BEIRUT: THE BAND

How a 20-year-old blogosphere star is dealing with massive hype, brutal flops, and
a suddenly awkward name.
Zach Condons first show in New York, this May at the Knitting Factory, was a
complete disaster. The 20-year-old had pulled together the three musicians for his
band, Beirut, only weeks before. His eBay ukulele would not stay in tune. He
fumbled with his trumpet and flashed a sheepish smile during the long breaks
between songs. His banter was self-conscious (Im sorry, this ukulele is terrible
). His voice shook.
The band seemed unripe and overwhelmed, sweating through Balkan-influenced
melodies that felt a size too large. On recordings, Beiruts songs are like the
lush score to a movie about Gypsies and bohemians. Onstage, Condon seemed like a
boy pantomiming the music of grown-ups.
It couldnt have helped that the place was packed. More than 200 people were at
this debut, driven by the guerrilla success of leaked MP3s from Gulag Orkestar, an
album Condon recorded in his bedroom in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Bloggers and industry
types had hyped the show for weeks, wunderkind a permanent prefix to Condons
name. I was going onstage to bomb, he says. We were just so unprepared, with so
many people there expecting the Second Coming. And I knew that I wasnt going to
deliver that.
He didnt, but a strange thing happened. Usually, the only thing music bloggers
love more than building buzz is torpedoing it, posting detailed rants about every
note gone wrong. Even after Beiruts misstep, however, the online community
continued to embrace the singer and his strange record. Listeners wrote in assuring
him of his potential. Would their faith pan out? And why was Condon the beneficiary
of it, anyway?
I think I share music with a very specific group of people, he says. I play for
those who want to hear something energetic and true and beautiful in music again.
But perhaps people just like that I am 20 and fresh-faced. Maybe if I had a beard,
they would have been harder on me.
Three months on, Condons band has grown to ten membersjust in time, it would
seem, to defend its name. You know, its ironic, he says, addressing the Beirut
situation before a rehearsal in his Bushwick loft. (Spackle covers everything,
including the pots and pans. He and his roommates are trying to build individual
bungalows, maybe buy a pool table.) One of the reasons I named the band after that
city was the fact that its seen a lot of conflict. Its not a political position.
I worried about that from the beginning. But it was such a catchy name. I mean, if
things go down that are truly horrible, Ill change it. But not now. Its still a
good analogy for my music. I havent been to Beirut, but I imagine it as this chic
urban city surrounded by the ancient Muslim world. The place where things collide.
Collision is a large part of Condons style, inherent to its appeal. His record is
not so much world music as a global mash-up. He first picked up a trumpet as a
grade-schooler in Newport News, Virginia. Newport was a coastal town. I was
always on a boat. It made me look outwards. But Condons family moved to New
Mexico in his teens, where he started making lo-fi recordings on a synthesizer,
inspired by the jangly, slapdash rock of bands like the Magnetic Fields and Neutral
Milk Hotel. I was so angry to be landlocked, I just wanted to stay inside and make
music. One day I just thought, Can I sing? And I tried, and I could.
One home record turned into five, and Condon dropped out of high school (and then
four colleges), thrilling his parents along the way. We are just not the kind of
family that has dropouts in it. The rest of my family is full of track-and-field
stars. At home, he also spent a lot of time, as any American teenager would,
watching Emir Kustarica movies. Hes a Yugoslavian director who makes these
beautiful, sad films. And he always had this Balkan band running around drunk and
crashing into things. I just loved it.
At 18, after bailing on his minimum-wage job and flying to Paris, Condon met these
sounds in person. I found this bandthese kids whod walk around with thrift-store
brass instruments. They werent Gypsiesthey were so in love with that music.
Eventually, I got the guts up to ask if I could play trumpet with them. They
started teaching me the songs to the point where I could riff, like a jazz song.
This one guy could play trumpet with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and at
night you could see little puffs coming out of the bell. There was another who
played the euphonium and poured wine into it. He gurgled.

BEIRUT BAND INTERVIEW

Even when Beirut was just the project of a teenager recording in his New Mexico
home, the music always exuded a certain cosmopolitan essence. From the Balkan brass
to song titles like "Postcards From Italy", and right on through to the fantastic
"Take Away Show" videos showing songwriter Zach Condon strolling through the
streets of Paris, the band signaled a strong connection to some kind of polyglot
European idyll.

Beirut's new album, The Rip Tide, however, finds Condon settled down in Brooklyn,
and its songs aren't concerned with fictitious stories about faraway characters as
much as the songwriter himself. We spoke to Condon over the telephone in Montreal,
where Beirut were set to play the following night at the Osheaga Festival. As if to
underscore that settling down doesn't have to mean closing off, Condon's plans for
his night off were almost quintessentially Beirut: going to restaurant called Au
Pied de Cochon for foie gras poutine.

Our conversation covered the new record, Williamsburg, comic books, playing giant
shows with Arcade Fire, and a recent resurgence of powerhouse vocalists.

