When Parquet Courts had to wrangle kids to record a song
On their 2018 album Wide Awake, Texas alternative rockers Parquet Courts peeled back the curtain and took a more personal approach to their music. Gone were the days of ‘Stoned and Starving’, with the band’s dual frontmen, A. Savage and Austin Brown, allowing their own stories to filter in. Savage pulled from his childhood in ‘Freebird II’, while Brown acknowledged a major childhood trauma in the lyrics to ‘Death Will Bring Change’.
When Brown was 20, his younger sister died after being hit by a school bus. Not wanting to give a play-by-play on the incident, Brown instead tapped into the weighty emotions and lifelong shifts in perception that come from death for the Wide Awake track. “It’s not about the death so much as how it affects – how it changes your personality; how it changes your life,” Brown told The Independent. “Death is tragic, and then the people who are left to deal with it, with grief, who are still around, have to deal with the emotional effect – that’s what the song is about.”
“The song is about the death of a child. I thought having the children sing the coda has this dark sensibility to it,” Brown also explained to Billboard. “The children weren’t with us in Texas when we were [there recording]. I had to go to the School of Rock in the Upper East Side at 9 AM and face these precocious 8-12-year-olds. That was pretty scary.”
“I had a really late night before, I had like two hours of sleep, and I come in there, and they’re like, ‘Alright, whatever you want us to do.’ I’ve never been around that many children, especially in a position of being in charge of anything,” Brown recalled. “I got a good 20 minutes out of them. We got like four takes, maybe, and after that, I was like, ‘That’s a good starting place, okay let’s try it a few different ways.’ And they all looked at me like, ‘Are you serious? We’re done.’ I couldn’t explain to them and be like, ‘I’m gonna take what you did and go work on it for 8 hours.’ They just did 20 minutes, and they thought they were in there for days.”
Parquet Courts were an established act at the time, and there were certainly some hipster parents with kids who were delighted to be taking part in a recording session. But for all of the kids, this was just some guy who wanted them to sing early in the morning.
“There were a couple parents in there who were really excited, but the kids didn’t seem to really understand what was going on,” Brown added. “For them, it was just another cool thing they were doing or something their parents made them go do. A couple of them were having fun.”
“I’m just not really used to being around kids. I wasn’t prepared to be charismatic,” Brown concluded. “They didn’t seem very impressed with me at all. That was a surprise. It was really difficult. I’m really glad that I went through with it, but it was very scary. You should never co-star with animals or children, and now I understand why.”
Check out ‘Death Will Bring Change’ down below.
