Solo Bandita Hayley Thompson-King at t.t. the bears in Ocotober 2012
Banditas is an all-female trio that makes brazen Americana garage rock with rich vocal harmonies. I first heard Banditas on the radio: I had just moved back to Boston after quitting grad school and was working a terrible restaurant job as I figured out my next move. I was driving home from work one night when I heard Banditas on WMBR's Pipeline (which is an incredible radio program, if you've never heard it). Something about their sound gripped me immediately, and their album Save the Rats, which came out this fall, is one of my favorite records of the year. Banditas’ frontwoman, Hayley Thompson-King, and I chatted over Scotch eggs and beers about how she created her sound, women in rock, and who inspires her.
How did you meet the other Banditas?
I was working at the Middle East downstairs, and Molly was working at Zuzu. I was in the market for a girl. She and I started hanging out and would go into the practice space and do whatever came to our minds. We’d throw stuff out there and learn how to use our gear. We could play guitar but we couldn’t really work the PA and figure out what our sound was. We just kind of did that for a year and played a few shows in that time. It was really just the two of us. I had all these ideas, and Molly could sing anything; she has an incredible ear. I would sing, and she would do these harmonies with it, and it was just really natural and automatic. It was kismet in that way, because I knew that’s what I wanted. We played a show at the Midway, which was like our second show, and I would play guitar and she would play drums, and then we’d get up and switch, and it got to the point where that was really daunting and neither of us were very good. Then we had a series of guy drummers, but it didn’t fit with what we were doing. And I don’t want to say we have Candace just because she’s a woman, but working with three women is special; having that energy is its own thing.
Speaking of which---in other interviews I’ve read with you, gender inevitably always comes up. Do you think it’s important and empowering to talk about women in rock? Do you also find that “girl bands” are constantly being lumped together?
It’s nice when it’s not an issue, but I do get asked about it a lot, and that’s partially my fault: I do Girls’ Rock Camp and I’m very involved with women who are women-in-rock-n-rollcentric, so I can understand. I love being in a band with all girls. It just has a different vibe. I can write about certain things with them that I probably wouldn’t write about if it was me and a bunch of dudes. People will lump bands together that have the ladyfest thing going, and I’m not into that at all. If it’s just a pretty girl without a lot of talent, there’s something transparent about that. People know. There’s only a certain point you can get to with people if you are vapid and not writing about something important. Even if people don’t know to say it out loud, they’ll pick up on it. But I feel like there’s something people are connecting to with us.
You studied opera at NEC. How did you make the transition to rock?
In that world, I wasn’t what they wanted. I was just never right: I was too sluttily dressed at my audition, and my bangs were in my face, and it just never worked. I moved back to New York after grad school and was studying with my teacher at the Met and was singing professionally but just getting bored of it. So, I moved out to LA with nothing. I really just had an acoustic guitar and a dream…(laughs)
The classic story!
Yeah, totally. I went through a terrible break-up, and all I had was this room I rented with my friend, my guitar, and a car full of floor-length gowns. I just made myself sit and write a bunch of music. I couldn’t let my little dream be crushed; I just wanted to perform so badly.
Save the Rats has a fuzzy, lo-fi quality. How did you achieve that sound in the recording process?
You mean, shitty? (laughs) You can pay a lot of money for that shitty sound or just throw a microphone in the room and see what happens. We found this guy that we knew was good and had a studio and a tape machine. All we know is that we want to do tape. We recorded it on tape, and the recording studio we were in hadn’t been finished yet – it was just dirt, dust, and walls and a tape machine. We moved the mics around, and we wanted a really tapey, really far-away but also live band sound. We recorded it all at the same time, and we didn’t really do overdubs. Dana Colley [from Morphine] gave us some microphones to use, and people just helped us. When I told people, we really want to do this thing, we feel so strongly about using tape, we want to get these sounds, people who I look up to so much were like, yeah, I’ll help you; yeah, I’ll talk to you about my recording style. The vocals were done at a later date. We did all live vocals, but we had to redo the vocals at another studio.
Did you know that you would have to re-record the vocals going into it?
We weren’t sure. We set it all up like we were playing live and miced things separately. That way, there’s all this bleed and you’re getting the acoustics of the room, and you have a mic just micing the room. So, after recording it that way, the vocals just weren’t the performances we wanted. We were actually really freezing, because there was no heat and it was the middle of December, and we were just so cold and the vocals just sounded shitty. So we went back and re-recorded the vocals. Normally, when you’re mixing and mastering the recording, that’s when you get all the sound. And we did just the opposite: we got all the sound in the process of recording—moving the mic one inch this way or that way. And then when we mixed it just barely. We were cutting the tape and taping it together. It was old school. I would always do it that way. I actually just bought an 8-track tape machine online earlier today.
Your sound incorporates bits of different genres—garage rock, country twang, and classic Phil Spector-style girl group harmonies and drumming. What has inspired your sound?
I listened to a lot of Willie Nelson growing up, because my father was really into him. So that led me to 90s country, like Reba McEntire. I feel like I sing like that which could be good or could be terrible. That’s the kind of thing I had to listen to in my dad’s truck a lot—that 80s/90s country. I just love country Western—Dolly Parton, Crystal Gail, things like that. I got really into girl group music; it felt really accessible to me and easy for me to write, which is so funny because if you look back, it wasn’t really easy to write, it was pretty complex, so who do I think I am thinking this is easy? A lot of the bands I listen to now weren’t bands I listened to or even knew about when I was writing this music, so now I go back and listen to Greg Cartwright [of Reigning Sound] and I listen to Margaret [Garrett of Mr. Airplane Man], and I’m like oh my God. If I had listened to the more modern stuff that I’m now emulating, I would never have written it, but I’m glad I had the balls to be like, I’ve got this great idea; like I totally thought it was just something that I thought of.
I think that makes it more authentic in a way.
It’s hard when you feel like you’re not good enough to do something. At the time, I thought I was the first person to think of combining girl group/country/blues/whatever. I obviously was not. I’m now really struggling to write Album 2 because I feel like there are so many better musicians than me. I need to get back to that inspiration of finding the root of what I love. I just have to be myself and play. It was a lot of pain too. I was so devastated and heart broken when I wrote so much of that. I still get choked up singing some of those songs. I remember myself being in that pain.
What are you listening to now?
I love this band Victory at Sea. It’s music I got into when I first moved to Boston, so I’m just really attached to it. I’ve also been listening to a lot of older, finger-picking blues stuff, like Mississippi Fred McDowell. He’s amazing. He had this wife who sang in this really brutal, beautiful way. A lot of Dan Melchior. Also some punk. The drummer from my new band [Love-Up Time] is a total punk drummer, and he’s been sending me Supercharger and all of these other bands I haven’t heard before. So that’s what I’ve been listening to. It’s all random.
What’s next for Banditas?
Writing now. I’ve been playing a lot of solo shows. Everyone was like… okay, one person was like, oh my God, did your band break up? And, no, not all. And it’s up to me to get the song stems started, to plant the seed, and for me, touring and playing solo is the way I get inspired to think about new stuff and then I can bring that to the table. We have a 7” that’s coming out in 2013. We’re figuring out what to do now. It’s so hard because it took me 33 years to write [Save the Rats], and now it seems like I only have a year to write this second one. You feel like it just has to come out of you, but it’s still gestating. I have no idea, is the answer to that.
You can also see this interview in WZBC's zine.
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