Instrumental health

Explosions in the Sky is one of those bands you've probably heard without realizing you've heard them. The Texas band's dynamic, cinematic instrumental rock music conveys powerful, but unspecific, emotions, which makes them a favorite for movie and TV show soundtracks. If you've seen All the Real Girls, Shopgirl, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, or the film or TV series Friday Night Lights, among others, you've heard Explosions in the Sky. In advance of the band's April 12 appearance at the Knitting Factory, we spoke to guitarist-bassist Michael James.

I'm curious about your process for writing songs. Does it come from compositions written beforehand or collective improvisation?

It's both. There's not like a set formula we have for writing the songs. Most of the time, it will start with somebody having an idea and bringing that to practice, and we all sit around and try to flesh that idea out. The idea can be in varying stages of completion. Sometimes it's 10 parts in a row that makes a big statement as a song, and sometimes it's one little guitar lick that can turn into a 10-minute song. So, we just kind of sit in a room and play, and then we all go home and daydream and play by ourselves and get ideas and generate them and bring them into the practice. So we just use every sort of creative tool at our disposal.

Is it important to have that balance between writing stuff together and writing stuff alone? Do you get different results that way?

We definitely do. I sure can't speak for every musician in every band. It kind of works differently for everybody, but for us, it is a great balance. Because when you're playing in a room full of people, you can't really sit and play the same thing over and over again for 90 minutes or something, just trying to get it just right. That's something that's much more comfortable to do at your house, playing music by yourself, and you can really finely tune details and inflections of a guitar part that is going to take you half an hour to get just right. Then, you can take that in to the group setting, and that makes it a lot more fun to play together.

When you play it in a group setting, does that change it?

Oh, absolutely. That was something that was kind of hard for all of us in the beginning stages of this band, because we would all have very finely detailed ideas of what something should sound like and then you bring it to a group of people and of course that automatically changes. And if you're not familiar with the people and you don't trust the people that you're playing with one hundred percent yet, it can be hard to let that idea go. But now that we've been a band together for 13 years and we're all best friends and kind of musical soul mates, there's so much trust there, so it's like, this wasn't—the way that we're playing the song now isn't at all what I had in mind, but now it's not my song, it's our song. And that's how it needs to be. That's how we've always decided it has to be—completely a group effort, a collaborative affair to write these songs together. You just kind of have to let go. It's kind of tough, you know, being a regular egotistical human being to let that go, but it's something that's worked out really well for us.

How do you develop that sense of trust? Is it something that just comes from playing with the same people for a long period of time?

Absolutely. I think it is a matter of time. I mean, some people you just click with. I've been in bands since I was 15 years old and sometimes it's just—there are certain people it's just really fun to play with, and certain people that it's not. And for us, it was automatically really fun to play, that's kind of how we got serious about this band, we just really like each other and the way each other played our instruments, but it also takes time. It really does. Learning how people are going to respond to a certain musical cue or something like that. That trust definitely takes time to develop.

Since your music is instrumental, how do you choose titles?

Being instrumental, it's kind of our one chance to use words to communicate with the audience what the songs mean to us. So we labor over the titles. We really do. We just try to come up with some sort of phrase or set of words that sums up what the song means to us. Sometimes it has absolutely no relationship to what the songs means to anybody else in the world, which is absolutely fine. One of the beauties of instrumental music is that it can mean an infinite number of things to an infinite number of people. So, yeah, the titles are definitely personal for us and we spend a long time—we spend as much time on the titles as we do on the songs.

What's that process?

Pretty much making lists, you know? Say we're almost done with a song, we'll start the process of coming up for a name for it. Very rarely, the title has come very early or even before a song—we'll just have a title that we'll write a song around, but usually it's the other way around. We'll be almost done with a song or completely done with it, and then just try to puts words to the feeling that we get from the song. We'll throw those ideas around, and make lists and talk about it over and over again at every practice. It really is just whatever sticks, the phrase that we can't all just throw away—that's usually the one that ends up being the song title.

Your music shows up a lot in movie and TV soundtracks. What is it about Explosions in the Sky that connects well with moving images?

I don't really know exactly. I think there's definitely an emotional component to our music. We certainly don't shy away from it. Our music is very overtly emotional and emotive. It's not something we try to shroud in coolness or anything like that. So I think it's very easy for people to get that from it. You don't have to dig very deep to find the emotional core of the songs. Now, certainly you can bring—and hopefully everybody does bring—their own unique emotional perspective when listening to the music, which can be very deep and involved, but I think heart-on-our-sleeves sound lend to emotional images and that sort of thing. It can accompany those sort of things without taking too much away from what you're watching.

That's interesting that it can deepen the emotional experience of images without distracting from it. Is that one of the advantages of being instrumental?

It's an advantage, and also a disadvantage. We do have the advantage that if people are going to listen to it, they have to really listen to it. It can definitely be a background thing. We have a lot of people tell us that we're great study music, that sort of thing, which is great. But if you're really going to try to experience it, it requires more attention. Which, for a band like us to have seen any kind of success really speaks well of listeners, that people are willing to devote that kind of attention. But it can be a disadvantage as well, because you have to work at it, you have to work at getting people's attention. You really have to earn it. You can't do it with a catchy turn of phrase, the more immediate effect of the human voice, which I think people respond to really quickly. So it makes us work much harder, but I think it makes our work more satisfying to us when we do it well.

You going back to the studio any time soon?

Not any time soon. We haven't had a chance to work on any new material. We've been touring a lot. … It'll be our first time in Reno, so we're looking forward to it.

That's exciting. We're excited too. What's your live show like?

In terms of the songs, the songs don't really differ in terms of structure or anything like that. We play them pretty much as they were recorded, but in terms of a performance, that's really what we love in a live show—a great performance. Not to say we can give a great performance every night, but we try our damndest. We really do. We try to bring as much emotion and passion and physicality to the songs as we can.