Go Old School to Win Thousands

The Seattle-based acoustic band Thousands has come to the Creative Allies community for a poster design for their recently released album, The Sound of Everything. To record the album, members Luke Bergman and Kristian Gerrard recorded in all kinds of places like stairwells, old silos and graveyards. All songs were recorded in one take and without postproduction.

We asked Kristian Gerrard to explain the recording process in more detail and advise designers on the look Thousands is going for. (Hint: A Google search of “magazine covers, 1969” will yield plenty of inspiring eye candy.)

Creative Allies: How many different spaces did you use to record your album?

Kristian Gerrard: We recorded in a lot of places, but only I think six are represented on the album. There’s a barn, a stairwell, a silo, the woods and a couple of different houses. Some of the scrapped sessions took place in a snowy graveyard, the beach at midnight (full moon), the banks of the Columbia River at sunset and more.

CA: Do you have any stories you can share about the places you recorded?

KG: The graveyard was really what started it all. We found ourselves in Roslyn, WA one night after having attended a mysterious party in the mountains. Luke knew the whereabouts of the historic graveyard in the town (which is huge, and old), so we drove out there, armed with our guitars and our trusty recorder. The graveyard dates back maybe 150 years (okay, so not old by European standards, but still) to the mining days when Roslyn got its start. Supposedly Jesse James and his gang used to spend time there between bank robberies. The cemetery is divided into ethnic groups. I think we did sessions both in the Lithuanian section and the Italian section, which is up a big hill, under the cover of towering firs and cedars.

CA: It is amazing how the echo of a stairwell can really transform your music. One could easily consider the stairwell a guest musician or an added instrument in your band. Did you start to feel that way moving from place to place?

KG: That stairwell was one of the locations we recorded the album — the song called “The Sound of Everything”. I had noticed it in the past for the vastness of the reverb in there (despite it being only three stories tall). Such a space makes every sound linger in a way that you’re still hearing yourself a few seconds after you make a sound, kind of slowly dragging through time, performing with your own ghost.

CA: How does the Pacific Northwest  influence the music you make?

KG: We’ve both lived in the PNW most of our lives, so the scenery has become deeply ingrained in our minds. I don’t know if I could put into words exactly how it affects me, but every time I leave Washington for a while and come back, I get that same sense of awe at the giant mountains and trees, as well as the cold ocean and crashing waves. Nothing really compares in my opinion. It’s an amazing place.

CA: You say in this video, ”Sometimes a certain environment felt right for a song.” Can you elaborate on that or give an example?

KG: I meant that in the most literal way, for instance, the song “Big Black Road” is about the building of railways and tunnels, so we thought we’d record the song in an abandoned train tunnel, but the sound in there wasn’t as nice as the silo, so the silo won out. We tried to find meaningful connections like that, but in the end chose locations whose acoustics worked with the song the best.

CA: Do you have any advice for Creative Allies artists and designers when they are coming up with a poster design? Colors? Imagery? Fonts? Anything designers should avoid with this design?

KG: I like hand-written type, ’60s-type imagery, photographs. I really hate overly stylized illustrator stuff with vines and distressed fonts and all that. Make it look like it came out of a hippie anarchist newspaper in 1969. I even like little details like not quite perfect color offsets and stuff like that from that era.

CA: What other musicians or artists inspire your music?

KG: We’re inspired by everything. We listen to lots of free jazz, noise, metal, folk, pop, hip-hop, whatever! Some of the biggest influencers of my work are more contemporary singer-songwriters like Elliott Smith and Phil Elverum. People like to compare us to classic groups like Simon and Garfunkel, but I shy away from that one, mostly because I hardly know any of their songs. Never been something I’ve gotten into.

Check out Thousands’ poster design contest on Creative Allies.