Murder By Death

Before Murder By Death did their first ever headlining show in Edmonton, front man Adam Turla sat down with me at an empty bar and did a rather lengthy interview which touched on their 1,000th show, their obsession with vinyl and difficult covers, selling out and Harley Davidson, their odd lyrical story lines,Schwarzenegger, Van Dame and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Yeah, it’s a pretty wide spread interview.

---

Bobby: Starting with the basics, you are eleven days into this spring tour – how’s that going so far?

Adam: It’s been good. It’s our first time headlining Canada and for the few American shows we’re doing, a lot of them are new cities. We’re kind of trying to go to some new places that we’ve never been; but there aren’t many left. We’ve been to a lot of places.

Bobby: Yeah, the first show on this tour in Ann Arbor was your 1,000th show right?

Adam: Yeah, yeah.

Bobby: How was that?

Adam: It was fun. I mean, a thousand shows… I can’t believe we’ve played that many. We’ve been keeping track just because from the get go we had this website that would sort of document it. It feels like it’s been a lot of shows. *laughs* It’s a bit of a funny way to start a tour because as fun as it is – we made it a party and we had a good mood about it – it also makes you think “wow, that’s a lot of shows.” It might’ve been smarter to try and time it so that was on the end, but that’s not the case.

Bobby: It’s a good way to kick off the tour.

Adam: Yeah, and we had a good party night with cake and balloons. We kind of just made it silly.

Bobby: When you guys were touring earlier in February you had one of your friends called Bob come out and film a tour documentary in Kentucky, Chicago, LA, San Francisco and Illinois – how did the filming go?

Adam: I think it went well. There’s seven shows that were filmed and we’re kind of just deciding what kind of DVD we want to make with it. Do we want to just take one show and have that be the DVD and mix the audio and everything? Or do we want to take shots from multiple shows or just have different songs from different shows? It’s a tough call because there’s so much footage that we actually don’t know what to do with it.

But there is this one show that we weren’t really expecting to be that good a show because it was an early one and we usually play late at bars. We played a really early show and it was the last day of tour in Champagne, Illinois. We were expecting that it wouldn’t be that big because it’s that early but there were tons of people, like five hundred people and we projected these images onto the whole wall which was seriously like a fifty by fifty foot image behind us as we were playing . It just looked really cool. So I’m thinking that show might be the one that we use a lot of the footage from.

Bobby: Because then you also have the extra visual element to it.

Adam: Some of the shows we were just playing these packed little room and this was this giant room so it has this kind of cool effect. But then I think it would be cool to have a couple songs where it’s just like a rock and roll club, a little place.

Bobby: Do you have any idea when we’re going to be seeing the documentary?

Adam: My goal is to get it out around Christmas. I think that would be cool. It’s really just a live show. I’m not very into documentary style stuff unless there’s like a real angle behind it. With this one, we just wanted to have a performance DVD because we’ve never done that.

Bobby: In February when you guys started touring you guys were playing a twenty one song set which had both CDs from the Desert series – In Red of Tooth & Claw and Who Will Survive And What Will Be Left Of Them? – played in order. Was that filmed for the DVD?

Adam: Yeah, that’s what we were doing on that tour and so we thought that would be kind of cool to have documented as a live thing because it was a unique way of doing it.

Bobby: Not something that you do all the time.

Adam: Right. Usually we play stuff from all our albums but that was just kind of interesting because it had a very sort of theatrical approach to it.

Bobby: What made you decide to do it that way with both albums back to back and how did it go?

Adam: I thought it went really well. The fans seemed to love the idea because we were getting larger attendances every night. There wasn’t a single night where there was less people than I was expecting. We’ve headlined a lot of shows in the States and we know generally what to expect but this was like… there were certain nights where we definitely had like a hundred to two hundred more people than normal. It was cool because it was like we played for longer and people were into that and we had fun doing it. We had our old piano player out with us so that was different for us. The idea came about because we did a few dates when Who Will Survive came out where we did the whole album but then we never did it with Red of Tooth and Claw. I thought if Vincent’s going to come out with us, why don’t we just do it all?

Bobby: Yeah, makes sense. You’re currently doing a new seven inch series where every three months you release a new seven inch where you cover someone’s band and they cover you. You just released the new one with Amanda Palmer.

Adam: Yeah, it doesn’t come out for like another two weeks but yeah, we just started the pre-sale.

Bobby: They’re coming out every three months approximately. Who else do you have planned? I heard you wanted to ask Mastodon at one point?

