By Keith Walsh
California’s PREGNANT is a band that defies categorization. With a curious mix of genres, and through an intensely creative studio process, their music challenges definitions.
Songwriter/instrumentalist/vocalist Daniel Trudeau explains: “I think me and Luis (Gutierrez – producer and synthesist) and Ben (Lewis – bass, keyboards, background vox) and Nick (Cowman – drums), and everybody that’s been in PREGNANT are pretty eclectic listeners. So that the eclectic listening kind of transfers over to the eclectic creation of the music. It can be really boring to have a static album, where all the way through it’s like this specific type of recording style, this specific genre, and I think that we just listen to so many different types of music…”
Trudeau continues: “We don’t get offended if our songs sound like something from the past. Sometimes I’ll make a guitar riff, someone will say ‘oh that sounds like (Trudeau sings) ‘I Would Walk 500 Miles’ by The Proclaimers. It could sound like anything, because we’ve made so much music by this point that it’s – we don’t concentrate extremely hard on it being super original. Because it just will be original.”
Creative Power
Luis Gutierrez, PREGNANT’s instrumentalist/producer of their latest album 100% Beef (read my review here) and their upcoming work agrees, while acknowledging an unorthodox approach to song structure. “I think a lot of it comes from, essentially for me, the recording and producing process — we don’t want something to sound so stale all the way through. Dan and I really get bored with parts going too long. It’s funny because I love Krautrock, but this is kind of like its own thing, where we keep it interesting every part, pull the rug out from underneath every part, it can change completely. There’s no loyalty to anything, being like ‘this is the verse, this is the chorus’ the vocals might say that, but I feel like instrumental wise, the instrumentation is different, it changes all throughout.”
Using an array of analog synths and vintage gear, in his role as producer Gutierrez has a lot of creative power at his fingertips. The only virtual synth used in recent work of PREGNANT was a Mellotron emulation. For the most part he relies on his favorites: an Arp Odyssey, a Korg MS-20, a Yamaha DX7, an Arp Quartet string machine, and a Roland String Machine. (The band also favors the stalwart Fender Stratocaster.)
With all of this analog gear as well as vintage mixers from Shure and Yamaha, Gutierrez lets his favorite influences guide his own aesthetic. It’s no surprise that two of his top artists hail from the 60s and 70s. When asked what genre he would place PREGNANT in, he explained: “I kind of consider it pop, experimental pop. And Dan knows — for me my favorite artists, producers, are Brian Wilson and Brian Eno. And whenever you put on one of their records, you essentially get a different genre each song. Each song is a different record pretty much. I think that’s what I strive for and kind of push for. Like Dan comes with a song, and immediately I’ll say ‘we should try it, make it this style.’ And we go back and forth. There’s a lot of scrapping. We scrap things a lot and try out different styles a lot.”
‘The Music Hits Me Good’
Trudeau has a lot to say about avoiding genres. “ I have been listening to quite a bit more music lately,” he said, “ but still have never really wrapped my mind around considering even what the genre is, as long as the music hits me good. I mean, I like Kraftwerk, or I like Stravinsky, or sometimes I’ll want to listen to Aphex Twin, or I’ll listen to Miley Cyrus, it depends. If someone made like one good f#@king song, I’m going to listen to it and appreciate the vibe. And so kind of when I’m considering the genre of PREGNANT, I’m not really considering it, because I’m almost past the consideration of genre in a lot of ways, and I consider it hampers the whole process of music.”
Still, Trudeau doesn’t dismiss bands that adhere to a fixed style. “There are some great genre bands,” he said, “where they are this specific genre, and they’re absolutely amazing, and I don’t think any less of those bands for sure. With PREGNANT, that has never, never been a consideration, and in fact I’ve tried as best I can to get it away from any genre, but it does fall where Luis said, where it just kind of like psychedelic electronic pop.”
(Featured photo L-R: Ben Lewis, Michael Saalman, Luis Gutierrez, Daniel Trudeau)
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More Of My Interview With PREGNANT
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