This is a very original idea!  What gave you the idea for the Gooseberries project?

At the beginning of last year,  the Happy Hollows and I had scheduled a photo shoot, and I had all of these crazy images in my head which I hadn’t any idea how to materialize without a massive budget that none of us had.   So, the day before our session, I pulled out a seamless backdrop and some paint and dug through my closet and came up with the closest thing I could to what I’d imagined. Reiko and I had been talking about doing a project together, and we both agreed that we wanted to do something a little more unusual than a coffee table book.  So, it all fell together pretty easily.

Why the title “Gooseberries”?

The project was meant to draw attention to the process of creation as a driving force in all artists – which we so often forget when we’re tweaking and twisting and obsessing over the final product.  There’s a short story by Chekhov in which a man discusses his uncle, who – after years of miserly living and dreaming of having a farm with gooseberry bushes -  finally harvests a plateful of these bitter, yet somewhat bland berries.  The story is a gorgeous way of illustrating that sometimes it isn’t the thing itself – rather, the idea of the thing – that truly drives us.

How did you choose the bands involved and how did you go about getting them to sign on to the project?

Of course, I wanted my friends to be a part of it – and I’d already worked with Silversun and Great Northern and Rogue Wave, but there was still this tricky matter of pitching such a weird idea.  I mean, how do you explain this to someone?  Paper and paint? It sounds absurd.  So I made a time-lapse video, and showed it to Rademacher – who suggested doing a music video.  Brad Basmajian (who was in Rademacher at the time) used the time-lapse footage from their shoot to make the video for “What I Want,” which I then used to pitch to the rest of the bands.

Tell us a little bit about the process you took during the photo shoots: the painting, the makeup, getting the bands into position, etc.

I started with a color palette for each shoot.  I knew I wanted Great Northern’s to be red and black.  I knew I wanted Earlimart’s to be shades of blue.  I knew that Afternoons ‘needed’ green with flecks of red.  I don’t know why, but those colors just made sense – and in my mind there weren’t any other options.  If Rogue Wave had told me that they wanted to be shot with purple and orange (I used yellow and black) I would have drawn a blank.   And because of these color palettes, I was very specific about what the bands were allowed to wear; I dressed most of the women in clothes from my own wardrobe collection – which largely consists of dresses that were made for my grandmother in the fifties and sixties.   I really wanted the final products to have the same feeling as those stiff, posed oil portraits which were commonly commissioned in Europe by elite families in the 18th and 19th centuries, so I kept my subjects moving in ways that felt very unnatural.  Of course, that makes for a miserable shoot, so we’d shoot for about twenty minutes, then take a break and have a drink and relax for a half hour, then go back to shooting.

Did you choose the ideas for each band based on your impressions of them, or were there other motivations behind each theme?

Not really.  The concepts had little to do with the bands themselves; I had these images and these colors in mind, and I wanted to use fun, creative people as my subjects – people who knew one another and had more of a bond than a mish-mash of models.

Do you have any funny or interesting stories from the project that you would like to share?

There were a few times I had come up with a concept that I thought would be really hard to explain to the band – and I’d find out that the band already had that idea in mind.  When Sarah from the Happy Hollows saw the tree I’d painted, she squealed “Oh my gosh!  It’s just like the trees I’ve been drawing!”   And I hadn’t the slightest idea how to tell Afternoons what I wanted to do with them  (gothic dust bowl migrants in Oz?) until I got an email from Steven that said “We’d love to do something with a dust bowl feel… or something dark, and yet still sort of vibrant.  Does that make sense?”  To which I simply replied:  “Yup.”

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