HEAD OF FEMUR
The SiS Interview by Jose Fritz

Speaker phone is a dangerous forum for an interview. It's not always clear who is speaking or what was said or by whom. In that environment a normal music writer often freezes. Jose Fritz just makes stuff up because he's a child-hating bastard and an inveterate liar. Head of Femur accepted these terms for what they were: an opening for them to run roughshod over all topics from local malls to the trials of touring as a 24-piece.

They've stripped down to a corn-fed quintet and stripped down their songwriting to make Great Plains, what will be remembered as their first rock album. It's street date is March 25th and until then the world knows them only as a vibrant source of orchestral pop. The transformation was unexpected by all. Head of Femur took some time to explain the process to Jose Fritz.

Jose Fritz: Is there anything you want to make sure gets into this article?
Head of Femur: No, I think we pretty much covered it.
JF: Is there anything you said and wished you
didn’t?
HOF: Nobody’s ever asked us that before.
JF: Should they have?
HOF: Uh…

I dialed the number and I was told they will call me back on speaker phone. I would be interviewing Matt Focht, Mike Elsener, and Colby Starck simultaneously. They spent the next 45 minutes impersonating one another, finishing each others sentences, ignoring questions and attempting to interview me. At no time was I actually in control of the situation. I’ll be referring to them collectively in this article, as a sign of my complete surrender to that state of affairs.

Head of femur:
The hemispheric articular surface at the upper extremity of the thigh bone. Also caput ossis femoris, caput femoris, head of thigh bone.

The head of a femur only even begins to develop at the end of an infant’s first year. The cartilage and joining tissue remains separate from the body for almost two decades. It only joins the whole of the body at around 18 years of age… or as was more succinctly written in the traditional spiritual plainsong:

The leg bone connected to the knee bone,
The knee bone connected to the thigh bone,
The thigh bone connected to the hip bone,
And hear the word of the Lord.

In Nebraska it was no different. The parts were inseparable. Band members depart and return: depart and return taking parts with them and returning them or not. The process alternately spawns and desiccates dozens of relatively unknown indie pop bands across the Midwest. Their ideas spread throughout and cross-pollinate like some great seed share program from the days of the new deal in the early and most promising part of this century.

JF: How many side projects are actually running concurrently at this point?
HOF: There’s Matt’s solo band and Box of Baby Birds, The Elks, Hey Hood, The Renfields, Magical Beautiful… We kind of live in this little communal area where three houses abut each other. So if you live here you’re probably in a band with one of us. The Elks are next door, Nick has his own band in Lincoln. Our keyboard player does his own stuff too. Are you counting? We’re not counting. You can make something up if you want. Round up. Whatever…There are at least 7 or 8 we’re sort of in.
JF: Sort of in?
HOF: You know; when we play with somebody else for a song or two.
JF: Like a time share?
HOF: Yeah! If you live here then you’re a part of this.
JF: But you’re even in bands that are 500 miles away.
HOF: Yeah somehow. Some of the people in our band are 500 miles away right now.
JF: I thought there were only 4 of you now? Who am I missing?
HOF: Eathan Janney replaced Tyson Thurston on Keyboard in June. That was when Tyson went off to be in Magical Beautiful.
JF: Like you weren’t already magical enough. Are any of you in Magical Beautiful?
HOF: Yes, we don’t totally understand it ourselves. We need a flow chart.

It’s difficult to determine if their jamboree-sized line up was a result of their orchestral pop structures or if it’s the other way around. What else can 24 musicians do in a room other than eat BBQ, get drunk and compose orchestral pop complete with tablature for the string and horn sections? In truth, the writing core has always been small, even if in continual flux. That’s what makes Great Plains unique in their catalog. Instead of traveling with two dozen drunk indie rockers stuffed with smoked brisket it’s just a tight five piece touring unit.

JF: what’s more comfortable for you, the big 24-piece band or the power quintet?
HOF: It depends. Performance-wise the power quintet is more comfortable, and way more comfortable in the car. We’re able to really find a groove easier with a smaller line up. It’s more like a traditional rock band right now than the big orchestrated group. It’s more about playing against and off of each other in this setting as opposed to knowing what the hell the glockenspiel player is doing.

In full disclosure they admitted that there was no glockenspiel player, it was just the corn-fed sarcasm flowing. But it was playful, not negative or aggressive. Matt, Mike and Colby were hesitant to complain about anybody or anything in our talk. Even the cold water treatment they got from SpinART was taken in stride. In 2006 they played on the SpinART stage at SXSW with every expectation that Great Plains would come out on that label. The songs were already written, the label loved the demos. It was a sure thing.

