A Kid Hereafter : Fuck Style, It's Infopop On Overload!

By Jens

You want eccentric pop that doesn't really sounds like anything you heard before? Try A Kid Hereafter, the flamboyant brainchild of Frederik Thaae who successfully throws everything at ya; punk, powerpop, hardcore, 60s pop, 70s progrock etc. Their debut album "Rick Freedom Flavour" is a strange mutant with quirky tunes that reminded me Sparks, Frank Black, Revillos…yeah even some Frank Zappa on his more poppy records. Now prepare yourself to enter the mind of the bearded fella behind A Kid Hereafter!

LC: Congrats on your "Rich Freedom Flavour" album, it's one of the most ambitious and schizophrenic Danish releases I've heard.

Frederik: Gee, thanks.

LC: Did it take a long time to record? And did you have it all planned out before going into the studio?

Frederik: About half a year, give or take - too freaking long. And that's without the mix! Since I had the luxury of working in my own studio the ideas and ambitions just kept piling up. Typical debut album syndrome, I guess...
This whole thing started out as a fun little workshop, where I was just writing and recording heaps of songs in my bedroom and bringing in friends to program beats or play the cello or whatever to spice things up, so when I signed to Iwave and started thinking about it in terms of an album, everything was still very open and not restricted in any way to a certain sound. I wanted to preserve that "workshop" vibe all the way through, and just sorta let each song determine it's own course. The arrangement ideas are sorta integrated with the songwriting for me, and for a lot of the songs we ended up using the best parts of the demotracks as a starting point and then recorded on top of those. It's not a very "live" record, actually it's more like a collage. Most of the time the players would have no idea where a part would fit or how the end result was gonna be. But everything was handled pretty strict, there was no jamming involved, all the parts were planned out before the sessions. So it was a balance of making sure you had all the pieces for the puzzle and still be open for new inputs to a realistic extent. One of the great advantages we had was the opportunity to record most of the orchestral parts (Cello, brass, choir, organ) in the Holy Cross church in Copenhagen, where Captain Woman is working as the organist. The place has an awesome aura and sound, and we had pretty much unlimited time there. We also had a luxury in DR (Denmark's National Radio) recording the string quartet, and our friend Jonas tuned up his fancy old hapsichord just for us. Of course all this required some planning and overview, but I did my best to keep a playful and non-definitive vibe at all the various sessions. The great thing about the process was that I got a chance to work with all my favorite musicians, and the band we have now came together pretty natural along the way, even though it's not a "band" album. It was a great help to have maestro Henrik Lund to help out with the mix. I had a pause of about 6 months after we finished recording, and he was very good at questioning some of the arrangements and identifying the key parts since he had a fresh view of it all. We even fired the title track from the album, since it didn't hold up in the long run. Maybe it'll turn up again in another shape or form.

LC: Your sound is pretty hard to describe to friends of mine who ain't familar with A Kid Hereafter. I hear early new wave/powerpoppunk ala Revillos, a bit of Frank Black, some Sparks/Zappa weirdness, as well as 60s pop and 70s prog rock...and that leaves my friends even more confused!

Frederik: Well I think confusion is good. It doesn't seem natural to me to exclude certain elements because they don't fit a given style. Fuck style. There's nothing wrong with teaching them obnoxious Vivaldi kids some old fashioned Slayer... I realize that some of the things we do as a band are certain commercial suicide, but somehow that's appealing to me... I wanna beat the grandeur of Yes into the shape of a NOFX song and spray They Might Be Giants' wit on top. It's called infopop. On overload.

LC: You don't really sound remotely Danish or even Scandinavian. I'd imagine America and Japan are ready for A Kid Hereafter?

Frederik: Thank you, kind sir. We're ready for them too.

LC: Some of the lyrics are both clever and dumb, while others seems to poke fun at consumerism and teenage pop culture like "Hip Girls", how important are the lyrics?

Frederik: Very important. Words are upfront and relateable, where music is abstract by definition. So I tend to spend more time fiddling around getting them right, where the music just sorta writes itself. "Cleverly dumb" is a good way to describe the lyrics. I wanna express a certain childish neutrality, hence the name AKH, that goes beyond the bluntness of popular opinions like "George Bush is stupid", "Commercials are bad for society" or "Jesus saves"... true or false, I'd rather revel in the absurdity of argument that occurs when you think about all the possible angles. This applies to political songs as well as love songs - I don't wanna write a tits and booty song no more than I wanna write a heartbroken ballad. But I think it's very fun to write something with a little bit of both and make each element poke fun at the other.
And by this I don't mean it's wrong to take a stand on something, it's just that turning things upside down has more poetic interest to me than contrived phrases and opinions. I guess it comes with being a spoiled danish brat. Anyway, I see all the songs as clearly topical, they're not abstract or surreal, they're just stories or social commentaries with a fragmented narrative. Like a kid would see it to some degree. How clever. And hell yeah - it's so much to poke fun at things. Most of all myself. That's teen pop for ya...

