If Solon Bixler had his way, he'd be going on a lunch date with Barack Obama and Billy Mays--you know, the screaming guy from the OxiClean commercials. There would be a few others there as well, like Cloris Leachman and the Dalai Lama. Sure, it's a pretty ambitious dream--but Bixler and the rest of Great Northern, an indie rock group from L.A., aren't musicians who think small.

Like so many great things, the group first started at an Elliott Smith concert in 2003. Bixler, a guitarist whose previous bands include 30 Seconds to Mars and Sea Wolf, among others, was attending the show with long-time friend (and current romantic partner) Rachel Stolte, and gave her a few recordings of the roughest outlines of songs, asking if she would like to sing and play piano for the tunes. Stolte took the tapes, and from the murky nighttime seranades of Elliott Smith, the band was born.

The duo emerged from their midnight beginnings into the indie rock spotlight, and are now finishing up a tour in support of their second album, Remind Me Where The Light Is. The song "Home," from their first album, Trading Twilight for Daylight, garnered much attention and was featured in a Nissan commercial and the movie 21 with Kevin Spacey and Jim Sturgess in 2008.

And the attention is not undeserved. From trembling, spindle-spun, smiley acoustic ballads like "33," the track that closes their latest album, to driving, rock-rooted, danceable tunes like "Story," the same album's opener, the group's sound matches the expansive, organic image their name evokes. Death+Taxes called Great Northern a few weeks ago as they were beginning their tour and talked with Bixler about the new album, Rachel's dreams, how to dance in public, and that intriguing lunch scenario. Read the full interview after the jump. (You won't regret it. Really. There are puns involving Grease and shit-talking regarding Zac Efron.)-AK


So you guys just started a country-wide tour. Where are you headed today?

Yes, we did. We're currently--well I'm riding, but Rachel's driving. We're all headed to Cleveland, Ohio.

That sounds fun. Are you excited about Cleveland?

Yeah! Yeah, I think we're going to go check out the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Do you have anything in particular you're looking forward to there?

Uh, well we're being inducted into the Hall of Fame, so that's pretty cool.

That is very cool.

I'm just kidding. [Laughs] No, I'm not that familiar with Cleveland, and I don't know if the other kids are, but--we're driving through, I think Pennsylvania right now, and it's very, very lovely.

Do you guys have any crazy tour stories so far? Has anything crazy happened to you on the road?

Uh... Other than going crazy? [Laughs]

Did that happen?

I don't know. I think it's slightly early in the tour... But I can feel the craziness begin to come out, slowly but surely. Once we run out of our medication I'm sure it'll get crazy.

This is your tour in support of Remind Me Where The Light Is--are you playing songs from that album, for the most part?

Yeah, and we're playing a couple older ones. This record has been different--a little more driving, a little more guitar-driven and whatnot, and more focused. With the older songs from the previous record, when learning them and playing them in conjunction with these songs, we've kind of had to re-work them a little bit, so we're just working in as many as we can, you know, time allowing. But yeah, it's mainly the new songs.

Tell me about making that album. It sounds very organic and expansive to me--almost like the soundtrack to a Northern Lights show. Was that intentional?

Yeah, I mean I think intentional in the sense that we learned a lot through making the previous record--that we didn't really have as much focus of how we wanted things to sound and come across and all that. And this one was a much faster process, but a much more difficult record to make. But we always kind of think in visual terms, so in writing songs a lot of times, you know, some people take it to a further place and see sound in actual colors, rather than actually hearing it. And that could be an extreme aspect of it, but we definitely try to think of the visuals along with the music, not that the music is secondary to it, but they kind of need to go hand in hand. So you can clearly be on stage and have all the lights out but you hear the music and have something visually going on other than the people playing--kind of telling a story, you know?

You mentioned that this album was faster to write--why was that?

I don't know. I think sometimes tour can be very conducive to getting to know yourself and knowing your process and how you write and how you want things to sound. When we finished touring last year--we got home in like April of 2008--and we wrote a little bit during tour, before we got home. And then we got home, bought some studio equipment, and recorded for about four or five months. About thirty different songs together, and then went and recorded those songs in the fall, and cut it down to eleven.

What should listeners take away from this album?

Take away the sadness and the emotional trauma that it took to make it. [Laughs] No, I don't know, take away--actually, you know, we got an interesting message on Myspace or one of those social networking sites. This girl--it's actually a sad story--she said that a friend of hers had passed away a year ago to the day that we were playing in Philly a couple [weeks] ago. And she was going to the show, and a few months prior she had gotten our first record and was listening to one of the songs on it and she felt that her friend who had passed away--the ghost--was in her car with her. And she kind of broke down for the first time and came to terms with it and dealt with it and though that was sad, it was kind of an interesting thing, that a song of ours actually did that, and it helps people kind of connect. There could be a positive side to that as well.

Are you writing any new songs on this tour?

Not at the moment. We still have a good amount of songs that didn't make the record that we'll probably work on, but, you know, there's always ideas knockin' around with the other screws in the brain. I'm sure we'll get to that point soon. Tour is always pretty conducive to writing--it's not necessarily conducive to recording, but with the technological advances these days it's becoming easier and easier to record while on the road.

Have you recorded on the road before?

Yeah, yeah, you know, it used to be with a four-track, and then maybe a little mobile computer, and now you can actually do it with your iPhone.

You said earlier that there are several songs you guys wrote that didn't make the album--but you plan to work on those in the future?

