Drill

So I went down to an X-96 show without an X-card. “Where is your X-card?” “What’s that?” “You don’t have an X-card?” “I don’t know what an X-card is.” Lucky that Drill’s tour manager walked by. I saw Drill and left. The coolest thing about seeing Drill live was the guy standing next to me. This dude, who was extremely hip, so hip in fact that he’d bleached a

 forelock blonde to contrast with his naturally occurring brunette hair, kept shouting, “show us your tits.” Show us your tits? Why are you here sir? Tits are easily viewed at countless “titty bars” around town. If you want to see tits why aren’t you at Golden Trails or some other similar venue? DV8 is a music club. Please go away.

The band had some equipment problems during their set. Mainly a malfunctioning guitar. I kept waiting for Dan Harnett, the guitarist, to explode and destroy something. He seemed on the verge, but he never did. Meanwhile Lucia Cifarelli, Drill’s vocalist, took over the stage, nipples erect and screamed. Those erect nipples are probably the reason the dude was so excited to see some tits. She does get into the performance, just a little bit.

Before this all occurred I spent some time on Drill’s bus talkingwith Lucia. How does this virtually unknown young band afford a bus? The EMPIRE RECORDS soundtrack rears its financially successful head once again. “What are you,” a song also present on the debut, and one of the highlights live, is also on the soundtrack album. Lucia is a talker. I like talkers, it makes my job easy, except when deadline time approaches. Some portions of the conversation were deleted. Hopefully what remains presents a picture of how sincere Lucia is about her art. “Product” isn’t mentioned once. She is a performer, a writer, a vocalist and an artist, not a manufactured item for consumption. “Show us your tits.” What a fool!

SLUG: Your bio says you met Dan through an ad in the Village Voice. What were you two doing at the time?

Lucia: He was working on songs, he was coming up with arrangements and weird trips in his studio and I was working with various people and in search of my other musical half. I was writing with a lot of other people, I was honing my craft and feeling unfulfilled because I wasn’t able to find anybody that could make a commitment to the project. And when I say “the project” I mean a band. I joined one band during the time before I hooked up with Dan. It was a good experience because I was able to get over my stage fright.

SLUG: You had stage fright?

Lucia: I don’t have it anymore, I still get nervous before every show, but I had stage fright for a really long time and I used the band I was in before I hooked up with Dan more as a platform to get over that. The band wasn’t going anywhere and most of the musicians I was meeting during that time had inflated egos and were so overly confident that they weren’t interested in anything that I had to contribute. I was studying voice, studying opera, and Dan placed an ad in the Village Voice. He was looking for a singer/songwriter and he had his influences listed in the paper. I called. I would always flip through the “Village Voice.” I love the classifieds. I don’t answer them, I just love to read them. But, I answered his and as it turned out he lived a couple of blocks from me. We hit it off. It was convenient. He respected what I did, what my strong points are. I respected what his were and we started working together. It wasn’t instantaneous. We went through a lot of different players. We’d get some musicians and in order for them to stay they wanted to get paid and we didn’t have money to pay anybody. Or the situation was they wanted to have equal say in the creative process. Once we got together the sounds and the chords he was playing, the things that I was doing with my voice and the melodies…it all happened really naturally. We didn’t want anybody to fuck with that process. We went through quite a few musicians before we finally hooked up with the guys we have now playing on the record. And we pay them. It is a band, it has to be a band because that’s the way everything was put together. When you tour and you travel, you get close to people and you want it to develop and fuse into something special. We’re working on that.

SLUG: Dan’s from Ireland. How did he arrive in the United States and set up a studio? 

Lucia: He’s originally from Limerick, Ireland and he was really stifled with the scene that was going on over there. He decided to pick up and move to New York. He had a hundred dollars in his pocket, he threw all his clothes into a garbage bag and came over. A pretty amazing thing for somebody who’s never been to the States to do. He did whatever he could. At the time he was doing a lot of carpentry work, he was in a lot of different bands. Over time he was able to put bits and pieces together over the years into his studio. It’s not a tremendous studio, but it is definitely a good working space that we can come up with something special in there. Or, at least the skeleton of something special.

SLUG: Going back to the opera training. You thank Dr. Gwen Korovin in the liner notes for your voice. Is she your voice trainer?

Lucia: No. Tina Schafer is another person I thanked in my liner notes. She is my opera teacher. Dr. Gwen Korovin is my doctor, my voice doctor, who… every time I finish a tour, anytime I have problems, she makes sure that I’m not damaging my voice. Because of the way that I sing, anything can happen at any time. The training that I have from Tina is amazing. It enables me to do this without hurting myself. I work with both of them on a regular basis. 

