Battle of Mice/Made Out of Babies
- Story by Anthony Bartkewicz
Julie Christmas tries to maintain her sanity fronting incendiary art-metal acts Made Out of Babies and Battle of Mice
A Day of Nights is not an easy record to listen to. I myself play it with the volume a couple of notches lower than anything else associated with Neurot Records, noise rock, or the word “crushing”—all things that, as a rule, sound better cranked. At polite volumes, the first full-length from Battle of Mice feels slightly less like looking into someone’s window or reading a diary I’m not supposed to. Through the writing and recording of the album, core Battlers Josh Graham of Red Sparowes and Made Out of Babies vocalist Julie Christmas went from being tourmates who hated each other, to bandmates in a romantic relationship with each other, and finally, to bandmates who hated each other again.
The product of their collaboration has lyrics like “I lie to you every chance that I get/ and I make it just close enough to the truth that you go for it every time” and, on “At the Base of the Giant’s Throat,” an unexplained, unsettling recording of a call to 911. (No comment, officially.) It’s not exactly a he-said/she-said Jane Doe, but tensions are obviously high in Battle of Mice. “I will not attack Josh’s character in print, but I can’t say anything nice at the moment either,” says Christmas. “I can only tell you what a fucked-up and vicious irony it is to be doing some of the best work of your life with someone who is [so] far different from you or anything you ever want to be or be around.”
Christmas e-mails from Brooklyn. Josh Graham is on tour with Red Sparowes in some part of the country where there are apparently no Internet cafés, and even cell phone service isn’t guaranteed. Christmas attempts to call or text-message Graham to find out when he might be able to respond to Decibel with no success. “Tour does all sorts of weird things to people,” she says, recalling how she and Graham first met. “Our respective bands played the South by Southwest Music Festival in 2005. It’s no secret that we hated each other immediately. When our two bands toured the West Coast later that year, things changed and we started to feel differently. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I feel like I become a different person on tour. Being trapped in a van for weeks, too much drinking, the scarcity of female company, and never ever being alone—which drives me to the point of having a nervous breakdown every tour—can cause you to form alliances and make friends and lovers out of people you ordinarily might not.
“Josh came to NYC when our bands played CMJ,” Christmas continues. “I think we really started to get together after we went in the studio to see what would happen if we tried to work together. It was supposed to just be for fun, but we both wanted to do it right in case it we wanted to keep the final product, so we asked [drummer] Joel Hamilton if he would be into it and we started to work.”
As the two wrote together, with Graham handling all of the music and Christmas taking care of the lyrics and vocal melodies, their relationship started to change. “The music was going far better than I’d ever expected, and we were spending a lot of time together in a positive situation. It was amazing. At least at first, that is.” She doesn’t go into specifics, but adds, “The album absolutely reflects the relationship accurately, if you consider the original timeline in which the songs were written. It is different from the order on the album. I have no regrets about anything that is on the album in terms of content.
“I like words because the possibilities are limitless,” she says, “which is rarely the case with people. Sometimes my lyrics are single words strung together to create a scene that is not necessarily reflected by the sentence as a whole. I never worry about making sense or making a point. When I listen to heavy music I sometimes get a feeling that the singers are sitting down with a pen and some paper, listening to the songs and writing something that they force to fit. This is especially true of guitar players who just decide that they can sing. There are millions of people who just don’t belong in front of the mic. It just makes the music fall short. I usually just listen until something hits me, and then make an effort to put it into words. I have listened to a song 200 times on a loop. On the other hand, sometimes it’s instantaneous.
“I think that the biggest difference between the way that I expressed emotional trauma and what you normally hear is in the abstract nature of the lyrics. If you listen to the album or read the lyrics, there is very little that would point to a romantic relationship going wrong, and that is because I never wrote about it. It’s hard to explain, but I work in a way that is almost entirely based on instinct and allowing myself to be carried away by something innate in the music itself. Most of the album reflects strong feeling, but our relationship has little to do with it.”
