BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM talks to Jonathan Bree, one half of The Brunettes, about the band, science fiction movies, the American experiences, and the problem of being pigeonholed as twee pop.


PLAYING with the likes of The Shins, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, The Postal Service in the US and Britain, and signing a record deal with the immensely powerful label Sub Pop doesn’t really surprise those who have been following the quiet buzz building around the Brunettes over the last ten years. They’ve managed to avoid the limelight in mainstream New Zealand, yet are so familiar and accessible to those in the know, that you always kinda knew it wouldn’t be too long before they capture the indie world’s spotlight. And that’s what seems to be happening to the band who started off when Jonathan Bree asked Heather Mansfield to sing some songs that he wrote a decade ago.

The Brunettes have frequently been described as “New York punk meets 60s bubblegum pop”. Which is perhaps a little reductionist, given the scope of their work and especially the sound of the new album. “Ahhh yeah those reference points. It’s not intentional, you’re always going to be influenced by a number of things. I think in a number of press releases we ran with a couple of influences, New York punk and bubblegum pop. I sort of feel there’s a lot of stuff we’re inspired by.” And as Bree points out, the archetypal bubblegum pop/New York punk band are the Ramones, and I doubt anyone would compare the Brunettes sound to Joey Ramone and co. Bree admits that early on he was inspired by some of the key music from the 60s. “My cousin is kinda responsible for introducing me to a lot of great music from our uncle’s collection – the usual stuff, the Beatles, the Velvet Underground, the Byrds, early British invasion stuff I kinda went nuts over as a kid, and am still very much fond of.”

The Brunettes have just released their third album in New Zealand (and is due for overseas release soon), and it’d be fair to say there has been a bit of time since their last release (especially given the success Stateside). “Our albums tend to be quite labour intensive efforts, we trial and error a lot of different ideas for instrumentation and arrangements. That’s time consuming, we’re not the sort of band who rehearses a set, goes into the studio and two weeks later come out with an album. We’ve been fortunate to tour in North America for the last couple of years. That slowed the recording process down a bit, also losing band members because they’re wanting to go off and concentrate on their own projects kinda means we’ve got to find other people to rehearse. Unfortunately it did take a bit longer, we thought it’d be out this time last year. But it’s always the nature of albums, you always get the due date wrong.”

The album certainly feels a little bit darker than their previous releases and perhaps there aren’t as many whimsical musical moments. However Bree disagrees in part. “I’m not sure if I think it’s actually any darker, it’s possibly a little more direct and focused where the other albums have been more varied in the sort of feel of the songs from one song to the next. But I think it hasn’t always been candy floss fairyland that a lot of the earlier stuff has been pigeonholed as. The main songs that got focused on were more upbeat and possibly people didn’t see that there were other factors involved, other themes.” But the twee pop label can be problematic with its implications of a lack of substance to the music, something that you can’t really accuse the Brunettes of. “I think there’s always with a lot of good bubblegum pop from the 60s that people will think it is complete throwaway. There’s a lot of innuendo and a lot do have darker elements. You just have to recognise that they’re there. At the same time you’ve got to appreciate it on the surface level and the direct meaning of the song. I think we’re partly responsible for cultivating the tweeness through our publicity and our press shots. I’d like to sort of think people who then go and listen to the music that there’s more to what we’re doing than just two dimensional characters.”

The lyrics of the album do touch on elements like homesickness and travel, a more brooding and evocative lyrical display than their previous work. “I guess I never really got to experience stuff like that before. Those are very new themes that we can say are quite honest and doesn’t come from a movie that we’ve seen.” Perhaps, this may suggest a more cynical edge gained with age, suggesting a possible shift away from the previous tales of teenage love. “It’s life. I don’t think so but I guess maybe because we’re sort getting older it doesn’t feel as right to necessarily do songs that are based in high school and deal with lighter themes. I still write songs like that, I’m not necessarily sure if the Brunettes are the right vehicle to execute those songs anymore given that we’re a bit older.”


