Strange Paradise: In Conversation with Grails’ Emil Amos & Alex Hall – Part 2

Last year, speaking with Emil Amos and Alex Hall about their Grails side hustle, Lilacs & Champagne, in anticipation of the project’s 2024 release, Fantasy World, the former spoke of not having the burden of commercial responsibility. In the same interview, Amos confessed that the duo had “pulled down all the toys off the shelves and have made a big fucking mess. And now everybody else has to deal with it.”

That same renegade spirit is rampant on Grails’ latest odyssey, Miracle Music. The band, reacting to conformity and music industry mediocrity as we know it, to the point where Grails don’t just charge the gates: they smash through them completely. The rules? There are none, and while this has always been etched in the band’s manifesto, on Miracle Music, Grails go to great lengths to even overthrow their own principles.

In the second part of our two-part interview with Amos and Hall (those yet to read part one can do so here), the pair shed more light on the process that makes Miracle Music the accomplishment that it is.

During this point of our discussion, we really get into the mechanics of how the majesty of Miracle Music was reached. Through the plotting, constructing and chiselling down to a point that makes Grails’ ninth full-length release their most sweeping statement yet.

Grails’ inventiveness and willingness to shine the torch into corners that few others dare to explore ultimately makes them one of the last vestiges in counterculture; Miracle Music, arguably the purest representation of it. From the stirring siren call of Silver Bells to the brutal sullenness of Strange Paradise and Visible Darkness, Grails expose a wealth of emotions, all of which leave indelible marks on the soul.

In a new world landscape barren with originality, on Miracle Music Grails move beyond, reaching their darkest frontiers yet, obliterating the idea of conventional methods in favour of unbridled radicalism. So how did they get there? Following on from part one of our discussion, Amos and Hall delve deeper into the pit, sharing further insight and much more.

Corridors of Power: 20 Years with Grails

Sun 13: How do the newer voices in the band of Jesse, Ilyas and AE change the colour of this record?

Emil Amos: “This record’s very different in the way it was tracked and mixed. We decided to use every person as a kind of commissioned performer. I’d be sitting at the computer and ask Jesse if he could play Shakuhachi or mandolin across a certain section until we could unlock what it wanted to be.

“Silver Bells has mangled excerpts of Ilyas playing electric guitar on his cell phone over top of it. And Tony was tasked to build out the end of Primeval Light I-III as its own little industrial planet. So the reason why this record feels like it has these little classical movements is because people were given assignments to fill out small sections and I think that ended up being a really honest way to create a picture of the personality of the band.

“Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Neil Young… they all famously have that one-take mentality. But from another point of view that’s remarkably lazy! So we did the opposite. We pieced together something only built of the necessary compositional items from the perspective of the post-mix, and jig-sawed it into a picture that’s specifically, texturally satisfying when you’re extremely high, which was a very important divining rod. Because when you’re high, people seem to think you can sit through absolute bullshit a lot longer, but it’s really quite the opposite. When I’m high I can see through all the layers of sound much quicker and see why it’s not taking me to the happy place I could be in, and leaving me in the warmest, glowing light. 

“So the mixing process was guided by a severe razor blade of weed consciousness, where every single 808 and mandolin had to sound really satisfying or else it would get cut. You couldn’t have done that on Buffalo Springfield records back in the day, because those live arrangements were spatially understood from a point of pre-production instead of in the post. That’s probably why it was so normal to replace band members with more professional players that were trained to obey the spatial laws of the producer’s arrangements in that era. So we tried to embrace the compositional possibilities that overdubbing can offer and treat that method as an honest frontier in itself.”

Alex Hall: “Because Emil was the producer of the record, the working process was totally different than anything we’ve done, and it worked really well. Even for efficiency’s sake… gathering everything and having editorial oversight. If you picture the traditional idea of a producer, you might imagine someone nodding and pointing at the engineers here and there… but in this case, the producer was incredibly high the entire time. So you’d approach the producer’s chair with your offering like consulting some kind of weed oracle, but they might just non-verbally give you a thumbs up or a thumbs down and keep looking for something else that felt more exciting or created the sense of motion the track needed.” 

