Grammys preview; the power of Pitchfork; 'Walking Dead' returns

Every season we hold auditions for future walkers and we have affectionately termed it zombie school. I usually do 20 or 30 people per class, and I spend an entire day auditioning people, putting them through some exercises in terms of how fast they walk, what their character is, what their personality is, explaining to them that in many instances, their performance can make or break a scene. If you have somebody who is in a scene who does not look like they are authentically performing, it could take the audience out of the scene. 

Well, authentic to the rules of our world. If we have somebody in the background who's walking like Frankenstein, that doesn't look to portray the rules that we have built in our show. 

A winner is somebody who brings a lot of character to their performance. This goes all the way back to Boris Karloff and Frankenstein. You feel the character under the makeup and within the makeup. That made Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi famous, because they were able to portray those characters with sympathy and with anger and with pathos. When we shot season one and Rick goes into the park and finds the half walker girl crawling along the ground, and he kneels next to her and he pulls the gun out and he says, "I'm sorry this happened to you," there is emotion. It's not just a monster, but he looks at her and we feel sympathy, we feel a sense of loss, we feel emotion. We also have to feel terror and a threat, so it's not as easy as it looks. Everybody thinks, "Oh I want to come be a zombie on the show," but there's acting skills involved. It's not just somebody who just decided one day that they wanted to be a zombie on the show. It doesn't work that way. 

My position always is this: You provide your directors and your producers with the tools that they need to do to tell the story, and Frank Darabont and Gale Anne Hurd right out of the gate when they were trying to sell the show, were very specific about how they wanted the zombies to be portrayed.



We have always kept it practical, because we feel that its more realistic, not to take away from the great visual effects team that we have, because they do a fantastic job on the show as well. "The Walking Dead" celebrates the practical aspect of makeup effects and has put it in the forefront of today's pop culture. Having 8-year-old and 10-year-old kids come up and say, "I want to do special effects makeup," when five years ago they probably didn't even know that job existed. Again it's a tremendous honor being able to transform people in to walking corpses every Sunday night. [That] just continues to perpetuate that desire to learn more about our business. 

I am always very aware with every season to continue to make the walkers look visually different. As time passes, the elements take their toll — sun, rain, weather. I always think about when it's Halloween time, and you have a pumpkin on your front porch, within two months that pumpkin has rotted into a puddle of goo because of the sun.



We take that into account every single season, where more and more skin decomposes, more and more bone structure and skeletal traits are visible, sometimes the teeth are broken out, sometimes their beards and their hair is a little bit longer. So every season we really do try to keep them visually exciting and visually interesting.

We make all the blood in house, and we also provide the blood for the art department and for wardrobe and makeup. We go through hundreds of gallons, because even seeing zombie blood on the ground, if you shoot a scene where there's 20 dead walkers on the ground, you have to put blood around all of them. 

Oh, yeah, without a doubt.

I'll tell you the secret, it's powdered food coloring, not liquid food coloring. You can go to the supermarket, and you can buy red liquid food coloring. When I was a little kid, that's what I made fake blood out of, because that's all that there was. But as soon as you do that, that blood stains your hands. So then you have a red stained bloody hand for two days. But if you use powdered food coloring — you can get it at a bakery or a shop that provides bakery supplies — you can use red and yellow powdered food coloring and put a little bit of soap in with it, and the soap will keep the blood from staining your hands. 

There was one gag that we did last year that Scott Gimple [producer/writer] thought maybe we went a little bit too far. It was a moment where there was a bunch of walkers up against a fence. It was episode two of season four, and the pressure behind this one person at the fence was so great that it basically pushed the walker through this fence.

Yeah, I just moved here a couple of weeks ago.

A little of both, but it's actually for personal reasons. I'm from Minneapolis, originally, and I moved to Chicago when I was 22. I stayed there for eight years, and then moved to New York and stayed there for eight years. Now I'm here.

Presumably, yeah.

[laughs] I don't know where I'll be moving to, but I'm happy to be here.

We've actually been wanting to do a radio station for about a decade. In 2005, we started looking seriously at having an online radio station, and we started to dig in and do the work to figure out what it would cost and what the licensing would be like.



But the technology wasn't as advanced at that time and the streaming was a lot more expensive, so we just opted not to do it at the time. But it's something we've always wanted to do.

We're going for a little bit of a community radio vibe, and we're really trying to have a loose and relaxed tone. But we are reaching out to tons of people from L.A., so we've had people in from Origami Vinyl, from dublab, and just people we think have good taste in music.

A little bit, yeah. We're always trying new things and we like challenges. People were saying, "Print is dead," and we made this inverse move to start a quarterly print publication. And people have been saying, "Commercial radio is dead," so we [thought], This is an interesting challenge and it's something that we want to do and we feel like we can do it well.



