Music Interview: Run sausage run

By Darren Young

Musicians experience many career ups and downs in the tumultuous roller coaster ride of the recording industry. One record may be a hit, the next may flop and sometimes it seems as if the flow of inspiration is never a constant. For this reason you truly have to admire those artists who never seem to run out of fresh ideas. Sometimes, to keep the ideas coming, artists need to turn to bizarre sources of inspiration. Experimental indie outfit Run Chico Run have their own source to keep the well from running dry.

“Probably food,” says Thomas Shields, one half of Run Chico Run. “I’m getting some ideas right now. We’ve got this huge sausage and the thing must weigh 10 pounds. It’s so hard you could literally kill someone with it and I think about how that must be a horrible way to go–to be beaten to death with a sausage.”

Thankfully it’s doubtful the band will ever have to resort to using assorted tubular meat for a muse. Run Chico Run are undeniably inventive musicians and on their latest full-length album Slow Action, have shown their innovation in an entirely unique fashion.

“Everything [on the record] is slowed down quite drastically,” declares Shields. “We played it really fast and at a much higher pitch than you would hear it live.”

In other words, Run Chico Run recorded Slow Action as fast as they could play the songs, and then slowed them down after the fact. To accommodate this unusual recording method, the duo has had to relearn their parts in order to play the songs live. It may take even more work, but Shields loves the slower tempo of the songs.

“When everything is slowed down, it gives everything that rich, velvety, buttery sound,” he remarks. “I always have my record player at the lowest speed and it sounds fucking rad.”

To Shields, Slow Action is his way of simulating the sound of a slowed down record. Shields seems satisfied with the results, and is proud of what Run Chico Run has accomplished on the album. If food is their fall back, it makes sense to be their means of celebration for a job well done as well.

“We just pat each other on the back and say ‘I love you man, do you want some sausage?’” jokes Shields. “We just like to sit back and admire what we’ve done.”

Slow Action is certainly a work to be admired. Run Chico Run will be touring in support of it for the next little while, but before this happens, they have some sausage to attend to.