Q&A with Roman Candle

Local band returns home for Pack Howl

Roman Candle formed in Chapel Hill in 1997, a family band in the truest sense: brothers Skip and Logan Matheny playing alongside Skip's wife, Timshel.  After 10 years in town, they picked up and headed off to Nashville, TN, leaving behind their best friends and favorite restaurants.  Earlier this year, the band released their first album in three years, Oh Tall Tree in the Ear (Carnival Recording Company), to outstanding reviews: PASTE magazine gave the effort 89 of 100 stars.  WKNC General Manager Mike Alston caught up with Skip as he was readying for the trip to Raleigh to play the Pack Howl concert Friday night on Lee Field at 7 p.m. Additionally, WKNC Promotions Director Kieran Moreira, also known as DJ Special K, will be interviewing Roman Candle Friday at 2 p.m. on his show on WKNC 88.1 FM.

Technician: Hey, Skip. Anything keeping you busy these days besides the band?

Matheny: I've been interviewing people, I started this series on americansongwriter.com called "Drinks With" where I interview songwriters about songwriting, an artist talking to artists.  I've been doing Q&As with [songwriters] and I try to stay out of the way and let those guys talk.

Technician: What do you think about playing a homecoming show and opening for a comedy tour?

Matheny: Yeah, it should be great -- the only thing we would have hesitated at would be if they had wanted us to play two hours and have people slow dance or something.

Technician: It's been three years, right, between the last album [The Wee Hours Revue] and the newest one [Oh Tall Tree in the Ear]?

Matheny: Yeah, the other one came out in 2006 on V2 [Records, a subsidiary of Universal Music Group].

Technician: So I want to talk a little bit about the album. You wrote a lot of this when touring with The Wee Hours Revue, right?

Matheny:Yeah, we started writing it….we'd had almost three years where we were shelved on a major label before "Wee Hours" came out, so we had a ton of time to write music while we were waiting for that record to come out ...Once we started to travel in support of that record, we went to England in February 2007 to play some shows and sort of stuck around and wrote in a converted horse stable in east Yorkshire. We started writing in a more organized, intentional fashion on the next record, which would become "Oh Tall Tree."

Technician: When the songs come to you, you want to get them down. Did you intend for the three-year delay?

Matheny: Three years -- that's the speed the music business runs.  In 2007, V2 totally closed down as a label, which kind of left us as free agents, which is an easier thing if you're the White Stripes or Moby or an established name and it's easy to find a new label.  At that stage we'd been burned by just about every label situation we'd gotten into ...Hollywood Records, and then V2 got bought by bankers and had to close down.  For the most part, we just had to figure out what we wanted to do creatively and organize that ...that's always come first for us. And then once we had that down, then we could go and figure out the business side of it.  We were looking for new management and a new lawyer and all kinds of stuff at that stage.  So it was really fun to stay in England and write that way ...We were able to start writing and come back and record a little bit at home with the album sort of organized in our head.  Then we all moved to Nashville, and we started to assemble a new bunch of folks to work with, started chatting with people.  That kind of stuff just takes forever.  Now we have a great label situation and we've put out 3 EPs and an album this year.  Once you have all the connections in place and the team you like working with, you can start working quickly.  So far so good with this team.

Technician: At a certain point, you must get a little jaded by the business aspect as a musician, so how do you guys define success?

Matheny: I think, no matter what goes on, success for us is making good art; at least what we think is good art.  Seeing people's reaction to it, and playing live, and getting journalists' reactions to it is all a lot of fun, but on a very basic level we have to decide that we like what we're doing and then put it out.  If that's going well, then everything else is going well.  The whole other side involves money, and it'd unbelievably wonderful to make a living off of what we're doing.

Technician: It's becoming more elusive for bands everyday, isn't it?

Matheny: Oh my goodness, yeah, I mean, it didn't just start that way in the last six months or anything.  We knew going into this record that we'd have to define our own version of what we want out of this before we get started.  If we were looking to set some sights on money, we'd be disappointed.  Sometimes we do make a little bit of money, but you know, everybody's still got their day jobs.  There'd be another level of success which would be, "we can quit our day jobs," which would be great, but we'd rather kind of make the art that we want to make. We had our first boy when the first record came out, and we tour with our kids, it doesn't slow down anything we do.  We've adapted our art to our family.

Technician: That's another cool thing, you guys moved to Nashville, and you take the family on the road. How is it different touring and making music with your closest family members rather than stepping away from them to do that?

Matheny: It's just really, for us, the best way that we work. We're all good friends to start with, and we all like the same artwork, so making art with those people -- there aren't nice fences set up between family and art, and jobs and life itself.  It's in the same big room, making a big mess.  We've been doing it since we were really young, and we don't know any better.  It's worked out so far, our family all has the same kind of artistic instincts.