Cast Spells

Best of What’s Next: Maps & Atlases

After years of practicing, touring, playing live shows, practicing some more, releasing four EPs and then meeting some nice people from Barsuk Records while out on the road, Chicago-based quartet Maps & Atlases are finally on the cusp of releasing their first full-length album, Perch Patchwork (out June 29). The record is a 12-track collection of wonderful variation; at some points it’s shoegaze-y and intricate, at others upbeat and sunny, and sometimes it’s just dripping with sardonic malice. On “The Charm,” singer/guitarist Dave Davison’s dusty, deep vocals confess, “I don’t think there is a sound that I hate more / than the sound of your voice.” Davison was a bit kinder when he recently talked with Paste about the band’s new album, playing live and writing songs via voicemail.

Paste: You just got back from tour, and now you and the band are already planning another. How do you keep each different show you do new and fresh?
Dave Davison: That’s definitely something that I think about a lot and that we talk about. I think when our band first started, we practiced so much and spent so long practicing and playing before we really played any shows, so for a long time our focus was to recreate the recordings as totally rock solid as possible and to not have any real deviation from the recording. But after playing so many shows there is an element of changing it up and unpredictability that kind of drives you to pay close attention, to get into it more and to appreciate the performance, each specific one, as something really different from the other ones. I think that one thing that we have started doing more is, if something is sounding interesting or people seem to be responding, we’ve sort of allotted specific parts in songs where there’s a little bit more looseness and freedom for doing different stuff every single night. That’s been a newer development in the past year or so, but it’s definitely made it a lot more fun and it seems like people like it.
If we’re in a town where there’s a band that we all know or are friends with we’ll try to get them to come play too on specific parts. It’s been really fun—we’ve had so many people on stage at different shows just doing stuff. In St. Louis we were doing this Frightened Rabbit tour, we were playing in this place—that tour was really fantastic and all the shows were sold out—but this venue was just totally packed beyond belief… So Many Dynamos were a band who we’ve toured with a bunch of times and who are just really good friends with us—they were coming to the show, but we just talked to them on the phone. We hadn’t seen them or anything yet and I kept being like, “Bring some stuff and come play with us!” But we kind of just assumed that they weren’t going to be there and then their part came up and the whole band walked through the center of the audience. It was like all this tons and tons of equipment and they just brought it up on stage in perfect time.

Paste: You all met in high school and later college. How did you all come to the conclusion that you wanted to make music together as a band?
Davison: Chris [Hainey, drummer] and Erin [Elders, guitarist] went to high school together in Wisconsin and they both went to school at Columbia College here in Chicago. So they had been discussing starting a band, and they met Shiraz [Dada, bassist] through an ad. Actually, me and Shiraz had both seen the ad that was hanging up at school and at that point I was definitely playing music but I was just kind of focused on going to school and playing on my own. But Erin and one of my really good friends from when I was a kid had been working at this record store together, and he had been telling me, “You should meet these guys. I think you would get along with them and you’d be good in a band with them,” and apparently had been saying the same thing to Erin. Then finally me and Erin realized that we had been in a class together for a whole semester. We were just kind of, “Oh, you’re that dude!” So we got together and after playing once it seemed to be a good fit, so we kept playing and practicing for years. And then we played a show, eventually.

Paste: Where was your first show?
Davison: [It] was a house show in Davenport, Iowa. And it was crazy. It was really difficult because at the time, as far as setting up shows in Chicago, there weren’t very many places that were all-ages and I wasn’t 21 for a little while. So playing house shows seemed like one of the only options. It was fun—I played the show with a big cast on my leg because I had a broken foot. So that was a little comical.

Paste: How did it go? Did you kill it anyways?
Davison: It was really really fun. I’d been in a bunch of bands in high school playing with friends and stuff, but it was no band of any consequence—it was just playing around… It still seems strange to me being in a band that goes on tour and plays shows. I feel really lucky because it was definitely something I really wanted to do and for some reason it just seemed like there was a disconnect between wanting to do it and how to do it… I would probably never have figured out how to play a show if I hadn’t been in this band—and I don’t really know how to do that anyway. Everything just seemed to work and I feel really lucky still.

