An Interview With Suuns’ Joe Yarmush [Full Transcript]

On September 2016, I got asked to interview Joe Yarmush from Suuns for the anniversary number of Indie Rocks! Magazine. I recently did a translation of that interview for my Medium page (just because I have so much free time) and while I was looking back at the transcript from the interview’s original audio, I realized how much of our conversation was lost between adapting it to the magazine’s format, sticking to a word count and translating the whole thing to Spanish.

So I decided that the conversation holds far too many fun remarks and pearls of psych rock wisdom for me to keep it all to myself. It just wouldn’t be fair. I felt compelled to share this with whoever might stumble upon it and enjoy, as I did on a cool autumn morning, a conversation with the guitarist for the best band to come out of Montreal in recent years. In my opinion at least.

Here’s the full transcript of our conversation, with very minor edits:

RV: Hi Joe! Hear me alright?

Joe: Hi! Yep!

RV: Great! Ok, just for some context, where are you right now?

Joe: Uhm, I am in Montreal, just packing some bags, getting ready to go on tour.

RV: You guys are going to do La Route Du Rock right?

Joe: Yeah, we are leaving tonight, in a couple hours actually.

RV: It’s been a few months since Hold/Still came out…Ben has mentioned that this is your boldest record so far. What is it about it, both in composition and recording that, at least for you, makes it bolder than the previous two albums?

Joe: Uhm, i think we just trusted our instincts more on this recording. We worked on it really quickly and we didn’t have time over think our record. In my mind it sounds more like our band does live. It´s not like a perfectly played or performed record but it has more of the spirit of the band that really comes across in the recording. That´s what we found to be more important this time around, just getting more of the spirit of the band in the record and not worry too much about perfecting each take. It´s a pretty fundamental thing but it can be difficult to realize that when you’re making an album. You kind of loose track with microphones and amps and synths; and that stuff is important in some degree… but we try to avoid getting lost in that and just simplify everything to create the best performances.

RV: I guess, capturing the essence of what the band is about?

Joe: No question, we try to push that stuff all the time, specially at every show. We try to make it different each time, for us and the audience. A lot of the songs weren’t finished when we went into making the album. We just sort of left them open. Just leave the room for something magical that could happen, or something terrible.

RV: So do you guys improvise a lot? Both on stage and on recordings?

Joe: Uhh… we do, but not like in a jazz musician kind of way where there´s like solos and that sort of improv’. More like playing off each other a bit more subtly. We stretch songs or shorten songs or take them to other places, just subtle things that maybe the audience wouldn’t notice. I honestly could say “yes we do” but it’s not that obvious.

RV: The four guys in Suuns come off as pretty strong personalities and that is very present in the music. How exactly do you guys manage to coalesce into a single direction?

Joe: I know what you´re saying. I actually don’t know, to be honest. Heh… we try not to overthink that part. Uuuhm… we definitely like a lot of different things and we are very different people day to day, but whenever we tap into something or hit into something musically, we know if it’s right for us, even though we might don´t know how to say it. I mean, we’ve been playing and recording and writing songs together for over 9 years so we kind of know when we are onto something. And that includes taking on new directions too. It´s a weird thing. Specially making this record, there was a lot of experimenting before hand. There were a lot of songs that we either left off the album or we didn’t record at all and just trashed them. We are not scared to go outside of what we normally do to figure out what we want to do.

At the same time, that means we don’t really work that fast in creating songs. A lot of the songs sometimes take years to fully form. Like the song “Translate”. In its most original form it goes back to 2007. We recorded it for every album since then and it never really worked properly until this one. Even on this album it almost got left off, which is just crazy to me now.

But anyway, that’s just an example of how we’re not really sure why a song doesn’t work, and I can’t actually tell you why the other one didn’t work that well but they just didn’t, and that’s cool. It’s a fun thing but it can also be frustrating, not being able to figure out what is going on.

RV: I guess John Congleton had a role in that, like in helping you finish songs like “Translate”?

