Yes Giantess Interview: SXSW 2010

Yes Giantess began in late 2008 as a party band project of Jan Rosenfeld, and despite growing in numbers and size over the years, the purpose of Yes Giantess has remained the same: make it as big of a party as you can. With big, brash pop sounds coming out of the same Boston scene that gave birth to bands like Passion Pit (who helped them out along the way), the band has scored fans for their 2009 single 'Tuff N Stuff,' their live show and numerous remixes. Before SXSW, they opened for La Roux on the band's recent North American tour and coming off that experience, Rosenfeld opened up about wanting to be like Prince, Mariah Carey's deep catalog and illegally remixing Miley Cyrus for their own pleasure.

Describe your sound in your own words.

We're sort of a fusion of a more electronic Prince or like Michael Jackson. A big part of what we do is deep electro stuff but then there's a huge element of early '90s late '80s era funk, soul stuff. Its part disco, it's part electro, I guess there's even a little bit of indie in there somewhere.

How did your band form?

[When] we initially started playing music, it was just me and one other person who is no longer in the band so it was really just me actually and everything was electronic. We started realizing that people would respond to a live band a lot more than they would in an electronic or DJ-like situation, so we went and recruited all the other members of the band who were all friends and we all went to school together at Berklee [College of Music] in Boston. I knew a lot of musicians, we all live together in this big house and so it was like, "Hey, you want to start a band?" So we got together and we got our start when Ayad Al-Adhamy of the band Passion Pit actually helped us produce a few songs and those songs would go on to become singles and that's how we really got moving and got shows and formed an identity as a band.



How did you come up with your band name?

When we started the band we were really into the idea of being a big huge party band and when we started out, all we did was play parties. It was almost like a mantra and Giantess went along with that, it was the hugeness of the situation. It kind of stuck and then we had to change to Yes Giantess for legal reasons, some other band in Canada who is now defunct had the name Giantess. [The "Yes"] is an affirmation of the whole theory, which is just about having fun and being free and being positive.

What are your musical influences?

The biggest one is probably Prince and Michael Jackson. Those are the two biggest. We actually draw most of our inspiration from way too-big-to-name pop stars, because we just really like the idea. Early on we started writing songs listening to people like Mariah Carey and going through her deep catalog and saying, "Oh what does this sound like and how can we turn it into something more visceral, or something more real?" Something that could connect with people that we knew and people we see at shows and so we were listening to big pop stars.

With your pop star inspiration, do you have aspirations to a large stage show?

Obviously for an indie band, it's not totally feasible to have a laser light show and smoke machine and crazy stuff at every show, but that's something we're into. We kind of come at the philosophy of playing a show, we got all this electronic music and we wanted to make it live and we came at it from the standpoint of an '80s arena rock band, like, "What would they do?" They would just be really bombastic and really bigger than life and so we took these songs that may or may not have been the biggest songs ever and we tried to pump them up to fill an atmosphere, to fill a place up with a party vibe. That's the angle we decided to take on it. Some electronic bands go for a really chilled out lo-fi approach, we wanted to go for something big and almost sloppy and fast, we just went that route instead.

What is the different process between writing your own material and remixing someone else's?

When we write our own stuff we have a voice in mind, not so much a character but there is an essence to what a Yes Giantess song is and what we want it to be and my voice and that defines the song and what we write about. When we're doing a remix, the cool thing is that we get to take somebody else's idea that is completely done and just strip it down to nothing and then rebuild it almost as if we are producers for them. It's like having this amazing talent to work with that we didn't have before, or we've never even met. We've done a lot of official remixes for labels and bands but I would say that our favorite was one night, we were goofing around and we did a remix of 'Party in the USA' by Miley Cyrus. Totally unofficially, completely illegally, we downloaded an illegal a cappella of the song and we got to put it together. It was fun to really hear how carefree it is.

Beatles or Stones?

Beatles, easily. It's definitely one of those things where everyone has an opinion, the Stones or the Beatles, like there's some sort of rivalry, but it seems like no contest for me at this point. History has treated the Beatles extremely kindly, and obviously the Stones too, but not in the same context whatsoever. I don't even think it's in the same realm anymore.


Carl Atiya Swanson is a contributor from Seed.com. Learn how you can contribute here.