“Changing Atmospheres” : An Interview With Ra Ra Riot

Story by Mitch McCann 

| Published Nov 21, 2011

The case of Ra Ra Riot is one of effort. Having been cut of the same cloth of contemporaries Vampire Weekend, it would stand to reason that Ra Ra Riot share the same spotlight.The industry, however, is not as predictable as one might think and the journey of Riot has been a slow climb. The success of the band is deliberate; each and every fan has been earned.

Ra Ra Riot’s chamber pop sound and string-laden arrangements are unmistakable and their inescapable charm attracts a strong international audience towards the quirky, well-meaning band. Every moment of fame has been worked for in earnest, and as the band continues its journey upwards, it also continues outwards. Side projects with contemporaries and friends ‘Vampire Weekend’ as well as as a solo effort by bassist Mathieu Santos have given the band a diverse amount of material to cultivate in and out of Ra Ra Riot.

Santos, out of the kindness of his heart, left his pickup street-hockey game early to sit down with Seeds and detail the band’s trek from its glory days at Syracuse University through collaborative coalescence amongst the peaches in upstate New York and finding beauty in the little things that success in an indie-pop troupe has to offer.



Seeds: With that, you’re still a pretty young band, but have garnered quite a bit of fame. What kind of response have you gotten overseas and at the bigger festivals, the kind of things that are afforded to bands like you with a little under their belt?

MS: We got to do Lollapalooza a few years ago. Obviously completely different than playing club shows. We get to play in front of thousands of people and often in beautiful, exotic locales. [There was a] nice break in the summer from the usual touring lifestyle. Fuji Rock and Coachella are our favorite overall, but we were just in Europe this summer and did a bunch of really beautiful ones in Germany and Austria. So much fun. Gotta make it worthwhile.

Seeds: Some people talked about the album as softer or more subtle. Did you want to give listeners a new perspective with the new Ra Ra Riot sound? What do you feel that perspective is?

MS: When it came time to record the new album, we didn’t want to feel like we had to deliver a certain product. “The Rhumb Line” was successful enough that we get to make a second album, but it wasn’t a huge blowout thing where everyone had a lot of expectations, so we felt free to follow our instincts. I think you’re right, that probably played into a lot of it. At the time we [wrote “The Rhumb Line,” we had] been playing lots of house parties for our friends when we were at school. A lot of material came from that. This time around we were in this peach orchard in upstate New York and it was dead silent; we had a lot of time and a lot of space to think about things and reflect. We had a lot of fun making it. I’m sure our next album, which we’re about to record, will be much different from the first two.

Seeds: You went from a band playing house gigs around your college in Syracuse to a band on Late Night and playing big international festivals. How did those two things make it onto the record(s)?

MS: When we first started writing songs, we didn’t take it too seriously. A lot of our songs had spoken word interludes or were geared towards that party atmosphere. That helped us develop a lot of aspects of our sound, but once we started playing bigger venues or got noticed on a bigger scale--not that we lost our sense of humor or anything, it wasn’t like we were joking around with our friends at a party where we knew everyone, [but] it was a bit of a different atmosphere. We were playing for people who didn’t know you or had certain expectations, maybe, so it made us change our sound a little bit; but not in a way where we were uncomfortable. It was a natural progression, I think, turning from a college band into a touring “professional band.”


Seeds: Ra Ra Riot’s crew certainly flexes its muscles across many venues. With the two albums diverging so much, Wes did “Discovery” with Rostam [Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend], and now you’ve had your own solo effort. Is there a little background you want to give us to [your album] “Massachusetts 2010”?

MS: When we were working on “The Orchard,” it was a very creative atmosphere and I started working on a few ideas that weren’t nearly confident enough, or weren’t finished enough, to bring to the band. I ended up bringing one song to the sessions, “Massachusetts,” which made it on to the record. It was the first song I ever wrote. Immediately after we finished recording the album we had a couple months off, and I was just back home and still feeling inspired. I had all the free time so I kept working on these ideas, just interested in developing my songwriting and arranging chops and having a fun project to do. I ended up demoing the ten songs that would eventually be on the album. I didn’t know what to do with them, but then this past summer Andrew [Maury], our sound guy, and Wes [Miles] helped me re-record them all.

Seeds: Back to Ra Ra Riot: where do songs like “Massachusetts” and “Do You Remember?” come from, exactly? What can you tell us about those two specifically?

MS: [“Do You Remember?”] has an interesting story. [Riot frontman] Wes and [Vampire Weekend keyboardist] Rostam did that “Discovery” album together. It came out in 2009, and “Do You Remember” was originally a song they were working on for “Discovery.” It started, I believe, with Rostam playing ukulele for this riff that would become the chorus and Wes started singing over it. When it came time for the album to come out, they had their ten songs and [“Do You Remember?”] wasn’t quite in a finished state, so it got left on the backburner. When they worked on [“The Orchard”] together, Rostam suggested Wes bring the song to Ra Ra Riot because he thought it would be a good environment for it to take shape in.

So Wes brought it in as just a chorus; then we started adding different ideas to it, and it ended up being this huge Frankenstein song where that part was from “Discovery,” Wes had a riff for the verses and Milo had this drum beat, so we pieced it together. Some songs take weeks and weeks to figure out, but this song came together really quickly for us. Our best songs are the most collaborative songs, and in a way this song was extra-collaborative because we had people not even in the band contributing.

Seeds: Do most of your songs come together in that collaborative sense? Is it a little of everyone?

MS: It’s a case-by-case basis. Some songs Wes brings might just be a keyboard riff or a vocal melody and we’ll fill in the bottom, flesh it out and the girls will come up with the string parts. Other songs work from the bottom up and we’ll build on top of it. Some songs we’ll come at equally, bashing away at it together, adding parts, subtracting parts. Some bands have one songwriter and do every one the same, but there’s six of us and we all have very different facilities and gifts.


Ra Ra Riot plays The Bourbon November 16th. Album Three starts recording in January, due out next summer.