without any sort of irony or


bootylicious quality. It is just a love song, a friendship song, a beautiful song. It was really an eye opener for me and I felt that, and felt that it would be for a lot of people. So I guess in some ways I did imagine it and it wasn’t shocking to me that it resonatedwith other people too. I have got great wedding stories about ‘Home’. My favorite one is that it was raining and ‘Home’ wasn’t the first song or anything and no one was dancing and ‘Home’ comes on and the groom and his best man look at each other and they both start grinning and they run out into the rain and start dancing like wild and everybody starts pouring out into the rain.


I don’t want to focus on Edward Sharpe as a character too much because I see the rest of the bands huge significance but when I read that he was a character that kept getting distracted by girls and falling in love I wondered is Edward Sharpe a hopeless romantic? Tat was sort of my stance a while ago, I sort of felt that I was deemed distracted by my alternate self by relationships a while ago and it’s sort of a funny subject to me, so I was writing a novel about this character named Edward Sharpe. But I guess, no, I wouldn’t say I’m a hopeless… well, fuck, I don’t know.


You come to earth and you want the full gamut of experience of feeling love and pain and so I do, except without so much of the pain hopefully.


I’m so excited that I have had the stream of the new album, ‘Here’ for a couple of days now - I guess when you were writing ‘Up from Below’ you were still getting to know each other, did that mean that the creative process for ‘Here’ differed? I read that it was gonna be a bit more of a Wu Tang operation? It was different in that everyone was participating a lot more equally and there was a lot more time spent on this album as opposed to just a couple of us doing a lot of it and then people coming in and out. As we needed them, most of everyone was present for a lot of it; if they weren’t recording themselves then they would be around supporting, throwing ideas in, whatever, so it was a lot more collaborative and I think that changes the experience of the recording process as it brings us closer together.


I was excited to read that Rough Trade are throwing listening parties around the UK for ‘Here’ this weekend, before its released on Monday. With that in mind, I wondered what’s the perfect


outlineonline.co.uk / June 2012 / 13


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