Chances are you’ve heard the name Roman Candle outside of the Elliott Smith LP by the same name. Roman Candle (the band) has been slowly but steadily gaining fans throughout the U.S. and building a significant amount of buzz since the release of their first album The Wee Hours Review on V2 after it was shelved for two years by their major label home, Hollywood Records. Made up of husband and wife combo Skip and Timshel Matheny as well as Skip’s brother Logan, this family band has been touring the states extensively behind their latest release, this year’s Oh Tall Tree In The Ear. Recently, TRACER’s Amber Valentine got to sit down with Skip and Timshel and talk about their difficult early years in the record industry and maintaining a functioning family dynamic on the road with two kids in tow.
TRACER: Since the release of your first album, you’ve been garnering progressively more and more attention and your new CD is getting a lot of acclaim. It seems poised to end up on a few Best Albums of 2009 lists.
Skip Matheny: I like your optimism.
TRACER: Thank you! Paste already said it’s one of the best albums so far. How has this attention been affecting you as artists?
Timshel Matheny: It’s encouragement.
Skip: We were really lucky with our first record. It had been shelved for a couple years and when it finally came out, a lot of journalists we never met and had no connection to were really kind about it. It kind of encouraged us to sort of follow our instincts. When we started our next record, we just sort of went ahead and hoped for the best. So far so good.
TRACER: Have things changed at all since the release of your latest album or is it too early to tell?
Skip: It may be too early to tell. We’re on a little label.
Timshel: It’s the first little label we’ve been on in a while.
Skip: We loved our situation at V2 while that lasted but unfortunately they shut down. We had a nice bunch of folks there and we were sort of looking for a similar family situation like we felt with those guys and this new label is really incredibly supportive. They have a wonderful loyalty and patience with the people they work with. You don’t feel like they’re sitting around looking at the Soundscan sheets, saying “If you guys don’t really sell any more records, I don’t know what we’re gonna do.”
Timshel: But if we do good on Soundscan, they’re really excited. They’re sort of like our mom. It’s really great because they’re really giving us one on one attention. They’re really good people. We have all of our meetings with our kids in the room and we schedule it around preschool. We looked hard and we were lucky that we got matched up with them. That’s been the best thing about this album.
Skip: The point being, to answer your question, it’s kind of too early to tell because things have been slow moving but positive and great. We kind of expected that. I don’t feel like we make the type of music that’s going to be latched on to in a very buzzy way like some bands do.
TRACER: I think that you are really buzzy, but that it’s been sort of a slow burn over time.
Skip: That’s cool and it’s great to hear that.
Timshel: The press has been really encouraging. The support that we have is really genuine and that’s really encouraging.
Skip: We’ve been around for a while and I don’t desire for us to have the type of success that other bands do where you’ve never heard of them and two weeks later, it’s all you can hear about. I don’t trust that sort of thing. I’d rather sort of grow slowly like a tree.
TRACER: Roman Candle is quite the family affair. Does the relationship of the band ever get strained because of the fact that you’re family?
Skip: Not anymore. I don’t think it did before, but maybe there were sort of immature spats when we started. I can’t remember any but I feel like we’ve been at it for so long now and we’ve stuck together so whatever edges we had as young, idiotic folks have been knocked off. We’ve had such a weirdo time in the music business, it made us develop our sense of humor, first and foremost. Because it was family, it was very helpful and worked for us and helped us survive.
Timshel: The good thing about it is that we’ve had a lot of different members in our bands and for all the little spats that can happen because of familiarity, there’s always that underlying love that is really prevalent in our band. There’s never anger or hatred, it’s just what happens with brothers and sisters lovingly. We can really lean on each other. We know that we’ll have to see each other at the end of the day anyway and at Christmas. Music works because we’re a family. I don’t think Roman Candle would exist without one of the three of us being in it.
Skip: It’d be a different thing all together. We’d have to change our name and all kinds of stuff.
Timshel: We’d have to find somebody else that was related to us.
Skip: Making music is so much about being in a studio and smelling each other’s armpits and figuring out how to make good art together. When we work with producers or whatever, we sniff them out for a long time to figure out who works with us in that way that we can bring in to our little weirdo circle.
TRACER: Not only are you a family affair but you have family at home with two children. Lots of musicians who tour have to leave behind their immediate families but you guys obviously don’t have to do that. Now you take your children with you, but it must’ve been hard in the past to leave them behind.
Skip: We’ve always tried to bring the kids but certain times, when you have a 16 hour drive that you have to do over night, it’s not something you want to put your kids through, suffering wise. They probably have more fun playing legos and eating pancakes or whatever. We’ve had to do both but 95% of the time, we bring the kids with us. They have retired grandparents who travel with us and watch the babies. Some bands deal with heroin or coke habits while they’re playing shows and that’s it’s own obstacle. We have children, which is very different than a heroin habit.
Timshel: It’s so much better. I don’t know by comparison.
Skip: It’s sort of our odd little quirk about how we play live. Our kids are usually at sound check and we eat together and they go to the hotel with the grandparents and we play a show.
Timshel: It’s important to say that it can be positive. It's sad that musicians can feel a divide, like they can’t have families. It is really hard. We have musicians that travel with us who have families and it’s really hard to be away from them but it totally pays off. For us, we look at our friends who work from nine to seven and they don’t see their kids at all when they get home. It’s a different situation. For us, we feel really blessed. The road can be really hard and really discouraging but kids are awesome and always positive. They see the bright side of everything and they’re really funny. I think everybody appreciates them lightening the mood.