Paste: The band recently signed with Barsuk Records, which is a pretty cool, well-known record label to be associated with. Has it changed your outlook or the band at all?
Davison: I don’t really think so, just because we had already made this record totally on our own anyway and we met the people from Barsuk during this past year. They were really super friendly people and seemed to have a really good perspective on releasing music and seemed to be really music-centered as a business, which is something that you want and hope for… I think it’s more that we’re just excited to be affiliated with such a reputable and interesting company that has released so much music that we enjoy.

Paste: I was just going to ask if you felt any pressure making the record, but I guess if you’d already met Barsuk by that point it kind of answers my question. So you made the record first and then sent it out, shopped it around?
Davison: We met them just from touring with Ra Ra Riot so I think that they had sort of been exposed to it in a live setting, and we had been working on it for a little while already. The recording was pretty much finished when people started hearing it live… I think there was a lot more pressure just from ourselves to do something that was different and interesting. We were really guided by the idea of making this record. I think it was important to us because after having been a band for a little while and never releasing an LP—I’m definitely proud of the EPs that we’ve done, but they were pretty much a documentation of the live experience, and we wanted to make a record that made sense as a record, that flows from beginning to end, that had space in it, that people could listen to it and find all different qualities to it and have that experience, and that’s definitely a task. Making a record that is all those things is a task in itself and i think that was the guiding factor and the guiding pressure all along.

Paste: What is the recording process like for Maps & Atlases?
Davison: It’s been a different process throughout the existence of the band. In the beginning it was definitely more based in jamming on ideas and just sort of seeing what happened. For the first EP, the words would come later on, and then for You and Me and the Mountain, the second EP, there would be the guidelines of a chord progression and the lyrics and then we’d sort of work and layer upon that to just finish the song with the basic idea. I think that this record was a progression from there where… instead of really jamming on that idea we would get the basic idea down and then experiment within the recording process.

Paste: Which do you like better, recording or touring?
Davison: Personally I think I like recording. I mean obviously both have their own qualities that I really enjoy. There’s definitely a quality to playing a show, that’s a really fun and immediate thing. But I really do enjoy that process of stumbling upon ideas and building upon things—I really, really love making records.

Paste: Besides making records with Maps & Atlases, it seems like everybody in Maps & Atlases either makes music or movies or has creative little side projects going on on their own time.
Davison: For me, doing the Cast Spells project has been a good way of really understanding what we do best together, what we have after playing all these years and touring, there are certain qualities that are unique to what we do.

Paste: People always tend to assign labels to bands, and I’ve noticed that Maps & Atlases are no exception—you’ve been called everything from math rock to folk and experimental. What do you think of those labels?
Davison: I kind of generally welcome it whenever it’s in the context of people being like, “I really like this because it’s like that.” No matter what “it” is… During this past tour we got some of the strangest comparisons where people were like, “Yeah, I really liked it because it was like if Dave Matthews Band was playing metal with The Who,” and all these crazy comparisons. But when it’s coming from a place where you know people are working from reference points that they genuinely enjoy and then they’re seeing something that is really unique… I’m totally fine with that.

Paste: There are several methods to lyric-writing; what’s yours?
Davison: A lot of times I’ll just record on my phone or leave messages. I mean now technology’s at the point where you can just record on the phone. But a year ago I’d just call people and leave songs as messages and then go listen to them later on. It’s kind of better for me to just have scraps around because I feel like if I sit down to write something I just have a hard time doing it. The idea of having a notebook almost makes it feel… too formal of a process. “Now I am going to write with my notebook.” (Laughs) It makes more sense if I’m just walking or I’ll literally just write stuff down on the side of a coffee cup, and that always is the most fun. I actually always try to save the most rough ideas. If I wrote something down on a coffee cup I’ll try to save it. It is cool to go back now that this record’s done and see those original ideas.

Paste: Does that mean that just about anything and everything can inspire you to write a song?
Davison: I would definitely say that that is the case. I mean, a lot of times I’ll just start writing about something and I don’t even really know why. A lot of times those are the songs that end up getting finished really fast in this sort of intuitive way, and those are also the songs that if people ask me about the meaning I’m just like, “I’m sorry.” … The title track on Perch Patchwork was one of those songs that I just came up with—all the lyrics and the progression and melody—and just recorded it straight through and really I’m not exactly sure why. “Pigeon” is another song that was sort of like that. I know I wrote that song, really, actually, but I wrote it really quickly and recorded it immediately. That was a song I left as a message on my friend’s voicemail, and I went over to his house immediately and just played it, and he was like, “OK, cool. That song’s done.”

Originally published by Paste Magazine