Butane Variations

Many have struggled to classify the music of Butane Variations, the Brooklyn four-piece who have created a buzz on the indie music scene. Imagine melodious folk rock with a smattering of twangy banjo, elegant cello, a frequent switch between acoustic and electric guitar, and the occasional psychedelic keyboards sneaking into the background. Topping this off is the eerie vocal harmony of the band’s two songwriters and their disjointed abstract lyrics.

Butane Variations has earned radio play on NPR and Sirius Radio and have also been featured recently on Daytrotter. Currently, the band is preparing for their biggest tour yet. Staff Writer Karen Looney recently caught up with songwriter and guitarist John Paul Norpoth to talk about their musical genre, stream-of-consciousness songwriting, and rooftop barbeques.

SSv: Can you tell me a little bit about the back story of the band and how you got involved with Butane Variations?

Norpoth: There are four guys playing in the band right now and all of us went to college together in upstate New York. We didn’t start the band in college but we all played around in different circles and knew each other. Some guys in the band played together for a long time. After we graduated college we went our separate ways. I came down to New York [City] for grad school. Two of the guys in the band, Phil [Weinrobe] and Michael Penquist, who we call Mike- there’s two Michaels, Mike and Michael … you guys wrote a really nice review of us playing in Rochester a month ago and had the names swapped, which is fairly common.

We all went to college together up there and after school I ended up in New York [City]. Phil Weinrobe came to New York after I was done with grad school, so two years after college. He had just finished playing in a touring bluegrass band and he was a little burnt out on playing bluegrass. He had written a lot of music on his own and had a band sort of on the side. He wanted [us] to write songs and sing them together, similar to a lot of musical partnerships that exist. We would have these fleeting moments of trading whatever songs we were working on. It was very half-cooked; we were just showing rough lyrics and nothing was planned.

About two years ago he moved to Brooklyn and we would get together and sing, always trying to sing in harmony. Some people like to draw Simon & Garfunkel or Hall & Oates comparisons. I don’t know if that’s such a good comparison. But usually you listen to a band and know it’s either one guy or the other guy or a lead singer and we want there to be two guys singing together creating one strange ethereal voice. Sometimes good, sometimes bad.

It’s sort of changed and evolved since then. There was a time when we didn’t even have a drummer; we had a guy playing a cajon, like a box drum, and we had fiddles and trumpets. What I hear now is more of a commonplace rock and roll band than what it started as.

SSv: Butane Variations’ sound is very interesting, seeing as you’ve employed all different kinds of instruments. It seems like a lot of people struggle to classify your sound. I’ve heard “garage-punk-country” used a lot. What would you classify your sound as?

Norpoth: My mom asked me that question recently. I still believe it’s rock and roll music. What used to be played on all these instruments is essentially played on two guitars, bass, and drums now. I think that there’s country in there. I won’t go so far to say that we’re “alternative country” or that we try to mix punk music and country music or that we’re trying to go back to Graham Parsons. There’s something in there that I wish could just stand on its own two feet as rock and roll music. I know there’s going to be some twang in there and I know there’s going to be some louder, harder edged things, but that’s what I think of it as in my own head.

SSv: Would you say you have any country influences?

Norpoth: Absolutely. Phil Weinrobe and Michael Penquist were touring in a bluegrass band for four or five years before this band started. They are incredibly versed with honky-tonk and country and blues and bluegrass. They know hundreds and hundreds of songs and we’re always influenced by that. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that when I get into my car there’s a country station on my five presets but there’s so many great stories and so many great chord changes in American country music that it’s hard to ignore if you’re trying to write songs.

There’s a lot us that listen to very folk-oriented things if you want to bring up people like Dylan and more common folk music. That has its influences but [calling us] country music, I don’t know … We’ll see when we go down south. Maybe they’ll boo us off stage.

SSv: I know you’re heavily involved with the songwriting process. Are you involved with lyrics?

Norpoth: Yes. All the songs on our two releases are either Phil’s music and lyrics or my music and lyrics. They’ll get thoroughly re-arranged over and over by the band, but yeah.

SSv: I find your lyrics quite interesting but I have trouble discerning the meaning behind them. For instance, the song “Goldie Hawn.” I can’t say I know much about the actress but the song has some interesting lyrics, with the verse about George Washington and his teeth, the repeated thought of the man who trusts like a boy, the line “she spits blood.” Can you clarify what your intention with this song was?

Norpoth: That’s a good question. I don’t know if I’ve ever answered it seriously enough. I live four blocks from George Washington Bridge and it towers above certain street corners in my neighborhood. I live in an apartment with my girlfriend and we take a lot of walks with our nine month old puppy now. The song was written two years ago but even then we took a lot of walks together. There’s definitely some abstract connection there. When I sat down and wrote it was I just throwing words and ideas around. I usually write like that. There wasn’t a strong or vivid narrative going on.

There is some kind of paranoia there, with the idea of really trusting somebody that you’re involved with and that you love. You try to find things to justify it and to tear it apart. You can look on the flipside of all relationships. The really full ones in your life are always going to have the double-edged sword idea. The George Washington line that’s thrown around in there is more tongue-in-cheek. But it just comes from taking long walks and looking around. It’s not meant as any strong political idea.

SSv: More like a stream-of-consciousness thing?

