I don’t know if you still have it on there, but when I saw you at SXSW you had "F THE NC GOP" written across your gear. I assume this is response to the discriminatory bathroom bills in North Carolina, right?
NS: Amidst many other things! We can talk about [former NC Governor] Pat McCrory's power grab in his final week in office to take power away from Roy Cooper’s incoming administration. We could talk about their unyielding gerrymandering of all of the congressional districts...
AM: Yeah, North Carolina is no longer legally a democracy.
NS: Oh yeah, we can talk about how we fell below the necessary requirements for a true democracy! [Laughs] We could talk about their continuing assault on voting rights.
AM: Yeah, and not to mention this bullshit fake-out fixer-upper of [bathroom bill] HB2.
NS: Oh god, that’s the fucking newest. And the NCAA caving on that, oh god.
AM: Heartbreak hotel.
NS: It’s just nonstop, and there are so many pieces of it. It's like a lot of politics right now, where everyday you wake up and they’ve done something new that would’ve been the most outraging thing of an entire administration before, and now it's like every morning.
AM: Fuck 'em.
NS: Sometimes when you only have a limited about of space physically you just got to get to the point. [Laughs]
To what degree if any do you feel artists are obligated to use their platform to address political and social issues?
AM: I don’t think that anybody is obligated to do anything because it's art, you know, you can do whatever you want. But if you have a platform, personally, I have a platform, and I intend to use it because that’s my prerogative. I think a lot of times, particularly as a women, people like to say a lot of things that women have to do when they’re performers to be a good role model, and I think it's all just rude and another way of trying to control people.
NS: We're actually an interesting case because we are almost entirely uninterested in making overtly political music. That isn’t to say that the music doesn’t touch on the emotional realities of living in a political world, that is certainly a big current, I would say, but I would be shocked if there was a day I woke up and thought to make a song about a particular bill or person seemed like the right idea. That’s just not our vibe, but at the same time we are very active with the band's kind of voice and our personal voices.
What is your favorite track from What Now and why?
AM: My favorite song is always the last one that we wrote, so in this case it's probably "Song," which you can tell we wrote so close to the end we didn’t give it a name.
NS: [Laughs] Yeah usually we have these kind of fake names for songs.
AM: And then we [come up with] the real names and we just didn’t for that one.
NS: Well we tried a lot of different names. They were all terrible.
AM: We tried a lot of different names and they didn’t work. I don’t know though, this one is horrible.
NS: But it’s more true.
AM: I am really proud of that song, I like it a lot, I like the ideas it talks about. I like that it's love song to songs in general.
What's an example for an alternate placeholder title for one of your past songs?
AM: We called one "Zelda."
NS: "Rewind" was called "Zelda."
AM: Just because one of the parts of it sounds like a peaceful level of [video game The Legend of] Zelda. [Hums melody]
NS: Yeah that opening, my sample voice in those chords, we immediately felt like that was a Zelda level, so that is what the track had become called. Most of the other ones are pretty direct; "Radio" is obviously "Radio," "Sound" is obviously "Sound," "The Glow," and "Kick Jump [Twist" were also the same.] Oh, "Just Dancing" was called the very inventive title "15" forever.
AM: 'Cause it was the 15th thing.
NS: If I don’t know what a thing is about yet I number it, this is really exciting. [Laughs] We almost called that one "15," but we didn't, thank goodness.
So what would be your favorite track?
NS: I think my favorite one is the first one. I think "Sound" is my favorite song. I’m just really proud of every piece of that. That came together in like an afternoon, and the minute we wrote it we knew it was the first song on the record. I feel like every sound in that song has purpose and meaning to me, and I feel like it’s the most enmeshed the two of us can be in a recording. That is like a really the prefect union of the two of us, both how it is written and everything. I am really proud of it.
