The Campbell Apartment are a rather excellent pop combo (in the truest sense of the term – i.e. they write excellent melodic rock songs that should be popular). Their debut album, Insomniac’s Almanac was released to critical acclaim in 2008, and are about to release the highly anticipated follow up In. The band are currently in the UK, in the middle of a tour that spans the entire country, and we posed them a few questions whilst they were in London last week.
Are the Campbell Apartment a band, or is it Ari and friends?
It’s a band and it’s a collective of friends who play together depending on which continent we happen to be in.
You seem to be in the great tradition of rock & roll, with a highly melodic sensibility. Which artists inspire you?
The Kinks, The Beatles, Guided By Voices, Pavement, Liz Phair, The Strokes, Badly Drawn Boy, Eels, Dinosaur Jr., Girls, Grandaddy, Fountains Of Wayne, the four W’s (Ween, Weezer, Wilco, Wu Tang), I could keep writing this list all day, but yes, the common link between them all is good melodies.
It’s been over 3 years between the first album and the new one. How come?
I wanted to get it right.
Pick a decade you love and tell us why.
What’s a decade?
Is a musician’s life just a struggle these days, or is there any fun left in this rock & roll game?
It’s all fun, it was always the driving force, it’s why I’m doing it.
Pop should not be a dirty word – discuss!
Hipsters hate on everything, don’t they? I’ve tried to write less catchy material, less hooky lyrics, to appeal to those that think everything should be a bit esoteric, but again where’s the fun and where’s the love if you do that? And in general, what’s the point of doing anything if it is to please someone else? It’s only honest and good if you’re doing it to your own standard. Pop just means popular, which means people like it.
Name 5 great works of art.
Brooklyn Bridge, Nabokov, Van Gogh, Fender Jazz Master, and my girlfriend.
San Francisco and New York – tell us about the modern day versions of these great cities.
I moved from NYC to SF two years ago and it’s almost like retirement to this sort of paradise. People are mostly brilliant, and very much taking it easy and stopping to smell the roses. On a pretty day everyone goes to Dolores Park and drinks wine in the sunshine. There’s this tremendous sense of community in SF, and it’s very other worldly looking, with the fog always sitting in the distance, a sort of staging area for this sort of unruly pet, which rolls in every night quickly and it gets very cold and you can’t see, and then burns away a few hours later just to continue to loom in the near distance.
NYC is an incredibly sexy, alive and charged up place. Everyone is witty, there is eye candy up the wazoo the second you step out the door, in general it’s sensory overload all the time. Incredibly inspiring. And unless you are doing something exceptional with your life there, it feels a bit like you’re missing out on the big picture. I am in love with San Francisco, and at the same time I miss NYC very much, it’s my first love, and I hope to return there one day – ideally I’d like to spend my time between the two cities, spending every fall and winter in SF and every spring and summer in NYC.
Vinyl, Digital, CD?
I guess digital because it’s so incredibly easy to discover new music these days, and that would be impossible without the internet. But I’ll go with vinyl in order to keep my indie cred.
How do you define success?
Success is doing what you love and loving what you do.