Joe: Yeah, definitely. He works extremely fast, totally the opposite of us. He doesn’t want to dwell on anything, ever. That helped us out a lot, just to realize “this is really good, just leave it, you don’t need to do anything to it, it sounds like you guys and let’s just move on”. Sometimes he´ll trick you, he´ll be like “okay we’ll come back to this and fix it up or something” but what he’s really doing is making us go on to something else because he thinks it´s already good. Then we’ll come back to it a few days later and we´ll be like “oh yeah, this is great.” Definitely, looking back, he was a real powerful personality in the studio for us.

RV: Do you have other specific moments or songs in the album where that happened?

Joe: Yeah, I could say a lot haha. But maybe a different kind of moment was for the song “Infinity”, which is the last song on the record. That’s one of my favorites in the album because, it was kind of a different song before and it had a different middle part and there was more guitar; more like a classic rock song. We were pretty happy with that song and we were playing it live but at one point John came in and was like, “it´s boring, you guys can do better on this song.”

RV: Haha!

Joe: Yeah! So then he was like, “I´ll give you 45 minutes to fix it and then we move on.” And we kind of did! He suggested a few little things and it turned out to be what it is. I started playing my guitar thing on a bass and did this little things to switch it up and make it really short. A person with his musical ability listening in, it´s great as an outside voice. He´s so aware of what is going on and he´s very used to being in the studio of course so he just knows what the band’s potential could be, while we were more clouded sometimes.

RV: Of course, it’s only natural, since you are playing the songs, it helps to have an external voice.

JOE: It´s always been a big thing for the band to just trust the producer. Musicians can be too attached to their songs so, it was great to get to a point with John where started to trust him with a lot of things. Not 100%, but a lot of things on this record.

RV: In a month or so you’ll be playing your first show in Mexico since Ceremonia in 2014 after Images du Futur came out. How was that show for you and what do you expect for the next one?

Joe: I feel like this is gonna be a lot different than the Ceremonia show, just because it’s in a club and not a huge outdoor show. I like going to Mexico City too. Although Ceremonia was not really in the city, it was great, the crowd there was really good. With crowds, we never really know what´s going to happen but we felt very welcomed, it was a big crowd even though it was pretty early in the day.

But this time it’s gonna be nighttime, in a club, and that’s really where we can take it to the next level. So I’m expecting a great show. I think it´s gonna be awesome. That´s kind of our best situation to be in. Somewhere in like a cool country, a cool city like DF and playing a great place, at night.

RV: I know that the other guys in Suuns went to Jazz School, can you tell us some more about your musical background?

Joe: Well, I grew up in a pretty small town outside Montreal and there wasn’t much going on. I listened to punk music and rap music. I was a skateboarder and I straight up traded one of my skateboards for a friend’s guitar. I didn’t know how to play but my neighbor did so he showed me some chords and I started a band about a year later. It never really stopped, I played in more bands but not really that many. Then Suuns started in 2007. I played in another band but things got busy with Suuns in 2010 and that´s it, I haven’t done much else since 8 or 9 years ago.

I didn’t go to any school or anything for music. I took some guitar lessons from a jazz player but that didn’t last too long.

RV: I guess your approach has been pretty intuitive.

Joe: Yeah! When I listened to a band like Sonic Youth or Yo La Tengo back in the 90´s, I didn’t know how to make that sound, it was like an alien thing to me. I had no clue how to do it. So it was just a journey to me, figuring out how to make your guitar sound crazy and not like Jimmy Page, just take it to a different place and create something new.

Back in the 90s, I think anyone who played music had a 4 track recorder and you just tried to experiment and write crazy songs. And that’s just what we did because we had nothing else to do basically. I´m really happy I grew up in a small town because I had no other distractions. Music was just my only outlet growing up.

RV: What was your first contact with electronic music?

Joe: It was only in a listening sort of basis, maybe seeing it live or going to clubs, but I was never that big on it. I think in our band that side really came from Ben Shemie. He was in Berlin for like six months and really got into electronic music.

