Louis XIV - Jason Hill Interview

King of the Hill

by Tina Whelski

“If you want clean fun go fly a kite,” sings Louis XIV front man Jason Hill on “Paper Dolls” from The Best Little Secrets Are Kept (Atlantic). But if you prefer the band’s kind of fun, just follow their musical exploits with “Little Stacy Q” and “Dominique” at Irving Plaza on September 1.

Brian Karscig (guitar, vocals), Mark Maigaard (drums), James Armbrust (bass), and Hill (lead vocals, lead guitar) will dole out songs like “Illegal Tender,” “Finding Out True Love is Blind,” “Letter to Dominique” and “Pledge of Allegiance,” where prowling riffs and frisky beats meet decadent pleasures.

Louis XIV’s Jason Hill talks to The Aquarian about the band’s “just press record” studio technique and of course, women.

AW: Where do those lyrics come from!

Jason Hill: (Laughs). Well sometimes they’re just straight me ad-libbing…For instance on “Paper Doll” I went and set up the microphone one evening and only like two microphones on the drums and went and played that beat myself…Mark’s a much better drummer than me, but quite often I’ll be the only one in there late at night, so as a sort of hack drummer, I’ll come up with a beat nobody would normally come up with. I sat down and played the beat and later had Mark re-dub a snare drum on top of it, which you hear in the final mix. But I played the initial beat and then went to the guitar and played the little riff and literally pressed record. So the riff that you hear the whole song on the guitar is basically just me making it up as I went along. I did the same thing on vocals…I think that’s one of the songs I’m most proud about because it’s completely, with the exception of a few lines I had to re-sing, all ad lib. You hear me sing something like “bang a gong get it own” because I didn’t know what else to say. I literally was just imitating my girlfriend the night before. I heard her for the first time when she got really wasted and she started speaking this gibberish and started getting a little mousy with me, like playful back and forth and it was funny. So this next night I was in the studio and I literally pressed record and sort of re-lived that conversation, although I took liberty quite a bit (laughs).

AW: The album’s definitely very present.

Hill: It was quite fun. I remember after I was done I sort of listened to it a million times over and over again thinking, “Should I re-do it? No, it’s great.” There were some things that I sing a little differently now live, but there was such a moment there…I did the same sort of thing on “Finding Out True Love Is Blind,” and especially “Pledge of Allegiance”…The most unreserved things come out when you just do that ...There’s one of the best moments on the second verse. It ends with like “oka sica saca” or something like that. It’s complete gibberish because I didn’t have a rhyme.

AW: I’ll say you’re “unreserved” on the album (laughs). It seems there’s more of a “shared perversion” with gal pals throughout the songs than critics tend to point out. Like in “Pledge of Allegiance” you sing, “Little Stacy Q/When she doesn’t have a thing to do/She comes to my house/Well let’s keep that between me and you.”

Hill: I think you nailed it on the head and I’ve never heard anybody say that. There’s like a “shared perversion” (laughs). Often I’ll read in certain reviews people go as far as to call it “masochistic” and I don’t see that at all. It’s all very shared throughout the album. The girls within that are so spunky (laughs).

AW: I would think you have more female fans than females you offend.

Hill: We certainly do. It’s more packed with girls every time. But you can get somebody that totally takes it the wrong way. I mean we were picketed in Indianapolis recently, which I thought was sort of weird. It’s kind of a funny story where there was a girl in the front row, our first time playing in Indianapolis, and she was like a super fan. She knew all the words and sang along and after the show I went out and had a drink and said hello to the different people who wanted to talk and she came up and we started chatting and what not and she goes, “I’m sorry about my friends out there picketing. They just really don’t like your band.” And I said, “What?” So I walked outside and they were still picketing after the show and handing out pamphlets and it was just crazy to me. So I said, “Well invite your friends on the bus for a drink with us at least and have a little pow wow.” I was curious what it is that’s so offensive. It sounded like the most fun conversation I could have that evening was with these people…So they came on the bus and I gave them a drink and tried to talk with them but they literally didn’t say anything. They just kept looking at their friend like, “I fucking hate you. Get me out of here.”