Adam: Yeah, they played here last night. I’ve been speaking to their management and their manager thinks it’s a cool idea but I’m not sure how familiar Mastodon is with us because we’re from such different circuits. I mean metal and like bar rock. It’s just different. I’m hoping that maybe they’ll try it just for something different. I think it would be cool to have a metal band in the series because I like the idea of diversity and the challenge of how do you cover a metal song with lyrics about wizards and shit? I don’t know. I’d like to find out through doing it. The next one with Amanda Palmer from the Dresden Dolls came out this week. We did William Elliott Whitmore and O’Death and then the next one that’s coming out in August is Lucero and then the next one is Langhorne Slim from New York. We mostly started with asking people we know because at first the idea was just to have it be our friends but then we realized that we kind of knew Amanda Palmer but we weren’t very familiar with her music. We thought that would be interesting, a woman and a piano singing songs done by a guy with a low voice and a full band. We thought that just because it was so different that it would be cool.

Bobby: Just to see her take on the songs and how it sounded.

Adam: And it was very difficult for us to find a song of hers to cover because her songs are so personal and also they’re very feminine. She’s got a really dark sense of humor but many of the songs are about being a dark girl.

Bobby: Like Oasis.

Adam: Yeah. I mean we didn’t really know her material that much, but there’s a lot of stuff like that.

Bobby: I was looking at the artwork for the Amanda Palmer seven inch and it’s really cool. I really like it. I know for the O’Death split you had fans submit the artwork through a contest. Who did the artwork for the Amanda Palmer one?

Adam: That’s my friend Ryan that I’ve known since I was seven years old. He’s a comic book artists and an illustrator so I thought it would be cool. I asked him to do it because I remember him just saying, when I mentioned the split, he’s like “oh, Amanda used to come into the comic book store that I worked at all the time, I’d always sell her comic books and I kind of met her and got to know her a bit.” I was like “perfect, you should do this one.” I think the guy who did the O’Death one was from here.

Bobby: Yeah, that was actually my next question. His name is Mason Thomas from Alberta. Do you think you’re going to run into him tonight or tomorrow?

Adam: I think he’s coming tonight. I remember he was excited that we were coming up here but I haven’t spoken to him this week. I mean I was emailing him during the production of it but it’s been a little while.

Bobby: Hopefully you’ll run into him. You guys have be very committed to vinyl. I don’t think I’ll ever forget reading the description of your double ten inch gatefold vinyl of In Bocca Al Lupo.

Adam: Quadruple gatefold.

Bobby: Which was seven feet long.

Adam: Yeah, seven and a half feet long when you unfolded it.

Bobby: Now you’re doing the seven inch split series which, at the end of the series, you want to release as a double LP.

Adam: Yeah, I think it would be cool to do that for people who got into it too late because they sell out within a month or two usually.

Bobby: So why are you so committed to the vinyl format?

Adam: There’s a couple reasons. It’s funny. When we started it, we just thought… We listen to a lot of vinyl, I mean I like a lot of old music. So I was one of those people who when I went into the store, I couldn’t find the Aretha Franklin record on CD as easily as I could find it on vinyl; or Percy Sledge or whatever. That was the medium that we were used to listening to. So when our first album came out, we really wanted to do it on vinyl but the label’s like “we don’t want to spend the money, no one’s gonna buy vinyl.” After it had been out for like two years I was like “hey, can we just put out our own vinyl?” They were like “sure, go ahead.” So we just did it for the satisfaction. We thought it would look cool. The twelve inch art looks better, it sounds better. But it’s interesting because vinyl has become trendy in the last year. We’ve been doing our own vinyl for six years and we’ve noticed an increased in sales. It’s just kind of cool because something that we’re interested in is now actually [popular]. Before we would spend all this money, because they’re expensive to make – especially that one [In Bocca Al Lupo]. I was told by the vinyl company that’s the most expensive record that they’ve ever made and they make everybody’s vinyl. He’s like “we’ve never even heard of anything costing even nearly this much.” So we had to charge more for it and we ultimately didn’t make money on it because we were doing it just for fun. But it’s kind of cool because we’re getting it back now. Now that more people want to buy vinyl, we’re selling more. We’re like “cool, we’ll just keep on doing what we we’re doing and finally actually not lose money on it.” *laughs*

Bobby: Yeah, vinyl has definitely come back. Nielsen Soundscan reported an eighty-nine percent increase in vinyl sales.

Adam: The highest sales since 1984 I’ve heard.

Bobby: Why do you think that vinyl suddenly has come back?

