SAINT AGNES on Your God Fearing Days Are About To Begin and The Rasmus Tour. Exclusive Interview with Gino Alache

Just over three months after releasing Your God Fearing Days Are About To Begin, Saint Agnes are preparing to bring their new material back to North America as special guests of The Rasmus, including a September 8 stop at The Opera House in Toronto.

In this exclusive written interview with Gino Alache for Rockum, Kitty A. Austen and Jon James Tufnell look back at how listeners have responded to the record and reveal some of the decisions that shaped it. Austen explains how distance from the recording process helped her recognize power as the connecting theme running through the album, while the pair discuss rebuilding “The Beast,” the decade-old idea that finally found a home in “Song For Mia,” the battle to save “The Ghost,” working with mixer Jim Pinder and the band’s growing confidence with melody.

The conversation also moves from the studio to the stage. Saint Agnes discuss rebuilding songs for live performance, their refusal to surrender creative control, the technical work behind their shows and how they approach playing to audiences discovering the band for the first time on the upcoming tour with The Rasmus.

For Toronto, Austen leaves little doubt about the intensity Saint Agnes intend to bring to The Opera House: “We will play like it is our last ever show. I guarantee that.”

1. Your God Fearing Days Are About To Begin has been out for almost three months now. Looking back at the response so far, what feedback from fans or critics has meant the most to you personally?

Kitty A. Austen: The fact people have dug deeply into the record, beyond the singles. We write for the record to be a complete listening experience, and it feels like this record has connected in that way.

2. Has there been one song from the album that listeners have connected with much more strongly than you expected? What do you think they found in that particular song?

Kitty A. Austen: My favourite song on the album is The Beast. It is so personal and was so cathartic to create. It seems people are responding to my philosophy on grief, as well as the simple, unfiltered authenticity of a song like that. My favourite music always has a ring of truth to it, like I can hear their heart loud and clear. I like to think people have found the same for us.

3. Now that you have had some distance from the recording process, is there a song on the album that you hear or understand differently than when you finished it?

Kitty A. Austen: The whole album! We knew as we made it that all the songs lived together; they felt like natural partners to each other, even when they were sonically very different. Despite this, I couldn’t see why. I couldn't hear the overarching theme until we had some space for reflection. And then I saw it: the album is all about power.

The ‘God’ of the title is shorthand for anything all-powerful that controls you in some way. The song The Ghost is all about the power taken from you when people you trust ignore you or render you powerless by denying your existence. Get Them Out is about the power negative self-talk has, how those thoughts bring you to your knees. The Beast is about the power of grief, and how making friends with it in some way allows you to create beauty from something horrific.

Jon James Tufnell: We also realised all the songs had something hopeful about them. There’s not total nihilism in the lyrics; even at their darkest, there is hope, and musically we reflected this by using major chords at times when the more normal rock thing to do is go minor.

4. What was the very last thing you changed on Your God Fearing Days Are About To Begin before deciding the record was finally finished?

Kitty A. Austen: That is a great and unique question. Two significant ones spring to mind. The first is taking the drums out of the first half of The Beast. It was originally a more typical rock song in some ways, but as soon as we muted the drums and allowed the vocals to have room, it came into clearer focus. We quickly rewrote the music around the vocal, and it isn’t until the second chorus that it comes back to where we originally started sonically.

The other is the title of the record. We had other ideas, but once we really understood the nature of what we had made, it seemed the most fitting title.

5. Which song changed the most between its earliest demo or idea and the version we hear on the album?

Kitty A. Austen: The Father, The Son & The Holy Beast started almost like a club song. It was entirely minor and had a kind of Korn-style riff as the main hook. None of that really survived the revisions we made. We just kept chipping away at the marble until we set the angel we saw inside free.

6. You have spoken before about keeping old musical and lyrical ideas until they eventually find the right home. Is there something on this album that actually began years ago and only now became the song it was supposed to be?

Jon James Tufnell: The oldest is probably the chorus to Song For Mia. I’d had that lyric floating around in my head for at least a decade and would find myself singing it from time to time, but it never had a home.

When we were writing the song, I’d built a very basic verse around the drum groove, really just to give Kitty something to react to. When it reached the chorus, I instinctively sang that old line. Kitty immediately jumped on it, gave it a melody, and suddenly it had a context within this song about nostalgia and childhood friendship. It was strange hearing something that had existed in my head for ten years finally become what it was supposed to be.

