One by one they appear, tumbling into a café in Los Feliz, Los Angeles, raising their sunglasses and blinking in the gloom.
It is the day after Warpaint’s homecoming gig at the Troubadour, Los Angeles, and there is a vague air of dishevelment about the band. Singer and guitarist Emily Kokal is seemingly still wearing the same clothes she wore last night. They scour the menu before beginning a postmortem of the show. ‘There weren’t that many familiar faces in the crowd,” Kokal says, sounding surprised. ‘It doesn’t often happen like that. Not for us. And to have that in your home town is …”
Though the sentence hangs unfinished, the implication is clear: life has begun to change for Warpaint. Last autumn, after seven years together, they released their debut album, The Fool, to critical glory. It is arresting and textured enough to reward frequent listening, but their early performances in the United Kingdom also confirmed the four-piece as a compelling live band. Last night’s audience in Hollywood was a strikingly diverse mix of ages and attire, women and men, all rapturously familiar with the band’s music.
‘I’d never been in a band with three other girls and it is different,” says bassist and singer Jenny Lee Lindberg. ‘It’s like if you have a guy friend and you have a girl friend. It’s really different, but I can’t describe how.” In truth, what’s striking is not just seeing four young women on stage, but also the unusual sense of warmth and connection when they play: talking, smiling, laughing.
‘In the beginning, we had no expression on our faces because we were petrified,” Kokal says. ‘We couldn’t even look at each other because we’d twitch and start laughing. You look at someone dealing with their nervousness and you know what they’re going through.”
There is something of the love story to the way Warpaint talk about their friendship. They formed, appropriately enough, on Valentine’s Day 2004, though Kokal and Theresa Wayman were childhood friends in Oregon, meeting when they were 11 and immediately becoming inseparable. ‘I had never had a friend like that before,” Kokal says.
‘Most often, those experiences are with the opposite sex, but it was just one of those things where you want that person, you need that person, they need to be in your life.”
Taking the leisurely route
‘It was a really young and fun relationship,” Wayman says. ‘We’d walk to school and sing, do harmonies for In the Jungle. And then, in high school, we really got into the same kind of music together.” Wayman and Kokal travelled around Europe together in their late teens, then moved to New York before settling in Los Angeles, for reasons, they concede sheepishly, that concerned a boy. There they met Lindberg, a recent transplant from Reno, Nevada, and a few years later the three formed a band, with Shannyn Sossamon on drums.
If seven years sounds a long time for a band to travel from formation to hot new act, they have no regrets about taking the leisurely route. ‘Even that,” Kokal says, ‘feels like it happened the right way.” It took them a good year and a half before they even played live and the intervening years have not been spent idly.
Songs were written, an EP recorded, Wayman had a son (a fact that requires some logistical consideration now they are touring so widely) and, post-Sossamon, there were several changes of drummer.
Stella Mozgawa was the last to join the band, but on stage she appears in her element, flailing ecstatically behind her drumkit. ‘Usually I don’t like to look at people in the audience when we’re playing because it’s a little bit creepy,” she says. ‘It’s a very intimate state, like doing a wee or having sex, so the less you’re conscious of the fact there are people there, the better.”
Raised in New Zealand by parents who were also professional musicians, she first learned to play guitar before begging them to let her take up drums. ‘The only time I could rehearse was the two hours between getting home from school and my mum getting home from work,” she says. ‘I’d have to take my drumkit down from the top of my wardrobe, put it up, rehearse and then pack it all up again by the time she got back.”
By the time Mozgawa moved to Los Angeles in 2008, she was a professional drummer, stepping in to tour with whomever might need her, but secretly wishing for a band of her own. She met Wayman at a party and soon after got a call from Lindberg, asking her to help out. By that stage, Lindberg says, Warpaint had been through five drummers and frequently played as a three-piece.
Letting go of outside perceptions
They had all played in bands before: ‘But not as seriously,” Wayman admits. She compares playing regularly to exercise: ‘You know, if you run every day for a month, after a while you’re going to feel really good,” she says. ‘People have to unlearn certain positions and it’s like performance, it’s the letting go of outside perceptions. I feel like I’m just learning how to let go and have my own experience. Losing yourself in it takes work.”
It should be pointed out here, perhaps, that the band is occasionally given to making such statements. Listening back to the recording of our conversation later, it seems almost comically littered with LAisms, talk of ‘energies” and ‘consciousness”. But, in person, Warpaint are charmingly earnest, their intelligence and humour and chemistry quite evident.
Confined by the city
Do they feel this band, this music, could have been made anywhere else, or if LA is in some way responsible for their sound? ‘It could have been made anywhere,” Kokal insists. ‘It had to do with the people we are, how we think. I don’t think moving to LA really changed who we are.”
Lindberg is less convinced. ‘LA had a lot to do with this record,” she says. ‘Where I grew up, there’s a lot of rich people, casinos and a huge lower class. It was a really confusing place to grow up. I felt confined by the city. I felt like a creative person, but I didn’t feel I had an outlet. When I moved to LA, I felt really free.” —