There was a reason the guys from Phoenix didn’t jump up when the Grammy Award presenter announced the band’s album “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix” won the award for “Best Alternative Music Album.”
If you go
Phoenix, Two-Door Cinema Club
Where: DAR Constitution Hall, 1776 D St. NW
When: 8 p.m. Monday
Info: $38.50; ticketmaster.com
It wasn’t that the French quartet was overwhelmed or reticent to accept the honor — they just couldn’t hear the name clearly. “We heard it and we thought the record name they announced wasn’t ours so we just said ‘OK. We lost,” said frontman Thomas Mars. “Admittedly it was even better one second later when we thought we had lost and then realized we had won. We never won awards before. This is the only one we’ve received.”
What a way to start a career. The Versailles-based quartet had never made music to win awards, though. When the band formed its members were in grade school. It took the members four years to choose a name. Then it took them four years to release the band’s first album “United.” While that album and others were well received, the band soon found itself adrift without a label.
“We never thought of disbanding,” said Mars. “Since the beginning, I think when we grew up we felt we didn’t need to please everyone. We wanted to please the least amount of people. It was very selfish. … When we made this record, we thought it would be a success but it didn’t matter to us. It wasn’t important. What was important was what we felt about it.”
Still it was surprising to the band when the songs found fans and soon the album found supporters — and a contract with Glass Note Records.
What Mars said worked on the album is the band members bringing their varied musical influences together and melding them into the songs. The lyrics, chords and other elements of the songs started very raw and were refined through a very collaborative effort.
“We would create a mash up that was cryptic and something we loved and something close to the music we wanted but we wouldn’t understand the lyrics,” he said. “When the first song we did was good enough, we kept on doing the same thing, to capture that sound.”
Now the key, Mars said, is to stay on the path of creating music that band members — before anyone else — find appealing.
“We don’t feel trapped, basically,” he said. “If you start with the idea that you want to please everyone artistically, you are dead. It’s not about constantly growing [the fan base] it’s about putting out records we are proud of.”
