It’s a mystery as to why a band like As Tall as Lions isn’t more popular, headlining arenas and having opening-week sales of 300,000. In a time when bands like Coldplay are seeing endless success with songs such as ‘Viva La Vida’ and the like, Daniel Nigro, singer of the New York quartet, could only come up with one reason as to why they don’t share the same success.
‘It’s because we’re not cool enough,’ Nigro said.’
It’s all right, though. The band is hard at work on their follow up to the 2007 EP Into The Flood, as well as 2006’s eponymous album. For their coming album, You Can’t Take It With You, As Tall as Lions hopes to explore themes of letting go.
‘People have a tendency to hold on to a lot of things,’ Nigro said. ‘A lot of the songs deal with letting go of the past.’
The biggest inspiration behind the album, according to Nigro, was a book titled Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. The book is centered on the concept that humans are the only species in the world that uses more than it needs.
‘Humans create so much more than what’s needed. We control our environment and have taken the role of God into our own hands,’ Nigro said. ‘A lot of the record is the realization of that and getting away from it.’
In comparison to previous albums, the recording process will be both different and similar this time around. The band has been known to use several layers of music for their songs, and they continue to do so. One of the biggest differences will be that the sounds will be more focused on percussion.
‘Our last records were groove-oriented with the drums and bass. This record relies on auxiliary percussion, where there are several different types of percussion going on at once,’ Nigro said.’
He also explains the band’s need for a forward progression in sound and how not everyone is going to want to hear the same styles found on their previous albums.
‘The more time we spent writing the record, the more we felt like we needed to grow, and also realized that our fans grew too,’ Nigro said. ‘Fans that were 17 when they bought the self-titled album are now 20, and if we were to put that out again now, they might not like that. It took us a long time to get the songs to say that we made a progression.’
During the recording process, the bands ran into problems with their producer. The original producer didn’t particularly like all aspects of the band and was focused on the instrumentals. The band said they grew weary of him and would eventually hire another producer, Noah Shane.
‘To the old producer, if it can’t sound good on an acoustic guitar and be sung, then it wasn’t good. He worked with U2 and Bob Dylan and was telling us our songs were terrible, so we are all thinking that they sucked,’ Nigro said. ‘With (Noah), he was telling us that they were our best songs, and we were just saying ‘That’s what we thought!”’
As long as the group is making progress, they hope that their listeners will listen to their album all the way through, from start to finish.
‘The problem with today’s industry is that it’s very much centered around instant gratification. You throw it on your iPod and change albums and songs right away. Our music isn’t meant to be listened to (in) that way,’ Nigro said. ‘With other bands, the more you listen, the more you might think that it sucks. Not to be pretentious or anything, (but) our music grows in time with people.’
