Most commonly identified as a part of the Saddle Creek Records' emo-pop scene, Cursive has set itself apart with raw vocals, stinging lyrics and brash guitar. Started in 1995, Cursive has gone through several lineups and creative tangents, most recently resulting in its 2003 release,
Cursive comes to Madison April 20 at Club Majestic, 115 King St., along with Denali and Mike Park as a part of the Plea for Peace tour.
Lead singer Tim Kasher recently chatted with Cardinal Arts about politics, his sideproject, The Good Life, and the future of Cursive.
How did Cursive get involved in the Plea for Peace tour?
We did Plea for Peace last year and got to be good friends with Mike Park, who runs Asian Man records and also started Plea for Peace. We got to be pretty good friends with him and when this year rolled around, he asked if we'd be interested in getting involved again; and he said he was going to work with Music for America, which is going to be out with us help getting people set up to register to vote. We were interested in getting a chance to do something to help out in the election year. It's nice to be able to use the platform to get people to register.
Would you consider Cursive to be a liberal group?
Yeah, definitely.
What do you think about the political election this year?
I think the most important thing that I'm trying to get across is how important it is for anybody who wants to change the global-political climate, that this is the year we have a chance to do that. And that we all have to decide on one candidate. We all saw how close it was in 2000, and it's dangerous this year to not vote, if one is to be conscientious and is concerned about how the last four years have been run, then there couldn't be a more important year to vote. It couldn't be a more important year for all of us to set aside our grudges and pick one person, which would be John Kerry, obviously. I don't know how anyone else is going to be able to beat Bush. I'm kind of talking about Nader enthusiasts and anyone who is going to try go independent or libertarian.
Now you're on tour again, and it's a new lineup compared to earlier Cursive tours. What are the differences with older tours versus this current tour, on the road and live performances-is there anything you've noticed that is different?
I guess slowly over the years we've figured out ways to expand the music live. So now we do have a cello on tour. We also have some keys on tour, like piano and organ. We also have samples of certain parts of songs and just for another layer of sound on certain parts. Just things like that. We've been using drum triggers for a while to capture some of those production techniques that we do in the studio. It's been a slowly evolving process.
is the most recent Cursive album. What sort of response have you gotten to it and are you happy with the response?
I was really happy with the response, really surprised by it. It was phenomenal and way above and beyond what our expectations were. I guess that I would say I was just mostly flattered.
I noticed in lyrics you pre-emptively deflected criticism. Especially on songs like \Art is Hard,"" you address the listener directly. I was just wondering, in terms of the future of Cursive, how do you follow something like that up? Have you guys upped the bar to such a degree that there can never really be another Cursive record that is just a collection of songs?
Right, instead, the way I see it is that we've gotten a lot of that out of the way, a lot of that self-reflexivity or self-effacing subject matter. Which I think is important to bring up, hopefully it's interesting for the listeners, too. But it actually feels like even on the first half of the record gets into a lot of that and the second half does more story writing. So we were trying to make a point, too, not to cover those kind of details on the next record. We don't need to cover it anymore.
You have a new The Good Life EP, coming out soon and a full-length in August. How are these two pieces by The Good Life going to be different from your previous work with them?
In some ways I think it's quite a bit different. The EP is more straight-up the four of us jamming out. We kind of wanted to sound more like an old garage band. That's not the right term, but more stripped down. Just like the four piece we grew up listening to. But the album actually goes in a lot of different directions, I think just being a full length we want to make sure a lot was being represented. Probably the most significant difference is that we've taken out a lot of ... the electronics of what we've done in the past and gone to more of natural-sounding instrumentation.
You've been involved in The Good Life for a few years now. What kind of creative outlet does that provide you that you can't or don't get through Cursive?
I don't know if this going to be a chronic problem in my life, but at this point it definitely helps me to be doing both bands because I do one band about to the point I don't want to do it anymore then I move on to the next band. So I can keep a rebirthing process where I can still enjoy music because it keeps changing and I think I've become pretty tired of Cursive this year, but last year I was pretty tired of Good Life; now I'm ready to start Good Life up again. It just seems to keep working that way, just when I'm ready to break I can just move on to another project.
What are you listening to?
I bought the new Blonde Redhead. I like that a lot, I think that's good. There's that Tilly and the Wall, that Conor Oberst is starting a label called Team Love. So I have a copy of that first release. I like that.
Is there anybody that you would like to work with?
That's a good question but at the same time I feel like there are so many. There would be plenty of people that would be good to work with. I'd love to find a female vocalist to work with, it's something I've wanted to do for a long time, where I could maybe co-write with Amiee Mann. I think singing is a struggle and I like female vocals more than male vocals; I wish that I was a girl.
What's in Cursive's future?
We're probably practicing less and talking more about how can we make another record. Trying take it seriously as far as we don't ever want to put out the same record. Each record is a real challenge in that sense, we don't to put out again; we don't want to go back and rehash something older that we did. I think that a horn section keeps being brought up, as far as our early ideas. I have a hunch we want to keep going to raunchier sounds and influenced by the grotesque and that's what the horn section ideas are, just blast dirty, perverse music.
