| Rue Royale |
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| Posted by Matt Conner |
06:57 PM Sunday, 01 July 2007 |
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Take it from us: Rue Royale is one of the best bands you've never heard. The acoustic husband/wife duo makes stunning, beautiful music with subtle, whispery vocals atop minimal instrumentation and the result is haunting and subdued. They just played Cornerstone Festival and are currently writing material for another effort. But in the meantime, head over to their MySpace to check out a few songs and read more in this interview with Brookln Dekker as he speaks on making music, what Rue Royale is all about and The Search for Where to Go, both literal and figurative. Matt: Rue Royale is now a year old, so what has this past year been like you for guys? What has it brought? Brookln: I was actually in another band and it wasn’t really working out. It was kind of an overpolished, overproduced project. I was actually still in the band when I wrote my first Rue Royale song. The band just dissolved after that. So that’s how we were birthed. We were just looking to do some music together that wasn’t so polished. We didn’t want to have to have a click-track to actually be able to perform a song. We had five songs – the five that are on the EP – written in about a week or a week and a half. I have some friends from the other band who had some recording gear and we went to their place to record. That was in May, 2006. We played our first show, which was a catastrophe, in August. [Laughs] Matt: Where was that at? Brookln: It’s called Corduroy’s Espresso Spot in Chicago. Or something like that. Matt: What makes a show go horrible? Brookln: Whoa, boy… there’s a lot that can make a show go horrible. [Laughs] What made that show go horrible is that I wasn’t used to playing in a band or unit that relied so heavily on one instrument or even two. I was very focused on having to play the guitar, the kick-drum and sing. I think I was a little overconfident. I felt really good about the songs and how quickly they came together, so I think we under-rehearsed. It was just sloppy. And it was just an awkward room. There was maybe 40 people there in this really big coffee house. Just an awkward show. [Laughs] After that, we just kept playing some shows. At the time, I worked part-time booking shows for a bar in Chicago so I booked us a couple times and kinda used that as a residency venue for us. We really got polished up and worked on our chops there. Since then we’ve just been playing shows. MySpace has been really good for us. I don’t think we would even exist if it wasn’t for MySpace at this point. Matt: Has this been a difficult first year or is it still exciting? Brookln: I think it’s a little of both. I’m a rock and roller at heart. I like to lead a band, so it’s been a big adjustment for me as far as that goes. But it’s been really, really exciting to be able to make music with my wife. Matt: So is she the primary musical influence there? Because to listen to Rue Royale’s music and then to hear that you love to front a rock band… well, the two don’t naturally seem to correlate. Brookn: Yeah. Well, I think it’s a departure out of necessity. It’s only the two of us. There isn’t anyone else. Or at least that’s how it started. I made a solo album in Nashville and the producer and things just got out of hand. I couldn’t even support it live. Then I was in this band in Chicago that was overpolished. So I think it was a response – that the broken down nature of Rue Royale was a response to all this production. As far as the main influence, I would say we bring an even amount to the table. It’s really funny how we write Rue Royale songs. We each write songs all the time separate from each other but none of them ever make it as a Royale song. For some reason, I can’t write a Royale song by myself and neither can she, so it just works out that way. Matt: So do you see yourself departing from this sound as you go? Maybe adding more pieces? Brookln: I don’t know. I kinda like where we are right now. I like the ease of it. I like the nice small little band to tote around. Going on tour is fun. It’s gonna be great going on the road with my wife. So I like it just the two of us. Yeah, we might introduce a string here or there or a friend along the way, but I think Rue Royale will always be Ruth and Brookln Dekker. I think our EP we made last May is very much still the vein we’re writing in sonically. Matt: So you are writing right now? Brookln: Yes, we are. Matt: Do you guys have day jobs, so to speak, or is this full-time? Brookln: Yeah, we both have day jobs. I work for an audio/visual company in Chicago and she works for a bank. Matt: Is that difficult to not do this full-time? Brookln: Yeah. We want to be doing it full time. We love it. It’s a drag that we have to go to bed at a decent hour because we have to get up. I go pick her up from work, we come home and eat dinner, work out and then start working on songs. Then