“You don’t want to have a Ridges song written about you,” said Victor Rasgaitis, frontman of The Ridges, as he led the group to nail down the final touches of the new song “Emaline” — a harmony driven acoustic song interrupted by Rasgaitis’ screams of “please let me die.”
The Athens band premiered the song on The Post’s continuing video series Athens Sessions, which you can check out online now at thepost.ohiou.edu.
Rasgaitis pushed a core group of members including founding member and cellist Talor Smith to learn and prepare the song which the members said they only played once before that day. It started off rough but soon enough the harmonies started to synch up and the song came together as we got a first-hand look at how The Ridges meticulously practice and evolve its songs
.
Sound engineer Steve Van Dyne even had a hand in writing the song’s foot-stomps as he placed a floor mic by the feet of Rasgaitis, who went to town pounding away at Van Dyne’s floor boards.
The group is slated for a new album this year but joined The Post for a song and and interview before heading off to the studio.
The Post: Tell us about the new song you’re playing for us today.
Rasgaitis:
We’ve barely worked on this song at all, we pretty much wrote it while you guys were setting up. No, we had the basics of it. … The last time we played it was in February, we didn’t touch it on tour. We just got back from two weeks on the road around SXSW and we got really focused on making that a tight festival set because we were playing so many times — we didn’t really experiment with anything new.
The Post: How do you go about writing these songs and forming
the sound?
Rasgaitis:
It’s a very collaborative song process, but it always starts with a singular vision and a singular point of communication like “what is the song?” But then everyone who touches it changes that a little bit, so that at the end we have this collective consciousness about what we think the song is.
The Post: Especially with harmonies you just seemed to be winging it and playing off one another.
Rasgaitis:
We all trust our instincts pretty well, we trust everyone who plays in the band a lot. Everybody writes their own parts and then we’ll work together to finesse those. Particularly with harmony, that’s a great example of we wanted that to be a big harmony. We didn’t write out what the chord was or anything like that it was more like, you know where you fall in the harmony, you know your voice, find where that fits in.
The Post: Some of your songs are very dark in nature and yet fans are so jubilant about the music. Like in “War Bonds” you’re singing “we’ll all be dead in the end” and the audience is right there with you singing along.
Rasgaitis:
I think that’s part of it though because those darker topics, which is usually what we write about with this group; we’re just drawn to it and the instrumentation lends itself nicely to doing some cool stuff by pulling on those emotions. But it doesn’t mean it has to be giving up. Just because these things exist and these topics that we write about exist doesn’t mean you have to be totally buried by it. So sometimes it can be really fun to sing about dying.
The Post:
Victor and Talor, you two obviously have good chemistry as songwriters having worked together for four years now.
Rasgaitis:
Yeah, that’s definitely what you look for in a band. We’ve often worked with a large rotating lineup. Some people come and go with their availability and some people just go because they can’t commit to it and we’re trying to push it bigger and forward. We just want to grow as a band and not everybody is up for that, it’s a huge time commitment and a lifestyle commitment. And so it doesn’t work unless you have chemistry, that part has to be easy, because everything else is so hard.
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Video Online
Check out the exclusive recording of The Post’s continuing video series Athens Sessions online at thepost.ohiou.edu