SLUG: Tina trained you to sing like you do?

Lucia: She didn’t really train me to do the things that I do, she gave me a hard-core foundation – training in opera. I’m not capable of singing “La Boheme” or “Madam Butterfly” and blowing anybody away. I can do it, just based on the techniques I’ve learned from her. The training I got from her I started playing with and I started discovering all these different quirky things I could do with my voice. She’s not happy with what I did with it, because it scares the shit out of her every time I do it. She goes to my shows and cringes. She’s really happy for me, that I found a style that I’m happy with, but worried nonetheless because it’s a hazardous thing to do with your voice if you don’t know what you’re doing. I study with her when I’m home and I work on my tapes when I’m out on the road. I go to the doctor if I have any problems and when I’m off the road I make sure to check-up. I have huge color lasers on the inside of my throat just to make sure that nothing’s being damaged. I value my instrument. I want to take care of it. 

SLUG: How about signing to A&M without a band?

Lucia: We got signed playing with other musicians. It was a little disjointed because we were working with people that really didn’t plan on staying. We were playing in a club in Boston. Our producer was in town that night working on another project and he happened to be out and he saw us. He really liked what we were doing and he invited us to come into the studio he works out of in New York. We went in there and put some ideas down and Rick Wakes owns the studio that we recorded some stuff in. He’s also the president of DV8 which is through A&M Records. At that time he was in the beginning stages and he was looking for people to sign. He liked what we were doing and he gave us some development thing. We didn’t get like a big contract after we recorded. It was more like, “Let’s see how this develops, why don’t you come in and do some more stuff” and over the course of a year we found the guys who would play on the record, Dan and I wrote the rest of the record and there were a couple of key tunes that sealed the deal for us. We kept writing and recording until we had it all done and then the whole A&E thing came into play. You’re working with a small independent label, but then when the record actually comes out and you start going around the country, you feel the weight of the major label behind you. It took some time. Dan and I have been working together for more than four years writing so it wasn’t like Dan put the ad in the paper, I answered it and in a year boom, boom, boom everything happened. We worked together a long time, closely, more than anything on the writing. We did tour, not extensively. We couldn’t get a gig in New York City. It’s a very political place and if you’re not in the clique, the cool clique, which definitely exists in New York. It’s a very cliquey place, especially in the club circuit. It’s difficult to get a gig. We played some gigs in and around New York City and honestly it wasn’t until people knew that we had a deal that we were able to play regularly in Manhattan. Then we went on the road.  Our first tour was with Gang of Four. We toured with them for about a month and it was amazing. It was amazing for me because although we did play a lot, as a performer, when you see somebody who’s seasoned and knows how to work a stage, and knows how to get something back from the audience, it inspires you and it pushes you. He (Jon King) inspired me so much and he watched all our shows and he spoke to me and encouraged me and he said, (adopts British accent) “You have to own the stage, you have to be like a wolf marking his territory, pissing all over the stage.” I just love that quote and I try to remember that five minutes before I go on the stage. No matter how nervous I am, this is my space. Don’t fuck with it.

SLUG: Is your stage persona getting better and better all the time?

Lucia: Yeah, yeah! The more you perform the better you get. It’s one of those things where I’m constantly trying to evolve. I never want to feel like I’ve reached that point where I feel that this is as good as it gets. I push myself. I still take voice lessons because I really believe that you have to keep working, not only to keep what you have but to push yourself further. For me it’s all about evolving and reaching this point of honesty where I’m not afraid to show who I am. No matter how ridiculous it may look. I’m just trying to relate to people and break those barriers. Those – oh no, no, no, we don’t want to see that. Sometimes it’s disturbing, when you touch somebody in the audience and you know that as whacky as what I did was, that person got it.

SLUG: The songwriting process. Do you guys were together on the lyrics and the music?

Lucia: Dan does the music and I do the lyrics and melodies. J.D., John DeServio, the bass player, co-wrote two songs on the record and his contribution was the music. I don’t mean to be a hard ass about the lyrics but that’s what I do. I don’t play an instrument and if I learned how to play an instrument I wouldn’t start showing them how to play bass lines. I’ve been writing for a very long time, I know who I am as a writer. I want to evolve and I want to stretch it more and more but I’m very protective of that aspect of the songwriting. It’s who I am as an artist, just like the music is who they are. That’s my ego thing too. You don’t want people stepping all over your shit. I’m sure that the longer we work together as a band, I might let the reins loose a little bit, but I have to sing it, I have to deliver it, I want it to be something that I can be honest about. 

—Walli

Read more interviews from the SLUG Archives:
Loose
Syd Straw

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