There have also been some great reviews, one in San Francisco in some weekly that was totally like a thesis of why we’re offensive. (laughs). She said “chocolate girl” and “little Asian friend” were racist.

AW: But you actually sing in “Pledge of Allegiance” “I know it ain’t correct/But politics is so much better when there’s sex.”

Hill: Exactly! You get it. I’m just having fun…“Little Asian friend,” how is that offensive? I don’t know? Somewhere [in the report] she said our cover depicted a dead, naked girl that we’d defiled and raped and “A Letter To Dominique” was about a rape and I’m like, “Are you nuts?” The best part of it is like paragraph six or something where she says she would actually “like like,” (the double “like”) this music, but she goes on to say, but she just thinks “rock n’ roll should be more responsible.” And I was thinking, “I love that you said that, because that right there sums it up for a lot of people.” They’re going to go on the other side and go, “I don’t.”(laughs).

AW: Why do you think the best little secrets kept?

Hill: The problem with secrets is most often they’re not kept…Somebody always knows…I have many, many secrets that I keep very close to my chest…I’m not one to go around and talk about all my adventures in life, though I do in my songs.

AW: What is it about “secrets” that you cherish?

Hill: There’s obviously this dangerousness to secrets. I have so many facets of myself, which I think everyone has. There’s sort of a dark, perverted side. There’s a very vulnerable sort of kind of guy that literally loves to cuddle teddy bears and soft things. Everybody has those sides to them. There’s just something about secrets and that shared bond between people. If it’s truly kept, it continues to be very special. The problem with secrets is they get out there eventually and things unravel and if it’s not a big deal then they don’t, but it’s no longer special.

AW: What attracted you to the figure of Louis XIV?

Hill: Here’s the truth about it. The name means as much to us as led balloons meant to Led Zeppelin after the album. …The first tune we did was Louis XIV, so we named it Louis XIV…At the time I got really fascinated by Van Gogh [Vincent]…The story of his life was so fascinating that we sort of did the first album in many ways based around his life, but it becomes a boy that starts to lose his mind and then begins to believe that he is Louis XIV. Within that, I made a point of not knowing hardly anything about Louis XIV because to me if I’m truly going to tell the story, I wouldn’t’ really know all the facts about his life. You’re losing your mind, right? So you’re just sort of making them up. A lot of what we made up tended to actually mirror his life with our vision of the first album, oddly more by coincidence or that we were in Paris and tapped into something. I don’t know what it was. So we recorded that first record that had something to do with Louis XIV, but not really “the king Louis XIV,” but “our own person Louis XIV” and we kept the songs “Louis XIV” and “God Killed The Queen” because those were the first two songs we did. We brought them over to the new record…We wanted to make sure all the songs worked together and in some ways the sound connected it through and in some ways the production and in some ways the sexual nature and the honesty with the lyrics. But there wasn’t really a concept, like we’re trying to put the sex back in rock n’ roll or whatever.

AW: Your production on the album is interesting.

Jason: I fell in love with recording the moment I first bought a little tape recorder and played a song into it and realized it sounded different when I played it back. The first time I went into a real studio I said to the engineer, “I want to get the vocals of the singer to sound like this” or “the guitar to sound like that” and “the drums to sound like this,” and it was always, “No you can’t do that, but this is how I normally do it.” Then you’d come out and be very unhappy with the recording so it sort of forced me to be like, “Well, I’ll just have to do it myself.” I do things somewhat odd though because I was very broke all the time. I would max out all my credit cards to get recording gear, but to keep it working, especially old stuff, it cost a lot of money so often half of what I had was always broken and I had to make do. In that odd process of trying to do things and not caring how other people did it, but caring how it sounds, I would do things quite a bit different and the choruses sort of developed a sound…There’s no reverb on our record which is very odd for a lot of people to hear. Everything is very dry and fuzzy and natural. It’s sort of this crisp fuzziness. I love the fact that I don’t know a lot of what I play on the record. I love that I can never do the same solo twice (laughs). And I love the fact that half the record is me or Brian just pressing record and it’s just all off the cuff.

Louis XIV perform at Irving Plaza September 1.

Originally published in The Aquarian Weekly 9/1/05.

Louis XIV Video for "Finding Out True Love Is Blind."