{The Midget plays a show sponsored by Another Rainy Saturday on Thursday, May 12 at the High Dive with Glitterbang and Secret Shoppers. $7, 8pm doors, 21+.}
“We like couples working together in a lot of different ways” says The Midget’s Amber Rossino of her band with her bandmate and fiancé Sean Curley. Having just released its brilliant five-song EP City Drop, The Midget has quickly become one of my favorite local bands to discover this year and I was eager to meet with the pair at a Belltown restaurant and bar to discuss the band’s genesis and future.
City Drop is a pop album that belongs in Seattle, in 2011; it’s a very modern and stylishing EP. Though employing lots of synth parts and catchy choruses and pop hooks, it’s certainly as authentic as anything that romanticizes Depression-era poverty in this day and age. Curley explains, “Our songs are deeply personal and about our life, and our life in the city and how we react to it and how we’re ultimately happy living here.” Rossino concurs, saying later, “A lot of the lyrics came out of being in the city everyday, how I felt going to work or what it’s like on the bus, what pisses me off and what I liked. The whole EP gelled around that idea.” The melancholy, distance and acceptance they feel towards Seattle may obscured by the dance beats, but it’s there in a careful listen to the lyrics.
City Drop works well by drawing inspiration from the pop music they enjoy and other musical and romantic partnerships that have produced compelling music. Sean notes that, “My Bloody Valentine wouldn’t sound the way they did if Bilinda (Butcher) and Kevin (Shields) weren’t a couple and the songs are about that.” He adds at another point, when talking about influences, “Les Paul and Mary Ford might be our favorite thing because they’re the blueprint for a lot of pop music today. We still reference that a lot.”
The first Midget album was a self-titled LP in 2005, of it, Curley says, “The first Midget record is folkier, a lot more acoustic guitar. When I made that record, I was sick of rock music at the time and that was going to be my Fleetwood Mac record.” The evolution that led to City Drop, he says follows that, “We were listening to a lot of dance music and pop music over the past five years. For me, I’ve always been a really big Madonna fan and the new Midget album is kind of my Madonna record.” For influences, their musical taste is broad and diverse, which comes through at times throughout City Drop. When asked who they listen to, Curley tells me, “We listened to a lot of stuff we think you listen to, too, like Robyn, Uffie, Amanda Blank, Peaches. But we listen to a lot of krautrock, like Neu, Can or Kraftwerk, or things like My Bloody Valentine and lots of guitar rock. We listen to tons of old music like Harry Nillson or Randy Neuman or lots of girl groups like The Shangri-La’s.”
While another friend occasionally helps with songwriting, The Midget is predominantly Rossino and Curley. They have a studio in their West Seattle home where they record and produce all of their own music. She explains, “Everything we make, we make in our basement studio. Every time some small bit of change comes our way, we always buy something: a piece of equipment we need or want.” They also self-release their albums on their own Impko Records. They’ve been able to purchase much of their equipment through licensing songs from Curley’s previous bands, the most well-known likely being Wallmen, who were on Bar/None Records in the 1990s. The Midget did license one song, “NQ”, to Target to appear in an iPad commercial. He tells me, “No one makes money from record deals, you make money from licensing your songs to Pepsi or Mountain Dew or whoever, and I was lucky enough to do well when I was younger and that let us build our recording studio. I reinvested a lot of money into building that studio. My dream was always to be a self-sustaining artist, and that meant having your own recording studio.”
As for writing songs together, she tells me, “I think we have a division of labor in the band. Sean writes all of the music, all of the songs pretty much. I write lyrics and melodies, play guitar. He’s the main songwriter and it really works well that way. Sean produces everything, but I help with the editing.” He quickly adds that her input is essential to the group’s success.
The possibly politically-incorrect band name, the note, comes from a notorious Seattle dive bar. The Midget was a bar that sat where the British pub George & the Dragon sits now. One Fremont bar owner told The Seattle Times, it “was one of the scariest bars I’ve ever been in, and I’ve been in pretty much every bar in the city.” Long gone, stories of The Midget the bar’s shadiness continue and the band has a sort of personal connection. Rossino says, “A friend of ours who lived here forever used to live behind The Midget, and we kind of took it from that… he shared a fence with the bar and told us all of these crazy stories about how he’d go in his backyard and find all of these heroin needles and have to clean that up before his kids went to play in the yard. It was really scary.”
This comes in contrast with the accessibility of their music, which is instantly catchy and easy to dance to. The lyrics reveal something more personal and occasionally darker, which comes from multiple listens. At the end of the day, it’s very well constructed pop music and that’s a good thing. As Sean Curley explained, “Most of the music we would sit here and discuss is pop music, it just might not be saccharine like Britney Spears or Madonna. For me, there’s not much of a difference. I think you know that if you have a popular song, you’re making everyone happy.”
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