HOF: SpinART was jumping up and down telling us how much they loved the new songs. Then we got back to Chicago where we had our studio time booked at Wall-to-Wall. Then Jeff had to cut our budgets to a tenth and said he was out of money and he was probably going to fold. They said “Here I’ll give you $1,200 to make that record we love so much.” The record industry is having such a hard time right now. SpinART is unfortunately one of those casualties.
JF: So how did the record get made?
HOF: We called our guys at Wall-to-Wall, Dan and Chris Brickly. Dan was drunk at a wedding. He said “I don’t care if you can pay me or not. Just come on down and record this record.”

They brought in A.J. Mogis to mix it in Omaha. Matt, Mike and company had moved to Chicago but their loyalties and support came from Nebraska. It was a long inseparable bond. A.J. Mogis is the brother of Mike Mogis one of the founding fathers of Saddle-Creek records, the musical epicenter of Omaha. It’s as obvious as the cornfields. They know they are connected to it both literally and metaphorically and that it runs through everything.

JF: An Edison cylinder only holds about 2 minutes of audio. If you had to pick 2 minutes of material from Great Plains for a Cylinder what would it be?
HOF: I’m thinking the second half of “Covered Wagons” into the first half of “Great Plains.”
JF: That’s what encapsulates the record to you, the Midwestern imagery and all that?
HOF: It’s sort of in our blood.
JF: You relocated to a major metropolitan area and you’re naming your record after spacious skies and amber waves of grain. Explain this to me.
HOF: For being a big city [Chicago] is very Midwestern. You’ve got a big huge skyline surrounded by a city and lake. It’s got the big city feel but you can hop in the van and get to a corn field quickly. We live on tree-lined streets, it’s very nice.
JF: It just makes you want to plant a field of wheat.

Head of Femur remains fully aware that they disseminate their way of life. It’s that longing for the open spaces, that true yearning for the American heartland. They are more a part of it than any meth-cooking Nebraskan cowfuck. Their notion is more like the one in the American Dream. It’s a traditional image of Americana as old as our national anthem.

Oh beautiful, for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain.

HOF: Chicago is a big city with fantastic opportunities but it’s spread out. It’s got space; you can breathe easy even when it is polluted by Gary and the awful factories around here. It’s spread out and it reminds me of home. Spending time on our 3 house compound here really adds to that. We have barbecues weekly in the spring and summer time and hang our here as much as possible and play music.

Early in their career, Head of Femur suffered from an overt and undeserved comparison to Bright Eyes. This was to their detriment; with two members in the Bright Eyes touring band and both bands connected to the Omaha scene. They spent the last 5 years straining to escape Connor Oberst’s pretentious shadow. The core members of Head of Femur were already playing as Pablo’s Triangle. They packed their idealism and their PA system into their Dodge Dart, strapped an air mattress the roof and moved to Chicago. Five members survived the move. Two stayed behind to guard the Fort Calhoun.

They shook that Bright Eyes tag over time and earned comparisons to King Crimson, The Flaming Lips and Golden Boots, and all were true. But their past albums did not succeed on the basis of primogeniture. They succeed on two things, hype and substance. You need some of each of course, but only one is resolute. Only one bears the potential to endure, or the hope for timelessness. That quality does not need to be enveloped in a warm orchestra of French horn, xylophones, zithers and violins. They shed it all, not just displaying the structure but fully exposing and advertising it like a public confession. They brandished it blatantly on the album art.

HOF: Maggie Pedersen painted the cover and we all worked on the inside. Maggie was kind of the art director, Thomas Irvin did the layout. Then we used a bunch of photographs my father took in the 1970s of Nebraska. The art really celebrates where we came from and our influences. We’re real happy how it came out.
JF: Seapking of influences, The first album you guys released was said to be mostly influenced by Brian Eno. Later albums got a lot of comparisons to Brian Wilson. Any more Brian’s we should know about?
HOF: We’re always going to have a couple bands that we think we’re sort of sounding like and sort of writing songs like. But then, inevitably things sort of turn out another way. I think it’s more about what we’re listening to than anything we’re ever trying to sound like.

That self-awareness makes Great Plains into that rare avis among pop albums. They’ve grown the confidence in themselves to strip away the ornamental parts of their music and write a rock record. They realized where the songs came from at long last. More importantly for the purposes of this article they had admitted it… at least indirectly. Nothing had come directly; everything had been anecdotal or inferred.

The transcript of this event didn’t do justice to the chaos that ensued. I’ve pieced together events as best explain them not the interview. Even now, days later there appears to be missing time, not like Nixon’s 18 missing minutes of tape but more like when Hendrix left studio masters in his taxi cab and it vanished into the stinking fog of the Bowery night: lost forever except unto legend, lore and entertaining lies.

HOF: …I lost my train of thought. I wish we were interviewing you.
JF: I don’t think that’s the way this is supposed to work
HOF: We’re very sarcastic. There’s been a lot of people in the group and we all
agree. That’s like 45 people.
JF: Are you guys finishing each others sentences or am I just hallucinating?
HOF: That happens sometimes.
JF: When I get this lost I usually ask if you’ve been arrested.
HOF: No comment.