Rusty Interviews Carrie / Carrie Interviews Rusty

Carrie's first musical interview. Enjoy. Or go back to Carrie's interview with Rusty.

How would you describe your taste in music? What do you look for? What makes you buy an album?

I can’t categorize what I like the way most people can. Like saying "I listen to indie rock" or "Top 40." I really like a lot of the hip-hop that’s out right now – this is my most recent discovery. (Musical interest goes in cycles for me.) I also like a lot of 80s hits. And a lot of indie rockers that Rusty introduced me to through compilation CDs he makes—like Modest Mouse and Grandaddy and The Sea and Cake. I guess I’d say catchy songs grab me the best—things like OutKast’s "Hey Ya!" or Wham’s "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go" or The Jackson 5’s "I Want You Back."

I also often like artists or songs that have an edge of humor to them – Liam Lynch or They Might Be Giants or The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. I like it when people don’t take themselves so seriously. But at the same time, I can also think of some favorite stuff like R.E.M.’s "Night Swimming," which is very beautiful, though not exactly upbeat or catchy or funny. So I’m not sure where I fall in all of this.

I usually buy albums because I’ve heard one or two songs that I like by an artist. Once I like an artist, I will probably buy more of their albums. I originally bought my first Belle and Sebastian album, Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant—before I knew Rusty or anything at all about the band—because I liked the album title so much.

Tell me all you can about your experience with "Hubba Hubba," the first song you recorded.

I was pretty terrified about it. I remember once I was in creative writing workshop during my first semester, and Rusty was recruiting girls to sing with him at his first live show at the Thirsty Hippo. I didn’t know Rusty very well yet at that point, but a lot of the ladies were agreeing: Pia Ehrhardt, Kim Chinquee, Paula Leffmann. I remember our professor, Rick Barthelme, was asking Rusty about who he’d convinced to sing and Rusty said something like, "I’m just waiting on Carrie." And I made a joke and said, "Good luck. I hope things work out," as if to say, "When pigs fly!" Everyone laughed because, at the time, I was the shy girl and they all knew I wouldn’t sing with Rusty at a bar.

But I was always a fan of Rusty’s music. Rusty gave me a CD of MP3s for every one of his recordings—all of his musical incarnations, not just Rusty Spell or the Mnemonic Devices—in only November after I met him in late August.

Anyway, to make a long story short, when he started working on the Sparkling Objective Correlatives CD, it was February or March, I think, and we were much better friends by that point. We’d emailed each other all through Christmas break and hung out a bunch of times and sat together in class. So even though I was the shy girl, I felt really comfortable around Rusty. So I agreed. It may not seem like a big deal, but this was kind of a huge accomplishment on Rusty’s part, to get me to do this.

This is how it went down after that: I told Rusty I’d be more comfortable with a duet, and that it’d be cool if he wrote a song like one of Beck’s. Then I went over to Rusty’s place one night to record and he played "Hubba Hubba" with his tentative guide vocals.

I remember that I almost asked for another song at first because the lyrics were so sexy and I was a little embarrassed by that. But I liked the song a lot—especially that famous opening—so I decided to go with it.

This was back when Rusty put girls in the closet to record, so that’s where I was—this was great for me because I would’ve been embarrassed back then for Rusty to watch me sing. He was outside in the room, on his computer, and I could hear him talk into a mic though my headphones. Rusty soon learned that I didn’t know a thing about music. He said I got the most takes of anybody. But he also learned that the secret to working with me is that I need to sing the song a bunch of times before I "get" it. Otherwise, I hit wrong notes and I get off rhythm and I also tend to sing things at the wrong time—starting lines too late. I got it, eventually, though—I was really excited by the final version. We danced like crazy and listened to it like five times. Then we ate pizza and I got to see Freddy Got Fingered for the first time.

Tell me about "Jenny," the second song you recorded for The Mnemonic Devices.

