Le Loup, a melodic collage

By Moira E. McLaughlin
Friday, November 6, 2009

The stereotype of rock musicians paints them as flaky, unrealistic and even irresponsible. But Sam Simkoff, 25, frontman for indie-rock band Le Loup, comes across as remarkably (and a little disappointingly) not stereotypical.

"For now, music is fantastic and it's what I want to be doing, but we haven't been around long enough to make that sustainable as a full-time career," he says by phone from the band's van on his way to a gig in British Columbia.

Le Loup started in Washington in 2006 and quickly developed a strong blogging fan base. The band played its first gig at the Velvet Lounge, a tiny, bare-bones club on U Street NW, and "packed the place" mostly with friends, Simkoff says. (The Velvet Lounge has since expanded.) A gig at Iota Club and Cafe in Arlington landed the group a record deal with Seattle-based indie-label Hardly Art.

In 2007, Le Loup released its first album, "The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly," garnering a review in Pitchfork, the online news source for indie music. The songs, all Simkoff's, are simple -- a little banjo here, a little synthesizer there, a drum machine and Simkoff's doubled or tripled voice in the forefront, often reverberating.

The album name is taken from a bizarre altar made of aluminum foil, cardboard and other random items, created over 14 years by a janitor and now on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Such a long and grandiose album name seems perfect for a cooler-than-thou indie-rock band, but Simkoff seems genuine about his reasons for naming it so.

"I remember seeing ['The Throne'] for the first time, and I was really taken by it." The album, he says, was homespun in the same way the throne was, done as a labor of love.

Le Loup's second album, released in September and more simply named, "Family," is almost too pretty at times to be rock-and-roll. It's the music of the smart, geeky music crowd that sits around deconstructing chords and experimenting with cool sounds.

Simkoff studied political science at Ohio's Kenyon College. He moved to Washington after graduation and worked as a paralegal. Always a musician, he started looking for something to do in his spare time. He turned to Craigslist to piece together a band.

Musicians have cycled in and out of Le Loup. These days, he collaborates heavily with his best friend from high school, Christian Ervin. The two started writing together via e-mail when Ervin was studying architecture at Rice University.

That kind of long-distance musicmaking is standard for the band. Although the group holed up together in a house in the District to make "Family," today band members are strewn across the country. Simkoff lives in Seattle, Ervin is in Portland, Ore., a couple still live in Washington, another is in Princeton, N.J.

And there's no talk of changing that. Simkoff is married now, and the practical side of him won't bank on a long-term career with Le Loup.

Success, he says, is "hard to define. As soon as you get really specific, that's kind of setting yourself up for disappointment, especially with something as vague as music. It's up to public perception, and unless you're super-talented, there's no way to manipulate the outcome."

Plus, Simkoff says, he likes the contrast of life on the road with life at home, working in an office in temporary positions.

"I feel like I have to be a productive member of society," he says. As musicians, "you're contributing to culture, which is great, but I also want to help the community [and] my wife."

The future of Le Loup appears vague. The group sold out the Mercury Lounge in New York but couldn't draw more than 50 people to Boston's T.T. the Bear's Place. For now, that kind of inconsistency is okay with Simkoff, but three years from now, it may be a different story.

"Before I was on this label, I dreamed of being on a label, and that was the end-all be-all." But the bar, he says, is ever-rising. "There's nothing wrong with always wanting to push yourself further. Success is a constantly shifting thing. If [Le Loup] can go a little bit further, that's great."

And practical.

SO MANY PEOPLE CROWDED into the Velvet Lounge to see Le Loup for its June 21 secret show -- announced day of -- that folks were listening to the group from the stairwell.

With an Arcade Fire-sized lineup, Le Loup's sound is atmospheric. The band builds serious weather from mere whispers, starting, say, with a single banjo line and then layering guitar, French horn, guitar, drums, keys, vocals and more guitar.

Only a short time after forming, the lupine septet is headlining DCist's popular Unbuckled concert series on July 11. Suffice it to say, the wolf is loose.

Yet the band's most formidable feat came before Le Loup had even gelled, when Sub Pop's imprint Hardly Art approached and then signed the band. At that point, Le Loup was a lone wolf: songwriter Sam Simkoff.

Express caught up with Simkoff to discuss the band, outsider art and incredible displays of violence.

EXPRESS: A many-bands-enter, one-band-leaves situation: We Are Wolves, Wolf Eyes, Wolf Parade, Wolfmother and Le Loup. Who comes out on top?
SIMKOFF: I'm kind of biased, because Wolf Parade is one of my favorite bands, period. So I'd have to say that they might. I'd love to say Le Loup, but I don't have that kind of hubris yet.

EXPRESS: But you guys have seven people.
SIMKOFF: That's true, we do have manpower. Get us hyped on enough Sparks and we might come out the victor.

