Louis XIV - Slicker Than Your Average
It’s 12:30pm, and Jason Hill is just waking up. At first glance, it’s the stereotypical life of a rock-and-roll artist – rolling out of bed after a late night out. But it turns out their flight got in late and his periodic sniffles give away that he is battling a cold.
“The last month, I’ve been kind of sick,” he explains. “I came on tour to get healthy.”
That statement is one of many things that keep Louis XIV from being just another cookie-cutter rock band. Made up of Hill, guitarist Brian Karscig, drummer Mark Maigaard and bassist James Armbrust, the band breaks musical molds by experimenting with new sounds and refusing to stick with a classified sound. It’s been a mission of theirs from the beginning to make music that insists on innovation and evolution.
The original band joined forces in 2003, with childhood friends Hill, Karscig and Maigaard going to Paris for an impromptu writing and recording session. They originally garnered a bit of a buzz in the U.K. before their tracks made any noise in the states, but it was the grassroots radio play of the single “Finding Out True Love is Blind” from the band’s website that pushed the demand for a self-titled EP release. From there, it was just a matter of time before record labels came calling.
Five months after Atlantic Records won the bidding war, the band released their first full-length album in 2005, titled The Best Little Secrets are Kept. What followed was a lot of attention from audiences, though not necessarily for the right reasons. The risqué cover and controversial lyrics led to a ban from Wal- Mart shelves and having various shows cancelled. In Hill’s mind, it was much ado about nothing.
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In spite of the controversy, they toured relentlessly to support the album, eventually garnering as much recognition for their stage show as they were the album itself. In 2006, they took to the road with rock notables The Killers. The tour paired them with a band that was riding the wave of mainstream success into arena venues that seemed beyond imagination. For Louis XIV, it was a chance to see what the rise to success was all about. “Our first time on tour with them was when they first went from a van to a tour bus,” Hill recalls. “We’ve seen them grow from 50 people in Orangeville, California to 16,000 seats in Australia.” Hill brought his recording equipment on the road with them, filling the back of their bus with equipment so the band could write and record while on tour. Recording, it seems, is his passion, and allows him to stay grounded in a lifestyle that seems ultimately surreal. The feeling of creativity, he explains, is what keeps him sane, and he does it so obsessively because he enjoys the high of writing a new song and finding a new sound.
“I suppose if I really enjoyed bike riding, I’d want to be riding a bike every day too,” Hill suggests.
“The high (from creativity) lasts a very short time,” he continues. “That’s probably why so many musicians and artists do drugs – they’re looking for that same high, but they’re trying to find it artificially.”
He pauses for a moment, starts laughing, and says “Sorry – I’m just thinking out loud, I guess.” He does that often throughout the interview, and it provides further insight to a band that is obviously insightful and has keen observations of the industry and the world around them.
Those new sounds Louis XIV has found are the result of tinkering and toying with combinations of instruments and equipment. Rather than rely on Pro Tools, they use a variety of older microphones and amplifiers for the unique twist on the music. “I do very strange things in the pursuit of different sounds,” Hill explains. He recalls their studio session at Capitol, where they were recording strings for the song “Air Traffic Control” with musician David Campbell. “Instead of using Pro Tools, we spend four hours hooking up every tape machine we could find and basically playing them all at the same time, to create this sound,” he says laughing.
While it was an unconventional method, it was one that was well worth it to Hill and the rest of the band. Otherwise, he explains, “it wouldn’t have had the sound we were looking for.”. The recording process – both on the road and in the studio - led to a collection of well over 70 songs to choose from when it came time to put together Slick Dogs and Ponies. With Hill as the producer of the album, it often left him frazzled when trying to find a way to narrow down the tracks and find a direction for the album.
“It got to be too much to control,” he recalls of the experience. “I felt like a little kid in a cluttered, messy room.” Eventually, they narrowed down the list to 11 songs that made the cut. According to Hill, half of them were sure things from the beginning, but the rest of them were constantly changing – very much like their own sound.
“I like to investigate,” he explains. “It’s like playing hide-andseek with new sounds.”
Looks like they found that the formula for success is to always keep them guessing.