Norpoth: Yeah, yeah! I think both Phil and I write in that vein a lot. That’s why it’s difficult to explain it. We definitely know where all the songs come from. Some are more direct than others and some are a pain in the ass cause they just come out and you don’t really know what to do with it. It’s more abstracts than specific meanings or ideas. But that’s only me, I can’t speak for Phil.

SSv: Would you say that you followed the same kind of writing process for “First Day in June?” The song seems to be a series of mysterious images.

Norpoth: I didn’t write it but this is my interpretation of some of the lyrics. I think the images mark a move from spring into summer. It’s kind of dark and gritty. When I was growing up, from March to April it would just be cold and damp and humid and after that it would start to open up. I think some of the great lyrics in that song follow the idea of incubating and then brightening up. I haven’t had any deep conversations about that one with Phil in a long time. It’s funny; we don’t really play that song. We tried but that’s a difficult one for us. Maybe somebody else can play it.

SSv: What sort of impact do you aim to have on listeners?

Norpoth: Lately I’ve been hearing from friends and loved ones that when they listen, they hear us having fun. I’m probably hearing that more from a performance standpoint and not the records themselves. We really do enjoy playing together. Not to say that we enjoy it all the time but we still rehearse a lot and haven’t toured a lot yet. We’re always trying to get better as a performing band and we have a lot of fun doing it. I think that that impact is an honest one. I like going to see bands who enjoy what they’re doing and don’t take it for granted.

As far as a musical impact, I think both Phil and I have a fairly skewed sense of humor. I wouldn’t say that we’re incredibly dry but we both look at the world in a funny way. Nothing’s too intense, too sad, too happy. We can stick a fork in it and find something about that that’ll make you laugh. We can also see very disgusting things in a beautiful light. What I’ve been getting lately from Phil’s songs is very vivid imagery and the idea that you can imagine when you sit down and listen to music. You can have your own imagination about it. We’re not spoon feeding you what you need to understand about the song. We’re just giving you your own runway to fly off.

SSv: So you’re creating images and worlds and letting people take from it what they will?

Norpoth: Yeah. I got this Dylan record when I was a kid, Highway 61 Revisited, and it’s incredible, the best record ever made. There’s so much abstract imagery and all these crazy characters he pulls together and has them do strange and ridiculous things, wonderful and funny things. It can make you laugh, just listening to these great pop, rock, folk, whatever you want to classify these songs as. They have the ability to take you away in a really healthy, escapist way.

SSv: Speaking of having fun, is it true Butane Variations hosted a Bring Your Own Barbeque event this past summer on a rooftop?

Norpoth: Yeah. The people who are putting out our music – and I wouldn’t go so far as to try and shield this from anybody – they’re friends of ours, they’re our peers, they’re doing exactly what we’re doing in a different way. They live in Williamsburg, right on the water. It’s like this old warehouse that’s been converted to lofts. They have a huge rooftop with a view of all Manhattan and Brooklyn and they just went up there and we got a big PA and lots of beer. People brought their own meat and vegetables. We did it twice. The cops came both times but they came late.

There were all these great moments of going over to the roof and looking down at all the families in these little apartments and their backyard. We’d wave to them and they’d wave back. It was a minor Let It Be experience, if you want a comparison. It was really fun. One time we played it was really late and the other time the sun was setting and it was incredible. We had to look at the audience and I remember constantly turning around and trying to catch the sunset coming through the skyline. It was probably the best musical experience I’ve ever had.

SSv: Did the cops shut you guys down?

Norpoth: I’m trying to remember. The first time it was earlier and the second time it was much later. There was kind of like a rave at the end. We had two smaller groups playing and then we played and we had all our friends come up and play string instruments. There were like nine people on stage and we were all just making a racket. After that show a DJ came up and immediately hit the music. Everybody started a dance party. The cops eventually came and shut it down but it was like 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning at that point. It was no big deal.

SSv: Going back to songs, what song on the self-titled album has the most meaning for you?

Norpoth: Well, to get into “Heaven in My Mind” and the way we did it … Everything else on the album went through lots of different arrangements and options and overdub. For “Heaven in My Mind” we grabbed a tape machine from a friend of ours and set it up in an apartment and all our friends came over and we played and sang and taught them songs. There were a whole lot of people. It’s fairly different from everything else on the CD and I think it benefits from that ’cause it really has that great “rockage” energy to it. We hadn’t been used to doing that for a while. We labored over all the other arrangements on previous songs and wanted to have something that was “it.” I’ll never forget anything about that day and what went into it. It’s very special.

SSv: What’s on the horizon for Butane Variations?

Norpoth: We’re working on a live show and trying to decide what to do with it. It’s a show from a club in New York called Mo Pitkin’s, which is like a cabaret performance art style place. All these places in the Lower East Side of Manhattan are closing down, like great little clubs that have been around for a long time. CBGB and Mo Pitkin’s… They’re all going to close eventually but the Lower East Side used to be a very diverse and tough neighborhood and is now becoming very condo-ish. We played [at Mo Pitkin's] two weeks before it closed and our digital distribution brought someone out to record us. We’ve been laboring on that. It may come out in the next six months, may not.

We go on the road in January, down south, possibly to the Midwest, and a couple shows in upstate New York. It’s the most traveling we’ve done so far so we’re a little nervous as well as excited to get out there. Right when we get back we plan on going back to the studio and working on tracks for a new record that we’ll hopefully get out before the end of 2008. We have a lot to do in the next six weeks.

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