EA: “If each person is throwing paint at the wall, it will paint a better, overall picture if it’s all put through a rigorous sieve. So a sound is only allowed to make the cut if it pleases this extremely high editor… which is actually a remarkably consistent metric because that kind of listenership is really unforgiving. It comes back to the Brian Eno mantra that prowess in playing music is fine, but listening closely is where the vital skill comes in. It’s easier to apply this idea to hip-hop production where the greatest producers were people that just listened really well. So when it comes to pleasing the kind of producer we used, it’s someone basically saying, ‘This drug can only let pleasurable things through to my ears’.   

“The edge of a hovering keyboard note buzzes in your ear differently when you’re high. It’s a more deeply satisfying sound to you on a level that your conscious, sober mind would never have the time to stop and fully apprehend the texture of. So this record exploited the cheat code of weed. The best engineers in the world that worked on The Beatles records or any of the great classical music didn’t really have the time to stop and bask in the frequencies they were fine-tuning. They were trapped in an over-specialised lab coat reality, focused on making sure the mics weren’t peaking and looking at things that aren’t totally the point of the overall picture.” 

S13: In terms of your willingness to always move forward and your curiosity of the past, I feel like Visible Darkness sort of exploited a space of liminality between the band’s past and present. It’s a key track, and almost feels like a finale of sorts… 

EA: “I think that song was a secret core ingredient of the record. And because Alex started that track alone, there’s a tangible connection to the melancholy of The Burden of Hope, which he wrote a lot of alone, too. Alex tends to come back to pretty brooding and unrelenting colour palettes which have always been a big part of our sound… it’s just his natural inclination.

“The beauty of a Grails record is that it doesn’t just do that, though. We knew where to let those parts shine.” 

S13: Do you still seek out new music or do you insulate from what’s immediately going on around you? 

AH: “The number of new releases I buy has been pretty consistent over the years. If you have a constant need for music that engages you emotionally and spiritually and you have to keep feeding that, I think new stuff can always do that.  

“But if you only have so many minutes of your day, there’s still so much old stuff that needs to be rifled through, and I think you have a responsibility to know as much about that as you to continue to refine your understanding. It becomes a numbers game, and you may not have that much time left over to dig through all of the new stuff being released these days.” 

EA: “Younger people today are very aware that they’re being pressed up against this new kind of observational glass and that everything is being seen too closely now. The excitement of The Beatles – the formula of four people on a stage – that’s a pretty exhausted formula to most people now. Things are over before they can become something, no matter how idiosyncratic and inventive they are. Styles are turned out so fast and become boring so quickly that the space race to discover new and bizarre things has become relatively stale… being pressed up against this observational glass would make anyone more curious about revisiting music made back in more innocent times.  

“That’s why the re-issue phenomena overtook new music years ago. And now that phenomenon is old. Old music overtook new music because there were better stories to tell there. The singer of this record got captured by a UFO and nobody ever saw him again? You’re going to want to hear that way faster than whatever some kid who works at the coffee shop down the street from you is working on. That kid’s never been abducted! (laughs)

“We find ourselves digging back into what feel like more innocent moments of human history because we’ve become suspicious of the current dynamic and are looking for a more honest transmission. The past is where all the excitement and mystique often is because nobody wants to feel as exposed as they are now.”

S13: Harmonious Living really reveals the depth to Miracle Music to me… the multiple layers and how well it’s been mixed.  

EA: “That song was a surprising one to mix because Jesse came up with the base of that song and it really feels like it could have been on Take Refuge In Clean Living. We’ve been travelling down this road for so long that we can inadvertently return to sounds we’d forgotten about and still find something new we hadn’t quite turned out.” 

S13: Given that everyone’s living in different parts of the world, that must inform the music, perhaps on a subconscious level…  

EA: “In an ideal world, the fact that we’re all isolated in different day-to-day experiences could end up making a more personal record than a record we might rush through if we were all in the same room. In a strange way, each person’s voice really got to say what it meant, but then the person who was subtracting and magnifying things was of one mind. So the record employed this strange super-highway where everyone’s individuality feels more preserved.” 

AH: “I think that’s exactly right. We stumbled upon a formula that allowed for a working method that allowed these separate things to be preserved in their original state and not just be absorbed by the normal band bureaucracy and consensus.”  

EA: “Even within a photo of a band… the collective experience can water down a sentiment very easily. Democracy can ruin things, but for some reason this particular method created a back door entrance into everybody’s individual vocabulary.”

AH: “I think we figured out a long time ago that the idea of standing together in a room with guitars and looking at each other isn’t the best way to get where we’re going. It’s not going to say what we want or need to say. It has to have these preserved kernels of truth within it… the ideas must be kept purer.” 

