The seven N.C. musicians who make up Paper Tongues started out as street buskers in an improv music collective that regularly met and jammed at a busy Charlotte intersection “for the city and the people and the homeless and the club goers and whoever wanted to come out.”
All that changed fouryears ago when their demos caught the ear of producer Brian West (K’Naan, Nelly Furtado), who invited the septet out to his LA studio to record. “We were just like, ‘Yeah, we’ll be there, see you in a week,” guitarist Devin Forbes recalled in a recent CL interview, laughing as he described the frenzied fundraising that followed and ultimately inspired their first single, “Ride to California.” [Video after the jump]
Once they arrived in LA, they were faced with a new challenge: learning how to create in an environment completely different from the one they were used to. None of them had ever worked in a professional recording studio, and coping with the pressures they put on each other was just demanding as learning the technical ins-and-outs of the process. “We had to deal with getting over a lot of emotional boundaries of just allowing each other to really explore a song … and not jump to any conclusions about it too early,” Forbes explained. “Actually giving people space to breathe and create and to move within a song that we’re working on, that’s how we really got to this crazy sound that is Paper Tongues. It’s not just Aswan North’s sound, it’s not just Dev Forbes’ sound, it’s all seven members – which is a lot of members, mind you – jiving together and trying to make something that we can compromise on together.”
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2011.