by Ida Griesemer
I met Sam Herring, the front man of Future Islands, on April 4th before his show at Glasslands. We strolled around a corner and sat on a little ledge and talked for a little while. I told him I grew up in New Hampshire and so he started out by telling me about his experience there seeing "one of the greatest musical performances" he's ever seen. The interview will appear in two parts. Sam and the band will be back in town this weekend to play a show at Silent Barn on Saturday, June 12th.
View: Part 2
LL: What was the crowd in Portsmith like?
SH: It was awesome. There was this band called the Texas Governor. It's a really interesting story. The guy who was the Texas Governor, his band, he had this band in the mid 90s in Boston called the Elevator Drops, and they were getting kinda big, they were touring with Blur, it was either Blur or Oasis. When they were big in the U.S. they were opening for them, and when they got into Texas - cause Dave grew up in New Hampshire – as Dave tells the story, he was blown away by all the space. And he decided right then and there that he was gonna move back to New Hampshire and marry his girlfriend. He wanted to be a father and a husband. So he quit the band in the middle of this tour, that probably would have made them take off, and then he later did the Texas Governor as a solo project. But so, the whole crazy thing was that William, our bassist, was a huge fan of the Texas Governor in high school, because he saw them open for some band, either a Frank Black show or a Smashing Pumpkins show, he saw them open and it blew him away. So William contacted him, and asked if he would play with us, so dude set up a show, and the whole thing was we got there and we thought we were gonna meet this guy, this big star, and he was just this older really sad looking guy. And he tells us this crazy story about how he just had to take his step son that day to the insane asylum, because he had a breakdown, and he's saying it in this deadpan. And we had just met him and we're like 18, 19 years old like, "Oh, man! I'm so sorry!" And then he's like, "Oh, I'm just joking," and we're like, "Haha…uhh," and he's like, "No, I really did have to do that, " and we're like, "OH FUCK!" And it was crazy, because we played in this upstairs bar. It was the first show he's playing in 2 years and he'd assembled a band just for this show, just because William was this huge fan. But it really cool though, because we became good friends with him, and because of that show he started doing more stuff and was really inspired by us, because we were making weird pop music, and he got more into writing pop songs again and having a good time with music. The show was in the Red Room in Portsmith, New Hampshire, and it was one of the greatest musical performances I've ever seen. It was really watching a man who was affected. Because we knew that he was hurting, and he still went on with the show. He was a true performer. I can only imagine seeing him in his prime. I got to see him later, but that night seeing him was like seeing a man break down. Fuckin'… It was really powerful. I mean, I try to channel that with my own performance, and I was very young at the time and impressionable, and that has always struck a chord with me, watching that show. It was amazing.
LL: Did you stay in touch with him or see him perform another time after that?
SH: Yeah, we played up in New Hampshire at least two or three more times with him, and those guys also put us on in Boston once and did a big show with us. And that was pretty cool because at that time hadn't really – and I'm trying to think – that was Future Islands. That was a Future Islands show.
LL: Where were you living at this point?
SH: This was when we were still in college in North Carolina. We were like, freshmen in college during this first tour.
LL: What was your school like in North Carolina?
SH: It was a public university. East Carolina University. Me and Gerrit, the keyboardist, we grew up together, we were best friends in high school, on the coast of North Carolina. All three of us in Future Islands are from North Carolina. Me and Gerrit grew up in a small town called Morehead City on the coast, and Willam's from a small town called Wendell. And so me and Gerrit went off to the same school. We never made music together in high school. Gerrit made music. I was into hip hop. I was an mc, and went off to college I was trying to find somebody to make beats for me, and me and William met because we have all the same art classes. ECU is a big school. It's now the 2nd biggest college in North Carolina, which is kinda crazy because it's in a small town. The town in maybe twice the size of what the university is, like the town in maybe 40 or 50 thousand, and the school is now like 30 thousand, it was like 25 when I got in. And so we went to school, and me and William met, and I found out that he made weird music, and he gave me a cd that he had made that summer called Computerness, it was one those 2 and half inch CDs, they're like the little discs. I don't even know if they make them anymore. It was a really cool thing when they came out. They had like 22 minutes of music. And William made this album that was 38 tracks, 22 minutes, called Computerness. It was a really weird album. It was kinda like Kraftwerk making music on the first Apple computer, or like, Kraftwerk's little brother making it. Like Ralf and Florian's cousins got together and made this music on their first apple, and it blew me away. Me and William started shooting off ideas, we were instant friends, very similar in what we wanted to do. So me and William had the idea and we started the first band and Gerrit came in really right after we started. We played one show and Gerrit was in, and that was as a five piece at that time. Kim was one of the musicians, and she's the girl who does our artwork, she lives in New York, she's a working artist, and an amazing artist, but she went off to graduate school and we kept going. And then our friend Beeby, who when he left Greenville after two and half years of hard work, we moved on and started Future Islands. The first band was Art Lord and the Self Portraits.
LL: So that Computerness album really struck a chord with you.