you get into this zone but then you’re like, “Oh, man! At some point we need to be responsible and go to sleep.” It stifles the creativity. It does for me. My motivation is inspiration usually. Ruth is the opposite. She will say that we will rehearse from 8:00 to 11:30, but I don’t work like that. If it’s 8:00 but I’m not in the zone, I will say, “C’mon, can we do this later?” So it does stifle the creativity. But that’s part of the challenge right. Matt: How would you describe Rue Royale? Brookln: Funny you ask that because we’re in a season of trying to answer that for ourselves. That’s been a topic of conversation lately, just as we’re writing for our next EP or full-length, whatever it is. I think we’re still trying to find that identity, but even coming back to the EP – The Search for Where To Go – I think Rue Royale is really just a journey. It’s been musically when we first started, it was a response to something. The lyrics, the idea of us being on the road, they’re all a response. So I feel that’s what Rue Royale is. It’s just a journey and a search. Matt: Is it structured in such a way? Because when you close the EP with “U.F.O.”, you are saying lines like, “So I lift up my eyes to the one who shines the most…” Brookln: That song was actually the only one of the five that I’ve used in another project. I used “U.F.O.” in that band I was talking about before but it never felt right, just because it was this huge band playing over it and somehow the heart and idea of that song and what I was going through was lost in that. We got the guitar one night and we were just playing around writing some stuff for the EP and I started to play “U.F.O.” We ended up writing a second verse. And we ended up closing the EP with that because it seemed to be a good endcap. It serves as a summary for the album, because it’s all about a spiritual search, at least for me. It’s all about whatever search you are on. So for me, it closes with this idea of “Oh, now I know who this is. I lift my eyes up to you.” That’s a great way to end a EP or record to look up toward the future and the next thing. Matt: Can you speak to that? The role of spirituality in your writing… Brookln: It’s organic. We have our moments where we sit down and say, “Okay this is really hot right now, so let’s write about this.” But those songs never work out. We’ve never performed one of those. Not once. The songs that become Rue Royale songs are definitely the ones the grow out of whatever we’re in. And that is true to every one of those five songs. Every one of the five are offsprings of us in that moment. Matt: So what is that moment for a song like “Parachutes and Lifeboats?” Brookln: That search that we speak of mainly spiritual. I was playing music in a couple different churches. And there were some awkward and uncomfortable experiences that we had. There were some relationships that we let slide and just difficult situations that translated to difficult spiritual situations. They were people I looked up to and they represented God to me in ways. I don’t want that to sound silly, but they were just good influences on me. So that was difficult. It knocked me off my feet spiritually and it took me awhile to figure out my faith for me and our faith as a couple. We wondered how we were going to deal with this. But that’s part of the search. And also there was a musical search and creative identity going on for us. “Am I a worship leader? Is that what I’m supposed to be doing? Is this my calling? Am I supposed to be in a rock band?” All of these questions we were asking ourselves… that’s what that search was about. As we wrote the song, it became the peroxide that draws the infection to the surface. We began to realize that these issues we were having were spiritual questions that needed to be addressed. It was really the song that helped answer our questions in a funny way, even though the song itself is open ended. Matt: You mentioned that idea of calling and your place in all of this, what is the role of just being an artist within that? What is the artistic tension for Rue Royale? Brookln: I think some of these experiences I was alluding to, I found that I felt the victim in a lot of those situations when I was in it. Then when I was looking back as we were praying and spending time together talking over these things trying to heal, we realized we weren’t being totally honest. We weren’t being legit ourselves. I don’t know if I have figured it out yet what my calling is. I don’t even know if that exists. We are just focused on writing songs that are the stories of what we are going through in honest language and just being real, not trying to be something bigger or shinier than we are. I’m not sure if that’s a calling or if this is just another step on the way to figuring out what our calling is. I just know I’m still on the search for where to go. And that’s what we sing and talk about and that feels like our calling right now. Comments (2) |
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