LC: There seems to be two kinds of A Kid Hereafter approaches live, 1st time I saw was at the "Banjo Fury" Klub Argot show on a boat with you on banjo as a 3 piece, and the next time the stage is populated with musicians and backup singers that'd make Phil Spector proud?

Frederik: Actually, there are a couple more. The banjo thing was a one-off, so you got lucky. Besides the main Sextet, we also have a more "serious" acoustic quartet and a full on Grindcore act. It's all fractions of the same band, and we hope to expand even more. It's all back to the workshop idea, keeping it open and dynamic. We wanna be able to do both wedding and hardcore gigs. Next month we're doing a special perfomance in Pumpehuset featuring the Athelas Sinfonietta Ensemble, and I hope to get the Grind band off the ground this spring, too. That's just me and the boys, and we've already recorded 17 tracks that sound like a mix of Napalm Death, Pig Destroyer and Dillinger Escape Plan. It's gonna be grand.

LC: Is A Kid Hereafter a democracy with you as benevolent dictator or how does it work?

Frederik: Yeah, that sounds about right. AKH is my alias, and "Rich Freedom Flavour" was very much a solo project, with Captain Woman as my only steady sidekick. But you can't help feeling more like a band when we play the shows, and I'm pleased and honoured to have the kind of creative talent and input around me that I do now. Everything's just more fun in a group, even though I still believe leadership is important. You wouldn't want six directors on a movieset, would you?

LC: What's with the Amish beard, Frederik?

Frederik: It's this jesus fixation I can't seem to shake off.

LC: Nearly all the popular acts on the Danish scene bore the hell out of me, why does it have to be so whiny and depressing?

Frederik: Dunno. Some claim it's that Northern melancholy thing, but that never really sunk in with me. Could also be a puberty thing, just too bad for those who never get out of it. Must get kinda boring listening to them Depeche Mode or Radiohead classics over and over again, just to see if you can find a way to water it down just one tiny step more. I have no problem with sad in general music, though. It's the same problem with any genre... Being an old metalhead, I should know, right? But I do think there are a lot of danish acts in different genres like kloAk, I Am Bones, Murder, Friends Of Mary Anning, Said The Shark, Naim, Choir Of Young Believers and Spektr to name just very few that are up to something new and grand. It's so easy to pick a random band with succes that suck, but it's hardly any fun.

LC: Your audience is a mixed crowd, this middle aged r'n'r rock'n'roll asshole didn't know what to expect being around the young hipsters, but I did find some familar faces of the punk underground, even a metalhead or two. That's a pretty rare experience for me.

Frederik: Young hipsters? Wow, I didn't think we'd get them out of their shells. How exciting! Our goal is definitely to have an odd crossover audience. I'm very happy if we have some appeal to the punks as well. Subcultural environments are usually very closed and dogmatic within themselves, so if we can get just a few of them out to mingle and smile a little it would be a great achievement, I think.

LC: By the way, thanks for a kickass release party!

Frederik: Yeah, and cheap, too! I very much enjoyed the low key manner of it... We like to keep a homely vibe to everything regarding the band, and throwing a private party instead of renting some fancyass bar seemed like a good way of sticking to that.

LC: Future plans? Touring etc.?

Frederik: Yeah, we wanna play as much as possible. So far the spring is looking alright, but we hope to get to play even more places in the fall, hopefully outside DK as well. We've played shows for less than 10 people, and it's fun just the same for us. It's very much a from-the-ground-up game we're in, and we're loving every second of it. People have got to see the show or listen through the album to know fully what we're about. I'm still truly amazed every time I get an enthusiastic comment on MySpace about our wacky shit. The next single is gonna be "Hip Girls". It features Marie Key on lead vocals and hopefully someone is brave enough to pollute the airwaves with it. It's actually the most collage-like song on the album, featuring 8 different players in 8 different locations. Then of course there's the grind album that will hopefully be out in the fall, and I also have about 10 songs ready for the next "real" album, but that'll probably have to wait for next year. So all in all it's looking good.

LC: Anything to add?

Frederik: Quit smoking. It smells bad. And we hope to see y'all at a gig somewhere in the near future.

http://www.akidhereafter.com/
http://www.myspace.com/akidhereafter