Freelance Whales cut their teeth playing jaunty pop music on the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Recently, the Metropolitan Transit Authority granted the band a license to play in subway stations as an official member of Music Under New York, complete with banner. We spoke to one of the band’s multi-instrumentalists, Jake Hyman, about the differences between street and tunnel playing.

TMN: Tell us about your subway license. What’s better, playing the subways or busking on the street?

Jake Hyman: The Music Under New York award was quite an honor. We get to be those guys with the big black and yellow banner behind them playing in the most crowded stations, being ignored by millions of commuters, not just the hundreds we get when we play on Bedford Avenue. As a group I think we find playing on the streets and subways to be a very different experience than playing a traditional show.

TMN: How so?

JH: The reactions we get on the street are very real, very ethereal. If people don’t like it or they’re too busy, they move on. If they do like it they smile, they dance, they clap (and give us money). But either way everyone’s on the same page. The feedback is immediate and unavoidable.

TMN: You closed down Bedford Avenue during one street show. Is that your turf now? Do street and subway musicians fight for the best spots?

JH: I wish we could call it our turf! The truth is we just sort of wander until we find a good spot. Lately we’ve taken to playing both on Bedford Ave and down in the L-train station when there isn’t another band around. Other musicians have been really friendly about sharing stations with us. As long as you ask and don’t just start encroaching on someone’s livelihood, nothing gets contentious.

TMN: You’re a subway rider, what makes you irrationally angry?

JH: When people don’t wait for me to exit the train before they push their way on—it takes every ounce of strength not to strangle them. Even just seeing someone do that when I’m not involved gets me, too. I’ve verbally accosted more than one person about it (much to the chagrin of my girlfriend) and never been satisfied with an apology.

TMN: How does the band’s creative preparation begin?

JH: Before shows we get together and do our own form of meditation. We get into a circle and close our eyes and hold hands and do some chanting and harmonizing. To me it feels like we’re just sort of putting ourselves in a bubble together and really connecting. It really helps to focus and relax us; our diverse instrument setup at traditional venues can get pretty stressful and hectic.

TMN: What’s something you’re not good at but wish you were?

JH: Musically? I’m a horrible lyricist. As a lifetime choir singer I can come up with melodies and harmonies like it’s my job…which it sort of is. But I have the lyrical prowess of a monkey. Non-musically? I wish I were good at a sport. Not just casually good, but had some sort of natural aptitude for applying myself to soccer or hockey. My dad and I used to play sports constantly and I used to be in all the youth leagues (though I wasn’t very good), but around the time I got my first drum set I stopped playing sports altogether.

TMN: What is your favorite object in your office?

JH: I’m a writer all day, every day, so I get to sit around and type stuff. In between paragraphs and while I’m doing research, I love to grab my guitar and just noodle around for a while. I’m a drummer through and through, but I can’t help but try to practice something else for a while to remind me why exactly it is that I stick to the drums.

TMN: What’s next for Freelance Whales?

JH: Well, recently we put out our first record, Weathervanes. It’s been a long road to get it heard, get it up on iTunes, and make it accessible to everyone that wants it, and we’re going to really be playing hard to support the record at a bunch of CMJ shows this year. Hopefully a tour is not too far off. Of course, we’re going to keep playing on the subways and streets, but I’m excited that we can start to ramp up the number of proper shows we’re playing, as well. —Mike Smith, Oct. 21, 2009

Sacha Gervasi is a British director, screenwriter, and journalist. His screenwriting credits include The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks and directed by Steven Spielberg. Gervasi’s directorial debut, Anvil! The Story of Anvil, a documentary about an aging Canadian metal band for whom he was a roadie in the early 1980s, is being released on DVD tomorrow.

TMN: What caused you to reunite with Anvil and decide to make a film?

Sacha Gervasi: Some of my best memories as a teenager were the time that I spent with Anvil, but as I grew up we fell out of touch. I always wondered what happened to the guys and just decided one day to do a search for them on the internet. I was amazed to see that the band was still together, still playing, and still recording albums (they had recorded 12 at that point). I was able to get in touch with Lips through their web site, and before I knew it he was on a plane to visit me in Los Angeles. When I picked him up at the airport it was as if no time had passed at all. And when I saw that Lips still had the same passion and drive for Anvil as he did 20 years ago, I knew there was a story that had to be told.

TMN: The film comes across as so much more than a music documentary. Do you flinch at people referring to it as a rockumentary, and comparing it to Spinal Tap?

SG: No, not at all. It’s a natural comparison. In fact, Spinal Tap is Anvil’s favorite movie!

TMN: What makes you irrationally angry?

