Digizine Interview - Summer/Fall 2008 Issue #16

Flight of the Conchords Cruising Altitudes
by Bill Murphy

Is there any reason why a pair of scraggly, guitar-toting New Zealanders should be able to channel the nerdy quirks and quibbles of the downtown boho lifestyle in New York City?  No doubt that's the question HBO execs were asking themselves when the comedy series Flight of the Conchords made it's quiet debut last year.

Now a certified smash, the show is gearing up for it's second season, and the FOTC brain trust -- partners-in-crime Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie -- have just released their first full-length album on the Sub Pop label.  Through it all, with the expert backing of record producer Mickey Petralia and video editor James Thomas, the Conchords have relied on the Digidesign and Avid equipment to the keep the party airborne.

"It's been pretty crazy," McKenzie says from Los Angeles, where he and Clement have been holed up working on themes and musical sketches for then new half-hour episodes.  "
I think we were a real surprise to a lot of people.  It's such a different experience now from when we were first touring, when no one knew what our songs were about.  We absolutely never intended to create a television show out of the band -- all the songs and characters, and the style of the show, developed from us performing live over the years."


Although there's always a shred of luck involved in any breakout comedy hit, it's easy to see why Flight of the Conchords struck such a nerve with American audiences.  The show is filmed in and around New York -- primarily Manhattan's Lower East Side, and in some of the more hipster-gritty enclaves across the river in Brooklyn -- and the duo's deadpan, hilariously artless take on a starving musician's existence is so offbeat and left-field that it just works.

Plus, their songs are exceedingly clever, mercilessly incisive, and down-right funny.  From the absurdist Serge Gainsberg-like ramblings and the cheesy rhythms of "Foux du Fafa" to the side-splitting raps and drum-machine beats of "Hiphopopotamus Vs. Rhymenocerous," the Conchords can dish out multiple musical styles on cue to skewer their favorite pop icons, including David Bowie, Prince, Barry White, and Hall & Oates.

When it comes to realizing the musical element of the show, FOTC turn to studio genius Mickey Petralia, who has worked on albums for the Butthole Surfers, John Cale, Luscious Jackson, and Beck, to name a few.  Petralia manned the controls for the Conchords' Grammy-winning 2007 EP The Distant Future, and reprises his role on the new album, which features more refinded versions of several songs that have made it to the TV screen in the music video segments written into each episode of the show.

"Mickey has always been good at bringing life to our tracks," Clement says.  "When we first started to record stuff ourselves, we though we'd put an album out, but it would always just seem lifeless, so we gave up and went on traveling aroudn and playing live.  But with Mickey, all that changed.  He's great at programming beats and helping us flesh things out -- he's really funny, too, so when me and Bret are out of joint, he always cheers us up."

Digging in with Demos
Although some tracks on the FOTC disc (most notably, the Pet Shop Boys nod "Inner City Pressure" and the Prince-ly "Most Beautiful Girl In The Room") were created from scratch in the studio, much of the material when through a demo phase first.  Petralia's home studio, which is outfitted with Pro Tools|HD and a Digi 002, served as the creative laboratory for Clement and McKenzie to get busy without any distractions.

"We used to do our demos on Mboxes,"McKenzie says.  "On the road though, it was always a different story.  I had this bag full of cables, an Mbox, and a microphone, but to be honest, I never really got anything done on tour.  Theoretically, it should have worked, but it seems that whenever we've been touring, we're too burnt out to get any proper demos done."

This time around, the Conchords found themselves with a solid stretch of time before shooting began in New York.  The intention was to finish the album with Petralia in California -- a tall order that turned out to be a little too tall.  But the group was able to build up a solid stash of Pro Tools-redy demos to work from.

"A lot of them revolved around beat boxes or little percussion rhythms and loops that they had made," Petralia recalls.  "Then we'd just start piling on.  For the most part, I do all my beats, programming, and chopping in Pro Tools.  I was a DJ before I got into this, and I have a pretty vast vinyl collection, so once we get an idea of what we want temp-wise, we'll map something out with a beat box -- just a click, a kick, and a snare -- and then we'll go into the library and start pulling up beats.  I think we only used a straight loop on one song.  Usually I would go in and fine-tune and chop the hell out of it -- a kick here, a snare there, a hi-hat there -- and build our own beat."

On the rare occasion when the original demo survived all the way to the mixing phase, it was primarily because Petralia couldn't top the original in-the-box arrangements with his arsenal of exotic analog outboard gear.  Case in point: "Business Time," a faux-sexy funk grind backing Clement's insanely funny Lou Rawls-meets-Barry-White rap.  The song was originally released on The Distant Future, and is also folded into the new album.

"We've already started on the second season,"Petralia says, "and I'm fully aware of the fact that we're mixing as we're going.  That's just the nature of working with Pro Tools -- you're constantly building the mix as you go -- and the original rough mix we did on 'Business Time' really held up.  I tried all kinds of tricks with compression and EQ to break it out on the console, and I still couldn't get it to where I wanted it.  So that blew me away."

