by Tony Ferrari of The Courtesans
Tomorrow, Saturday, February 4th, Olivia Mancini’s new band with Jarret Nicolay, Astra Via, is headlining a show at the Rock and Roll Hotel with Brooklyn’s Little Anchor and my band, The Courtesans. The Vinyl District gave me the opportunity to talk with both Olivia from Astra Via and Alexa from Little Anchor.
Tony: I know you from your work with Olivia and the Mates. How did your new band Astra Via come together?
Olivia: Astra Via is an extraterrestrial name affixed to a project Jarrett Nicolay and I have been working on since the summer. You may have heard of Jarrett’s other projects, Virginia Coalition and My New Mixtape. I know him best from our teaching at the same guitar school, GIGS, in Kensington. We’ve been helping each other out musically for a few years now—he played guitar for a few Mates shows, I did some vocals on his John Lennon tribute album. And then this summer we decided to bite the bullet and start a band together. I know you’ve been in the Blackberry Belles for a while. What made you decide to start the Courtesans?
Tony: The Courtesans actually started long before the Belles. We’ve pretty much been in and out of stasis for years. Before we were officially the Courtesans, we had a singer that quit on us. At the time neither Dave, the bass player, nor myself were singing for the band, and we had just gone through a very lengthy audition process to find the last guy. In the meantime, I auditioned for The Breakups with the understanding that I would just play guitar, but I was talked in to sharing the singing duties. After my first Breakups show, the Courtesans were sold on just doing it ourselves.
Around the time The Breakups broke up, the drummer for the Courtesans took a job in Japan, so we were back on the shelf. I immediately put the Belles together and got back out there. The Courtesans found a new drummer, GP, and we played a couple of shows, but Dave got married, and then I got married, so we’ve been pretty busy.
There is a little overlap in my writing style for The Courtesans and The Blackberry Belles, but for the most part I’d say the Belles are spookier. I take the approach with my writing style of either singing to someone or that someone singing to me, but The Courtesans’ music smiles a little more. How does the work you do with Jarrett differ from your work with the Mates?
Olivia: A band’s history is never simple, is it? The trick is just riding the wave and continuing to make songs in spite of anything else that may be going on. Such is the case with the Mates, who have seen several lineup changes over the years, as people move or get married or get sober or quit music or switch instruments or get full time jobs.
Astra Via is presumably more stable, and more of a collaborative writing process between Jarrett and myself than the Mates, where I write the songs and the band puts their spin on it. (This is not at all to minimize the band’s contributions—I play with a lot of different lineups and the songs can sound completely different depending on who is on the kit, playing bass, singing back up, taking the solos. Randy Scope, Kristin Forbes, and Ed Donohue, in particular, have played big roles in fleshing out all the Mates songs. Randy’s even written a few.)
Jarrett and I started with sharing our unfinished or unrecorded songs with each other. We chose the ones we liked best and then worked on them together to improve them or tailor them to our style. Jarrett and I are both Beatles freaks, and I think we’re psyched on the McCartney-Lennon model—one of us writes a song and then the other adds a bridge or a chorus to contrast or compliment what’s already there. We’re also fooling around a lot with different keys and harmonies, and pushing ourselves to come up with more interesting arrangements. Jarrett’s miles ahead of me as far as music theory and guitar technique goes. I’m working hard to keep up with him. When and how did you start playing guitar?
Tony: I started around 18. I actually started as a rapper at age 13. For real, I thought I was fresh. This was pre-Vanilla Ice. He caused a lot of problems for me. I put the mic away some time ago, but every so often something funny will come to me. I eventually picked up the guitar because the rap group with a few real instruments I was in ended up as a two-piece, and the guitar player wanted to play the bass. Somehow I wound up studying jazz on and off for years, but never quite got it together. My technique is disastrous. What drew you to the guitar?
Olivia: Tony, you are so fresh! Heyyyyy, Homeskillit! Um, I always wanted to be in a band. And I like to sing. Guitar seemed necessary to facilitate both of those things. But guitar is a pain in the ass. Bass is my spirit instrument.
Tony: Going back to the writing process… Little Anchor released their Yellow Lights EP in September 2011. In the Courtesans, one of us will come in with a song pretty well sketched-out with verses, the chorus, and occasionally a bridge; however, everything is subject to change when it’s played as a band. And often times what I’m singing in my head, quietly, by myself, which sounded amazing in my head, doesn’t translate so well when I get it in a live setting, and I find I have to find my voice (notes I can actually hit) on the fly. What is the writing process like in Little Anchor?
Alexa: Little Anchor started out as a solo project, and as a result of that, the bulk of the songwriting still happens on an acoustic guitar or a piano, on my own, usually in my bedroom. The lyrics for Yellow Lights and Sunland were largely based off of personal experience, but writing towards the new record has been lyrically very different—the songs have become their own stories based on one small feeling, anecdote, or occurrence, and largely driven by phonetics, or words just sounding nice next to each other. We’ve started to play a few of those live since releasing Yellow Lights.
Once I feel pretty satisfied with the basic song, structure and lyrics, and it’s in a key that suits my voice, I’ll record a really rough bare-bones demo with vocals and either keys or guitar in a one take on garageband or my iphone and send that to the guys so they get an idea of what we’re working with before rehearsal. At rehearsals, we arrange parts together off of that basic architecture, and I feel lucky to say that it happens pretty fast and naturally. Harmony parts are figured out during rehearsals, too. The bare bones demo leaves a lot of space for everyone to write and develop their own parts together—it almost feels like orchestration during rehearsals, rather than writing, but that’s where the songs really come alive!
Tony: I recently watched a U2 documentary where Bono phonetically susses out melodies with gibberish, which eventually turn in to lyrics. It was fun to watch it all unfold. I look forward to your set on Saturday night at the Rock and Roll Hotel. We’ve got a pretty sonically diverse line up between the three bands; most shows I’ve played in the DC/Baltimore area seem to go this way. Personally, I enjoy the mix. However, there are some limitations. I often get requests from super macho rock bands pairing bad heavy metal/blues rock riffs with equally bad sexual innuendo who claim to both love my band and think we’d pair well together on a bill. What’s the weirdest band you’ve shared a bill with?
Alexa: We have a pretty close knit circle of musician friends in New York, and luckily haven’t been on a bill that’s been far off the map in the city. Outside of that is where things change a little bit. We’ve shared one bill in particular with a band that also had a nautical name, but it almost seemed like three different bands depending on if the bassist, keyboard player, or guitarist wrote the song (and who was doing the lead singing). It changed from funky slap bass to singer/songwriter lullabies to classic rock in half an hour. Much to my dismay, we’ve never been approached by macho heavy metal bands wanting to share a bill with Little Anchor. Still waiting for that…
Tony: You’re in luck, I’ll start forwarding all of our super macho show requests on to you. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me, and I’ll see you this Saturday at the Rock and Roll Hotel!
