On June 8th, Drilling For Blasting played a record release show at Chop Shop for their debut full-length, Fingers are the Best Eyes. We met up with singer/guitarist Douglas Ward and drummer/singer Kammy Lee before the show to talk about the album, including how it was written and recorded, what some of the songs are about and more. The record finds the band refining their sound, which combines elements of punk and blues with an undercurrent of reckless energy and unconventional songwriting. In short, it’s an eclectic album that’s happy to color outside the lines of any typical genre boundaries.
Additionally, we discussed the concept for the record release show, which featured four bands set up in different corners of the venue. Each band would play one song and when they were finished, the next band would start. The bands alternated in a clockwise pattern, with the crowd in the center of the room. It was a decidedly unique experience for those in attendance and an absolutely fitting way to celebrate the release of Fingers are the Best Eyes.
Bill – You spent several years working on songs for this album. How would you describe the overall writing process?
Douglas – These are songs that we’ve been playing for a long time. Some of them kind of go back and a few of them are ones we really don’t play too much, although we do play all of them. It was really just more a slow start in getting around to doing the record. We’ve been wanting to do it for years. Life and things like that were such that we just didn’t really land where we wanted to record and who we wanted to record with till a little bit later. But, it’s not a race. We’re not in a hurry and when it was time to do it, we had a full roster of good songs that we wanted to put on there. We could have done the record two years earlier, but it just happened when it happened.
Bill – You recorded the album at Electrical Audio with Greg Norman. What was your time in the studio like?
Kammy – Fantastic. Definitely the best experience I’ve ever had in a recording studio. It was a little intimidating walking in there, but it’s really not an intimidating place. It’s pretty chill. We’ve recorded with Greg with previous bands and he was just a joy to work with.
Douglas – That was really the deciding factor, was Greg. We had known and worked with him and obviously he’s been at Electrical for so long. It’s funny, we’re drowning in wonderful people to record with in this city, there’s so many, but we just sort of talked to somebody and didn’t connect and then talked to someone else and it was the same thing. And we literally bumped into Greg at the Burlington when we were in the middle of this and I was like, “God, why don’t we go half a mile down the street from our house and record with Greg?” And we’re glad we did. Everything was quality and everything worked great. Greg, Kammy and I just doing our thing and it all rolled right out. It was one of the most comfortable recording experiences I’ve ever been a part of.
Bill – That’s great. In terms of the finished product, what are some of the things that you like about how the record turned out?
Kammy – Because these were songs that we had for a long time, I’ve had it with other bands where we recorded the songs and then we went and toured a couple times and it was like, “Oh, we don’t even play those songs quite that way anymore.” With this, I feel like we caught them in kind of the evolved state. It really sounds like us and it sounds like how we play the songs now.
Douglas – Recordings have a weird lifespan. Anything you’ve ever recorded changes over time, whether it’s six months or a year or five years later. You might come out of the mixing room and be like, “This is the best!” And then maybe two months later you’re not so sure. This recording was actually finished a year ago and it honestly sounds as fresh today as it did then. And it’s because it just sounds like us playing. There’s nothing adulterated by it, it’s just the songs. It’s what we imagine we want to sound like when we’re onstage and what we sometimes do sound like when we’re onstage, (laughs). There’s no funny business or changing, it’s just really clean and pure. A year later, I’m as happy with it as I was initially, which is good. That’s not true of all the recordings I’ve been on, but it’s up there with the best ones I’ve ever done.
Bill – Awesome. What inspired the album’s title?
Kammy – It’s kind of a woodworking saying. Well, Doug is the woodworker…
Douglas – Yeah, it’s one of my hobbies. I’m fanatically into woodworking. It’s like you can measure something with a tape measure, but nothing is as true as getting your hands on it and touching it. So, sometimes they say “Your fingers are your best eyes.” That’s when you know two things are lined up or when you know that something feels right. The thing that I love most about being in bands and music is how ephemeral it is. You can’t put it in a bottle or hold it in your hand, you have to be there. The greatest moments of music, you don’t know when they’re going to happen. You’re just at that show and that thing is happening and it’s great. And you have to tangibly, physically be there. So, trying to put in on the shelf or play it like you did 20 years ago or in some way quantify it, it doesn’t happen. You have to be in it and doing it. So, that’s the arty farty way of getting to that point, but that’s kind of what that title literally means to me. You gotta get your hands on it. You gotta be in it.
Bill – That kind of leads into my next question. Speaking of woodworking, I was going to ask about the song “Hurray for Hickory.” I feel like that’s one that immediately stands out when you first listen to the album. What’s the story behind its creation?
Douglas – Well, this isn’t a woodworking album.
Kammy – It’s not? (Laughs).
Douglas – But that song is literally the most related to woodworking. Yes, it’s about hickory trees and wood. It actually comes from the title of an episode of a long-running woodworking television show called The Woodwright’s Shop. It’s been on for 37 years on PBS. There’s this goofy guy named Roy Underhill who’s making stuff with old-time hand tools. He’s a real character, kind of a Paul Bunyan meets Mark Twain. Anyway, he did an episode about the wonderful wood hickory. The lyrics are almost a paraphrasing of him going through the virtues of this great American wood. About how the axe handles were made from hickory and the axes cleared the trees and they built the furniture and so on. He’s cheerleading this wood, but it also gets to looking at a common thing you wouldn’t think of, just some tree, and dismissing it. It’s just a single thing, but realizing that it’s much deeper. There are all these things you can make from it, that you can enjoy from it and that it gives to you. So, it’s a metaphor for again sort of exploring the world around you, being tangible, being in a place and interacting with things. It’s sort of a silly title too and it’s fun to chant. That’s kind of where it comes from.
