Chris Renn, singer/guitarist for The Kilowatthours, hasn't seen half his band in more than six months. The quartet hasn't played together as a whole since October, and yet they're kicking off a three-week national tour in five days. So how much rehearsal will the estranged outfit get to log in before hitting the road? "One day," replies Renn with a chuckle. "I'm not kidding. We'll just check and see if we remember the songs.
"I'd be lying to you if I said I wasn't nervous," he adds. "You always think you know the songs, then you realize you've forgotten bits and pieces. I hope it works out, though — we don't really have much of a choice."
In terms of both methodology and style, The Kilowatthours are about as far-flung from the average indie-rock combo as is possible. Everybody knows the usual story; it's the one about innumerable practice-space hours, shitty day gigs, van-miles, basement shows, compilation appearances and opening tour slots. But Renn, drummer Ben Lord, pianist Dan Benningfield, and guitarist Ryan Compton eschew the band-as-life philosophy in favor of a much more unorthodox, but equally rewarding, strategy — one that allows them to disregard scenes and trends, and explore their own musical identities without pressure.
"That's one thing that we definitely have an advantage in, not adhering to a vibe," says Renn. "Because we all live in different places, so we don't really have a vibe as a whole. We don't have a home base. People are doing whatever they want, and that's nice. You don't have to fit into any one group."
The four members are scattered throughout the East, currently living in Louisville, Nashville, Atlanta and New York. They write separately, often leaving riffs and partial arrangements on one another's answering machines. Complete songs are generally hashed out during infrequent rehearsals, held whenever everybody's schedules happen to mesh, and recording is done in the same compact bursts of activity. Often, all tracking is completed in less than three days.
This fragmented, yet extremely collaborative, songwriting approach is largely responsible for The Kilowatthours' iconoclastic sound, a moody mix of dynamic guitar rock and atmospheric, arty deconstruction. The fact that each member is free to compose individually keeps things fresh, and without any tendencies toward the formulaic.
"There's definitely no one who's dominant," Renn affirms. "I mean, Ben's writing guitar lines, our piano player's writing on drums, I'm writing on piano. Everybody does everything. Everybody writes on their own, while we're in our different cities and whatnot. And when we come together, we basically throw ourselves into it and see what pops up."
They seem to have turned an apparent liability into an asset. Unaffected by local-scene homogenization and the stress of attempting to parlay personal expression into a career, the Kilowatthours aim to please themselves first and foremost. They've played together long enough to know how to present their individual visions as a cohesive whole. Their first full-length, last year's Strain of Positive Thinking, is an eclectic, flowing affair. The disc centers on instrumental melody, and contains plenty of both the upbeat and the hypnotic, without kowtowing to either school.
Catchy but still ambitious, The Kilowatthours nod to alternative rock as often as they do more fringe-oriented peers like Low or Yo La Tengo. The dichotomy has made the band rather difficult to pigeonhole. Renn says that they've never really fit in anywhere, but would rather appeal to open-minded music fans in general than the crossed-arms crowd.
"When we first started playing shows, we noticed that we didn't fit into any bill that we played on," he says "Not with the hardcore kids, not with the art-rock guys. I don't care about that. Those kinds of people are the ones who show up two-and-a-half hours late at the shows, and stand at the bar. And talk. I don't care what they think. They're too cool to buy records now anyway."
In any case, listener tastes and underground trend shifts don't figure heavily in The Kilowatthours' creative process. "I still don't really believe that people buy our records, you know?" Renn muses. "That hasn't really entered into it. Maybe if we were a huge band, but I don't really think about it. The only thing I think about is, I'm gonna have to listen to it. My mom's gonna tell me it's horrible," he says with a laugh.
While Strain received enthusiastic reviews from magazines such as CMJ, and remained in heavy rotation on various indie-bent Internet radio stations for months on end, the group's four members are either beginning or entrenched in their nonmusical careers, hundreds of miles apart. By treating their artistic pursuit as another facet of life, rather than life itself, the quartet never experienced the make-it-or-die-trying tunnel vision that burns out or compromises the output of so many bands. Renn, for one, believes that freedom can't help but produce better, or at least more personal, music.
"We started out like "we're gonna take over the world,' like every band does," he explains. "Now we do it — it sounds ridiculous — but pretty much for the music's sake. We enjoy playing music. We just want to have fun. I don't know if that's selfish; it probably is. It's good to take it seriously, but if you get way too serious about it, get completely caught up in it, you're not going to enjoy yourself, and you're gonna write terrible music. As far as indie bands that have gotten huge, there's always that hope. But I think when people are much more relaxed, they're actually working twice as hard."
Not that they wouldn't love to achieve a greater level of success, he's quick to add. It's just that the band's modus operandi, and their lives away from it, don't exactly lend themselves to the conventional cycle of recording and touring. "No, we've never really been able to look at it as a career choice," he says. "We never really had the opportunity to. God, it would be great, though."
The members' lack of proximity might lead one to suspect that perhaps they're not as tight as most bands, that the project might be more legacy of inconvenience than labor of love. But Renn contends that the four friends are as close and committed as any outfit — they just don't get to see as much of each other, and have to work a little harder than most when they do.
"You have to go out to a bar, or go bowling, just kind of hang out for a couple of days, you know?" he says. "You have to get readjusted. Every time you go away, you change, and you come back as a slightly different person. That's what happens. So you've got to hang out, get to know one another again, and then get to work."
He goes on, however, to assure that it's not all catching up and cramming when the men finally do find some time to get together:
"That reminds me of what me and Dan are doing. We're growing our hair out, we promised not to cut our hair until after the tour. And Dan can't take it. So he comes up with this great idea that, when we go into the studio, we're gonna give ourselves ragin' mullets. Huge, total "business in front, party in back' mullets. So if we ever get angry at each other, and start yelling at each other — come on, we're wearing mullets! You can't take anything that seriously. "I can't believe you want to — oh, man, you've got lightning bolts shaved into the side of your head!'"
This article appears in Jul 18-24, 2001.