“My Only Offer“
from the album Re-Arrange Us
2008
iTunes
Mates of State has been a band nearly as long as its members, Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel, have been a couple, and their stories are inextricably linked.
She plays electric organ, he plays drums, and they both sing on charming, tuneful indie-pop songs with intertwining vocal harmonies. They’ve been at it since 1997, when they met as students at the University of Kansas, while each was playing in other bands. Attraction came first, then music, though neither was sure at first that the music part was a good idea.
“It was definitely nerve-wracking the first time,” Gardner says, tucked into a couch in the living room of the Stratford home they share with their two young children. “It was like, if this doesn’t work, this could be really bad.”
“We thought that if it didn’t work musically, it would ruin the relationship,” Hammel chimes in.
Instead, the two found their musical chemistry was as strong as their romantic chemistry, and they have evolved in tandem through various life changes, including moves to San Francisco and then Connecticut, and having children. Mates of State’s early albums — complex and busy, full of shifting sections and sometimes frenetic melodicism — had the impetuous energy of young love.
“We were listening to this old cassette we had found a couple of weeks ago, and we were just like, ‘What were we thinking?'” Hammel says. “It was so random and chaotic.”
The band’s music has matured and deepened since then, to the more reflective songs on the duo’s fifth album, Re-Arrange Us, out today on Barsuk. The title could apply to the couple’s family status — Gardner gave birth to their second child, June, early this year; she joins sister Magnolia, who is 4 — and to the songs on the album, which finds the duo broadening its sound.
“We wanted to get rid of that organ, the one that is sort of that signature Mates of State sound,” Hammel says. “We were kind of getting tired of lugging it around and getting tired of how it sounds.”
Not only does the organ, a bulky old Yamaha behemoth, have a distinctive, almost abrasive blaring tone, it has various technical limitations in the studio. Also, Gardner found she was having a hard time writing songs on it this time.
Inspiration struck again when she switched to piano, which left enough musical room in the songs for the duo to try new things in the studio. Recording mostly with Peter Katis at Tarquin Studios in Bridgeport, the Mates experimented with strings, horns and even a few musical guests, including Katis on guitar and bass, Spoon drummer Jim Eno on percussion and guitar and vocal contributions from Death Cab for Cutie members Chris Walla and Ben Gibbard, respectively.
“I just think we needed a change,” Gardner says. “And it was so fun recording, because before, the challenge was always getting good sounds from the organ. … So we had a whole different experience in the studio, and it was like, let’s pull some strings in, let’s pull some horns in, and it just kept going from there. We didn’t stop and think, ‘How is this going to be pulled off live?’ We just really enjoyed the studio this time.”
It shows in the songs, which are among the band’s catchiest and most direct. Simple piano chords open “Get Better,” the first tune on the album, and cello adds a swooning melody beneath vocal harmonies from Gardner and Hammel. Gardner sings alone in a strong, calm voice to start “Now,” a straightforward pop ditty with an insistent, repeating chorus, and she and Hammel trade parts and sing countermelodies on “The Re-Arranger,” a song that rolls through several distinct sections.
“We’ve always been a parts band,” Gardner says. “We don’t feel like if you do one part, you have to do it four times and come back to it at the end.”
That said, Gardner and Hammel made a more concerted effort this time to write less complicated songs. “I like the idea of challenging yourself to write a concise pop song that people understand and that is catchy and has meaning,” Gardner says.
“And to get the idea across in as few amount of words, it’s just a lot more poetic sometimes to be like, ‘These are your guidelines; say what you need to say within these guidelines,'” Hammel says.
As for re-creating the songs live, both Mates say they’ve stopped worrying about it. “If people think, oh, it doesn’t sound the same live, it doesn’t matter to us anymore,” Gardner says. “We’re doing this for us, primarily, and then if people enjoy it, great, it’s awesome, I’m glad we can connect. I think we just got over the whole mental analyzing ourselves too much.”
“That was always our problem with the previous records, when we were like, ‘We can only do what we can do live on a record,'” Hammel agrees. “And once we finally — five records in — got rid of that sort of notion, it was a lot more freeing. We could really get the sounds that we wanted to get.”