Words by Cameron Cook
Photos by Dana Goldstein

Sometimes, conducting an interview is easy: you’re confident, you have all your ducks lined in a row, you’re cool and composed. It’s a walk in the park. A piece of cake. A slice of pie.

Other times, you forget to put fucking batteries in your fucking Dictaphone, and the person you are interviewing has bought a broken cell phone from a street vendor, and you go on a late-afternoon excursion to Best Buy in a torrential downpour to purchase some Duracells and a Motorola charger that may or may not have been manufactured since the early ‘00s. When I interviewed Erlend Øye from Norway’s finest purveyors of acoustic balladry, Kings of Convenience, the former transpired, under the watchful and concerned eye of their label’s publicist (holler, Alison), and after the band had performed a breathtaking comeback show at the Bowery Ballroom for the release of their third studio album, Declaration of Dependence. The show included an amazingly tongue-in-cheek cover of “It’s My Party” by ‘60s pop songstress Lesley Gore, and an absolutely magical, totally unamplified guest performance but none other than Feist, much to the surprise of all in attendance. The following interview was conducted while running down Fifth Avenue, and drying off in an EMI conference room (that possessed a baby grand piano, somewhat randomly). Much like his music, Erlend was equal parts studiously serious and charmingly droll, and we touched upon topics such as the Kings’ meticulous songwriting process, their penchant for putting a song’s musical essence before its recorded version, and the complex nature of their lyrics. Despite the, cough, setbacks, his personality, and the beauty of Declaration of Dependence, shone through.

So, what can you tell me about the Norwegian music scene?

You know, I think it’s really cool. It’s pretty quiet. There’s a lot of snow, a lot of ice up there. But back to you, Erlend!
(Laughs)

I know that everyone probably wants to talk to you about Leslie Feist, but I wanted to talk about Lesley Gore, because I am a huge fan.
Who’s Lesley Gore?

She sings “It’s My Party”!
Aaah!

I thought you were going to be like, a fan!
When we cover songs, we normally don’t do it out of respect for the existing version. We do it out of respect for the songwriting. We think: ‘This is actually a really good song! I think people should listen to the lyrics in a different way.’ So, Lesley Gore, I know precious little about. You tell me.

She started in the ‘60s, and her big hit was “It’s My Party”. There’s a sequel to “It’s My Party” called “Judy’s Turn to Cry”, about how she gets her boyfriend Johnny back.
(Makes surprised face) Aaah!

Yeah. Oh, and she came out as a lesbian in the ‘90s.
Wait, are we on 23rd?

I think this is 20th… I think we should have passed the Verizon store by now—
Maybe [the clerk at Best Buy] was wrong? You know what, out of respect for you, we are going to skip this.

(Laughs)
I have a little bit of respect for you left, and I’d like to keep it that way (laughs).

[The interview resumes once we return to the EMI offices]

We were talking about how you guys do covers.
Yeah, we just don’t do it out of respect for the existing recording. For example, we did a cover of “Manhattan Skyline” once, where we just had to totally re-do the dynamics of the song. There’s this huge rock riff, and obviously we couldn’t do it. But that’s definitely a challenge. I love it when a song is so good that one guitar and a voice is more than enough. I love it when you can just showcase how good the song is.

That’s always the way to gauge a good song. If you can sit at a piano or guitar and play it, and it’s still good, it’s a classic. It’s great when music can transcend its genre.
I very often don’t think about music as genres, just as songwriting. That “Hurt” song by Nine Inch Nails, and the Johnny Cash version. I had never heard the original version, but that’s a good example. Who cares about the genre? I don’t put so much pride, or energy… [pauses] I just don’t care about the genre. That’s like, in the studio, you decide to put a synthesizer [in a song]. If you decide to put some synthesizers on the track, people say, ‘Ah! It sounds a bit like the ‘80s.’ It’s so random! But words are not random. Words, for us at least, take two-and-a-half years. But if you were to record it with drums, or without drums, that’s more [pauses] accidental, really.

Your lyrics are very complex and narrative, which I find is rarely the case for a band who writes in their second language.
Like what? Give me an example.

Uh…
I have one. The craziest lyric is ‘It undulates on the waves.’ (Laughs)

It strikes me because, even though I appreciate Kings of Convenience, I’m typically not a big fan of songs with a lot of words in them.
Well, first off, we don’t necessarily appreciate songs with a lot of lyrics either. It just has to be enough lyrics. Of course, if it’s a stripped-down as guitars and two voices, you gotta fill it up with words, I guess. The words are what’s happening: that’s the drums, that’s the texture, that’s the brass, that’s everything. I guess we like songs that can be interpreted. It should be different every time you hear it. I hope it gives a slightly different picture, every time you hear it. Words are what we spend the most energy on. That’s the hardest thing. Like, when we spent four years writing a song, it’s because we’re lacking some words, we’re lacking one last line. We’re just waiting and waiting for it to appear.

