It's About Time

© therentals.com

Matt Sharp is in front of, and behind, the camera.

For the last year, Matt Sharp has been living in a sort of self-imposed fishbowl. Last year, he and his band The Rentals decided that they would record and put out an album every three months, produce a short film every week, and take a roll of photos every day, publishing one on their website daily. The grueling creative schedule challenged the band, and the filmmakers who worked with them, well beyond their limits. Today, it's all over. A piece of it, anyway. Their last film is going online, and with it their year-long experiment ends. I recently had a chance to catch up with Sharp and chat about the project they called Songs About Time.

How did the project come about?

We talked about it at the end of 2008 and started talking to different people and started talking about the film aspect about it. We knew nothing about it, and the people that we met along the way added to the project. We kept finding that, "Oh, we're gonna need more people." We constantly found ourselves out looking for that. We essentially have a basketball team full of editors now.

I feel very proud of it. I feel a lot of pride about the fact that we didn't sit around and wait for someone to enable us to do it. We set ourselves some goals that were at times too ambitious but that at the time seemed just ambitious enough. I feel really good about that and about the fact that it was done through total independence.

Tell me about the filming. Did you find it very intrusive?

I definitely found out right away that I'm most happy when I'm on the other side of the camera. We talked specifically about not wanting to do anything like a typical documentary style. The films can at times be that, but I certainly didn't want it that way. In the beginning of the year we had a list of the things that we didn't want. We wanted it to be whatever it was that we came up with that week. We didn't want it to be about tension and release: Can they get it done? Oh they got it done!

We wanted it to be a more creative outlet we wanted it to me more than just about the musicians. There were definitely times when it was like, "Oh my god we have to put out a film in two days and we still haven't come up with an idea!"



Did you start to see yourself as a character?



I know one thing, it's very difficult with being so immersed in something to have any sense of perspective on what you're doing. There's not too much time to contemplate, it's just like, "we've got to do something." I think last night was the first time that it started to sink in that the filming was coming to an end. That hit me last night for sure. It's very strange to be nostalgic for a year that you're in already. Maybe people feel that way about graduating college or high school or something.

 Sometimes I wonder if we've made any films that are not about making films. That's our default setting. It becomes so much about the process.

Do you think that you'll miss it?

I know certainly that there's a feeling between a large group of us that have been working on the movies. We're sort of nostalgic about it already. A lot of friendships were born out of his project.

I imagine that there was a lot of pressure, once the project was started, to see it through. You can really feel that in the April 20 film, once the songs for the first EP were recorded, and you're cleaning up. It's a really great transition. And in that film, you say you have no idea about how to continue. But then, the very next week, you're recording a song.

It's funny that it's April 20 that you're talking about because there were times (after we had finished another cycle or work) where we wanted to go back and do the same kind of thing, but we realized that, "Oh yeah, we already made that film."

There's definitely a point where, at times, the responsibility of having to deal with all of the aspects of the project weakens everything, and you begin making compromises with all three mediums. Or times when you're putting too much into one specific thing – where you're paying too much attention to the music, for example, or to the film.

But there have been these moments that these things do have a balance together and a rhythm where one thing inspires the other. And for me, when that balance happens between all three mediums, it's really a beautiful thing to be a part of. It's difficult to keep it there but you really know when it's happening. For example, I have to take a lot of photographs in the house that we're working in, because I have to take a lot of photographs everyday and the house is just where I happen to be. So that forced me to go out and find something new. Thought that, you discover a different feeling, a different melody, or a different building in the city, and all of those elements start working together. And you want to write a song or make a film about that place, or that idea, that never would have occurred to you had you not left the house.

Can you think of some places (in the films, photos, or songs) where that's been the case?

October 13th. That film is something that was born out of all of those elements. The film is a single take of the city in reverse. Playing behind it is probably my favorite piece of music out of the whole year. That's one of those times where all those things came together. I wouldn't have found that particular location without just drifting around with the camera and having the pressure of the film. During that week we ran into a rare thing.

Most of the films where made where you have one idea and execute that idea by the end of the week. You don't have a Plan A, a Plan B, and a Plan C. But sometimes it just happens to you where you set out and everything is against you, and your original idea gets derailed and you better come up with something, and because you spent so much time on that now-defunct idea, the thing you come up with better be simple. That particular film was born out of that. Because it had to be something that wouldn't take an editor days and days. But that location wouldn't have been found without the photography and the music going from that. I was out with my camera looking for a simple film idea, and the music idea came right away.

It's one of those things where you don't know if it's going to work, and you don't know why it works, it just does. That film gives me a feeling that I'm proud to share with people.

You made the EPs and you made the music for the films. That must have been an incredible amount of work.

