An interview with Robert DeLong

By: Grant Sharples

Electronic-indie artist Robert DeLong released his sophomore LP In the Cards back in late August. The self-proclaimed “computer nerd” from Seattle is on the rise of popularity in the realm of alternative music. He is currently on his own headlining tour with Big Data and Coleman Hell and performed at a multitude of festivals earlier this year such as Big Guava, SXSW, and LouFest. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to talk with Robert himself about his inspirations, his live performances, and his new album.

What inspired you to start playing music?

Music has always been a part of my life. My dad was a drummer so that was kind of how it was introduced to me. Music was always kind of around, but I was always interested in it even from an early age. Once I started playing drums, I took it up from there and started playing in punk and jazz bands and did music in school. Eventually, from being a computer nerd, I got into audio engineering and slowly but surely ended up here today.

What are you some of your musical influences?

Besides my dad inspiring me early on, I’ve always been a huge fan of Brian Eno. Growing up, I listened to a lot of things like [Pink] Floyd and The Beatles. Later on, I really got into things like Boards of Canada, and then I got into modern electronic music eventually. It’s kind of hard to trace any direct influences. I kind of take everything as it comes. I grew up in Seattle, so there was a sort of Death Cab [for Cutie]/Modest Mouse thing going on in the early 2000’s that really had a huge influence on my songwriting and whatnot. I’ve always taken all things that I’m listening to at all times and tried to combine them together into Robert DeLong soup!

Your live performances are always so intriguing and unique. How do you go about orchestrating your live show?

It’s just kind of evolved over a long period of time. I was always writing songs for myself, but it was about five years ago that this project sort of congealed into something similar to what it is now, and about three or four years ago that I really started taking it seriously and started thinking about what it was that I wanted to do. It really started with about two [production] controllers and a videogame controller. From there I just kept adding things and it just kind of slowly evolved. That was the big thing, getting out there and playing shows and seeing what people responded to, then trying to take that and figure out what was cool that I could do on stage that would visually represent what the sounds were.

What kind of software/DAW did you use when you were first starting out and what do you typically use now?

When I first started making computer music it was on Acid Pro back in 2002, but Fruity Loops was the first software I really kind of dug into which eventually became FL Studios. But it was right when I went to college that I switched to using Logic, and I’ve produced in Logic ever since, and then for live shows I use a combination of Logic and Ableton and a couple other third-party softwares. It’s a bunch of different stuff!

Describe your new album In the Cards. What kinds of themes and concepts does it adhere to?

The initial theme for the album came from the title track, “In the Cards” which was written about a year or year and a half ago. It all kind of stems from this sort of fascination with the artwork on tarot cards, and from there I started thinking more about why that was interesting to me and the ability of the human brain to take some sort of mythic concept and make up your own meaning and apply it to all sorts of things. I just started using that as a muse and thinking about how people use symbols to help them work through their life problems. So each song I kind of set out with the objective of having its own specific world and theme, like a tarot card would create an idea or narrative in someone’s mind. It was just a muse for me and that was kind of how I started writing all these songs and then I had a collection of songs that had a lot of similar ideas and themes.

When I was listening to the album, I thought the album artwork complemented the music nicely. Is there any significance behind the album artwork?

I work really closely with my graphic designer who puts it together. I initially had the idea of having this tarot-themed [artwork]. So his idea was to take some of the cards and redesign them into a modern, minimalist iconic approach. Then we started talking about what kind of aesthetic that goes along with [that idea]. We just kept coming back to desert imagery. So then we went out to the desert, and over the course of a really long day, just shot a bunch of really cool stuff in the desert, like the cover photo and the projection of me against a giant rock, which was really cool, but that was at like, four in the morning!

I feel like In the Cards is more song-based than your first album, Just Movement, which felt like one gigantic song that slowly introduced different ideas. How would you compare In the Cards to Just Movement?

I think that is the primary difference and that’s kind of the way I was coming from. With Just Movement, I had my whole lifetime to write. I was writing those [songs] over the course of five or six years and there wasn’t really any intention. It was just a collection of songs that I slowly pieced together. The intention with [In the Cards] was to create individual songs that held up on their own that didn’t need any partners in crime. That comes from a few things, like obviously today people usually listen to music [one song at a time]. This more just kind of goes back to my songwriter roots, and I think the other part of it is I really wanted to explore a lot more genres and a lot of different tempos, like there’s slow songs, there’s drum and bass, there’s some guitar, and it’s just kind of all over the place genre-wise on the album. For me, that was a lot of fun.

What song off of the album are you most proud of?

It’s hard to say. I’m proud of them all for different reasons, they all do very different things. “Jealousy” was a lot of fun because that’s a little bit outside of my norm, in a lot of ways it’s kind of bubbly and poppy. I love “Sellin’ U Somethin” because I love the vocal production stuff and that one was a lot of fun for me. I love getting into that kind of thing. I think the other one that turned out really cool was “Born To Break” just because I like the idea of taking a song and slowing it down until you can’t slow it down anymore!

What are some artists you’ve been listening to lately?

When I was writing the album I was listening to a lot of stuff like Paul Simon, Prince, [and] Flume. Right now, I’ve been touring more than I’ve been listening to music, but when I do listen to music, it’s a lot of instrumental electronic/techno kind of stuff. But I haven’t really been listening to much because when you’re touring and writing with music in your brain all the time, the only thing you ever want to listen to is something that’s weird and you can space out to and not have to pay too much thought [to].