
Our very own Marc & Brad are making waves with their group The Cemetery Improvement Society. Our friends are on the brink of releasing their new album J.A.N.E this Saturday at The Frequency in Madison, WI. You can check them out tomorrow night too where we co-headline a show at the Union Terrace. Marc was recently interviewed by The Onion’s Ben Munson. Have a look!

by Ben Munson June 14, 2010
When The Cemetery Improvement Society needed authentic band photos for its upcoming concept album about a young prostitute, J.A.N.E. (“Just another neglected existence”), it surprisingly didn’t have to travel beyond the East Side of Madison. It seems the ambitious project—told through Marc Claggett and Brad Hawes’ industrial electronic guitar rock and Jessica Knox’s extensive artwork— pertains just as much to Madison as it does to everywhere else in the world. The A.V. Club recently sat down with Claggett ahead of the CD-release party Saturday at The Frequency to talk about the rigors of making a prostitute concept album and how it can be a good excuse to kick out some party jams.
The A.V. Club: Can you explain the concept?
Marc Claggett: It’s basically following this girl’s life, what I call a fictional audio documentary. It’s like a movie with no movie and each scene is a song starting at a point in her life before she gets into prostitution. The whole point is that I wanted to do something different and to have a purpose; everything else I’ve done has been basically the mood I’m in when I sit down. The whole [album] is like a downward slope. The first song is “Fever” and it’s a club-dance song, something I might not have written if I didn’t have a reason to.
AVC: It’s a serious subject that you seem to take a joking approach to on some songs.
MC: There are some songs, like “Dirty Blade,” that’s a complete early-’90s Dr. Dre song, so there’s dark humor to it. We have weird senses of humor and we like to put that in there.
AVC: Is that to defuse such a serious subject or more because it’s just fun?
MC: Because it’s fun, mainly. And because it fits what the songs about, like “Dirty Blade” is her hanging out with her new hooker friends and it’s a bunch of women telling nasty stories and shit like that.
AVC: There’s a pretty significant shift in the tone right after “Dirty Blade.”
MC: Yeah, that’s basically where things start to go downhill.
AVC: This is a pretty ambitious project, coming out a little more than a year after Lonely Dog Island, which in itself was an ambitious project.
MC: Like I said, I had parts and some songs that were pretty much written before I decided to do it, and then I worked those in. [Hawes and I] basically did all the writing within three months, then fit it all together and started recording in January.
My friend Chuck [Prasalowicz], who’s in a metal band called The Unnecessary Gunpoint Lecture, he did vocals on the song “Work.” And my friend Jeff [Goldsmith] did vocals on the song “Christmas Hill.” Scott [Cannaday], who’s also in Projection People and Revolving Doors, recorded the whole thing and produced as well as playing a little bit on a couple of tracks.
AVC: You could classify your music as electronic but it really is guitar-driven as well. How important is the guitar to each track and what advantages do you see in using the seven-string guitar?
MC: Compared to Lonely Dog Island, there was maybe two songs with guitar. Almost every song has guitar on this one and the whole album is more song-oriented, as opposed to just zoning out and forgetting about composition. The guitar obviously adds a lot of melody, and I actually loop guitar so a lot of songs have, like, four guitar parts going at once. That also fills out the fact that there’s just two of us.
I started playing seven-string about four years ago, and I just love the versatility and that you can add a low end that fills in the absence of bass.
AVC: Was Jessica Knox’s artwork planned from the beginning?
MC: It wasn’t planned from the very beginning, but as we wrote the story, I just thought it would be a really cool idea to have something visual to go along with it. The main reason is to just explain what’s happening in every song and to put the listener in Jane’s shoes.
The ideas for this were like a rough story behind each song, and the idea was to have her write from Jane’s point of view.
AVC: So you just gave her a rough sketch and let her go with it?
MC: Yeah. She wrote a lot of it before I actually gave her any of the music. We hadn’t finished writing it, but I had outlined what was happening in each song. So the rough story was done, and then I gave her that and let her fill in all the details.
AVC: So did she influence the final product?
MC: Yeah. Some parts I had music that I hadn’t done anything with and that would shape what that song was about. Other parts I had what the song was about, and I would write totally new to that. Other parts [Knox] would add stuff and it would change things.
I watched a lot of documentaries on prostitution and that’s where a lot of the samples come from. And there were parts where the samples I would find would end up writing the story, too. I would listen for stuff that stood out and sometimes a character would be created because of something from a movie or a documentary.
AVC: The album’s coming out right around the first day of summer, but most people wouldn’t consider these songs summer jams. Would you accept or refute that?
MC: [Laughs.] I’d say there’s some of both. There’s definitely dance-y, upbeat stuff and there’s the complete opposite.