Explosions In The Sky's Mark Smith on music and storytelling

Instrumental rock band Explosions in the Sky are arriving in Manila this week for their first ever show in the country. 

 

The Texan quartet—Chris Hrasky (drums) Michael James (guitar, bass), Munaf Rayani (guitar), and Mark Smith (guitar)—have been making music for more than a decade now. They have a total of six studio albums, the most recent being "Take Care, Take Care, Take Care", which was released in 2011.

 

Aside from making records, they also have numerous scoring and soundtrack projects, like for TV series "Friday Night Lights", and most recently, for film "Prince Avalanche", a collaboration with director David Green and composer David Wingo. 

We talked to guitarist Mark Smith and asked about the band’s past, present, and future: the 2013 tour with Nine Inch Nails, TV/movie collaborations (they’re set to score "Manglehorn", another David Green film, which stars Al Pacino), life on the road, and what he thinks about a common fan’s response to their mind-melting performances. 

 

You started touring with Nine Inch Nails this week. How's the tour going so far?

 

Mark Smith: Pretty fantastically. The NIN band and crew have pretty sterling reputations for how they treat people and bands, and we have found that to be true. The shows have gone extremely well, as far as I can tell. The venues are the biggest we've ever played at, usually about 10,000 people a night. And for the 45 minutes that we play every night, it seems like we've been received pretty well by their fans. I mean, we've had some heckles of people who seem to think we suck really badly, but that's cool. For the most part, I think we've gotten our music across to a lot of people who have never heard us or heard of us, so that's what we were hoping for. 

 

You said in an interview with “Rolling Stone” that all of you were filmmakers before being in a band, so I was wondering—do you think your filmmaking background has made a difference in the way you write songs?

 

MS: Maybe not directly, but they're both about the storytelling. For as long as we have been a band, we have talked about the stories for most of our songs, sort of like how a storyline for a script. I don't want to overstate that – most of the time the stories are vague, and again it's not for all of them. But I think the moviemaking and our type of songwriting share a lot in structure and aim.

 

I noticed that in your most recent concerts, the tracks from four albums are evenly spread out, so listeners can get a little bit of everything. Is that intentional?

 

MS: Yeah, definitely intentional. There's a few tracks that have I guess become staples (I'm thinking mostly about "The Only Moment We Were Alone" and "Birth and Death of the Day"), that we play at nearly every show, because they're the ones that people want to hear the most and the ones we think are the best in the live setting. Then we just try to fill it out with songs from the different albums. We played a few songs from “How Strange, Innocence” and “The Rescue” at some shows a few years back, but it seemed like they mostly succeeded on a novelty level – people weren't expecting them, so they were excited, but on a musical and live level, they just don't feel near as great to us. 

 

I watched you guys in 2007 in Boston (you opened for Smashing Pumpkins) and I walked out of the venue a bigger fan than when I’d arrived. The experience gradually becomes so intense that it gets spiritual, even cathartic. It happens even when I watch your videos on YouTube. Do you get a lot of these kinds of observations from fans?

 

MS: Yes, and it's incredible. I love reading our emails from fans – we always end up feeling better about ourselves. Obviously we had no idea we would have any kind of chemistry when we started playing live, but we do and I feel pretty fortunate and grateful. It doesn't always happen that way for bands.  

 

I’ve always been curious about how you write song titles. Could you tell us more about how you come up with them? Was there ever a time when the title went first, and then you built wrote a song around it?

 

MS: It's largely what you would expect – a ton of brainstorming and discussion and the words start to mutate and most stuff gets discarded but then we are left with one that we all like, and that's that. Then we repeat for the next song. We take some ideas from books or movies and sometimes change them to match better. The main one I can think of where the song title came first was "Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean," which came about when the Russian Kursk submarine sank and we were following it in the news and just couldn't help but imagine the darkness and horror the sailors must have felt, and we decided to try and write a song that would have that kind of tone. 

 

You said that there was a lot of electronic/online exchange when you wrote songs for "Take Care, Take Care, Take Care." Do you think you’ll be applying this method again in the future? 

 

MS: I know it will, because it still is. And it's been a little bit out of necessity, because one of the guy's wives lives in Los Angeles for the time being for her work, and another of the guy's wives lives part-time in Detroit for her work. So we're not together all the time like we have been in the past. And we've begun exchanging demos for the next album and for the Manglehorn soundtrack by email already, so yeah that process is here to stay. I love it—it gives you a lot more time and freedom to develop and experiment with song ideas on your own while still bringing the joy and surprises of collaboration. 

 

I hope it’s not too early to ask this, but has your part in the Manglehorn project started? 

 

MS: Yes, in a few small ways. We've read the script (written by our good friend Paul Logan), and talked about what we want to do with Wingo, and heard what the director David Gordon Green is looking for from the music. And we've written a few small sketches for some song ideas. – KDM, GMA News

 

Explosions in the Sky will play on October 30 at the Samsung Hall, 6th floor, SM Aura. Show starts at 8pm. For more information, visit the Kindassault website or send an email to tickets@kindassault.com. 

Photo courtesy of Kindassault.