Brooklyn-based band Forest Fire

Forest Fire was divided between Brooklyn, NY, and Portland, OR, when they were recording their debut album Survival; as a result, it was assembled over a period of eight months. This forced them to spend a lot of time meditating on and perfecting their material between recording sessions, and this extra work shows: Survival is an intricate gem of an album that deserves to be heard by everyone. I'm thrilled, then, that Good Prattle has been given the opportunity to bring this great band to your attention by means of an interview with members Adam Spittler and Mark Thresher. Enjoy this article!

I know the band is kind of split up between the two coasts… with a setup like that, how on earth did you guys end up forming?
MARK THRESHER: Well, at one point we lived in the same apartment in Brooklyn, which is actually where we’re talking from right now, and only one of us—Adam—still lives in that apartment, but we would all sort of meet up to record here. When our friends were on tour we would see each other in this apartment and, uh, make recordings!

Now you’re split up between Brooklyn and Portland, which is—they’re both great cities for making music, so at least if you guys were separated you were in good cities all around.
MT: Yeah, absolutely. We’re actually not currently split anymore; we’re actually all for the most part here in Brooklyn. Our friend Nathan [made] the move out here in September and we [came] back shortly thereafter. So all of us are in New York right now.

Well, that’s good. Are you guys particularly involved with other Brooklyn musicians? I live in Brooklyn and I know there’s so much music going on here.
MT: Yeah, we certainly feel like outsiders, pretty much functioning within our own… we’ve got some friends who play music that we really enjoy, but we certainly don’t feel like we’re part of a scene or anything like that.

While you guys were separated, how did that inform your music?
ADAM SPITTLER: We just… we took a lot longer to make things, and when we did get together we worked really hard. I came up to Portland a few times over the course of the last year or two, and Nathan came to New York several times when Mark and Natalie were still here as well. We’d get together for two or three weeks at a time and just record really, really aggressively for as many hours a day as we possibly could, and then in the space between we’d mix things and send it back and forth and gradually work on it.
MT: It gave us all time to reflect and make sure what we were doing was what we actually wanted, instead of cramming into a studio and having to commit to something that we weren’t ready for.

In terms of your sound, what are some of your key musical influences?
MT: Not a lot of contemporary things that I can really think of. Predictably, a lot of classic rock records from the late ‘60s through the late ‘70s.

Yeah, I can definitely hear that in your music. What about influences in film or literature, especially for you, Mark, as a songwriter?
MT: My partner is actually a songwriter first and foremost, so I would have to say that she informs me in a literary sense more than anyone else.

While making this album, I know you kind of had to piece things together, but while you were doing that did you have a vision of the album as an entity or were you just playing it by ear?
AS: I think that we definitely had a vision; as we got closer to it, it changed a lot, if that makes sense. We originally wanted to make something that was recorded entirely live; we wanted to throw a microphone up—pick up everybody on the same microphone and get a lot of performances that had a lot of really unique character. Like, do it over and over again and find the one performance that we really liked, and not worry about the flaws and just try and capture a raw energy. And we did that, I think. We got things that we liked, although they were so deeply flawed that we had a lot of trouble figuring out whether or not we could actually use them. And then we ended up going pretty far from that, really elaborately correcting and overdubbing and putting things together and trying to make something that sounded like a real rock record. We sort of lost track of our vision, but…

What are some of your favorite places to play?
MT: I really like playing at a place called the Glasslands Gallery. I just feel like that place lends itself to performing in a way that suits our band. Also, you know, there’re always places like the Mercury Lounge. I haven’t played a lot of places, but I feel like that place has really good sound, which is always the most important thing.

[laughs] Word, but I was thinking more along the lines of different cities. Like, maybe people react differently to your music depending on in which city you play…?
MT: Well, we wouldn’t really know because we’ve actually—we’ve played a show in Connecticut, a show in Portland, and every other show has been in New York! So we don’t have a lot of experience playing outside of New York.

But you were in a very huge festival in August!
MT: Yeah, that was a pretty big thing for us. We were pretty overwhelmingly excited about that, and that was the first time we’ve ever done anything even remotely like that at all.

Check out Forest Fire's music at their MySpace... or listen to their album as a stream on the Catbird Records website.