Get Them Out has some history too - the main riff and chorus were written almost immediately after we finished Bloodsuckers - but Song For Mia definitely wins for the oldest surviving idea.

7. Jon has said that “The Ghost” was a song he had to fight for because the original idea did not immediately convince everyone. What finally happened that made the rest of the band realize the song was worth pursuing?

Kitty A. Austen: Jon has so many ideas that sometimes it is overwhelming!

Jon James Tufnell: I always have a lot of ideas, and for them to mean anything I have to be in love with them. So, for the brief time they are my most recent idea, they always feel like my best and possibly last ever idea, so I fight for them all.

This means the rest of the band are used to me saying, “Here’s my best idea ever!” I think it comes across like the boy who cried wolf, and it just got lost. So I figured out how to play it on piano, as there was one right by the control room, and when there was a break in recording I just forced everyone to hear me sing it and play it once. Suddenly everyone was like, “Actually, yeah, that does sound pretty cool.”

8. Which song caused the biggest disagreement between the members of Saint Agnes while making the album, and did that disagreement ultimately make the song better?

Kitty A. Austen: We really didn’t disagree very much. If one of us felt something wasn’t working, usually everyone else could hear it too. The disagreement, if there was any, was more about how to fix it. We might all agree that a section wasn’t good enough, then come up with four completely different solutions.

I think we’ve learned to be quite ruthless about that. Nobody gets to keep something just because it was their idea. The song wins. We just keep pulling it apart and trying things until suddenly everyone in the room knows it’s right.

9. Jim Pinder handled the final mix after you had already built the identity of the record. Was there one specific thing he changed or brought forward in a mix that made you hear your own song differently?

Kitty A. Austen: The beauty of Jim’s mix is that he really didn’t change much at all. He just made it all clearer and allowed the layers to be more accessible to the listener.

Jon James Tufnell: I remember hearing the drop where the drums come in and the solo begins in Gods of War, and sonically it was so much bigger than what we had sent him. He didn’t add anything; he just made what we had created do what it was meant to do.

10. What was the most difficult sound, arrangement or production idea on the album to get exactly right?

Jon James Tufnell: The Beast. Once we had stripped away the drums, we had so many ways to present the vocal. Was it with grunge guitar chords? That was how Kitty had first played the song to me. Or maybe solo piano? We tried so many ideas, and each of them worked, but eventually the cold, inhuman synth coupled with the very human piano won.

11. “Good Boy,” “The Ghost,” “Song For Mia” and “Get Them Out” show very different sides of Saint Agnes. Which track do you think points most clearly toward where the band could go next?

Kitty A. Austen: I think that implies we will narrow our focus in the future, but I don’t think we will. Those songs all live together in my mind where we ended up from a previous era. So the next era might well be as diverse. We are already working on ideas, and I think they feel like a natural extension from this record.

Jon James Tufnell: We are enjoying challenging ourselves with simplicity - how to tell the same story but with fewer song sections. Whether the final versions remain that way, only time will tell.

12. When you compare this album with Bloodsuckers, what are you able to do musically now that Saint Agnes could not have done convincingly three years ago?

Kitty A. Austen: I think our confidence with melody has grown. I really wanted to sing more on this record, rather than just rage. Bloodsuckers was such a genuine expression of my inner life at the time that to attempt something similar would have been fake. This time I was hearing more melody and seeing myself onstage emoting through melody.

13. You’re about to tour North America with The Rasmus. When you are supporting a band with its own established audience, how do you decide which Saint Agnes songs give somebody who has never seen you the clearest introduction to the band?

Kitty A. Austen: It’s always difficult to decide, and we tend to tweak the set slightly every night depending on how the previous show felt. It’s important that the set reflects where we are emotionally as well. If we’ve had a particularly anger-inducing day, you’ll probably get a more intense song selection.

Jon James Tufnell: Ultimately, we don’t really try to second-guess what somebody else’s audience might want from us. Whatever songs we choose, the same thing tends to come through: this pissed-off punk energy coupled with something much closer to joy. Even the ballads somehow have that.

I think the clearest introduction to Saint Agnes is just to be completely ourselves for 40 minutes. If we try to tailor it too much to who we think is standing in front of us, we’d probably lose the thing we’re trying to introduce them to in the first place.