That was another thing that I didn’t really know how to create because I was just trying to work on guitar and stuff. When I was starting to get into drum machines and synths it seemed like another world that was completely alien to me. Which is cool, when I’m doing my own music at home or making songs with Suuns, I use stuff like that. Everyone in the band is very into electronic music now. Probably more so than rock music. It´s been a part of developing our own sound. In electronic music, the gear is just endless so it’s like a journey, finding the right shit that works for your band.

RV: Speaking of that, what kind of gear are you using now, at least for your end of the Suuns sound?

Joe: We’ve actually been pretty good at keeping it similar to older recordings. Mostly the synths. Liam got a drum synth last year called a “Vermona” that we used a lot in the record. We use it live as well. It´s pretty interesting and it sounds great. I think it’s pretty expensive. Not too expensive. That´s like our thing though, don’t go too expensive but, just expensive enough. But yeah, I think that’s the only thing that we’ve changed up really. The synths, those change like every 4 months but they’re always doing the same thing. Just the same sounds programmed into them.

RV: Nice. Tell me about side projects. I saw that you used to keep a photography blog on tumblr. Are you still doing photo work?

Joe: I do do photo and video work on the side but I am not really pursuing that as a career. I was a freelance photographer for like 8 years and that’s just how I made money. Then I got to busy with music and I had to stop doing that. I still do some photo and video but I’m not that into working in that field. I just sort of do it on the side for certain things but I don’t pursue it. It’s something that’s part of my life but I’ve stepped back from it a little bit in the professional sense.

RV: What do you think the future holds for Suuns?

Joe: That´s a good question. I thought, to be honest, that we would have a lot more time this summer to work because we left a lot of songs off our last record that just didn’t fit or didn’t work out. And we wanted to work on those but the touring is only going to slow down until November. Hopefully we’ll record a couple of songs by September. Man, the touring really sucks all your time. It’s great to do but it’s really hard to do new stuff.

But I think early next year we’re going to work with Jerusalem In My Heart again. He’s also very busy so it’s hard to organize everybody. But yeah, that’s the goal at least. To make more music. We always wanted to make a punkier album. I don’t know if we’ll actually do it but we want to.

RV: Punkier huh? In what sense?

Joe: We have a lot of songs that are sort of in the Bad Brains, Stooges kind of world. It would be fun to just to make an EP of those songs. We record a lot of them but they never make it on the albums. That’s like another side of the band, the fast and quick songs and that we haven’t been doing lately. We’ve sort of been doing more of the electronic kind of drone out slow jams, Portishead sort of, slow stuff. But that’s the Suuns thing, we are kind everywhere musically and I don’t know what will come next, at all. No clue.

RV: That´s good to hear though, I’m sure it will be amazing anyway.

Joe: Oh thank you, I don’t know, hopefully, haha.

RV: So listen, as a last question, I read somewhere that you always ask for socks in your rider.

Joe: Oh yeah? Hahaha

RV: Yeah, haha, and that you never get them. Have you gotten them?

Joe: No no, haha, maybe once, or never. I don’t think that’s in the rider anymore though. Actually this year I looked at our rider for the first time in a long time and I was kind of shocked to see what was on there.

RV: How come?

Joe: I don’t know, I think riders in general are for a crew. Like if your band is big enough and you have guys setting up your stage and stuff, then I guess they need food and they need coffee. But like, 4 guys showing up playing a show? We don’t need much. So I just kind of took off most of the stuff and left a few snacks. I don’t know what we were thinking. I think we had cigarettes on there at some point? Guitar picks? It was so stupid. We are not big enough that we need a crew so I´m sure what’s on there now is like, enough.

There’s one thing though, there’s a Pinot Noir wine on there. It sounds insane but it’s true. We just left that because it´s this red wine that we all really like but we are not picky. If it’s not there, it’s fine.

RV: Haha, nice! Well thanks a lot Joe, see you in Mexico and good luck with upcoming shows.

Joe: Right on man! Yep.

[Awkward Silence]

Recording stops.

You can read the printed version of this interview here.

Check out Indie Rocks! Magazine’s website.