About the waiting. I can pretty much assume that the predominant question you are getting asked on this tour is: ‘Why did it take you so long to release a new album?’ But you said onstage last night that when Eirik broke his fingernail, you had to take a break and wait for it to grow back. Does it really get that precise and minute with you guys?
Yeah, I don’t know what a good analogy for that is but, the nail, that’s where you hit the string. There’s an ocean of difference. At least, we hear it, and we think everyone hears it too. You might think, ‘Oh, no one notices!’, but you do, you just don’t consciously realize. And of course, the whole point of a record is that it’s supposed to be the best you can do, and if you know you could do better, if it would have flowed more beautifully if you hadn’t broken your nail, and instead it’s like, ‘Duh-duh-du—duh-duh-duh, Duh-duh-du—duh-duh-duh,’ because the one finger where you’re supposed to hit the string isn’t happening, there’s nothing you can do! You have to wait for it to grow back. You book time in the studio, and that’s that. It’s like, you’re singing, and you have a bit of a cold. What are you going to do?

With that in mind, looking back on your records, are there any songs you’d want to do over? Or, because you strive for perfection, once something is recorded do you just leave it because you have reached that goal?
Usually, the idea of a song is better than the recording of the song. But the cool thing is that, we’re a live band, we play live, you come and see us, and you might get to hear a better version live than what’s on the record. That’s kind of exciting. Of course, it can also be much worse (laughs).

One of the tings that I realized with Declaration of Dependence is that it is even quieter than the rest of your music. Did you go into writing this album knowing that you weren’t going to come out with a song like “I’d Rather Dance With You”, for example?
“I’d Rather Dance With You”, great song, but it was hard to fit it on the second album. It was really hard.

I dunno, I just feel like I become very attuned to a band’s discography or progress when I listen to them a lot, and this new record just struck me as more (pauses) monochromatic. Like, everything is on the same wavelength.
I think it will take people a lot of listens to get beyond the same-y-ness, and get to the textures, the little crystallized salt in it. But it’s there.

A lot of the time, when you have a record like that, part of the joy is finding the minutiae in the songs. The undulations, as you put it.
It’s same-y, but at the same time, the songs are all about different things. So maybe musically it’s same-y, but the little short stories are about different situations. I’m not sure if it’s really possible to listen to the record the whole way through.

Really?
Yeah. I guess it depends on how loud you listen to it. I feel that the best way to listen to this record would be if you made an iTunes playlist where you put a similar song—like a Caetano Veloso song, a Bob Dylan song, maybe a Leonard Cohen song, a Suzanne Vega song—in between every other song. [The record] would come out the most. There’s something about what we do that is very good in contrast to other people’s music. I find it’s very different to other music in that it’s so… (pauses) buttery. For me, it’s joy to hear [one of our songs] next to another piece of music. Not that I don’t like the other piece, they go well together. It’s like air conditioning. You go inside to outside, hot to cold to hot. If you stay inside for three hours, it gets really cold.

I really enjoy listening to a full album, especially since people seem to be doing that less and less. Declaration of Dependence kind of reminded me of that last Goldfrapp record [Seventh Tree, Mute, 2008]. I listened to that album on the train, just about every day for a couple of months, and I didn’t tire of it, because of that sameness—because it’s one solid palette. It’s like, ‘I have 45 minutes until I get to work or wherever, I can just sit and relax.’
Well that’s good, if you have 45 minutes (laughs).

I don’t want to dwell on the Feist thing because she gets enough press—
Really? No one talked to me about her.

Really? I would have thought that today everyone would have been like, freaking out about it.
Well, not everyone that interviewed us today came to the show.

Well, what was really cool about her guest appearance was that no one knew. I’ve been to so many shows where you can always sort of guess who the special guest is going to be. But everyone was so shocked when she came out, it was this beautiful moment. How did you even keep it a secret?
(Laughs) Well, I did actually make an effort to keep it a secret. I told one guy at the record label and was like: ‘Don’t. Tell. Anybody.’ I really wanted to keep it a surprise. There’s some something about a real surprise, and it was a real surprise! It’s hard these days, to have real surprises. I knew that this was the only time it could possibly happen. She was here, we didn’t have to fly her here, and we’ve known her for a long time, she had time in her schedule and it was fun for her to do it. It was hard for it to fall into place. Singing without microphones, without PA, has an extra, one-dimensional, magical layer. And this was the only chance we had to do it because the venue was small enough. It was just such a shame that those fucking photographers had to click their way through it. I mean, how could you be so insensitive?

But at the same time, if you were a music photographer, your boss would be like, ‘Wait, Feist was at the Kings of Convenience show and you didn’t take a picture?’ If it makes you feel any better, there was no disturbance from the audience’s perspective.
Cool, because I could only hear my own guitar, from where I was standing (laughs).