Ra Ra Riot’s Wesley Miles gets into the art of his music before Wednesday’s Riot Room show
Ra Ra Riot’s early recordings — such as the Syracuse band’s debut LP, The Rhumb Line, in 2006 — were hailed as baroque pop gems. That was due in no small part to the band having both a cellist and a violin player. But after the departure of cellist Alexandra Lawn, Ra Ra Riot’s music took a synth turn. In February, the band’s latest release, Need Your Light, turned heads for sounding not like anything Ra Ra Riot had done before and more like a very specific time in the ’80s.
I spoke with Ra Ra Riot’s singer and keyboardist, Wesley Miles, by phone about the new album and the response it has generated.
The Pitch: After listening to Need Your Light, I went online to see what other people thought, and it seems that everyone either adores or despises “Bouncy Castle,” and for the same reasons. What was the process behind that song?
Wesley Miles: That is a highlight for us, and it is a little polarizing. Basically, it started as a demo that Matt [Santos], our bass player, made, and he sent it to a former drummer of the band, Gabe Duquette, who played drums on The Orchard, our second record. They were just kind of working this instrumental track together. Gabe gave it the working title of “Bouncy Castle” because it just kind of had that attitude, not really intending that to be the title of the song.
So, when they turned it over to me, I just thought that was the most amazing title, and that it could be an amazing lyric. This story — almost like a stream of consciousness — just came out of me, and I worked a chorus around that. It was actually the first song that we started to work in this demo process for the whole record in Brooklyn, in the spring of 2014. It was kind of the track that we took, and we figured out what we were doing. It was early in the process, and we didn’t feel any kind of pressure to make any specific kind of music. We felt free to make it a little silly, which it obviously is.
It seems like it’s similar to “Call Me Out” — not sonically but in that it references a very specific time in music. Is that happenstance or intentional?
A lot of people have been saying that “Call Me Out” reminds them of Journey and all these things, but those haven’t really been specific reference points for us — or, at least, they haven’t been in the past — but they’re still ones we’ve been affected by, too. Like Boston or something.
So, yeah, there’s a different attitude on this record, in a lot of ways, and one of them is that the songs are gonna dictate to us how we’re gonna make a record. We didn’t want to put it in a box before we even finished all the songs. That was one of the fun things about it [“Call Me Out”]. It was a bit different for us. “Bouncy Castle” is a lot like that, too. Some people have said that it reminds them of F-Zero. I don’t know if you remember that video game at all, but that was super exciting for us to hear, because we’re all into that kind of art.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone refer to the game F-Zero as art, but that really makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, definitely. You know, not like the same kind of art that you pay money and go into a museum to look at but interactive. It’s the kind of art that we most digest, aside from music and books, maybe. But, especially for people who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, it’s a really important reference for us.
That really brings some other aspects of the album into focus. Specifically, those two tracks Rostam Batmanglij produced, “Water” and “I Need Your Light.” Those fit nicely into the idea of video games as art. They don’t seem like outliers on the album, but there’s definitely a different vibe.
Yes, definitely a different vibe, definitely on the warmer side of the record. But Rostam was actually the first person to point out the F-Zero thing on “Bouncy Castle,” even though he didn’t have anything to do with the track. I think because the rest of the record came out of a bunch of different writing sessions, and different locations, even, while producing it, I think that helped those tracks to fit in. If it was eight of the songs prexisted in one other place, with one other person, it would be much easier to pick them out. While they are standout tracks in a sense, they’re not really like sore thumbs because there were a lot of different personnel involved. That’s one of the things that makes it really dynamic, and that’s always been a priority for us.