From: ‘Julie Christmas’
To: ‘Anthony Bartkewicz’
Subject: RE: DECIBEL interview questions: Battle of Mice
Date: Aug 27, 2006 12:45 PM
Hi,
I am sorry that we were not able to get Josh’s responses. He just got home, but I think it’s probably too late? We are usually much better about things like this, there were just a few unavoidable snags this time around. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Thank you,
Julie
With Graham still M.I.A., our talk turns to Made Out of Babies, Christmas’ main gig in Brooklyn. The new album, Coward, is a gnarly piece of noise rock that lazy music-journalists will almost certainly say sounds like some ’80s or ’90s Amphetamine Reptile band with Björk or PJ Harvey singing. “I don’t really get most of the [vocal] comparisons that are made,” Christmas says. “It seems like any female voice that sings over anything remotely heavy is fair game for me to be compared to. I have a whispery kid voice that I use sometimes that I think is chiefly the origin of the Björk references. The voice is actually meant to be my own take on a character from a British children’s story. She was Francis the Badger, and my mother used to play me records of the story being read. She was always doing things like running away to the space under the stairs and breaking her friends’ tea sets because they were better than hers.
“I am most definitely influenced and tied to noise rock. The first two songs I learned on guitar were Jimi Hendrix and Halo of Flies songs,” says MOOB guitarist Brendan Tobin. “Whether you like it or not, you are the sum of your influences. There’s a line on the last Neurosis record that goes ‘Whatever comes through me, I will be’—so, um, yes. I don’t know where we fit. The metal scene here is nearly non-existent, as far as any bands doing anything different. Plus we’re not really interested in the macho posturing that usually accompanies that scene. There is a big indie rock scene, but it seems we’re too harsh for them. Otherwise there’s all this dancey electro-what-have-you, and I think we’ll just stay over here in our dark little corner, thank you.”
I ask Christmas if there’s any crossover in lyrical themes between A Day of Nights and Coward. “I have the same approach to the lyric writing for both bands in the sense that I respond to whatever inspires me about the music itself. I don’t purposefully stay away from, or steer towards, any subjects in the attempt to differentiate the bands from one another,” she explains. “With Battle of Mice, Josh puts the songs together almost completely from percussion to guitars to ambient sound. I listen to them about 50 times and just naturally let some idea develop before I write. With Made Out of Babies, I’m usually in the room when the actual songs are being written and revised. I think both ways have some benefits and some drawbacks. In both bands, we stay flexible up until the songs are recorded. I have seen songs change drastically in the studio at the last minute.”
From: ‘Julie Christmas’
To: ‘Anthony Bartkewicz’
Subject: RE: DECIBEL interview questions: Battle of Mice
Date: Aug 28, 2006 12:21 PM
Thanks for all this, I know we would all rather this were going a bit more smoothly. I sent Josh the questions and an email to respond to you. I gave him your phone number, so he may be calling. Last night was his last show, and I stressed that you needed his answers ASAP. If he doesn’t get back to you today or early tomorrow, please let me know.
Thank you,
Julie
Back from tour with Red Sparowes, Graham confirms Christmas’ account of their partnerships: “A brief affair turned it around; it was a mess of alcohol and tour stress rolling into our two personalities and simultaneously stumbling into the music. Everything was basically an accident.”
I comment that Red Sparowes’ cinematic instro-rock is pretty dissimilar from Made Out of Babies’ gut punches, but he disagrees. “I think that they are in fact similar. The pretty parts in Battle of Mice could easily be worked into Red Sparowes. The difference is that I am playing all of the guitar tracks as well as multiple keyboard lines, so instead of me taking a part into a Red Sparowes practice and five of us collaborating on a sound, this is more just me working all of these instruments together. I wanted to definitely do something heavier as well, which is where I think Battle of Mice is very different—Red Sparowes is heavy but we like to stay away from the riffs, so this was a great outlet for me in that regard.”
Despite the fractured personal relationships involved in Battle of Mice, Graham promises “There will be more things to come. As far as what kind of music we would make now, I have no idea—which is the same for any inter-personal relationship we have. Where we each are in our own lives will reflect where the music is at that point. It’s all a stressful one, for sure. We’ll see how that shows through in the live performances.” Christmas adds, “We just wrote and recorded new stuff that I am in love with, so I know we can work together as long as we don’t have to be in the same room for too long.
“If we were speaking to each other, we might have been able to agree on some way to handle this whole thing privately and make it a little prettier,” she concludes. “We’re both strong-willed and passionate and we see no reason to make anyone think for a second that we are the best of friends or even close to it. I think it might make things more difficult if people assumed they could throw us into situations together lightly. Just about the only thing that we do agree on is how important the project is. Doing everything possible to make sure it gets off the ground and continues to be productive musically, is of the utmost importance. I think we both know what’s ahead of us. Being in a band means spending time together and we’ll figure it out one way or the other to keep going with Battle of Mice.”
