For once the rumour mill has been correct. Summer Lee Carlson and Frank Scarfone have been collaborating on writing songs, and have set up an outfit The Velvet Compromise, using The Blue Souls as a backing band. LengPleng sat down with them to get the full story.
LP: How did the two of you come to start working together?
Summer: It was by accident, actually. We met to have just coffee one day, talking about me singing with The Blue Souls, and then we decided to go and have a jam. Frank started playing a riff, and I started singing, and we wrote an entire song in a couple of hours. Oh, that just happened! And that was in April. Then Frank went to Italy for three months.
LP: Is that how the collaboration has continued, with that sort of jammy let’s try something feel?
Frank: For me it’s very easy – I play something and she can immediately sing along with it. Or she starts with a vocal and I try to follow, we can add a variation or a bridge or something else. I don’t interfere much with her vocals, she doesn’t interfere much on my guitar, so it works quite fast. So we have already ten songs.
Summer: He’ll write a riff, he’ll send me things. Sometimes we work together and sometimes on our own. Sometimes we together think what if we go here? Or he’ll offer a certain sound, or let’s try something more like this. There was one time that I had an idea while eating breakfast, and I put it on the piano, thinking this would be a guitar song, and I brought the half-finished song to him, and then he finished it.
Frank: The one on Bandcamp.
Summer: Yeah, it’s on Bandcamp. We recorded it right before he went to Italy, just a very stripped back version.
LP: Summer, do you find that you have a different approach to the lyrics with this compared to the electronic styles you’ve been doing with, say, Mute Speaker?
Summer: Yes. I often write from a woman’s perspective, and blues has a different attitude, so I try to write according to the attitude of the song. The words may not be nice but they’re honest.
LP: Sounds like the blues to me. Is it more lyric first or music first?
Summer: Both ways. I’ll draft something, and say I don’t know where to go from here, and Frank will say what about here? Or he’ll play something and I’ll sing along. We just talk about it. Sometimes he’s sent me whole songs, and I’ll listen, and we’ll tweak it.
Frank: One was written when I was in Italy, the lyrics and the structure came together once I came back to Phnom Penh.
LP: Frank, we know you from The Blue Souls and Japan Guitar Shop – have you done much songwriting before?
Frank: Not really. Riffs yes, but I never really followed up with words or the structure or anything. I have collected so many riffs over the years but I never got the chance to play them live.
Summer: He has a lot of ideas, a lot of ideas.
LP: A collaboration often gets you doing things that you didn’t know you could do.
Frank: With blues we play covers, with Japan Guitar Shop I have my parts and licks, but there’s minimum space. This is the opposite, because we started as a duo, and there’s a great deal of freedom, and it changes the way I play, I don’t have to be stuck in any box.
Summer: Frank will suggest a sound or a style, or I’ll say can we try getting darker on this. I’m really proud of the fact that all the songs are really different from each other; that’s hard to do.
LP: Tell us, Summer, from a performance point of view, about the difference between working with a DJ and working with a band.
Summer: I’ve missed it a lot. I was in a full band in Kampot for a long time. I can really belt it out. It’s really fun, but also very scary, because sometimes you think this is going really well, and sometimes you think oh, this is horrible.
LP: It must help that you already have a backing band that’s used to playing together, for years. Not bringing them together from scratch.
Summer: Yes, when we first went to practice as a band they all know each other so well.
Frank: And they follow my lead easily, so this helped put the show together quickly.
Summer: The night we previewed a couple of songs at Oscar’s we had just practiced that afternoon, and I was kind of blown away, again, the calibre of musicianship here, which is why I moved to Phnom Penh after all, to do things like this. My collaboration with Mute Speaker is still alive, we’re just taking a bit of a break. Since I moved to Phnom Penh it makes it a bit harder.
LP: Are there plans for more recording?
Summer: Yeah! For sure. I’m really proud of these songs, I really want to record them.
LP: Anything else we should cover?
Summer: A big shout out of appreciation to Cameron Smith who has been coming along on this journey as well.
The Velvet Compromise make their debut at new venue Motodop (* was Tittibugs) on Saturday, opening for The Blue Souls. Check them out in advance in a stripped down version of the song When It’s Time To Quit on Bandcamp. Also IG @thevelvetcompromise and Facebook.