Adam: Downloading. It’s the fact that people still like to collect even though they’re stealing the stuff online. You go online and you download it and it’s so unceremonious. It’s just there, on your iPod. I agree that it’s more convenient to just have it all in one place but people are pack rats. People love to collect. They come to the show and we sell so much vinyl at the shows. We always sell more vinyl than CDs these days. They see that twelve inch and it opens up and it looks so good. I’m a sucker for it too. I think people are just attracted to the idea that you can hang it on the wall or you can *pretends to open up a record and hold it in his hands.*

Bobby: Like you said you’ve been putting out vinyl a lot yourself, the past couple of years have been through your label Tent Show Records.

Adam: Yeah, which is just me. I arrange the artwork with our friends who are artists, I deal with the printing companies, and then I just announce it through our website. There’s no ceremony, no press releases, it’s just available on our site. I mail them. I package them up and mail them to people. It’s just kind of my pet project.

Bobby: I know that your record In Bocca Al Lupo was released on CD through Tent Show Records, now that you’re on Vagrant is Tent Show just going to be vinyl or are you going to do CDs too?

Adam: It was never really much of anything. It was kind of like a dummy label. Basically we had funding from a bigger source.

Bobby: East/West.

Adam: Yeah, they kind of handled everything. But we got to call the shots creatively and we approved – like if they had said “okay, we’re willing to spend this much on advertising” we could say “no, we don’t want you to spend that much” or whatever. The idea was that we wanted to be able to be in control of our careers and have creativity especially. So Tent Show was never [a full fledge label]. Like we got all these bands that people were like “hey, will you put them out?” or bands sending us demos; which was not something we wanted to do. Because honestly we’re so busy, I don’t want to screw over some band because we’re too busy to help them out. I wouldn’t feel good. The funny thing is, I forget to put the label on the artwork. I never remember to put “Tent Show.” I don’t know why. It’s a dummy thing, it’s, like I said, unceremonious. Anything that we put out, I guess that’s Tent Show. I always forget to put the little thing on the back though because it’s just like… I don’t know.

Bobby: It’s not that important.

Adam: Yeah. I sort of think that people would be kind of pumped if it was on there. We just ordered In Bocca Al Lupo. A new pressing that’s a simpler version just for people who don’t want to spend twenty-five dollars on a record, and I totally forget to put that on there. I just thought of that. Oh well.

Bobby: Your song, ’52 Ford, is currently playing in a Harley Davidson commercial. How did that come up?

Adam: Well we have a publisher. We really want to do movie soundtracks, to score a film; that’s something we’ve always wanted to do. So we have someone who’s job is to try and find opportunities for using our music. People have different opinions on this but basically we got an offer from Harley Davidson where they offered us some money to use our song for twenty five seconds and I don’t think anyone would have even known if we hadn’t announced it. I felt kind of torn. We put a post up about it because I was curious as to what people would say. We got a couple people who were like “oh no! Why did they do that?” We did that because we need money. We’re poor. You’d do it, anyone would do it.

The term sell-out just doesn’t really exist anymore because you can’t download music and then complain at a band for using a song in a commercial. It’s the same thing. You’re both taking an opportunity that presents itself. I mean, if you’re taking the only source of income from someone… when the band started, we used to make all our money – like a large portion of it – from CD sales; and then that just went away. So for us, it was a no-brainer. We’d do it again in a second.

It’s kind of cool because it’s at least like motorcycles. That’s what we were saying. We’ve heard of tons of bands that we know and I think a lot of time they’re ashamed to admit it. Their songs are used in really crappy product commercials and stuff and I mean it’s at least kind of cool that it’s fucking Harley Davidson Motorcycles. It could be worse.

Bobby: It could be like shampoo or something.

Adam: I don’t want to mention any names but I definitely know some bands who have had shitty cell phone ads or that sort of crap, cosmetics. Or God, I wouldn’t want to be on an iPod ad unless they paid be a ton of money. *Laughs*. That stuff sucks. It’s a tough call but it’s the modern way where you have to go with your music now. If you want to be a career musician, if you want to be able to go out there and tour and play for your fans and actually make this your entire life, then you have to be able to pay your rent or your mortgage or if you have a family. As we get older, Dagan, our drummer is thirty and a lot of people have kids at thirty. We don’t because we tour all the time but some people do.

Bobby: You guys have always had interesting lyrical content in your songs. Red Of Tooth and Claw is based on Homer’s Odyssey a bit. In Bocca Al Lupo takes some influences from Dante’s Divide Comedy whereas Who Will Survive and What Will be Left of Them is kind of based on a story of the Devil attacking a town in Mexico. What influenced you to go that route with your lyrics?