EXPRESS: Are there any instruments you want to add to the band?
SIMKOFF: Want to? Yes. Going to? Probably not. We've actually got a hidden band member, so to speak. One of our band members is my good friend from high school, Christian Ervin, who collaborated with me on a couple of the songs on the album. He put down computer beats -- he's kind of a digital wizard. So given the opportunity, he comes and plays shows with us where he actually plays the computer. He's got a bunch of stuff set up and he uses the keyboard as keys. We're trying to integrate him a little more, just because he kind of fills stuff out and he's enormously creative. I'd love to have more singers -- which is nigh impossible to execute live.

EXPRESS: So a laptop choir is in the works?
SIMKOFF: It's already hard enough to schedule practices for seven people, and we're each making approximately $10 off shows, so I'd probably have to wait a while for the full choir.

EXPRESS: How did you get seven people together?
SIMKOFF: It was fast and furious. I put a bunch of songs on MySpace before ever even entertaining the notion of having a band, kind of on a whim. I started friending all my favorite bands. I got a response from Hello Central, and they're really nice guys. They said they liked the stuff and had passed it on to somebody at Sub Pop, who then contacted me and expressed a very unofficial interest. We kept in contact for maybe seven or eight months, while I was putting together the rest of the CD, and I started pulling together a band. I sent out a few advertisements through Craigslist, and the people who showed up for the most part became the band.

EXPRESS: Before, you were writing and recording all the parts yourself for the songs you put up on MySpace. How did bringing a band together change that process?
SIMKOFF: We've been focusing so much on honing our live show that we haven't started the group creative process of making new songs. Everyone has stuff they want to bring to the table. As of yet, we're just focusing on putting together the stuff that was already there. Obviously the dynamic changes once you go from one person to a set, and for the best, I think. As a function of it having so many people, and as a function of it being live, our live show is a lot more energetic than our recorded stuff. And some of the nuances get lost. But it's all for the best, it ends up being really fun to watch. A lot more people means a lot more sound and a lot more energy.

As far as the creative process goes, everyone else brings their own styles and ideas to the table, and we end up reinterpreting the songs for the live show. So live they sound a lot different.

EXPRESS: Is Hardly Art arranging for any mixing or engineering or added production for your upcoming album?
SIMKOFF: When I sent [the CD] to them as a demo, I got it mastered around here on the quick and dirty: I gave a guy $200, just the fastest job imaginable. So I passed it on to [Hardly Art] just so that they'd have something that sounded semi-professional, and they ended up accepting what I submitted as the CD. What they decided to do with it was, we went over a few different mastering places and got it remastered, and it sounds fantastic.

EXPRESS: Your album's name is . . .
SIMKOFF: "The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation's Millennium General Assembly."

EXPRESS: What's your connection to James Hampton?
SIMKOFF: Oh, we go way back. [Laughs] I went to the Portrait Gallery shortly after moving to D.C., and they have this folk art collection there, and they have James Hampton's ["Throne of the Third"] piece there -- it's staggering. Huge. I remember seeing it for the first time, and I was caught between thinking, "This is crazy nuts" and "This is really beautiful." He ferreted away all these pieces of furniture, bits of detritus, for over 15 years. Early hours of the morning, late at night, kind of making these precious objects out of found household items and wrapping them in tinfoil. And then once they got dust on them, instead of dusting them off, he would wrap them in more tinfoil. The whole process of taking something homemade that was very much an amateur affair and layering it with homemade bits and pieces -- that obviously kind of struck me because I felt like I was basically sitting at home doing the same thing.

Now, I don't see myself as the leader of any church. That kind of devotion bordering on complete obsession, it created something beautiful, his utmost faith in what he was doing. It turns it from something that you might think is crazy or alarming into something really gorgeous. It ends up being really beautiful.

EXPRESS: You may not have a church, but you do have a following. You registered some surprise to being approached by Hardly Art -- but what's your reaction to the response from D.C.?
SIMKOFF: It's been fantastic. The D.C. music and artistic community, in general, is a really unique one, at least compared to where I've lived. I grew up in Portland and then went to school in Ohio in a really small rural community. D.C. is dynamic because the people here really care and the musicians are very supportive of one another. In certain circles in other cities you get these closed social situations with high barriers to entry. D.C. is very open and accepting. I don't know if it has something to do with the city not being traditionally seen as an artistic, bohemian epicenter, and so when musicians come along, they're applauded, or whether people are just generally nice here.

EXPRESS: We talked about the story about a member of the band Barkitechture throwing a bar staffer through the storefront window of a place next door to the venue where they were playing. Who in Le Loup is most likely to throw a bouncer through a window?
SIMKOFF: I don't know; we're all pretty sanguine. But for the record, [bandmate] Mike [Ferguson] scares me. The guy will kill one of us in our sleep one day. I don't think we have any real boiling tempers, but then again, we haven't gone on tour yet.

--Express (July 2007)