How Indie Rockers Spent Their Summer Vacation
Some of our favorite artists took on the "essay topic everybody hates" for The Onion's AV Club:
Avery Tare (Animal Collective)
"I spent a lot of summer in Iceland. Some of my wife's family lives on a sheep farm right on the sea. It's a tradition in her family to go every year to help the sheep give birth. So I got to see a lot of lamb births, which are very bloody. My wife helped give birth, but I kind of just watched with my mouth open. And I videotaped some. Sheep are very vocal animals. They're almost human sometimes, really brutal. I'd never heard 300-400 sheep making noise at the same time. It's the loudest scream I've ever heard."
Sounds like an Animal Collective video.
More summer fun after the jump...
Gabriel Andruzzi (The Rapture)
"We didn't do shit this summer. I guess we just got back from Japan a couple days ago. We played a couple shows and saw Daft Punk. They played in a big pyramid that lights up. You can probably watch it on YouTube or something. We went record shopping. The record stores there are incredibly thorough and incredibly well organized. I got a Michael Rother record for cheap, and She's Strange by Cameo. The highlights of the whole trip were eating amazing ramen and drinking bright green melon-cream soda. It looks like anti-freeze. Part of it is just the joy of drinking something so neon translucent green."
Kaki King
"I drove through West Virginia to do this syndicated radio show called Mountain Stage, and me and my girlfriend saw a sign for a lake where this hillbilly boy was renting boats for $4. So we get in a boat and row out to the middle of the lake, and all of the sudden, there's gunfire coming from everywhere. It turned out there was a hunting area on the next hill. It was this beautiful little spot that we thought we'd found -- living in New York City, how often do you get to say that? -- and then out of nowhere we're dodging gunfire. But it was still really nice. The lake was called Plum Orchard Lake, though we didn't see any plums there."
Matt Berninger (The National)
"The best things I did was go to Cincinnati and sit outside all night with my brother drinking whiskey in my parents' backyard. It's all right if I just did boring things, right? We talked about TV most of the time, the weird alchemy that makes the English Office so great, HBO vs. Showtime. We were just up all night talking shit and getting drunk. Living in New York without a backyard, that was the best time I had all summer long. The next day I went and hit golf balls with my dad at a driving range where there was this target, an old van with Osama Bin Laden painted on it."
Yeah Matt, it's all right if you just did boring things. I spent the whole summer blogging.
Posted at 12:50 PM
Tags: Animal Collective | Kaki King | The Rapture
I'm okay with rock stars that don't act like rock stars. Or at least don't end up bloated and in and out of rehab every six months.
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as i understand it....avey tare's wife is the singer from Mum...by the way....
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i love posts about animal collective
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When I grow up to be a Indie Rock star like I dream every night..I hope to do cool summer things like, ... freeing my people ..chek out my music - www.myspace.com/nelybrown
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