We didn't necessarily know which songs we were going to work on, but once we got started, that kind of changed. With the first record that we put out, there was one particular song that I wanted Joey Santiago play on. That was my wish at the beginning of the year to have him play on this one particular song. I had met him though a friend and it was one of the things we talked about, but it was a bit vague. He said he'd like to do it but then we lost touch and it got to the point where we were set up to mix the song and I was just like, "OK the song is not going to have any guitar." But the next morning Joey called me up and said, "Hey are you still interested in working with me?" And it was such a great thing. One of the best memories I have of the year is looking around the room and everyone just so overjoyed that he was a part of it. Everything he played, everyone was just like "That's great!" It was because of the structure of the project, it was nice that it was documented in the way it was, and without force.

How did the project change your music?

Well, there's a lot. Certainly, thinking about scoring the films has changed a lot. Things like traditional drums and guitars and things like that that don't necessarily work great as a score. A lot of the time we focused on what Lauren [Chipman, who plays violin, viola, piano] does and a lot of what she brings. I would work on these different ideas for the film, or we would adapt a part of a song for the film – again taking it away from guitar, bass and rums. This was the first album I engineered. I've never had the hunger for that knowledge, but it came with the necessary of the project. So, I had to think about the instruments completely differently – not in a classical form, but how would they work best for the films.

I had absolutely no confidence in my abilities as an engineer in January. As the year has progressed I've gotten a little more confident and a little more confident. In the past I would have given the project to a professional engineer and let them do the magical things I know nothing about. But I had to do it myself and think about the contribution of the different instruments and think about them in a totally different way.

Another way that the project has changed the music very directly is that every Wednesday, which was the first day after we put out a film each week, I would sit down with the editor and say, "these are the pieces of music that we're thinking about," and ask if they trigger any ideas for the editor. And often the editor would go, "oh I just like this part." And they would go through different aspects of the project and find things that would often lead us into something else. It would completely influence the kind of music we started working on.

This happened with the film we did for September 1. It was another act-of-desperation film that we had to do very quickly. We were working with someone whose cousin was an artist and we said, "Lets just buy a dry erase board and see what happens."

In that case I had to very quickly come up with a piece of music that would suit our first – maybe our only – animated film. I was driving in the car with our main shooter, David Leamy, listening to some of the music that I had in mind for it, and he said, "God I just wish this song could be this way, but you're just going to layer it." So I just kept thinking: god, don't ruin this song; don't ruin it. That's the song "A Rose is a Rose." The song was not very fleshed out. It was more or less written with a particular film in mind. So I just worked with everyone to maintain the innocence of it.

How has this project changed you?

A lot of the times the people that I enjoy reading or watching their films or listening to their music seem to be trying to tell a specific story, and just keep coming at that story from different angles with different projects, but the elements are the same. I seem to enjoy them trying to tell that thing. That happens with a lot of things. I mean, how many Bergman films have a family member on fire? Or how many Woody Allen films have been about the same thing?

This has just been another way of trying to tell at story, or trying to get at a particular feeling. It's like somebody writing a book where they finally get at what they've been trying to say. Or a filmmaker who finally gets it right. Like with Woody Allen in Crimes and Misdemeanors. He was right there.

So you think you've finally told the story that you've been trying to tell?

Hopefully, but I can't really speak to it because were still in it with this project. But I hope that we're there with it. That it gives people a sense that we've finally gotten it.

So if this is a theme that has been running through your career and you get a it with this project, what's next?

As this year comes to a close we're just about to take that big breath and put it together in a tangible way, which is a big challenge for us because we haven't been living like that. Now we have to take all of this stuff and flip the switch and all of these things are going to be living in a physical form and have to represent us.

All the stuff we made this year is going to be put into a kind of, I don't even know what you would call it, a box set, I guess. So we have to start reflecting on which films are we most proud of and we have to start making these things, this package, that's going to bring all of these things together. It's also going to include Test rolls from the shots that I've been taking all year, so we're going through thousands of photographs for this book. And we have to represent the films and the music and all of that. It's probably more work than what we've been doing all year.

Do you feel pressure to do it a certain way?

I don't worry about the music, or how we decide to represent the music, but with the films there's a totally different challenge for us. I know that if someone gave me a DVD and said, "Oh here's a DVD with 52 short films in four different languages," it would just seem daunting to want to get into and you might look at it as a laborious thing to want to watch, which is my big fear about it. Because we did a lot of things that we're proud of and that we want to share with people. So we just want to give people enough to give them the courage to get the DVD out and put it in. We want to share the year with as many people as possible, but we don't want the idea of watching them to by scary.

Finish this sentence. "These are songs about time, but they're also about..."

Oh lord I hate questions like this! Um...let's put it this way: I went to see a lecture with these guys that run this company Tomato in the UK, that's this huge arts collective that deals with music and film and all sorts of different things. They had just done this crazy spectacular art exhibit that blurs the lines between various forms of art. During their lecture they said these beautiful things about art and their work. Afterwards, someone stood up and asked about their philosophy and one of the guys just said "Just get on with it."

So the songs are about time, and they're about getting on with it. Whether you like it, or think you could improve with it, you've just got to get on with it, because there's another one you've got to do. So it's just about moving forward instead of spending so much time laboring over things that may mean a great deal to me but mean nothing to anyone else. So this year has been about not getting caught up with that, and just moving on.