Athens, Georgia has long been a hotbed of alternative music and boasts a musical heritage few American towns can match. Early indie rock pioneers like R.E.M., The B-52s and Pylon paved the way for the Olivia Tremor Control, Elf Power and Neutral Milk Hotel, and today bands like the Drive By Truckers and Dead Confederate carry on that legacy. But “Next Big Thing” status has been reserved for The Whigs, a hard rock trio given that’s been pounding the pavement since 2002 and racking up plaudits from blogs far and wide, as well as glossy magazines like Rolling Stone and Esquire. Their 2008 album, Mission Control, a straight up rock ‘n’ roll barn-burner, stood in stark contrast to last year’s prevalent folk movement spurred on by bands like Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver. The band just finished recording their follow up, In The Dark, which will be released in March of 2010. We spoke with bassist Tim Deaux last week, just after this year’s Grammy Award nominees were announced, and after getting over the shock of not being nominated, he gave us the scoop on the upcoming record and a host of other topics. He even let us a get a word in edgewise once or twice. You can see the band tonight at the Black Cat, along with openers The Features and Mean Creek.
I hate to start this interview off on the wrong foot, but I should probably go ahead and tell you that the band didn’t get nominated for a Grammy this year.
[Laughs] Surprise, surprise! We were counting on that. What happened?
Well, there’s always next year, right?
We’ll keep our fingers crossed.
What can you tell me about the upcoming album?
We’ve been working on the tracklisting the past couple days and today is a deadline and we’re frantically trying to agree on a tracklisting for the record, so we’ve been listening to it a lot today.We feel that its some of the best stuff we’ve ever done. We’re just excited to finally have it finished. We’ve been working on this record for almost exactly a year now. We started writing music just after Thanksgiving last year, so its something we’ve been concentrating on and focusing on for quite some time and we’re excited to get it out and hear what other people think about it.
How does the band approach the songwriting process? Is it a collaborative effort?
It’s pretty much all three of us putting our heads together. Songs come about in different ways, whether its a tune that Parker comes to us with a guitar riff or melody or Julian will show up with a drum beat that he’s been playing around with. We just build upon that initial idea. There was quite a bit of songs that came from little jams that me and Julian had started, just drum and bass only and then often times we’d try and track a little demo and try and outline a song as best as we could. And then we pass that over to Parker and Parker seemed to really enjoy that, because it seemed to free Parker up to really think and work less about guitar and more about melody. So it was a new approach for all of us, but we really enjoyed the results.