14. The first Canadian date is in Toronto at The Opera House. When Saint Agnes walks onstage that night, what do you want someone discovering the band for the first time to understand about you before the set is over?

Kitty A. Austen: That we live this. The art, the music, the band life. We have all been doing this for a long time, with no support, grinding it out on the road and making the music we believe in, with no regard to short-lived trends. We will play like it is our last ever show. I guarantee that.

15. Which song from Your God Fearing Days Are About To Begin is the most difficult to perform live, and what makes it challenging?

Kitty A. Austen: The Beast is emotionally brutal for me. It is such a personal song, dealing with grief, but it also makes it unbelievably rewarding and cathartic.

Jon James Tufnell: For me, it's Gods of War. I love the song and the space we have created in it. It's just in an unusual key, and the solo and end melody modulate from the major scale as they ascend to the minor as they descend. I always like to leave a little room for variety and live interpretation, and making sure I’m mentally moving with the key changes is challenging.

16. Has any song from the new album had to be rearranged or approached differently for the stage because the studio version simply could not be reproduced in the same way live?

Kitty A. Austen: We always change things up a little for the live show, extending sections, adding or removing layers, all dependent on what we want to hear and also what we can physically play on stage. The last couple of minutes of The Beast on record rely on an unnatural mix, where the drums fade away and the soft vocals rise up to dominate. There’s no way to do that live, so we had to think about how to create the same feeling the recording gives, but in a playable way. It has resulted in chaotic guitars ramping up and overtaking everything, and it is one of the most thrilling parts of the set to play.

Jon James Tufnell: Even with the electronics on the record, we are, at heart, a live band, and most of the songs transitioned fairly easily from studio to stage.

17. With three albums of material now available, is there an older Saint Agnes song that you perform very differently today because the band itself has changed since it was recorded?

Kitty A. Austen: We haven’t revisited Silvertown for a long time. I’m very proud of that record, but it feels like too much of a mental shift in a 40-minute set to accommodate those songs. The two EPs and Bloodsuckers all have material we regularly play, and we do tend to reinvent it. We played The Meanest Little Kid In Town a while ago and turned it into an even quieter, more sinister song that then took off into chaos.

Jon James Tufnell: We are a band that is always looking forward. We even considered playing some of the stuff we are writing now on this upcoming tour, as we like to go with what we are most excited by. But we have decided it is not quite ready yet.

Kitty A. Austen: We are not a big enough band to have a crowd just there to hear a hit from the first album. This means we are free to play whatever we want.

18. What is one part of the current Saint Agnes live show that takes far more preparation or work than the audience probably realizes?

Jon James Tufnell: The tech is complicated. We want to have hands-on control of everything people are hearing, which means Andy controls loops and samples from the kit, while George and I have access to all the changing sounds we need to trigger on keyboards. Making that work properly is a lot of work, but it makes for a more dynamic show, rather than being like a lot of bands that essentially just dance to pretty much entirely pre-recorded music. If time allows, we also pre-program our own light show and run visuals on screens. We would rather leave no stone unturned in creating a great experience than make life easy for ourselves.

Kitty A. Austen: We are still a DIY band. We are technically on a major label, but in this day and age that means very little, especially for control freaks like us. We don’t like anyone else’s fingerprints on our music, art or videos. So all those jobs that could be done by other people, we insist on doing ourselves. It is a lot! But if you want to be proud of what you made, how can you do that if half of it is done for you?

19. You have several Canadian dates on this run. Do you normally keep the same set from city to city, or can the audience, venue or atmosphere of a particular night actually change what Saint Agnes does onstage?

Kitty A. Austen: Usually the basic flow of the show will stay the same, starting in a certain way and building to a specific feeling for the close. But how we get there can change a lot depending on our mood, how well certain songs have connected, and even whether the venue itself has a different vibe.

20. Finally, is there anything else you’d like to say to the readers of RockumWeb.com?

Kitty A. Austen: Our motto is we are here to have a bad time. Come see us and have a bad time with us.

Interview conducted by Gino Alache – Founder and Editor of RockumWeb.com

Rockum Radio Show – CFRC 101.9 FM, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

Related Rockum Coverage:

Saint Agnes Release 'Get Them Out' With Visual Homage to Nine Inch Nails Ahead of New Album

Saint Agnes Share 'The Ghost' and Introduce 'Your God Fearing Days Are About To Begin' Album