However the song-writing itself feels more mature, and the songs themselves have a free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness feel to their form. “I do like the art of writing the song, the verse-chorus-verse-middle 8 section-outro, but a lot of this album has been what sort of feels good, moving into the next part of the song. A lot of the songs don’t have any sort of formal orthodox structuring.” The Brunettes have also never been afraid to experiment with different musical sounds, and anyone witness to their epic twenty-person performance at the 2006 Big Day Out shows their fascination with an unconventional musical palette. “As both a songwriter and a musician, and a producer, it helps to exercise all those different things. I don’t understand why more musicians don’t do that. A lot of bands kinda see doing that sort of thing as ‘not keeping it real, we gotta do what we can do live’, and they stare at their guitars and their drums and they might get adventurous and get a pedal.” Bree admits that this does mean it might be “a bit of a headache live” but that can also allow the music to gain a different feel live. “A modern philosophy behind a live show is if they sound like the record they sound really good. I think that’s a ridiculous approach to working in the studio”.

This means the band aren’t afraid to go everywhere from the theremin to the clarinet. “My favourite at the moment is the mellotron which features quite heavily on the album. It allowed me to write the string and orchestral arrangements without having to go through the nightmare of having to compose sheet music which I know very little about, and Heather has spent many sleepless night writing that stuff up.” The new album is mixed by Ed Cake, a former member of the band Bressa Creeting Cake, who are also one of New Zealand’s most underrated bands of all-time (Bree stole Liam Finn’s copy of Cake’s albums as well as few years back). You can also draw comparisons between the Brunettes and Bressa Creeting Cake with both utilising eccentric melodies and lyrics that jump between the airy and the dark. “If you see links between the two that’s cool with me.” Bree jokingly adds “Bressa Creeting Cake are a bit prog, they’ve got prog elements I can pass on.” He does also suggest that they were “definitely one of the better Flying Nun bands of the last period.” Cake’s input was important in this album, from his engineering which Bree admits “definitely shows, the drums, I think production wise it’s a lot better than previous efforts”, to devising the lyrical content behind the album’s craziest track ‘Stereo (Mono Mono)’.

This album certainly may do well in the States, where the buzz they’ve been garnering has helped sell their previous albums by the thousands while on tour. They were asked to tour the States with the Shins (post-Garden State Shins to boot). “I don’t think any of us really knew what to expect at all. When we first went over and got to support the Shins, we knew we’d play in front of big crowds and they’d be more vocal than the usual New Zealand crowds. That’s not a hard one. We’re a quiet sort of lot that likes to sit back and make up our mind over whether we approve over what we listen to. We were just very fortunate to support bands whose music doesn’t necessarily sound like us, but it’s not a huge stretch for their audience to appreciate what we do as well. Whether they walked away or liked us or not, it helped.”

However, before I make the new album sound like The Brunettes have gone all moody and My Chemical Romance-y, there are still the endearing lyrical moments (though, admittedly, it was hard to top the seahorses from Mars Loves Venus). There’s the continued fascination with aliens. “I have I guess a weakspot for science fiction films. I think Planet of the Apes I was definitely obsessed with when I was younger. I didn’t get to see the TV series until I was in my twenties. I don’t think I’m alone there. Most people have a soft spot for something, futuristic fantasy films. I just tend to use them in songs.” And indeed, there is a lovely reference to the classic film on the album. There’s also a passing reference to the Scientology stress tests – “I never had time to do it, I always thought it’d be fun to do. They have them all over Hollywood Boulevard, and a number of centres and people on the streets. No matter what you do, even if you answered every question chipper and being positive and upbeat, they’ll probably tell you that you’re stressed.” And in what is shaping up as a big couple of months in the lives of the Brunettes – a headlining tour across the United States, an upcoming European tour, and the release of their album worldwide – perhaps Bree should probably avoid the stress-tests around the place. However, it’d be fair to assume that the band will continue to do what they do so well, and sing about some of the important things in life like seahorses, hairstyles and homesickness.