Cinema Verite

THE POSTMARKS overcome the nice weather to make melancholy

A chance meeting at an open mic night in Miami and it seemed the lives of Christopher Moll, Jonathan Wilkins and Tim Yehezkely were destined to intertwine and create the softly romantic music of The Postmarks. In 2005 the band's bedroom symphony caught the fancy of musician and producer Andy Chase of rock band, Ivy, who not only signed the band to his label, Unfiltered, but also ended up mixing The Postmarks' debut, selftitled full length. Playback sat down with Moll to talk about his song craft, his influences and what lies ahead for The Postmarks.

After your last band See Venus disbanded, you and Jon discovered Tim at an open mic night.
I wanted to do something that was going to be kind of lush and orchestral. I wanted to have a voice that people could kind of identify with - some kind of persona that you'd want to rush up and give a big hug to. At the open mic night, Tim had just showed up to play her song. Jon was floored because it was a club that was usually quite noisy, and he just sat there in rapture, listening to her to play. He approached her afterwards and said, "Look, I've got this buddy who's putting this thing together. Why don't you come back next week and play?" She agreed, so I showed up the following week. To me, she kind of embodied almost like this Amelietype central character. I wanted to have that persona be the focal point in this lushly painted environment that she was going to exist in.

Your music is very ethereal and subtle, which seems to clash with the loud, flashy culture of Miami. How does this kind of music come out of the land of beaches and bikinis?
The first time I called Andy, he was like, "How does someone write this music from down there?" But I was born in New York and grew up in New Jersey so there's still that whole kind of winter thing embedded inside of me. It's beautiful down here, but I'm nocturnal anyway. So most of the time I'm kind of staying at home and working on my music. I've always been somebody who's just been into things that are cinematic-sounding. I don't really worry about Miami and how it filters into the way I write.

How did the album come together?
The way that I approached writing with Tim was that I would have sacrificial lyrics. We'd sit down and go over what my intent was musically and sometimes those lyrics would reinforce that. She would either take it a whole step further or decide to go off in a different direction. At first there were some difficulties between Tim and I, but Jon realized what both of us had. In another interview we recently did, Jon said his role was basically the sergeant in the war, making sure the troops stayed on course so that the mission could be completed. He made sure the two of us stayed on track and kept at it. It just blossomed from there.

What was the first song you two wrote?
"Leaves." As I was presenting musical nuggets to Tim, they weren't really embodying where I wanted to see this thing go. "Leaves" was the first one that I had that she really reacted to. She had a piece of poetry that fit almost perfectly on top of it with the exact kind of melody that I had crafted up for it.

What do you think is the most personal track on the album?
"Winter Spring Summer Fall" from a musical standpoint is one of my favorites on the album. From a lyrical standpoint, it's a little bit fractured. Tim and I are two radically different people, but I think we balance each other well. I'm the one that's a little more day dreamy and melancholy, and she's the one that's a little more upbeat. And yet, I think when you actually see us live it feels like it's the opposite of that.

I heard that when you originally wrote "Goodbye," it was written in the perspective of the dumpee not the dumper… It was actually written much more in the third person. One of the things I like when I write is to think about how a camera would record certain events, like if you're doing a fade out of the song and you picture the camera panning back and more and more is being captured on the lens as the day drifts on... It's a very cinematic way of displaying life. With "Goodbye," I was just trying to capture something in the third person, an event, whether it was a relationship or whether it was about a band.

I like the influences you listed on your MySpace page… red wine, friends, rainy days, starry nights, the art of daydreaming. Do you feel like your influences have changed at all since gaining some attention?
I started writing for the second album already, and I asked one of the guys playing with us live, what he thought about the new songs – how they stand up again the first volume of work. He said, "Yeah, I definitely do, but what I find funnier about the whole thing is that you just sound like you're happier now…" I still think there's that kind of melancholy inside of there. That's just the way I write. I like those little in-between moments in life… all the black keys on the piano. I just think it's more interesting to kind of pick up on those.

— Jin Moon


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