Tapes Rolling

Grier didn’t keep the job out of follow-up anxiety. He kept it because he’s good at it. And he’s good at it because he actually likes analyzing data.

Grier’s head contains that certain shade of gray matter that’s actually stimulated by numbers and patterns. When he’s onstage and he’s got that schizo, middle-distance, crazed-maniac look going, he doesn’t seem like a math geek (maybe a little during the awkward between-song banter), but Grier was a math major at Carleton, back when he played in Luntz of Blaine, his first band, with classmate Steve Nelson, before the two math geeks started Tapes ’N Tapes after graduation. It wouldn’t be fair to categorize Tapes ’N Tapes music as “math rock”—there’s too much punk-rock spaz in it—but Grier is obsessive about avoiding cliché in his patterns. “I am always messing with song structures,” Grier says. “You gotta try to keep it interesting for yourself.”

Since the very beginning, Tapes ’N Tapes has gone through several personnel changes, but the songs have all started on the same computer, with Grier sitting down with a guitar and some drum-machine software and banging out demos for the rest of the band to study. The latest lineup—Grier, Matt Kretzmann on keyboards, Erik Appelwick on bass, and Jeremy Hanson on drums—has been playing together for almost two years now, and according to Grier, the stability has helped streamline the process from demo to completed song. “Now when I show up at practice and go, ‘Here’s a new demo,’ they know what to expect.” He pauses. “As opposed to a demo that, uh, sounds really good.”

The band’s name came from an old joke about Grier’s propensity for tweaking, for endless experimentation: “tapes and tapes of bullshit.” There’s a DIY aesthetic to his process too—in 2004, the band self-recorded their first seven-song EP on a four-track in the middle of the woods at Kretzman’s parents’ cabin in Webster, Wisconsin. The same year, Appelwick, who was a producer at the time, approached Grier and urged him to “do it right this time.” In 2005, the band recorded and mixed The Loon over “nine business days” in Appelwick’s ex-bandmate Darren “Kid Dakota” Jackson’s studio in Northeast Minneapolis.

For Walk It Off, however, XL Recordings was footing the bill, so the band picked out a big-time producer, Dave Fridmann (Sleater–Kinney, Flaming Lips) and recorded at Fridmann’s Tarbox Road Studios in Cassadaga, in upstate New York.

This time, the cabin in the woods was bigger and nicer (Tarbox Road is a large house converted into a studio with a living space the guys stayed in), but their approach didn’t change much. “I need deadlines with this kind of stuff,” says Grier. “On The Loon, I took it back and I slept with it. I dumped all the tracks in and I put some extra stuff on top of it and I messed with it for a month, but I could’ve messed with it forever.”

On Walk It Off, Grier set his own deadline. With the pressure on, with new car payments, mortgages, wives, and girlfriends waiting, with the Internet’s denizens of snarkulation ready to rip on the band’s sophomore effort—Grier decided not to take three months to record Walk It Off.

“I wanted it to be the way we’ve always operated,” Grier says. “I [thought], ‘Let’s give ourselves three weeks, and we’ll show up with everything good to go.’ ”

By go time (September 2007), they had been touring The Loon for almost a year and a half, with Grier finally getting an opportunity to write new songs in January of 2007. The band started touring again in the spring of ’07, working the demos out on the road, playing four or five new songs in their set throughout the spring and into the summer, and practicing the other new songs regularly.

The Loon had blown up so suddenly that Grier felt no pressure to respond to expectations on the part of either new fans or fanemies. “You know, I never presumed that anybody would like our music,” Grier says. “When people did, on one hand it made it a little more like ‘Oh, people might care if the record sucks.’ But at the same time, people liked it when we weren’t caring before, so all the more reason to keep believing that we should do what we wanna do now.”