"Jenny" came about because I’ve always liked the way Rusty’s name sounded and liked saying it. Rusty was going to be my name if I was a boy, you know. Russell Geoffery. Anyway, when we recorded "Hubba Hubba," Rusty was making sure stuff worked so he told me to say something into the mic. I started saying his name in different voices. Then we said we should make a song where I just say his name over and over again, like an exercise in Brecht’s concept of "Verfremdungseffekt," or the alienation effect, where something becomes unfamiliar or loses its meaning.

I kept waiting to record the song, and then when I brought it up again one night at a USM Kafe night, Rusty acted like he didn’t want to have any references to himself on a Mnemonic Devices album. He said he’d do it for something else, and because I didn’t know, then, of all of his stringent rules for TMD, my feelings were secretly hurt. But he apparently mulled it over in his head and told me that we would do it since "Rusty" could be a character. I was psyched.

We recorded it real fast on an afternoon when I was skipping school, right before we went to Chalmette, LA for Rusty’s Espresso Yourself performance. I ad-libbed the whole thing, without even knowing what the music or Rusty’s opening would sound like. I just said his name into the mike with a ticking sound coming through on the headphones. When I say, "Salman Rushdie," that’s an inside joke about this former Center for Writers student who was once drunk and lispy and kept making the name "Salman Rushdie" sound like "Salman Rusty." When I say "Pastoral," that’s because Rusty was saying "Rustic" to me through the headphones. The last part of the song was my end of our back-and-forth of Rusty and its derivatives. The rest of it just sort of came out, I guess.

Then Rusty wrote the music and the intro and I was surprised at how romantic-sounding and sexy it ended up sounding when put with the music because, at the time of recording, it just seemed like a little joke. Of course, Rusty ultimately scrapped a lot of the repetitive "Rustys." I still laugh when I hear this song.

You were the sole female vocalist on The Mnemonic Devices’ Love Chewed Off Its Leg EP. Talk about your involvement with this release.

My involvement was pretty minimal, in my opinion. That’s how it is, I guess, with The Mnemonic Devices. I’m just a Devicette. Rusty does all the work and tells me what to do. So that’s how it rolled—he showed up at Christmas-time from Edinburg with his computer in the car and a keyboard and his mic stands. All the stuff was ready to go. He gave me lyrics sheets and guide vocals and I did as he bade. We recorded in my closet this time. And, again, it took a while for me to get it done right, but I did it.

What is it like working with Rusty Spell?

The hardest thing is that I don’t know any musical terminology—so when we’re doing The Mnemonic Devices stuff, it’s hard for Rusty to tell me what I’m doing wrong. And when we’re doing The Strawberry Explosion stuff, and I want him to change a song once it’s done, it’s hard for me to tell him what I need.

Otherwise, it’s a breeze because he’s so smart about how to do all that stuff. And he can make a song so fast.

It’s also just fun. It doesn’t feel like "work" ever to me. It’s just an extension of all the fun we have everywhere we go.

Do you think you will ever do a Carrie Hoffman solo album?

Sure. I’m not sure about how much I want to write songs after "Kissy, Kissy," but I think if I did a solo album, I’d want to write my own songs. I think if I chose cover songs, I wouldn’t have enough of a vision of how to make the song my own. I’d just choose songs that were already good, and there’s not so much fun in that. So, if I ever have the inclination to write an album’s worth of song lyrics, and could get the music in my head for them, sure I’d do it.

If you could learn one musical instrument, what would it be?

It’d have to be drums, even though I realize I’ve got no rhythm for them. I can’t do anything on beat. When I was a kid, I learned the basics of the piano—no lessons or anything, just from my mom and Grandma who knew how to play—and it didn’t seem fun to me. So the keyboard and piano are out. And the guitar just seems like a pain in the ass. Coordinating fingers and plucking strings. Blisters. That’s not for me. Playing drums is the closest thing to dancing, I think. Flailing your arms and bobbing your head and all. It seems like the funnest instrument.

