It doesn’t take D. Crane long to write a song. “I have this
room attached to the laundry room,” says the singer/guitarist for
Seattle band BOAT. “It’s pretty small, but I have all the instruments
that no one would want to play. Bad drums, bad guitar, everything that
we don’t keep in the practice space. I have the recorder there, and I
just record bad versions of songs.”
“He’ll flesh out a song really quickly. It almost frustrates me,”
says BOAT drummer J. Long. “He’ll be like, ‘I’m gonna go into the back
room and make a song.’ Then he’ll be back, seriously, like half an hour
later—’Okay, I finished something.’ Like, that’s crazy.”
Crane (first name Dave) explains, “Everything’s kind of first
draft-ish, usually. For some reason they keep coming. I usually can do
that over a weekend, like make four or five songs and then eventually
we get up to a number where the guys will check out the ideas and
figure out which ones we want to work with and which ones they’re
embarrassed of.”
BOAT’s latest batch of non-embarrassments is called Setting the
Paces, which I’m tempted to call their most mature effort, if you
can call an album that contains songs like “(Do the) Magic Centipede”
and “You’re Muscular” mature. It’s a slightly more focused effort, with
fewer between-song interludes than the wonderfully fractured Let’s
Drag Our Feet and Songs That You Might Not Like, their past
two full-lengths for Portland-based label Magic Marker. But
Paces still contains plenty of BOAT’s trademark goofy-sweet
pop-rock, driven by fired-up guitars, shouted choruses, and lyrics that
actually sound like the way you talk. It’s impossible to listen to
Paces without a big, dopey grin plastered on your
face—quite simply, there has never been a band that’s as much fun
as BOAT.
The bulk of the new record was recorded at Crane’s home, which was
dubbed Cat Escape Recording Company because his cats kept trying to run
out of the house. Long (first name Jackson) oversaw the proceedings and
finished the record off at Two Sticks, where he daylights as a producer
and engineer. M. McKenzie (first name Mark) and J. Goodman (first name
Josh) fill out the band on record, but as a live act, the configuration
of BOAT changes depending on their location.
“It’s usually who’s available,” explains Crane. “We’d love to have
Josh be our full-time multi-instrumentalist guy, but he has two kids so
a lot of times he can’t go out of state for shows. So Ricky [Cancro]
plays with us in Portland. He’s one of our friends from the Galactic
Heroes—they were another band on Magic Marker. He’ll make up his
own little parts on different instruments. But he also has a young son
so he’s kind of strapped down. And Zach Duffy is in Chicago; he meets
us on the East Coast and Midwest, and he runs our website and
stuff.”
Instead of splintering the band, the revolving-door lineup keeps
things spontaneous. “They almost can listen to the CD and learn the
song and then just kind of show up,” says Crane. “We’ll tell them what
to play through a sloppy email, and they’ll figure it out.”
Long adds, “Josh made a point, he’s always thought of BOAT
as—like, the reason some people like it—is it feels like
anybody could just join the band and it’s a band that anyone could
make. It’s that simple.”