The safe sound of Phoenix Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix It was more than just the French band's breakthrough in the United States: it baptized a new era of electronically aided indie rock. It brought the “French touch” familiar from Phoenix's previous work, as well as Daft Punk, childhood friends of Phoenix guitarists Christian Mazzalai and Laurent “Branco” Brancowitz, to a soulful widescreen format. The album is luxurious and elevated, but the journey to get there wasn't nearly as glamorous.
Speaking with Branco and Mazzalai in Los Angeles ahead of their performance at Just Like Heaven 2024, a time capsule of the indie era that Phoenix helped usher in, the two musicians fear giving in to nostalgia. “As human beings, we're not really nostalgic people,” Branco says. “But sometimes it's good to remember those moments in our lives: we know the power of that music and what it means to people. So tonight is one of those shows where we give ourselves over to this emotion.”
Phoenix's audience had been growing before wolf. Their third album, It's never been like thisThey capitalized on their predominantly European audience while remaining a bit secretive in the United States: they toured in the United States, but never in venues larger than clubs.
Their clever mix of synth-soaked rock was far from fashionable in 2006. Mainstream alternative radio found itself in a big conundrum of post-post-grunge, Fall Out Boy-style pop-punk, and whatever Red Hot Chili Peppers was doing in Arcadio Stadium. But the independent scene began to flourish, and in the meantime, Phoenix found itself free of a record label, thrust into the “blogging age” with the world at its feet. “We were just coming off a big tour of the United States and the world,” says Mazzalai. “We had the energy!”
Before locking themselves in a studio to record their fourth album, the band decided to try something romantic and write music in select locations, starting with a hotel room in New York. “We shared a room,” Mazzalai reminds Branco. “We had a fantasy because we knew that one of our heroes, François Truffaut, the French film director, would write all his scripts in hotels and never leave them. “So we had the dream, the fantasy, of meeting all the hotel employees and being really creative there.”
Although the duo confesses that not much came of those early sessions in New York, one song started there: “Rome,” a somewhat contradictory title for the only song they wrote in the United States. However, Phoenix continued to find new places of inspiration once Mazzalai states that they “discovered the beauty of changing the environment.” One of those places was a boat on the River Seine in his native Paris: beautiful, romantic and inspiring, yes, but practical? Definitely not. “This was the only place where we wrote zero, nothing at all,” Mazzalai says. “We were a little dizzy. The water looks calm when you see it from the shore, but it is not calm at all!
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