Introducing the band: Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite interviews Tortoise

Stuart Braithwaite: Do you remember how Tortoise first started out?

Doug McCombs: It was kind of a long process for us actually. John Herndon and myself decided we wanted to play together, in the late 80s, and we did a little bit here and there. We weren’t sure exactly what we wanted to do but both were playing in conventional rock bands; so I think we knew we wanted to do something a little different, that touched on other music that we were into. Eventually we arrived at the idea of trying to be a bass player and a drummer, and that was it. When we started recording stuff I would overdub a bunch of bass parts and he would overdub a bunch of drum parts, and eventually we came to the conclusion there should be two drummers and two bass players. That’s kind of how it all started.

SB: Before you guys got together you all played in punk rock and hardcore bands, so when you started playing together and doing the kind of music Tortoise do, did you feed on that musical upbringing as well? It almost feels like that punk and hardcore was thematically about breaking the rules, but actually the music tended to be pretty organised; you almost took that ethos and applied it to the music itself.

DM: Definitely. Members of Tortoise, excluding Jeff Parker, all sort of came from this 80s background, from what you would call punk bands. I guess a better term for it was probably “underground rock bands”. I never really played in a hardcore band. My bands were more like X and Television. By the time we got to Tortoise we had decided we wanted to incorporate all these things. Anything we could think of. That was the only thing we made a decision about. It could be anything.

SB: I remember you telling me about how you met had something to do with skating?

DM: My skating career was over by the mid 80s because I was concentrating on playing music, and skateboarding had been such a huge thing in my life that I didn’t think there was room for both. John Herndon met Dan Bitney probably around 85 or 86 in Wisconsin where Dan lived – he was just skating down the street and Dan was like: “Hey do you want to go skate this ramp?” and then they both found out they played in rock bands and became friends.

SB: After the band had been going for a while you started adding more electronic elements. Earlier records were pretty organic, tape loops and spoken word stuff. You seemed to embrace the new 90s sequencing. Do you remember first experimenting with that?

DM: One of John McEntire’s focuses at college was synthesis. So he was always the guy who was into modular synthesisers – we all were to a degree, but he was the first who knew how to get his hands on the stuff. One of the first synthesisers we used in Tortoise was the EMF Putney, an early 70s synthesiser. We even used that for some sequence on the first Tortoise album. The possibilities were starting to present themselves as sampling and digital and editing programs [came in]. We could take the band’s writing process and explore it to where we could write parts of songs and stitch them together using editing programs. That wasn’t really until our third album, and even on our second album all that weird stuff is edited on tape.

SB: When you guys were making Millions Now Living Will Never Die, did you realise that record was going to have the impact it did? It’s almost a game changing record.

DM: I don’t know. I mean, when the first Tortoise album came out we all had a feeling that we were on to something interesting. Having said that I don’t think we thought anyone would like it. We thought some of our friends might, and there might be some people interested in a minor underground way. But anyway, we got to start making Millions and we really were just excited to be assembling this thing. We put our insecurities aside and were all really excited and confident we were on to something really cool. And it had no bearing at all whether people would be interested in it.

SB: You also get to the point where you don’t really care. You’re so happy with what you’re doing, that what other people are thinking about it is either a pleasant surprise or a mild annoyance.

DM: It’s hard to say whether we would have maintained that level of confidence and been able to really progress without the feedback we got, though. There’s no way to undo that feedback. Once we finally released these records and realised people were into them it was really gratifying – it helps you move forward. It’s like a signifier in some way that says: “All right, I wasn’t wrong.”

SB: The last thing I heard from Tortoise was the music you did for a horror film [Eduardo Sánchez’s Lovely Molly]. It’s a really great and creepy film.

DM: Yeah, I like that movie a lot. It’s such a great opportunity, something we’d been hoping to do for years and then to have that movie not really taking off…

SB: We’ve always done things that haven’t happened. And it seems like the world of music is fickle, but the world of movies is brutal...

DM: I’m starting to realise that. When you figure out how many movies are out there that you’ve never seen because they were never promoted, just shelved by the film company, that’s true. It’s way more ruthless than music. But with Sánchez, who made one of the most iconic films of the 90s [The Blair Witch Project], and who makes this other great film … I thought, “Oh, I see this will be Tortoise’s entrance into the world of film music.” This is going to be our chance to do more of this stuff. But it just seems to have remained pretty underground. The film’s great and creepy – it was really super-gratifying to work on something that intensely and have it turn out the way it did.

SB: Are you working on new music?

DM: Well the new Tortoise album is probably as of today finished. And that’s not coming out until 2016. So we’re not really touring until that. We have a few things coming up and something in the fall but Eleventh Dream Day, the band I’ve been in for exactly 30 years, had their new album is out in July.