Skip: It’s easy to find jaded people traveling on the road. It’s hard to find a jaded four year old. Turn the kid loose in Oklahoma City at some ridiculous Waffle House and he’s like, “This place is amazing!” And you’re like, “You’re probably right, I’m just not seeing it.”
Timshel: You get to take your roots with you. They’re constantly inspiring.
Skip: The Carter Family always had their kids rolling with them whereever they went and that’s something that we, in our own backwards way, are trying to keep alive because it’s the only way we can function.
TRACER: Why did you choose the name Roman Candle? Is there a significance behind it?
Skip: You know, it was more arbitrary. I was sitting in a class and I should have been paying attention but I was just like, “Roman Candle! That should be our band name!” I had been listening to a ton of this U2 record, The Unforgettable Fire, and there’s a lyric in the song "Promenade," “Roman candles are lighting up the sky.” At the moment, I was thinking it came from my own imagination.
Timshel: Now you’re not foolish enough to claim it’s your own imagination.
Skip: Exactly. A lot of things we do have a really thought out meaning behind them... but the band name was not one of those.
TRACER: Was U2 a big influence?
Skip: Yes and no. I felt like it was for everybody in a way. So many people have embraced that band. It kind of goes beyond just being a band. I’ve met some people that have really been influenced by U2 in a more strong way than I can claim. I totally revere that band and what they do and what they try to do so yes, they were totally influential. I feel like it’s appropriate we took our band name from them.
Timshel: The older we get, I think I’m really inspired by how intentional they are with their celebrity. I think they do a great job of being responsible as artists. I’m proud of being inspired by them.
TRACER: Other than U2, who else made you want to pursue music as a career? Or even just a hobby?
Skip: We were really inspired by all the British bands in the ‘90's. We hook line and sinker went for the whole “Cool Britannia” thing. The b-sides of Oasis got us through high school so easily.
Timshel: There were the Kinks and the Faces before.
Skip: The whole British thing. I think it might be Jack White who said, “Don’t trust anyone who says they don’t like the Beatles or Bob Dylan.” I can really relate to that. It’s a good rule to go by.
Timshel: Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison.
Skip: Not just the cool stuff. I like the weirdo Joni Mitchell, the weirdo Van Morrison. The later stuff that people turn back in at the record store. We always got into music that was song writing based. Not in a James Taylor way but just people who focus on a song. Everyone from Cole Porter to John Hartford and Tom T. Hall to Damon Albarn and people who are trying really hard to craft a song because that’s their art form, that’s their medium. That’s what inspired us to say, “Let’s do this ourselves.”
TRACER: You get a lot of heady comparisons such as Wilco and Bob Dylan.
Skip: Oh, cool.
TRACER: Were you guys aware of that?
Timshel: Sometimes.
Skip: We didn’t try out for that. It’s a great surprise because I love and respect those bands. You never really set out to write a song or be a band and think, “I want people to compare us to X, Y, or Z.” Some people may and they might have great success but we couldn’t do that and feel like we were getting anywhere. We just made our own thing and hoped people took something away from that.
Timshel: Every musician tries really hard to make good music. To get compared to stuff like that is a real honor.
Skip: I feel like those guys make great art. We would like to think that we’re trying to make great art.
TRACER: Your first album was shelved for quite a while. What did you do while your career was basically stagnating for a couple years to combat the shelving of your record?
Skip: We did a few specific things. We wrote a lot of songs and didn’t finish them because we thought that everything we finished was basically going into the tomb of Hollywood Records at that time. We did a lot of our own ideas. We ended up finding new outlets that our major label contract couldn’t put a leash on.
TRACER: When I read about the whole ordeal with your first album, it was like a mini version of the whole Yankee Hotel Foxtrot ordeal that Wilco went through.
Timshel: We actually had the same lawyer. It was kind of ironic. It wasn’t purposely. The dangerous thing about that situation is that it can really rob your creative mind. We really had to fight for that.
Skip: It was really healthy in the long run.
Timshel: No matter what happens, we still will make music.
TRACER: The funny thing about situations like that is that I think the major label is totally foiled in the end because the bands get more press for the fact that this all happened in the first place. The major label looks bad and the bands sell more records.
Timshel: The bands get more determined too. It’s a pain in the ass but it’s good.
TRACER: Your new record actually takes its name from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, correct?
Skip: Oh, yeah.
TRACER: Is literature a big influence?
Skip: Yeah. I mean, we could go for years and yap about that but it’s a huge influence. It’s kind of where we find a lot of inspiration. It’s hard to say but it does influence music we make even though it’s not musical inspiration. We all kind of get together and see what we can come up with on our own, musically speaking. The odd thing about music at the moment is that music is such a young tradition when you talk about recorded pop music. Nobody really knows the tradition that they’re writing in yet, as a mainstream thing. If you write a song now, you’re writing in a tradition that’s thousands of years old. It goes back to Homer, to people who were singing stories. Whether you know it or not, the Ramones were doing it, the Supremes were doing it or Berry Gordy, who was writing the Supremes’ songs, but it’s a real tradition. It doesn’t matter that people don’t know that, but it’s something we’re all fascinated by so we try to be aware of the tradition we’re writing in. We write music that is at least consciously part of a long tradition, whether it’s good or not doesn’t matter. That’s for other people to figure out or decide but the awareness of that is something we’re thankful we got from our education.