EH: “Can the experience of shock even be had in a rock club anymore? Do people even think it’s possible?”  

S13: Not a chance. Those days are long gone.  

EA: “We’ve arrived at this place where people are so spiritually tired, they’ve given up any expectation of encountering something that could knock them off the basic consumerist path. You can see it in the state of how bad podcasts are. What people fill their ears with is shockingly inane. If people can actually listen to others babble to that extent, it seems to speak of a desperate need for total disassociation. People have become so tired that they’re too tired to even try not to disassociate. So I think there’s a minute obligation to try and break the structural pattern of escapism surrounding us. 

“It’s an old artistic method to just to toss people down into the pit of pain… but to do it gently and tastefully in a way that honours the true complications of life is the challenge. Bringing them down into a place where they can view the ghastly bits of themselves while respectfully honouring their intelligence. This isn’t really for the rock club anymore.”

S13: I’m trying to imagine an instrumental band that could cause the kind of shock Stravinsky did with the rioting after he debuted The Rites of Spring. It seems impossible to imagine Grails edging towards that kind of cancellation in these times, though.

AH: “There was a time where that felt within reach… back when we were using dead people in videos and things. Chuck Mangione did try to cancel us. He sent a cease and desist letter to our label and Jeremy Devine [Temporary Residence founder] who didn’t find it in his mail until a year later, during which time we had neither ceased nor desisted. It was the ultimate dick move, because we didn’t even know we got it!”   

EA: “We don’t want to waste people’s time. And now that the market of music has been deconstructed fully, it just puts more pressure on us to satisfy ourselves internally. We had an excuse in the mid-’00s to feel like it was okay to have fun with it all as we were in our 20s and drunkenly trying to make the best of it. But it feels like that nonchalant way of artistic life is over.

“The only things left are the further, more brutal frontiers of exploration and that means doing real work. Everybody’s been trying to convince themselves that fucking around with Ableton in a coffee shop is ‘art’ for these last few years… probably because it’s easier to lay back into pacified, lifestyle music while letting the collective toxins wash through you and really changing nothing.” 

AM: “There’s always been a certain tension in Grails trying to exist in the marketplace. If you think about how absurd it is for a band to make a record that’s basically deliberately unmarketable, and then giving it to a label, and that label calling a meeting and saying, ‘How exactly are we going to sell this thing?’ It’s not going to be an easy lane to cruise in.

“It’s the same with playing live, you’re thrust into a performers arena because that’s the provided lane, and you have to figure out a way to resolve the tension that arises from not trying to be any kind of ‘performer’. It’s always been weird, but there’s just no reason to pretend anymore.”

S13: Listening to Silver Bells, and it really does feel like one of those final frontier moments…

EA: “If you can make something the capitalist machine can really use, then it’s just going to suck you up, hang you on the same old shelf and you’ll change absolutely nothing. You’ll get shelved, footnoted, and the conversation will be over. So you have to remain hyper protective of your ability to express the deeper dissensions you have.

“If you go back to Bob Dylan when he’s being grilled in Don’t Look Back, he’s watching the journalists trying to suck him up, slap him on page 42 of the magazine and end the overall conversation. But he’s ducking them and laughing back at the whole process. I think Grails is still part of that counterculture push-back. There are a lot of great artists out there right now that are making beautiful music, but I don’t think beautiful music is good enough anymore. I don’t think anything that can be used by the industry as any kind of pacifier can be good enough anymore. Something needs to stop the gears, and remaining aware of that obligation is easily as important as knowing how to play your guitar.”

S13: Homemade Crucifix underlines those obligations you’re talking about in so far as stubbornly pushing out into new territories. Is it harder to come up with new ideas each time?  

EA: “We’re lucky because our curiosity towards the history of music funds the core of what Grails is. We get to flip sentiments and production ideas into something that’s relevant to us right now but also matches our curiosity of the past. Digging through the history of music has always been a visceral/ personal experience for this band. Like the story Alex once told about being haunted by cover of The Stranger by Billy Joel when he was six years old… there’s something often trapped inside records that can scare you and draw you deeper into the mythology you’re slowly building in the back of your mom’s car on long drives to grandma’s house. It beckons you towards the inevitable damage you’ll incur just like the makers of this art did. We feel some kind of obligation to keep that portal open to benefit from its available magic.”

Miracle Music is out now via Temporary Residence. Purchase here.