Adam: I think it’s because I don’t really listen to that much music and I read a lot. I feel like I was doing better writing when I had an overall purpose in mind. Who Will Survive and Red of Tooth & Claw, those are like narrative fiction and In Bocca is a collection of short stories and each song deals with the idea of sin in a different way. I just wanted to have some unifying factor in the albums because I felt like they would flow better or be more creative if I did that. Now in an effort to be creative, like I’m writing the next album and I totally don’t want to write a story. I just want to write a record because that’s the thing that I haven’t done. I’m always trying to do something that’s different.

Bobby: So you said you’re writing a record right now?

Adam: Yeah, I’m writing stuff in my head and then after this tour we’re basically gonna take the summer off and start the process.

Bobby: Back in February, like you said, you played the two albums from the Desert Series back to back. One thing that’s interesting is how your new album, Red of Tooth & Claw, is the prequel to your first album. Why did you do it in that order?

Adam: I didn’t mean to. We were just writing the record and suddenly I realized that this character that I was creating for Red of Tooth & Claw was a character from Who Will Survive. It just became so apparent to me. I was like “oh, is this cheesy? I don’t want to do this.” And so I did it, I wrote it and we didn’t say anything about that until the tour in February. We never made any sort of press release, I never even told our publicist. Because I didn’t want people to rush out and buy it just because they liked Who Will Survive. I thought that would be kind of cheap. For me, I did it because it was creatively the best thing to do. I didn’t want it to be a marketing tool because I think it could have easily been used as one. Like Who Will Survive is still a cult album. People are still discovering it, it’s been very popular in a small circle and I just didn’t want to exploit that popularity and try to sell another record that way. I figured I would just let Red of Tooth & Claw be its own thing and then a year after it came out, we were doing this tour and I was like “well, now we’re going to have to explain what the hell we’re doing.”

Bobby: You recently started a food blog on MySpace where you talk about the food that you’ve been eating on tour. What gave you the motivation to suddenly start that?

Adam: I love food. The happiest part of my day everyday is if I have a good meal. We eat out every meal on tour and we’re on tour for seven or eight months of the year. I always wanted to document the stuff that we were eating that were really good meals. We’re always like “remember this place? Where was that?” Sarah’s into food as well so we go out and eat a lot. It’s a way of me writing down some of my favorite meals and some of the surprise meals. Those are the ones that I usually like to write about. I’ve only done three so far and I have a fourth one that I wrote, I just haven’t posted it yet. I want to do one for this tour, somewhere in Canada. I like doing places that are just not what you would expect. I’m not going to write about New York City unless I have like the best piece of pizza or something. One of them was a Mexican restaurant that was inside an Econo Lodge. We just thought “whatever, it’s just right here. Let’s just eat and go.” It turned out to be extremely authentic and really topnotch, and dirt cheap.

Bobby: Your name, Murder by Death, was taken from the 1976 comedy movie of the same name. Lately I’ve been getting into a lot of movies and watching old ones. Actually, after I found out about you guys I got Murder By Death out of the library and watched it. So I’m wondering, what are some movies that you’re currently into?

Adam: Um.. Currently into… I’m trying to think of what I’ve seen latelty. See, I like everything. I like all movies pretty much. I’m pretty undiscriminatory about movies unless it’s just the biggest steaming pile. I like 95% of movies, I’ll watch anything. I love foreign films but I’ve also see every shitball action movie that has ever come out. I own every Schwarzenegger movie, every Van Dame movie. I love that garbage, it’s funny. Recently I re-watched Bloodsport with Van Dame. That’s a killer movie. My favorite movie is The Adventures of Baron Munchausen which is a Terry Gilliam movie. It’s just like fantastical and it’s just such an extraordinary story. It’s about a guy who’s like the world’s greatest liar and it’s amazing.

Bobby: I’m really looking forward to his new one which comes out soon.

Adam: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus?

Bobby: Yeah, that should be interesting.

Adam: That guy, Terry Gilliam, has the worst luck. I mean, he’s had so many problems. That movie, Baron Munchausen, had a bunch of disasters with the release. The Lost in La Mancha one – The Don Quixote one – just fell apart because the equipment all got ruined. Then he got roped into, without wanting to, to do that shitty… Heath Ledger was in it… what’s that movie called?… Brother’s Grimm! It was terrible. Apparently he wasn’t even involved barely but he still got the director’s credit so it just makes him look bad. And then Heath Ledger dies while they’re filming The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus so they got all those other people to play the role.

Bobby: It could be really interesting to see how they get everybody to fill in for him.

Adam: It could be, it could be. We’ll see. I’m certainly going to go see it. I want him to have a comeback. I want him to be able to make the movies that he wants without any compromise.