More with The Envy Corps and the trailer for their live film

I didn't have room in print for all of my interview with The Envy Corps, so here's a bit more about them discussing their upcoming live release, "The Envy Corps Live at ARC," plus a trailer for it at the end. The band plays Friday at Wooly's.

Q: How far along are you guys with the movie?

Micah Natera: There’s a little bit left, I think. Brandon and his cousin are kind of…

Brandon Darner: The edit is completely done. We’re just doing color correction now. We’ve got some cool things planned, including something I haven’t had a chance to tell the band about yet. But I’m not going to mention it here.

Natera: Oh, thanks.

Darner: We’ve got a couple things with the video that could be a really cool way for us to launch it, for us to announce that we did it. It’s been incredibly tough. The average person isn’t going to care, but it’s actually a huge undertaking. Way more difficult than making the record.

Scott Yoshimura: We haven’t done it three times, or whatever.

Darner: We’re less experienced for sure, but I’m really pleased with it. It sounds really great and the band played really, really well.

Q: What was the inspiration for doing the video?

Darner: I’ve always liked the “Live from Abbey Road” thing they’ve done, and Nigel Godrich did those “From the Basement” things. Radiohead has one, Beck did it.

The other thing, too, is the way we released the record, we knew we wouldn’t be able to go out and tour extensively for it. We put everything we had into making this record on our own and releasing it on our own. I was kind of concerned about the fans in England, if we don’t get a chance to get over there, this is kind of a way for them to see us playing the songs live. It’s not exactly like a live show. It’s more like us recording an album live.

When you’re playing live you’re, not really focusing on how well you’re playing the songs. You’re just playing them and feeding off the energy of the crowd. This is more focused on playing the songs well.

Natera: We don’t really have a good representation out there of what we do live.

Darner: It’s kind of us, playing the songs in our own environment. Which I think bands are doing more and more of. I just came across it, but The Foo Fighters did one for their last album. They did the whole album live and it was a Youtube thing. It’s really great.

We’re sort of fans of music videos, but it seemed like we could have done an expensive music video, or something like this that can have a longer life than a four and half music video that’s just one song.

Yoshimura: And because we haven’t toured extensively, there aren’t random live videos on Youtube that suck, but are something for people to see. We also don’t have music videos for these songs. So it kind of encompasses those two things that are lacking in this album for our band.

Q: Do you have any timeframe of when you think it will be released?

Darner: I think it’s going to be released in the winter. I can’t tell you which side of the year it will be, but it’s going to be this winter.

Q: Are you thinking actual DVDs or Blu Rays, or a digital only release?

Darner: There’s going to be a limited run, hopefully we can get both DVD and Blu Ray done. Some of this we have to gauge the interest in it. Just like the album, we put everything we had into making the album as good as it could be, and that didn’t leave a lot for everything else that a band would need. It’s a similar situation here, we put everything into the video.

I think people are going to dig it. The idea for it to be “It Culls You” live came literally on the day we started recording it. We had planned to eight songs and four or five songs from “Dwell” and a couple from “Kid Gloves.” It was going to be an overview of our career at the time.

Our manager at the time asked…

(At this point the waitress asks if she can get us anything else)

Yoshimura: I’ll take an Arrogant Bastard (a beer)

Darner: I’m sitting right here, Scott.

Yoshimura: I’ll take another Arrogant Bastard.

Darner: The manager asked what would it take to play the other four songs.

Natera: Some of the songs we had never considered playing live. We had to on the spot figure out an arrangement to some of them.

Darner: “Dipsomania” is literally us jamming on the song. It kind of gave it an air of spontaneity, which is what you have to do live. You do as well as you can to make the record as great as you can, then you need to figure out how to make it work live.