The Czars
The La Brea Tar Pits Of Routine
Velveteen, 1997
Named after an LA landmark, La Brea was the first planned Czars album, the songs based – as would become their template – around Grant’s masculine croon.
GRANT: That’s a good album title. It’s quite funny. But I don’t know if I accessed myself at all on this record. “Cold” is definitely a step up in my songwriting, and that’s because I wrote it about Jeff [Linsenmaier]. I was mad at him. So it was the first time I connected with raw emotion and wrote down how I felt. That’s what works the best: undiluted, unadulterated feeling and passion. “Cold” was probably the first glimpse. And the synth on “Half The Time” proves I always wanted to make electronic music. From the moment I first heard “Eagle” by Abba. But I didn’t learn how to do it until I was on my own and made Pale Green Ghosts. The guy singing on “Russian Folk Song” is the same Russian guy that reads out the passage from The Master And Margarita at the beginning of the album. I was quite sweet on him at the time. But he was killed in a car wreck in Moscow a couple of years after. The band? I always had the best relationships with my guitarists. I didn’t feel my drummer was particularly good. I felt he was holding back because he was angry with me for not letting him have the amount of control that he wanted. I should have just been on my own from the beginning! Everybody thought I had a great voice but I didn’t know what to do with it. But I’m slowly, slowly opening up with each album.
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The Czars
Before… But Longer
Bella Union, 2000
Grant had been sending demos to Simon Raymonde for a couple of years before The Czars signed to his Bella Union imprint.
GRANT: I was going to meet up with a Cocteau Twin. And you can’t imagine what kind of a role the Cocteau Twins had played in my life. A guy at high school who I was in love with played the Treasure cassette for me in 1985 in his grandmother’s basement in Denver and they’ve been a permanent part of the soundtrack of my life ever since. We recorded this at September Sound, in St Margarets near Twickenham. In the studio I ended up feeling that Simon didn’t take me very seriously as a musician. I was writing lyrics as we did the songs, and I didn’t know what I wanted to say yet. Simon asked me who I’d like to sing with, and I mentioned Paula Frazer of Tarnation… and he got her to come over. She was like a modern-day Patsy Cline to me. I was being taken seriously a little bit. The album title came from a deaf mute I knew from Ukraine who I used to write notes with in Russian. We were trying to explain to someone how long we’d known each other, and what he wrote down was “Before… but longer.” There’s a good line in “Gangrene”: “The nail that sticks out/Must be hammered down.” Someone told me that that was the idea behind how Japanese society functions. I was starting to express that I felt alienated, and I’d been forced to conform. We were moving away from indie-rock, but there’s still too much of it
on “Gangrene” and “Zippermouth”.