How did The Strawberry Explosion come about? Give me your version of the history.

I can’t remember when we started talking about it. In the summer of 2002, Rusty and I once talked about doing an album called "Language Problems" or "Language Jokes" because a lot of our inside jokes are sort of pun-ny or rooted in language and we had an idea about an album of songs about language. That’s what happens when two English grad students hook up, I guess. We never did anything with it, though we always knew we wanted something of our own beyond The Mnemonic Devices. This way we could get out of their rigid rules and do our own thing. Some time between January 2003 and March 2003, the idea of The Strawberry Explosion came about in a phone conversation. I don’t remember anything about the conversation, though, unfortunately—and I have no idea if Rusty or I came up with the name. We knew we wanted a sugary pop band so the band name seemed to capture that and to capture something of the essence of us when we were together. We once ate strawberries outside the Liberal Arts Building at USM, and this girl walked by and said, "Those strawberries look good!" There is something of a good strawberry vibe going on. So that became our concept. We have always been a high concept couple.

Then in March of 2003, I went to Edinburg for spring break and before I went, I wrote "Kissy, Kissy" with the intention of recording it while I was there. But the time wasn’t right so we didn’t do it then.

A year later, I was in Edinburg again for spring break, and this time we were intent on recording a first single for The Strawberry Explosion. This was also the same time Rusty and I created the GLORY!blog, so lots of good things were happening and we were sort of solidifying the nature of the things we made together: how they should celebrate life and love and relationships and all the fun stuff we have. After hearing Rusty play his version of "Kissy, Kissy," I wasn’t exactly satisfied because he wasn’t capturing what we’d discussed. It seemed, to me, not to have the right old-fashioned qualities. (In fact, his TMD song "Poodle Skirt" would have been a really good TSE single, I think). So we decided to set the tone with Phil Spector’s "And Then He Kissed Me" – this turned out to be a really good choice. I could sing it really well because I’ve sung along with it on the radio all my life. Also, being an oldie, it automatically had that 1950s vibe we wanted. Once we had this down, we figured out how we wanted to release lots of packages and make lots of webpages and make lots of remixes. We’re still figuring things out, I think, and it’s fun doing this as we go.

Tell me about the single for "Then He Kissed Me."

We basically took an already perfect song with a certain old fashioned pop feel. The feel of two kids sharing a strawberry milkshake with two straws while sitting at a drugstore counter. Of course, Rusty took a while to make ours that way, too. I remember telling Rusty after the first version that it seemed like, "Then he kissed me. And then he dumped me." We had to figure out how to bring the candy goodness back into it. And we did that. It’s my favorite song so far, even though I wrote the new one and had a little more input into the music.

Tell me about the newest single, "Kissy, Kissy," the first song you wrote and recorded.

As I already said, I wrote it a long time ago and it got shelved for a bit before we finally recorded it as our second song. I don’t know anything about music, but I love catchiness, like I said before, and somehow I thought "Kissy, Kissy" would work. Rusty had to help me rearrange lines so it’d follow some pop song rules and patterns that I didn’t know about. We had lots of fun making it. We also have lots more ad-libbed stuff in the remixes than we did on "Then He Kissed Me."

What are The Strawberry Explosion’s plans for the future? Or any other musical plans you have.

Once we’ve got twelve or so singles released, we’re gonna put them on an album and release it. We’ll also do a DVD with a music video for each song. Or maybe a "best of" album with our favorite remixes. As far as other musical plans, I don’t have any in particular, but we’ve got tons of time so I’m sure I’ll do some solo stuff one day and Rusty and I will probably have more bands that we make up. Maybe we’ll do that Language Problems thing after all. Maybe we’ll do something with "Mewp," a song I wrote the music for and Rusty turned into a MIDI file last February. I also want to do something with DJ Rus as Special K with a C.

Go back to Carrie's interview with Rusty.