The response has been really, really good, and we've been really pleased with how it's come together. It's something that we're definitely going to continue.

I think it's a little bit easier to do with music criticism because critics are critical, they're snarky, and that's just part of our identity. It's always been a reflection of who we are as people and who we are as fans, and even though it's much larger than I ever expected it to be, many of the people who are working on it today are people who were there from the very beginning.

We had a very specific taste and a very specific identity in terms of how we approached music. Particularly in the early days, we were quite unprofessional and we would say things that really crossed the line.

[laughs] Yeah, I don't know. We definitely wouldn't pull any punches whatsoever when it came to critiquing the music or the perceived character of the artist in some cases. We were about bringing down the "sacred cows" of alternative music, and a lot of it was just fun; we didn't feel like anybody was reading us, and none of the artists were ever going to see what we were saying, so it was just a free-for-all.



But as we grew, our taste solidified and it got a little broader. But we still maintain that what we do is about highlighting underground or artists who, in large part, are not being heard. It became a resource for people who were looking for music that was not discoverable in other ways.

We did.

[laughs] We did two reviews about Jet, and the first is one of my favorites. It's a dialogue between the band's manager and the band themselves, and they're going out on stage and trying all these different things, failing at each one, and the crowd becomes increasingly restless.



The second Jet review that we did was just a YouTube video that we found online of a chimp sitting on the ground and urinating into its own mouth. We felt that was a pretty spot-on reflection of the music.

[laughs] I think those records really speak for themselves, and we felt that they were records that weren't being highlighted by other people. That was really what we put ourselves out there to do, to say, Here are records that are not getting the attention that they deserve.



I think those are both records with a broad appeal, and when I was first starting Pitchfork, independent music was considered really esoteric and challenging. But by the time I started listening to a lot of independent music, I didn't really feel that way.



I felt that this was music that was a little bit different but had all the hallmarks of great pop music. That was really the goal of Pitchfork: to help foster independent music and find a broader audience for it as a whole, because that was really my passion.

The approach varies a little bit from album to album. For the majority of the reviews, the rating is decided entirely by the critic, or largely by the critic. There is some editorial input, and if something seems a little bit high or the rating doesn't quite match the text, we may consult with the writer and then adjust the score one way or another.



But generally we look at the ratings as a form of consensus for what the staff feels as a whole. The Pitchfork staff and contributors are always talking about music and discussing music in secret areas of our website, so we're in constant dialogue about it. And when we're editorially assigning records, we'll try to assign the record to a critic who is largely in the consensus.



It's a little bit of editorial and a little bit from the writer, but it's a happy medium that's generally reflective of what we all feel.

You try not to think too much about the impact, which is sort of beside the point. We do make a point of highlighting records that are really good and really resonate with us, but the score really just represents what we feel.



This isn't what we started Pitchfork to do. We didn't start Pitchfork to make or break careers. It's a side effect of people trusting our taste and valuing what we say, but it's definitely not the objective. If you think about that too much it can start to corrupt what you originally set out to do. We try to ignore that.

Like you said, it's always hard to say with the Grammys, particularly because you never know how newer bands are going to evolve. But I'll give you a couple of artists that I think are doing really interesting things right now.



One is a guy named Tobias Jesso Jr., who's a songwriter who lives here [in L.A.], and he has this really simple but extremely heartfelt style. He's a powerful songwriter who's oddly in the vein of Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson. It's very spare, just him and a piano, playing these very complexly chorded songs that are really beautiful, and his voice is really evocative and emotional.



Another band who's been around for a little bit that has the potential to have a pretty big year is a band called Lower Dens. They've had a couple records that were almost there, but not quite developed, but it sounds like they're really coming out strong on this record. They're kind of between Beach House and The War on Drugs, and they have a very full-production sound, great lyrics, and the lead vocalist, Janna Hunter, is great.

[laughs] I'm not in the business of ranking scenes, but I'll say that something is happening in L.A. right now.



New York is going through something of an identity crisis for maybe the first time in its history. It's become so expensive to live there that it's becoming less attractive for artists to move there. There used to be scenes in the Lower East Side, and then it was Williamsburg, and then it was Bushwick; people were moving to these areas and they were the epicenters of music in New York. 



But that's changing, and over the past few years there's been a mass exodus of people leaving New York to come to L.A. Artists can still afford studios here, the climate is a little more palatable, and I think the music scene here is just turning a corner. It has the potential to be the center of music in the United States in a way that New York previously was.



It's all evolving right now, and it's hard to see exactly where it will go, but when you have a massive influx of artists from the previous capital of music, then certainly things are likely to evolve.