The Apples In Stereo | Interview

Story by Dylan Bliss 

| Published Jan 24, 2011

A man once explained to me, rather recently, how sometimes the easiest way to see the future is by reaching into the past. His name is Robert Schneider, and he’s been at the forefront of a longstanding alternative band called The Apples in Stereo. With an incredible amount of insight to share, it’s clear which subcultures and subgenres Schneider draws his musical inspiration from.

Throughout their impressive set of seven studio albums, “Apples” has constructed a heavily flowing vein of futurism and science fiction theatrics. Lyrics telling stories of UFOs and grandiose speculations of future life fill out these space pop melodies, poking and prodding the listener to just get up and explore gravity with their dance moves.

One fact remains clear: if Schneider and friends can continue to communicate this much fun through their music, their future is brighter then ever.


Dailyer Nebraskan: So much has changed in the past 15+ years since the band’s inception, members and overall sound, what changes benefited the evolution of the band the most?

Robert Schneider: From the start, we set out to explore a bunch of sounds. One of our philosophies since we were kids was that we would always try to do something different every time, kinda like the Beatles and the Beach Boys and other bands we liked. Every record is exploring different directions. And so, that’s kept us sort of creatively fresh as a band. It’s exciting when you have a new idea and you’re, like, chasing after it. It gets closer and closer and it seems like you may never reach it. It’s an exciting thing, and it’s kind of built into the nature of our band. As far as different members of the band go, our band mates have been fairly stable since the first album up until now. n the past few years we’ve accumulated a few additional friends around the sort of core band. And Hilary, our original drummer, left the band. That was probably the biggest change.
But, we’re not a “musiciany” kind of band. Being a real musician isn’t really the qualification for membership that we look for in someone for our band. Many people who have joined our band did so at a very primitive level of playing, but we were best friends and were creatively into the same stuff, and that’s really all that mattered. You know, we weren’t trying to be like a pro rock band or something like that.

Dailyer: Well, you’ve definitely fooled me, as far as musicianship.

Schneider: (Laughs) Yeah, you know, with time and stuff, and you get better with all the songs that you’ve done and the records you’ve recorded, and all of the sudden you’re “professional.” Even though it’s not necessarily “pro.” At the same time, it’s encouraging to know that you can be.

Dailyer: With “space rock,” at least that’s what I’ve been hearing it called, how did you fall into that groove where you wanted to make that kind of music?

Schneider: The record was sort of waiting in the background for years. It’s funny that you say that, it’s really like “space pop.” Probably about 30 percent of our songs are about UFOs and outer space things like that. It’s kind of been a loose end throughout our records. There was a science fiction sort of theme. Goin’ back to one of our first seven inch, there was “Rocket Pads,” and “.423.” It’s this wave of futurism that kind of washed over me in the last five or six years … probably the last 10 years. ELO(Electric Light Orchestra) kind of, like, changed my vision of pop music a little bit. Aside from trying to be “artsy” or sort of “baroque,” they were also, on the surface, trying to be a little futuristic. All their album art, and just the name of their band too.
Going back to childhood, I’d always been a fan of science fiction. I loved comic books as a kid. Sci-fi movies are like a constantly evolving mythology that we have and new ideas come out of it. These filmmakers are coming up with these non-rigorous ideas that are wildly creative ways to put together things in the world and it turns out some years later that you can do that with the world. Out of a series of experiences, it was clear to me that the band was ready to do a sort of futuristic record. On the other hand, we were exploring this super poppy direction.
I’ve been writing a lot of songs on the piano, and it’s kind of been going towards a sort of Hall & Oats songwriting vibe. We were just cranking out these super poppy songs. That also implies to me that we were trying to make a futuristic record that would be for the kids of the future.

Dailyer: What new developments did the signing to Elijah Wood’s record label create for the the band, and how did you first meet him?

Schneider: I would say that Elijah is very passionate about music and it really translates to the way that he runs his label, and also he had a sort of distribution deal with Yep Roc Records, which is another label that we really liked and were interested in. It’s hard for me to separate the impact of the label to the other sort of press things that have happened, TV things and the music itself. It’s hard to exact the influence.
We met him at an “Apple” show about 10 years ago, we were touring during SXSW in Austin, and he was kinda rockin’ out in the front row, he looked like he’d be a DJ or something. And then we met him and it was like, “Holy shit, it’s Elijah Wood.” We kind of just kept in touch over the years, ran into each other a few times, and then I guess he contacted us sometime — I’m not really sure. He was interested in putting our album out as the first album on his label. It’s awesome that he’s as passionate as he is about music along with being the head of the label. He’s got a public presence, and I think at some degree that’s good for the band. We already had our own sort of thing going, it’s not like he discovered us, but at the same time there may be some mainstream people that may not have heard of us until they saw some news clip about Elijah Wood or something.

Dailyer: Have you ever played in Omaha or Lincoln?

Schneider: Yeah, we’ve played in Omaha three or four times in Sokol Underground. One time we were stuck there in a blizzard a few years ago. The interstate was closed and we were stuck in a hotel with another band, I think it was Nickelback? At a little Holiday Inn Express. We were there for like 48 hours or so.

Dailyer: Your sound is fairly set apart in the modern scene. What are your main influences? What are you currently listening to?

Schneider: I listen to a lot of music. I like Ariel Pink a lot. For six months while we were recording our last album I listened to a lot of Michael Jackson. As a kid I listened to him for, like, eight years straight. It sort of mixed in with the ELO on the new record. Besides the influences, I’ve been listening to “Eye in the Sky” by the Alan Parson’s Project. If you haven’t listened to song, it’s a great, great song, and it came out when I was in like sixth grade or something. Listening to it has really given me the retro-futuristic vibe that reminds me of when I was a little kid. It’s really slick, but sort of sad and subdued. It sort of wrapped up a lot of things that I really loved and wanted to put into our records, so I made a rule that it would be the only thing that I’d listen to in my car.

Dailyer: So, what do you see when you dream about the future?

Schneider: Hmm … I think I dream about a cleaner world, sort of like in “The Time Machine,” a book by H.G. Wells with the world that he describes in the future, but without the “Morlocks,” the sort of wicked underground race of humans that feed upon the above ground humans. When I dream about the future I dream about this sort of like, lush world. Sort of like a Garden of Eden type of thing. Free information for everybody in sort of little temples — I don’t know. I have this idea that there should be these sort of public bunkers built around the world where we have computers that are completely indestructible so that civilization in 1,000 years or 10,000 years could still have access to the information that we’ve accumulated in our time. With all the blogs and websites for commercial stuff wouldn’t be lost forever, you know?