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Photo by: Alp Tigli
| Arriving late for our interview at Munich’s Feierwerk a few hours prior the band’s performance, Twin Shadow’s George Lewis Jr. is coolness personified. The six hours or so drive from Berlin where they played last night didn’t seem to faze him as he entered the room languidly. It’s obvious why the Indiedom is falling in love with him. He has charisma, style and flair like few others in a world where understatement tends to be equated with authenticity, a detritus from an era when independent music was a reaction to the glitz, glamour and decadence of the pop music landscape.
It’s tempting to label Twin Shadow on first listen. 1980′s new wave springs instantly to mind with bands such as The Smiths, Echo and the Bunnymen, Depeche Mode often thrown in as comparison. Closer listen though, reveals that there’s more to the music than just empty posturing or bandwagon jumping, which is really hardly surprising considering Lewis’ background. He played in a punk hardcore band, made music for a theater and a dance company, lived in Copenhagen and Berlin, and there’s also his Dominican heritage and upbringing in Florida. All of which undoubtedly informed his songs, whether it’s the lyrics, the instrumentations or the production. It made sense that Twin Shadow’s debut album Forget, which came out at the end of 2010, should be universally lauded. Despite the exterior though, Lewis is surprisingly soft-spoken, guarded even, especially at the start of the interview. Sitting in the hallway of the venue, W Music chatted with him about his music, his image, the tour and his future plans. W: Let’s just start with a basic question, how would you describe your music? Mmmm, I don’t know… I would just describe it as pop music, pop music that’s bass-line driven. I don’t know how else to describe it. W: Are you surprised by the reception of the album? It’s doing exactly what I hope it would do. W: You were that confident of the album. Yeah, of course. I wouldn’t have put it out. I wouldn’t have pushed it if I didn’t think it was good. I think it’s good. W: How long did it take you to write the album? Only three months, I think, to really get the songs down. And then it took a while, because putting out a record always takes forever, but the songwriting was about three months. W: Was it all written on the spot or was it something you’ve had for a long time? No, it was very immediate and on the spot. W: Your music, the whole 80′s influence, did you wanted to get that particular sound or is it something that just happened? It was really circumstantial. You know, I had some things at my disposal, like a Juno-60,probably the most popular synthesizer in the 80s. It just so happened that I was interested in synthesizers again, and I happen to have access to them.
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So that’s kinda how it all started. And once you started using the sounds you realize the sound sounds good with the 80s drum machine or whatever you know. So it wasn’t calculated, really, it was more just I had those tools. I’d just started using programming with computer and when you do a lot of programming, a lot of programming started in the 80s, at least the meat of it was in the 80s, and it was hard to avoid it but I didn’t think about it that much.
W: And does it annoy you that so many comparisons come up? I guess my thing is, I hear other records and I’m like ‘that sounds 80′s’. I don’t think my record sounds 80′s, but that’s just me. I don’t mind it, people can say whatever they want to, think whatever they want. W: Don’t take me wrong, but I thought it was maybe calculated in a way, because you have this certain style, your clothing, these images of yourself and the way you present yourself. You know, I think there are things that are calculated. My videos are very calculated, you know, I was trying to pay homage to that kind of 90′s reference. Thing is, when you mark it yourself in music, you have to calculate something. But I don’t calculate the making of my music, you know. If I need to sell it in a way, if someone says to me, “Okay George, you can sell a million records, we can put this label on it, 80′s new wave records.” If you tell me that and it’s true, that that will sell me a million records, I’ll do it. Because I don’t care what label you put on it, I don’t care if it’s calculated or not, the music should stand for itself. And if people think it’s a throwback, then that’s fine. If they enjoy the music, then they enjoy it. If they don’t enjoy it, then that’s okay too. W: Because a lot of bands now are going in the same general direction. I think that eventually you will find, and most people will find, that everyone’s exploring a bit of the past to try to come up with something new. And eventually it won’t look like people referencing the 80′s, because too many people doing it and then it’ll develop it’s own, it’ll have it’s own name or whatever. But this has happened in music forever and ever, you know… in the 60′s you have people doing songs that sounded like 50′s songs, and it was like un-cool. And in the 70′s people started doing 50′s songs, and it started to be cool again. So, to me it’s all the same. W: Your love of cars is pretty obvious (the Twin Shadow homepage had a special section dedicated to Datsun 280Z). Did it influence your music in some way? No, I’m really more of a motorcycle person. I actually ride a motorcycle. I watch a lot of motorcycle movies and stuff like that. I don’t know if it influenced my music, but I like the energy, that world. But motorcyclists mostly listen to bad music, so… I don’t know… I think the feeling of it definitely influenced me.
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