Halloween, Alaska frontman James Diers

Halloween, Alaska isn't a city in the United States but a band made up of Minneapolitans. Their sound is roughly in line with that which you'd expect from a band with such a name: it's got that sparse, ever-so-slightly moody quality all about it. In April the band released their third album, Champagne Downtown, and on its behalf happily embarked on their first real tour; it was at the New York stop of this long-awaited undertaking that I had the opportunity to speak with frontman James Diers about Mineappolis, the band name, and Bob Dylan.

So where are you guys based?
We live in Minnesota, the Twin Cities area, and most of us grew up there, so that’s still home.

Have you guys done a lot of tours before or is the touring for this record the most you’ve done to date?
I mean, the touring that we’re doing on this record is going to be the most sort of concentrated. It’s a weird band, in that we’ve not toured a lot but we’ve been to some faraway… we’ve done a lot of one-off places, like London and Colorado and just random one-offs, but we haven’t done a lot of dedicated weeks of touring. So I think this record is our first opportunity to do that, just because with the timing of the last couple of records coming out it was difficult for everybody to carve out the time. Everybody—or I should say most of us—had other things to juggle with. But here we are!

How did you guys come together as a group?
David King, the drummer, and I had played together in a band called Love-Cars in Minneapolis and he in turn had been playing with this guy Ev Olcott in a band called 12 Rods… so, basically, just knowing each other in the Minneapolis music community. And David just had an idea—David’s a really active person in that community as a drummer, and he plays a lot of jazz, so he kind of brought the original four of us together with the idea in mind of doing something that was incorporating some synth and some electronics and whatever but different from other stuff that he had done. So he kind of got us in the same room together and then we started playing more and… yeah.

Could you talk about the Minneapolis music scene? Because it sounds like you guys were really involved in that community.
Yeah, sure: just between the four of us, we were fairly active with other groups, and then this one lasted a few years when we were trying to get more active again. You know it’s a really great place to play, the audiences are really nice, there’s a lot of different music represented, so we’re always really happy to be in Minneapolis or to be outside of Minneapolis representing it in some way. We’re pretty proud of that.

In my mind I’ve always associated Minneapolis with more of a literary community, probably because Neil Gaiman lives there and etcetera.
Yeah, as far as people who are from there, the Coen brothers are from there… and, yeah, there’s a history of some literary folks for sure.

It’s a really cool place.
It’s a really great arts community. In another interview we were talking about how people like to speculate about how it stays that way, and I think once it sort of got some traction as an arts community in the seventies or early eighties people really wanted to keep that going. Because, you know, four or five months out of the year it’s a really hard place to live with that weather. You want to have a lot going on to take your mind off that and get yourself through the winter.

Well, you could just as easily ask how NYC has stayed an arts community with prices rising so greatly.
That’s funny too, because people now… it’s like people just expect it. They expect that you’re going to have to go and be poor for however many decades so that you can pay your dues in New York. But it’s a great city. I think the institutions that are based in New York have as much to do with the actual artists that are based here, be it publications or, for a while, record labels. Maybe not so much any more. But, yeah, New York’s cool too.

And depending on who’s in power at any given time—I’m not Bloomberg’s biggest advocate, but he is supportive of the arts.
Yeah, and that counts for a lot.

So are you enjoying being in New York?
Yeah, very much! I mean, I’ve spent a lot of time in New York collectively over the years, and I always like being here, even when the weather’s not so nice. And it’s also really nice to be finally playing here with this band. As I told you, our whole touring history has been so limited that it feels so weird, what with as long as we’ve been playing, that we’ve never gotten around to playing a proper show in New York. So that’s good as well.

You’re in a cool space, too. Joe’s Pub is a cool space.
Yeah! We were doing the math here; maybe a lot of shows here were a little bit more subdued, and we’re trying to figure out, “Well, should we only play mellower stuff tonight or just kind of go for it?” So we’ll see what we come up with. But, anyway, yeah! It’s a really nice room.

How did you guys come up with the band name?
There’s not really a whole story behind it. David came up with it, and in some sort of abstract way it was evocative of what he was hearing as being kind of the palate for the band: something that maybe had a little bit of a moodiness to it, a bit of a sparseness to it.

Like a barrenness, sort of?
Yeah. Maybe. I think at the beginning a lot of the music by design was really sparse, and that’s changed a little bit—but, yeah, I suppose that’s sort of how it’s connected. But, yeah, David would be the last word on that. Unfortunately he’s not here! But, no, there’s not much of a big story behind it. It evokes something; they’re words that mean something to most people, whether it’s specific or not.

What’re some of Halloween, Alaska’s musical influences?
We’re all really big fans of a band called American Music Club; there’s a Scottish band called the Blue Nile that we all like quite a bit; there are… Everything But The Girl is a band that we like a lot. It might be different if we were coming in and looking at a specific part or a specific piece of music, in terms of what influence you’re bringing, but in the general sense if we wanted to have a sort of allegiance then those are some bands where we really support their creative agenda. And those are all bands that are maybe bygone by some standards, and certainly we listen to newer music too, but those are a few bands that we go back to quite often.

Well, bands that have been around for a while have had time to perfect their sound.
Yes, that’s also true. Yeah, there’s an authority with those bands, for sure.

It can also work the opposite way, though. For example, Bob Dylan is no where in the shape now that he was forty years ago…
Right! Right. And that’s funny too; we were just talking about how Bob Dylan has a new record out, and of course he’s a very iconic person so it’s not a surprise that people drop everything to check out the new Dylan record, but for whatever subtle differences there were between his last three or four records it’s like… they get scrutinized so heavily and people are trying to find what’s different about this one! [laughs] Maybe they don’t have to get scrutinized so heavily. Maybe it’s just a Bob Dylan record.

Well, no, what I mean is: I’ve heard that—aside from the fact that you’re seeing Dylan live—his concerts are a great disappointment, versus someone like Leonard Cohen who apparently is still amazing onstage.
That’s interesting, yeah. I saw Bob Dylan… my gosh, easily fifteen years ago, and I’d say it was kind of like that. I was gratified that I’d had that experience of seeing him while he’s alive and doing his thing, but it wasn’t like on its own merits it was a great show. I know what you mean.

For more about Halloween, Alaska, check out their MySpace or their website.