Bill – “Slide Rule” is a fairly unique song in terms of its structure. How exactly did it come together?
Kammy – We wanted to do something to kind of start the song out at a gallop and it just formed that way.
Douglas – And then simmered into a long groove.
Kammy – I’m still kind of newer to the singing thing and that was the first song that I did most of the singing, so it was a learning curve. It kind of still is. He had actually written the words and was like, “You should sing this.” I was like, “Okay, I’ll give it a try.”
Douglas – And I really wanted to write more of a story song. A lot of our songs are kind of abstract angst and this is more of a story. You’re walking, you’re seeing things and you’re observing stuff. I want to get better at story-based songs. So, it’s a little bit of a dream of imagining present and past. And it’s sort trying to make sense of the world that we’re in now. It’s also about what we dismissed that was good, as well as moving forward to things that are better, but also things that are worse. Like when politicians or society makes those decisions, we’re almost always throwing something out that’s good in exchange for something else. Sometimes we’re throwing out something bad, but we’re usually doing both. It’s sort of a story song to think about that. But I do like how it’s a loud rocker at first and then you’re waiting and waiting for it to bang back in. I like keeping people in anticipation and hopefully by the time we hit it big at the end they’re still with us and it pays off.
Bill – Do you feel that these songs are all somewhat connected in terms of their lyrics or is it more that they each tell their own story?
Douglas – The only connection really is that they’re coming from us, but it’s not a story record where things are connected from one to another. It’s kind of an old adage with bands where bands keep trying to write that one song. Good bands try and get at that one song from different angles. Some bands just keep writing literally the same song. So, there’s this ideal that you chase and you try to crack that nut in different ways, but you never get there. In that sense, songs are always connected. Some of these songs are silly or whimsical and some are really bitter. Some are sort of admissions of guilt and failings, being very self-critical. And some of them are just pissed at how shitty things are, which are all aspects of stuff everybody feels every day. So, there’s that connection.
Bill – That makes sense. Tell me about the concept for tonight’s record release show and where you got this idea.
Douglas – This is an idea that I’ve had in my head for decades. The origin of why it’s on this show is because this is our record release show. We play out, but we don’t do tons of touring. We’re already a little self-conscious like, “What if we did a record release show and nobody came?” Part of the motivation was wanting to do something special and unique. We brainstormed a bunch of different ideas and then we played Ian’s Party at Chop Shop back in January. I’m looking at the room and I remembered that to do this four-way show, you had to have a relatively square room, and the room here is 50 feet by 50 feet. So, I’m like, “This is the room. This is the time. If we’re ever going to do it, we’re going to do it now.” That’s what started it.
There’s a lot of reasons why I like it besides it just being different. Another aspect of the record release show is if you have a band play that’s a much bigger band than yours, it can get awkward with the order of who plays when. Does the bigger band open for us because it’s our record release show? Not that anybody in our scene really is uptight about that or cares, but it’s still kind of a thing. The four-way show solves that problem. Nobody’s opening. Nobody’s closing. Everybody’s playing at the same time. I really love the scene-friendly nature of it. I know it’s a little silly to be like, “It’s our record release show. It’s about us.” But we can’t do that because we love being part of a scene. Symbolically, this show is awesome for that. I know it’s our record release, but we’re all in this together. Nobody’s above anybody else, we’re not competitive, it’s not music industry crap. I also love how it breaks up the big band/newer band dynamic. So, I definitely wanted to get WIG, who’s a newer band, and The Brokedowns who are a bigger band that’s been around for a while and put out a bunch of records. I wanted to mix that up and I also wanted the bands to sound different from each other. I wanted it to introduce the audience to different bands too. It has all those symbolic things in it that make it fun and it fits sort of how we feel about playing music. We’re not here unless it’s a scene. We’re in the scene and we love that, and we’re kind of celebrating that.
Bill – That’s great.
Douglas – Whether or not it’s going to work is a whole different story, (laughs).
Kammy – We’ve literally been talking about this for years.
Douglas – So, the guy who’s the sound engineer, Patrick Scott, is a guy I’ve played in two other bands with. He was in 97-shiki with me and way before that he was in a band called V.Reverse. He was also in My Lai with Brian Peterson, so it’s all connected. He’s a professional sound engineer and tours 11 months out of the year all over the world. I reached out to him about this idea and asked if it was possible. He was down with it, he got it. He designed the setup and came in to twiddle the knobs. Without him, it wouldn’t have happened. But again, you’ve got Brian Peterson, you’ve got Patrick Scott, you’ve got Elliot Dicks, Chicago’s favorite punk rock sound guy. It’s so scene-oriented on that level and then with all the bands. It’s also a split label release, just on and on. It feels great that all these great people that have been supporting music in Chicago for a long time, we were able to bring them all together to do this thing. That’s what’s awesome about this.
Bill – That’s really cool. I think this is going to be a memorable night for everyone who’s here. Lastly, what else does the band have planned in the near future?
Douglas – I don’t even know. We’ve been so focused on getting this show together…
Kammy – We have talked about writing new songs. We don’t want to take another five years to record an album.
Douglas – I want to get back and record with Greg at Electrical as soon as we can.
Kammy – Oh, absolutely.
Douglas – But we are going to try and do some touring, probably in the fall. We’re going to go out east for a bit and we’re going to fly out west. We have some friends in Europe that we haven’t played with for a long time. There’s a band in England that wants to do some stuff with us and maybe release the record there, I hope. Those things are coming up and we’ll be writing songs throughout that time. And I hope the next record doesn’t take nearly as long as this one did. We want to play a lot more shows and we’ve got a couple little things booked already. We will not be doing more four-way shows, (laughs). We will gladly play on somebody else’s show or somebody else’s goofy idea.
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