There were songs that, you know, out of the demos we had--there were songs that were more flushed out, more orchestrated--that we really elaborated on, and there were other ones that we didn't, and we kind of just picked the strongest ones, or the ones that were kind of already there, and through working with our producers, took them to another place. And that ended up being the record, and then the other songs I’m sure we'll continue to work on until they get to a place where we're comfortable enough to let them be free.

Tell me about your songwriting process. Which comes first, music or lyrics?

It all kind of depends. In Rachel's case, 'cause she tends to be more lyrically driven and has a heavier hand in lyrics, usually lyrics come to her first and then we'll write music around it. And I'm more musically driven, but all in all we still work on everything together, and this time around, after we finished touring last year in April, we bought a few little gadgets for recording at home and set up a little home studio. So that made it nice, just being able to record whenever we felt like it. It usually starts with fresh ground coffee, some nice freshly made orange juice, some bacon and eggs, and then we record.

That sounds good.

Yeah, you gotta stay healthy when you're writing.

Do you write anything other than songs, like stories or poems?

Well, Rachel's been working on a children's novel in her spare time. Mostly illustrations, but we're trying to put a story to it, whenever possible. But she does a lot of artwork, so she did the artwork for our previous record, and the artwork for some of our merchandise and whatnot. So she's got a very artistic mind, so we're trying to put words to it. But it might end up just being a picture book, maybe pop-up. We'll see what happens. You know, you can't just devote all your time to music. You got to try to explore as many avenues as possible.

What's the storyline right now?

You know, I don't really remember any of my dreams, but Rachel keeps a journal of all her dreams, but she's a very visual person, so a lot of her dreams she interprets visually, rather than--I don't know, it's a process, trying to interpret what the dreams mean and what each picture means. Hopefully we'll get her to release it soon--she's been working on it for a couple years now.

When you guys were writing the new album, was there any music in particular that inspired you?

Yeah, there's always music, I mean, we listen to lots of music. I think a lot of the influence comes from personal experience and a lot of voyeuristic activity. Because watching--not in a weird, freaky way--but it's just very interesting, humans' behaviors.

Are there any books or movies that inspire you?

Well, Rachel, in the past tour--took a while, a couple of weeks--but she got through War and Peace. That was a tough read. A lot of words in that book--a lot of pages. She didn't really talk to anybody for awhile after she read that book, but she's been coming out of her shell, and I think making this record definitely helped that. And movies, yeah, we love movies. Silent films, Charlie Chaplin movies, Buster Keaton, Sergio Leone, P.T. Anderson, Back to the Future, Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, anything by John Hughes.

You're going to Chicago on your tour, right? You could check out the football field from The Breakfast Club.

Yeah, we might have to do that. And maybe pump our fists up in the air like Mr. Judd Nelson, and maybe throw a little Simple Minds on the iPod.

If Remind Me Where The Light Is was a soundtrack for a movie, what would the movie be?

I think St. Elmo's Fire, maybe. That's got a pretty great storyline. Maybe I could play the role of Emilio Estevez, Rachel could be Demi Moore, and Dusty [Great Northern's drummer] could be either Rob Lowe or Judd Nelson, either or. [Laughs] The Brat Pack. There needs to be another Brat Pack. All that's going on now is fuckin' Zac Efron and this High School Musical bullshit. It'd be great to get back to some of the movies that actually translate well even twenty-plus years later.

What's in the future for Great Northern?

For the next record, we're focusing more on it being a little more driving, [having] a little more drum beats. [Compared to our first record], you could shake it and get loose a little more on this album, and on our next record we're going full-on, fuckin' dance party. There's nothing better than a good dance. Shake it off. Just fuckin' dance. If you're bummed out, dance. If your dog died, dance. [Laughs]

Do you dance a lot when you play?

All the time. I'm not a dancer, but for some reason, I dance. This record makes me want to dance. There's nothing wrong with a little dance. You gotta really be comfortable with yourself to dance.

Very true.

I'm serious!

I am too! Dancing in public is hard.

It is. It's very difficult. You end up getting in your head about it and wondering how you look, but you gotta just say fuck it and just dance. Like Kevin Bacon in Footloose. He had a whole town, a preacher, comin' down on him, and he said, "You know what, guys? Fuckin' dance." Same with Patrick Swayze. All the greats. They know what's up. You just fuckin' dance.

Like John Travolta in Grease.

John Travolta, great answer. There's another one.

Maybe the movie we were talking about earlier that Remind Me Where The Light Is would be the soundtrack to would have to have dancing in it.

Actually I think we would just have the lyrics scroll across the bottom of the screen with a little dot telling you when the words were coming, but the whole thing would be dancing--all the parts would be acted out through dance. [Laughs]

That would be a crazy movie.

Yeah, it would be a Grease-y movie. [Laughs]

Speaking of grease... If you and all of Great Northern could sit down and have lunch with five people who are alive today, who would they be?

The Dalai Lama, Lonnie Anderson, Barack Obama, Cloris Leachman, and Sigourney Weaver. [Laughs] I have no idea what we'd all talk about, but you know. Oh, you know what, instead of Sigourney Weaver, Rick Moranis. And maybe to keep everybody's attention and energy up, Billy Mays would be there as well. The OxiClean screamer, that guy.

A conversation between him and the Dalai Lama would be pretty intense.

Billy Mays and the Dalai Lama would have a great conversation. And Cloris would be the mediator.

What would Barack do?

Barack? Barack would just be the coolest motherfucker in the whole goddamn room.