Too Much Pressure
After the demo phase, FOTC continued work in Hot Pie Studios in Pasadena, where Petralia is a partner.  The studio is tricked out with the lastest Pro Tools HD software, a Digi 002, and a full load of Digidesign and third-party plug-ins.  Once filming began, music production headquarters moved again, to New York's Pilot Studios.

With two sperate music-recording workflows going -- on for the TV show (11 episodes in a tight five-month schedule) and one for the studio album -- Petralia and FOTC were busy, to say the least.  Once an episode's camera rushes were digitized at the standard 14:1 Avid resolution and an edit was turned over using versions of the pre-mixed music, QuickTime and OMF files were exported to Petralia so he would have a locked picture to follow for the music's final mixes.

"Mickey would often show up on the dub stage with the finalized tracks," says James Thomas, the show's main editor.  "We would cut to another version of the track before that, obviously, so the temp and everythign would be the same, but they'd be working on the mix and the instrumentation right up until the day before the episode's final mix was done."

These time contraints meant a lot of frequent flyer miles for Petralia.  "They would be filming five days a week," he recalls.  "I would fly out for the weekends, and we'd do music for the upcoming two weeks.  We'd fine-tune everything -- vocals, synths, guitar parts -- at Pilot, and then we'd have it on the set on Monday for the show they were filming for that week."

On Flight of the Conchords, many of the duo's songs provide the grist for music video departures fromt he storyline that usually occur twice in each episode.  The format offers a wide-open vehicle for visual experimentation -- particularly when the song itself is as suggestive as "Inner City Pressure," which came together after principle photography was already underway.

"We had an idea to do a song just about being poor," Clement explains, "because our characters in the show are poor.  Originally, it ws going to have a Grandmaster Flash hip-hop feel, but then our director James Bobin [best known for his work with Sacha Baron Choen on Da Ali G Show] wanted to do a Pet Shop Boys kind of video.  We had a look at it and we liked the sound, and liked the subtle English rap as well."

The video segment for the song appears in Episode 2, "Bret Give Up The Dream." It's a gritty nighttime street treatment of image melts, sequenced by Bobin and Thomas, that makes use of such Sapphire visual effects as BlurMotionCurves and SwishPan.  From a sonic stand-point, the song evolved over time to incorporate nuances that weren't in the TV version.

"We started with the loop and then overdubbed synth pads, synth bass, and some percussion," Petralia says.  "But in the end we thought it was too derivative for the show.  We wanted to make it a little groovier and organic, with an electric bass.  There's vocoder in there as well.  And the guys are really particular about getting their vocals just right, so we tweaked those a few times after the show was cut."

The Whole Wide Room
For all their success as comedy duo, it's sometimes easy to forget that Clement and McKenzie are compelling songwriters.  Perhaps no other Flight of the Conchords song bears that out more than "Most Beautiful Girl in the Room," a blisteringly tongue-in-cheek acoustic send-up of Prince that also conjures a bit of Midnite Vultures-era Beck.

"That was funny in the studio," McKenzie recalls, "because Jemaine and I are not particularly competent musicians.  We can get it together with the singing, but Prince is probably one of the hardest people to emulate in the studio.  So we would listen to our track, and then we'd A/B it against a Prince track to see what the difference was.  That was probably one of the most disheartening experiences.  We thought we had a bit of a groove going, but flip to Prince and he made ours sound like the crude children's rant!"

Petralia helped nudge the song closer with some instrumentation idea and mixing tricks.  "First we put a really warm-sounding Al Green kit over the original beat-box loop,"
he says.  "We wanted it to build, so we made our own tom loop -- a Timmy Thomas 'Why Can't We Live Together' kind of thing -- and then at the end we go to our kit.  I'm really with the drums on that one.  I do a lot of drum bus compression, so I used the Bomb Factory 1176 plug-in quite a bit."

The song presented further challenges when Petralia and FOTC split for Wellington, New Zealand, for the album's final mixing phase.  "The studio was pretty limited," Petralia says, "but I use Altiverb and the Digi delays a lot for mixing anyway.  Sometimes I'll put really quick delays on stuff just to give it some room ambience.  When we originally tracked 'Beautiful Girl,' I basically had an SM57 mic on both Jemaine and Bret, between their vocals and the guitar.  The song starts with the guitar in the room, and you can hear the drums coming through the speakers and the air in the acoustics, and it sounded really loose.  The musical elements changed a few times after that, but we really liked that sound, so to re-create it I used one of the Digi delays on Bret's guitar."

With work already started on season two, Flight of the Conchords are looking forward to honing their collaborative edge with Petralia.  "The tunes were getting better and better the longer we were in the studio," says McKenzie, "so I feel like now we're in a good position to hit a new bunch of tunes.  We'll probably have even more fun in the studio creating ideas.  'Inner City Pressure' ws a song like that -- I feel like it opened us up in a way that the older songs didn't.  We would never have done that song in a comedy club, because it relied so much on the studio.  So I think this next round will be interesting."