"The Rip Tide is all about settling down and getting comfortable in your own skin.
I guess I'm trying to grow up."

Pitchfork: What appeals to you about the image of a rip tide?

Zach Condon: It's not very subtle [laughs]. In some ways, I've been going through
an identity crisis recently, and the lyrics on this album are quite personal
compared to the other ones. As a teenager and a young adult, I never felt like my
own story was interesting enough to tell, so I always wrote lyrics from someone
else's perspective-- told someone else's story. This was the first time I did the
opposite, which was nerve-racking. The title popped up because it's fun to sing,
but also because that's what my life feels like-- I'm swept along by larger forces
out of my control.

Pitchfork: You're married, living in Brooklyn, and you've got a couple of cats and
a dog now. Were these songs partly inspired by settling down?

ZC: Yeah. I'd been living out of a suitcase since I was 17 years old, and it just
got to the point where it was ridiculous. Besides, it was really hurting everything
I was trying to do in music; to feel so consistently homeless was no way to endure
touring and stress. So it's all about settling down and getting comfortable in your
own skin. It's the same reason I started my own label. I guess I'm trying to grow
up.

Pitchfork: What Brooklyn neighborhood do you live in?

ZC: Billyburg. I was 15 years old when I first went to Williamsburg so, no matter
how much the neighborhood changes and gets ire from the rest of the city, I still
can't really move anywhere else. I love the community and the entertainment too
much. I'm used to it-- it's what I saw first.

Pitchfork: The physical edition of The Rip Tide looks a little like a hardcover
book. Why did you decide to present it that way?

ZC: For every other album I've done, I've always had an image in my head of what it
would look like well before I've started recording. But this time I had a complete
blank, so it just made sense to not print any image on the album.

Also, in the age of the mp3, you gotta make the package special, something that's
worth owning. So even though the album might have leaked a little while ago, some
people are gonna want to hold this cloth-bound, physical embodiment of the album.

And I've been picking up a lot of comic books recently, and they take such care
with the packaging. I was just in France and I went to this comic book store and I
filled my bag up. It weighs like 60 pounds right now and it's just these big, thick
French comic books, all sorts-- reading them helps with my conversational French.
Pinocchio is probably the most recent one I read. There's this great comic by Riad
Sattouf called La vie secrte des jeunes-- The Secret Life of the Youth. It's just
observational humor from Paris.

"There was always something that was uniquely 'Beirut' and nothing else; there was
never supposed to be any novelty to the type of orchestration and the instruments
we used."

Pitchfork: You recently talked to The New York Times about focusing Beirut's sound.
What does that mean to you at this point?

ZC: Well, the funny thing is that you can go all the way back to demos from when I
was 16 and 17 and there's a common thread melodically and harmoniously. There was
always something that was uniquely "Beirut" and nothing else; there was never
supposed to be any novelty to the type of orchestration and the instruments we
used.

Pitchfork: You're concentrating more just on piano, ukulele, and trumpet on this
album. Did that change the songwriting process?

ZC: Yeah, definitely. When I was writing the album, I was upstate, about two-and-a-
half hours north of the city, and all I brought was the piano, uke, and trumpet. In
some ways, I feel like I've been such a dilettante for so many years, just picking
up instruments and stretching myself so thin. I started to really watch the band
that I've been playing with for six years, and they have such ability and power
behind their instruments. I want to be able to do the same myself.

Pitchfork: Sharon Van Etten is on the new album, what was it like working with her?

ZC: Sharon just gets to you-- I'm also dueting with her on some stuff she's working
on as well. This year has been all about me falling in love with different voices.
And the great thing is they're contemporary voices, too. There's a kind of
renaissance of voice coming around. After so many years of whispery DIY vocals,
there's this new generation-- everyone from [Dirty Projectors'] Dave Longstreth, to
Merrill [Garbus] from tUnE-yArDs, to Sharon. The voices are really starting to
burst through the seams with all these different personalities and characters.
That's just so fascinating.

Pitchfork: Musically, is there anything else that you've been following recently?

ZC: I've been really digging the Frank Ocean song "Novacane". And I've been going
back to record stores and buying more of the stuff that I used to have as a
teenager. For me, that's not that long ago, obviously, but my most recent purchase
was Bonnie "Prince" Billy's I See a Darkness. I've had that album forever, but only
on CD.

"After so many years of whispery, DIY vocals, there's this new generation of voices
that are really starting to burst through the seams."

Pitchfork: You've been playing bigger spaces recently, like Hyde Park with Arcade
Fire. Does the experience change when you're up in front of that many more people?

ZC: Oh, it's rattled me. When we do festivals, we're always the B stage, never the
main stage. And I like that. I really do! Playing the Arcade Fire show in Hyde Park
was really eye-opening. I shook, violently, through the first three songs until I
could get a handle on it. But it was great. Arcade Fire are good friends of ours--
they always treat us like royalty. Still, I remember thinking in the back of my
head that there's a line I don't want to cross. I'd rather headline the B stage
than open the main stage.