SH: Well you know, when you're 18 you're very impressionable and just into everything. And it was something different that I heard. We didn't really listen to the same things. He was really into 80s music and dance music, and I just listened to hip hop and jazz, and was just getting into post-rock like Tortoise. Lots of underground west coast hip-hop. Global Floatations, Freestyle Fellowship, CVE, a lot of weird things, and then jazz and stuff. But it was kind of that thing like, William turned me on to Kraftwerk, and I had heard of Kraftwerk but I'd never heard their music really, but I knew that Kraftwerk was the band that the first break came from. I knew the history of hip-hop. I was deep into hip-hop, and I knew that Afrika Bambaataa created the first break using that song to create Planet Rock. So I was like, "Kraftwerk! Yeah! Those dudes started hip-hop!" And William's like, "No…I didn't know that."
LL: Right. So you were making the connections. How did Future Islands, as it is now, come to be?
SH: When we started Future Islands that was the very beginning of 2006. And then actually the Texas Governor comes back into play. Art Lords started in February of '03 and we played a few shows, and when our keyboardist left - because it was the three of us and then our friend Adam Beeby – when he left town in September of '05, so we had been together for two and a half years, we just decided to quit doing Art Lord. It was a concept band and we were trying to get away from that and be more serious. Honestly, I wanted to keep going with Art Lord, but Gerrit wanted to get out of it. I think Gerrit felt like it was holding us back. And then William kind of sided with Gerrit. And then it was just the three of us, and we try to run as a democracy so I said, "Whatever. I just want to make music with you guys. I don't wanna fight over –"
LL: What did they want to do?
SH: Well, the whole thing with Art Lord was that I, you know, was a character on stage. I spoke in a German accent. I slicked back my hair. I played this character. It was a performance. And you know, my character wasn't – he was kind of a silly, asexual, narcissist figure. Just in love with himself, knowing that the world loved him. It was fun. It's a very fun thing to do.
LL: Was acting something you were interested in?
SH: I was interested in acting, but when I went to school I was trying to study performance art. I was wanting to get into conceptual art. I applied to a lot of – ECU is the only public school I applied to. I applied to San Francisco Art Institute, the Art Institute of Chicago, MICA in Baltimore, where we live now. I was accepted into those schools but couldn't afford it in the end, didn't get enough scholarships to make so my parents wouldn't die. So I went to ECU. I'm glad now, but at the time it was hard for me to settle, because I had really high hopes. And ECU didn't help me with that. They're much more of a technical school. A great fine arts school. I had some really good teachers. I only really had one teacher who pushed me in a conceptual way, and I had him later in school. I dropped out after three and a half years. Art Lord ended. I had some really bad drug problems. Future Islands started up shortly after that in February of '06. That was like four or five months after I dropped out.
LL: So you left school, and then you reunited at some point?
SH: Well, it's really funny. So, in August of '05, right before our keyboardist left town and we ended Art Lord, William was talking with the Texas Governor about them coming down, because they always put us up when we play in the Northeast, but they had never come down. So William told them in August that we were gonna set up this tour for them to come down South and play with us. Then the next month Beeby left town, we broke up Art Lord, and we forgot that these guys were still expecting to tour in January or February. So they called up William in January and were like, "We're wondering how the tour's coming. Have you booked some shows?" And William's like, "Fuuuuck! I forgot! I forgot! We broke up. We're not playing together anymore." And they're like, "What?!" And we're like, "We'll get something together." So Future Islands started - out of necessity. Exactly. So we had this friend Eric who was a bassist in this technical metal band called the Kick Ass, it was in Greenville, North Carolina. And we loved Eric because he was a metal head but loved our music. Him and his girlfriend would always be in the front row dancing their asses off at our shows. So we're like, "This metal dude!" And he's an insane bassist. Amazing. But he always wanted to play drums for us. So we call up Eric and we're like, "We have to get this band together. Do you still want to play?" And he's like, "Yeah!" And the funny thing is that he had never really played drums before. He had this old electronic Simmons drum kit from like '84 or '85, which is like if you see those old videos, that's what the guys rock. They're the hexagonal pads. So it's the perfect look. Still electronic, but live. So I was working at the time as a dishwasher, and those guys got together, Gerrit, William, and Eric, and started writing songs. Then I came in one day and heard what they were doing. We basically wrote six songs in a week and a half. And did a tour a week and a half later. Just did it. And that's how Future Islands started. It was kind of this forced thing. It started off a little weird. Because Art Lord had started off as a joke, and then it became serious. It was supposed to be a conceptual art piece where I was playing this character. It was supposed to be social commentary on how we treat our pop icons and our rock stars and our art stars. And it actually works. Because the whole thing was that I was supposed to be this huge dickhead who's in love with himself and just talked down to people. And people loved it. They were just like, "This is great. This is hilarious. This is awesome." And then my character became a much sweeter, kinder, ridiculous egotist. It was hard for me to be a dickhead to my friends. The first couple shows I was trying to be rude, but it was funny, so I would just laugh. But then it got really serious because once we got past the concept and we wrote all the songs without the concept like "Little Line Drawing" and "Art School Dropout" and "Too Many Artists" and many other songs. We got into our personal feelings. And the musicians got better. Gerrit had never played keyboards before Art Lord, and now he's a fucking wizard. William had never played bass before; he'd just played guitar. Beeby had never played any instrument. I'd never played any instruments. I'd never sung in a band before. So we were just kind of feeling it out and learning things. But then Future Islands started, and it just started really fast, kind of sloppy. Really basic pop music. Synth pop.
View: Part 2
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