SG: The first Duran Duran album.

TMN: Has the success of the documentary bought a new level of success for the band? Was this your hope when you began filming?

SG: The great thing about the film is that it has given a whole new generation of people the opportunity to discover Anvil for the first time—and now things are really taking off for the band. They recently opened three shows for AC/DC! I always hoped that the movie could bring some new success for Anvil, but I never could have anticipated that it would reach this level.

TMN: In one of the finest moments of reflection, after tour disasters in Europe, Lips remarks, “at least there was a tour for it to go wrong on.” Was this sense of optimism something you were keen to highlight?

SG: Absolutely, it’s what keeps Lips and Anvil going. They have this unbelievable ability to look at things in a positive light no matter how dire the situation, and I think that’s something we can all learn from.

TMN: What is your favorite object in your office/workplace?

SG: I think this photo speaks for itself.

TMN: I understand you’re working on a biopic of Hervé Villechaize—the French actor who played Mr. Roarke’s assistant, Tattoo, in the television series Fantasy Island. Will it have a similar feel to The Story Of Anvil in the way that you present an untold story?

SG: It is obviously a very different story, but I think there will be similarities in the raw nature of the story and because it is based on fact. It is a side of the Herve Villechaize story most people don’t know and I’m excited to start making the movie!


 —Mike Smith, Oct. 5, 2009

Author Tom Piazza’s latest novel, City of Refuge, was runner-up in this year’s Tournament of Books. As a music writer, he won a Grammy for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey.

TMN: During the Tournament of Books, David Rees said City of Refuge “feels like it’s breathing and stretching and moving like a big organism.” What scope did you set when you began writing?

TP: Hurricane Katrina wasn’t just a local or regional disaster. The story didn’t just have to do with people’s houses getting smashed or flooded. People were taken out of their usual narratives and thrown all around the country into other people’s narratives. Probably half the novel takes place outside of New Orleans—Houston, Chicago, Missouri, upstate New York. Anyway, I knew the book would need to reflect that kind of upheaval and those kinds of contrasts.

Anytime you write a story that attends to people’s social or political lives as well as their interior, emotional lives, there is going to be a lot of tension among elements. City of Refuge contains several different types of discourse and narrative. I think that rattled some people, but it was the only way I thought I could, in fact, make the book be the kind of “organism” it needed to be.

TMN: What are your five least favorite things about New Orleans?

TP: Most of the same things I would dislike anywhere: Indifference to poverty and its causes. Violence. Racism. Greed and opportunism. Lack of curiosity.

TMN: How does your creative process begin?

TP: Usually with an image, a voice, or a gesture. I need to have something in mind that I know is true, and then I can build on that. I need to see that red wheelbarrow. If I can see it, or hear it, and I’m not just trying to tell myself I saw it or heard it, then I have something to go with. I like Picasso’s remark: “I don’t seek; I find.” I try to keep that in mind.

TMN: What are your three favorite books to recommend to people?

TP: Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann looks and reads like a big 19th-century family novel but is in fact a Trojan horse full of all these Modernist techniques that slip in and do their work without the reader noticing. Norman Rush’s short-story collection Whites is a neglected masterpiece. Bloods, an oral history of black Vietnam veterans by Wallace Terry, is one of the most astonishing books I’ve ever read. The speakers come from across the class and rank spectrum, and Terry manages to bring their extraordinarily varied voices to the page so that they appear in front of you like holograms.

TMN: What’s something you’re not good at but wish you were?

TP: Juggling.

TMN: Who is your archnemesis?

TP: Everyone’s archnemesis is some version of himself or herself.

TMN: What is your favorite object in your office/workplace?

TP: I like antique folding rulers; I always have at least one or two within reach. The one in the picture is made, like most of them, of boxwood and brass. I love how precisely it is put together. I like the paint on it and the marks and patina that come from having been used by someone who knew what he or she was doing. This ruler is somewhere around 90 years old. My father was an engineer, and there’s something about the irreducible utility of this thing that probably makes me feel connected to the best part of my dad, too.

TMN: What are you working on next?

TP: I’m working on a new novel set mostly in New York City, but also in other parts of the country. I don’t really like to talk about work-in-progress, at least until it’s more than halfway done, but this book is as different from City of Refuge as could be. I told my editor that it is essentially a comic novel but with tragedy riding underneath, set against a more or less epic landscape. I don’t know if he believed me. I’m also putting together a collection of my nonfiction pieces, and I’m writing for David Simon’s new HBO series Treme, which is set in post-Katrina New Orleans. —Mike Deri Smith, Jun. 10, 2009