Soon after joining White Denim in 2010, Jenkins played 11 shows with them over the course of three days at that year’s festival. “We played in a giant Doritos vending machine one time,” he casually adds, as if that’s not the most amazing detail.
As South By Southwest attracts more and bigger corporate sponsors, the stages get more outlandish. The ‘Doritos Jacked’ stage was over 17 metres high and had the band playing in the bottom section of a vending machine – the bit where your chips comes out – with three levels above that where packets of Doritos bigger than people hung from pegs, like you could buy one for $3.50 and then live like a king. “It’s almost like a Vegas kind of spectacle,” says Jenkins.
Cramming in almost a dozen shows like that over three days isn’t easy, but fortunately the showcase sets tend to be a bit shorter. “Sometimes they’re so short that they’re over before you realise they really happened,” Jenkins says. “Yeah, I’d say pacing yourself is a good thing. Usually it’s hot as all hell when South By Southwest hits as well. You’ve got to make sure that you have a healthy mix of water as well as beer and then I think the adrenaline’s pumping so hard that it just rolls you through it.”
Those live shows earned them a reputation for no-frills rocking out. Wasting no time, they’d barrel through their songs one after the other, with plenty of energy. “It’s not like GG Allin-crazy or anything like that,” Jenkins says of their live show, “but we used to not stop playing at all. We would just play continuously for however long the amount of time was so if there was 45 minutes we would play 45 straight.” They’ve learned to slow down a little in the three years since, however. “Now we’re putting more pauses into the set just to give us a rest. It could be pretty assaulting at times I guess.”
They’re helped in that by the mellower songs on their latest album, Corsicana Lemonade. In the past they tended towards blues-rock blasts with diversions into surprisingly complicated math-rock fiddliness, and while the new album’s still upbeat it’s also more classically structured, drawing on influences that have them sounding, to Australian ears at least, surprisingly like Powderfinger at times. “You can be mellow in those tunes even though they’re upbeat, I agree with that for sure,” Jenkins says. “They’ve leant themselves a little bit more to some space. We’ve started tying some of ’em together so we would block medleys out. Lately we’ve been interested in putting together medleys of songs, we were going like, ‘Let’s put four songs in a row from four different albums.’ We’ve been trying to have some fun like that, mixing that into it. It’s just the more material you have the more you get to paint with.”
Two of the songs on Coriscana Lemonade were recorded with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco after White Denim supported them on tour. They travelled to Chicago to work in the Loft, Wilco’s studio, and recorded A Place To Start and Distant Relative Salute, which laid the foundations for how they’d work on the rest of the album.
“If someone wanted to do an overdub [Tweedy] would say like, ‘Picture this person on stage playing this, is this someone that’s in the band actually playing the part or is this filler?’ It showed the need to think about overdubs in a more limited kind of sense, then also to really hone down what was integral to each track. I wouldn’t say [he’s] a minimalist or anything like that but he’s really got a refined sense of purpose for each instrument and each voice on a song.” After that they travelled back to Texas and built their own studio in a house overlooking a cliff. Inspired by the open floor plan of Wilco’s they created something similar, although with a vital Southern touch. “Barbecue. We barbecued a lot of meat out there on the patio. That was pretty essential.”
BY JODY MACGREGOR
