John Hastie (Nonagon)
SPB: What stands out to you the most, today, when you listen to (or think back on) your first record?
Hastie: Honestly, when I listen to No Sun, all I want to do is scream at us to calm the heck down. Those songs are somewhat complicated (at least for us) and were significantly slower when we first wrote them. As we got more comfortable with them, we kept speeding them up because they didn’t feel right unless we could barely keep up. Add to that our nerves about working with such an amazing engineer (Greg Norman) at such an iconic studio (Electrical Audio)… and then add to THAT the steady diet of “Fluffy Coffees” (Electrical’s house specialty) we were consuming, and you might start to get an idea of how torqued we were. I’m truly proud of some of the songs on that EP, but it’s a hard listen for me because I don’t think they “breathe” the way they should. We recorded “They Birds” (the latest record) at Electrical last year and I think we all kept the lessons of the earlier sessions in mind… except for moderating our Fluffy Coffee intake... Those fuggin' things are dangerous.
