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The Rabbits, Todd Rutherford (T) on guitars and vocals, Travis Cline (TR) on digital sampling mayhem and bass, and Jesika von Rabbit (J), the stunning lead
vocalist, guitarist, keyboardist and frontwoman for the band, always seem to have fun whipping up a frenetic crowd with their unique combo cowboy-alien groove, but don’t let them fool you. They’ve been working hard at all that fun.
And this year, it’s been paying off. The band has just released its exciting debut CD, “Music to Start a Cult to,” on Stinky Records. They’ve played Austin’s music showcase, South
By Southwest, and had one of their frequent L.A. gigs selected as the BMI pick of the month.
Tapping into the hi-desert vibe, the Rabbits are on a well-deserved, exciting ride. The Sun Runner got the opportunity to sit down with the group to discuss the rise of the Royal Order of Rabbits.
This year has been an eventful year for you, so I thought I’d start with how you got hooked up with Stinky Records.
Todd: It was just by chance. We happened to open for one of their bands, Singapore Sling, a band from Iceland, and they really took a liking to our performance and told Sabrina at Stinky
about us. The next time she was out... she made sure to come and check us out, and she really liked us.
Jesika: It was about a year ago we played this show with this band Singapore Sling. They were like, “Best band we’ve seen in America so far. Favorite
band.”
Is Stinky conducting a marketing campaign for you?
T: They hired a publicist for us. They hired a college radio firm to work on our record for the college radio network, and there’s also a specialty radio firm that’s going to try to get
us into special shows on mainstream radio to get us into commercial radio as well.
And they’re releasing “Dirty Horse” in the UK in October, which is really cool. I think the entire record is going to be eventually released over there as well.
So, are you going to turn into one of those Joshua Tree bands that is more popular in Europe than in America and you always have to go to Europe every summer?
T: To make money. I always thought that Europe would be more receptive to us.
J: We get that comment a lot. I think that Europe’s just more open to artsier, more creative music. They’re just more open-minded than here... It’s easier over there for musicians and
bands to be appreciated.
I think we’re probably going to make a video for “Dirty Horse,” because in Europe I guess they’ve been already asking for it. But I hope we can do well here too.
T: Sabrina was telling us the other day it takes at least like a million dollars to get a number one hit on the Top 40 because there are so many payoffs.
J: It doesn’t matter if it’s genuinely good, or if people like it anymore. It’s kind of frustrating.
Did you have any different approach in the studio this time than before?
J: Nothing different, I guess, just being open-minded for anything new to happen.
T: And working with a producer for the first time too. His name is Ethan Allen, like the furniture.
J: We prefer to call him “Ethan Alien.”
T: He used to be the house engineer in New Orleans at some famous studios there. He worked with Daniel Lanios.
J: He’s done work with Throwing Muses and Luscious Jackson, Patty Griffith, he’s worked with Emmylou (Harris).
How did you come up with the title, “Music to Start a Cult to?”
J: A friend of mine in Minneapolis who is a graphic designer, she actually designed this. For a class she was taking, they had to design a CD. It was right up our alley, or my alley
anyway, because I’ve always been interested in cults and culty stuff, and I kind of study them as a hobby. And just being out here in the desert in such a weird, surreal, paranormal place and having this band and
the rabbit ears, it felt right. It’s like a cult out in the desert.
How do you envision this cult you’re starting? Are we going to have legions of people with rabbit ears?
J: Yes.
T: Several.
J: The cult is the Royal Order of Rabbits. It’s basically just a big Rabbit army that’s tapped into the cosmic. The goal one day is to look out and see a sea of bouncing rabbit ears. It’s
just basically people devoted to one thing and that’s Gram Rabbit’s music. So that’s our cult. It’s our weird desert cult. The desert’s a good place for cults.
T: Time will tell just how weird it gets, I think.
J: If it goes the way we plan, the weirder the better.
Are you going to let shape-changing reptilian aliens join?
J: As long as they wear rabbit ears. Sure. If they like the music. If you get it, you’re in the cult. If you get what it’s about.
T: I think there’s something to “get” about our music. That’s part of it.
J: Like the themes of our songs. All the themes of our songs are so desert-inspired. It’s basically anyone out here that we’ve bumped into and become friends with that just kind of get
that weird desert serendipity and synchronicity. It takes a certain kind of person.
Some people would come out here and hate it or just want to get back to the city. All the strange coincidences we’ve had out here that we don’t think are coincidences. A lot of
cosmic stuff.
When Todd and I first moved out here, strange things happened so much that it was weird. It was getting a little witchy. It was fun, but it was sometimes like, wow. Just like
tapping into each others psychicness. Your psychic awareness seems heightened, all that kind of stuff. I think that’s a big part of it.
And you like that, right? It doesn’t unnerve you or make you want to crawl under a rock?
J: No. Nothing evil has ever really happened. It just makes me feel alive and I like using those parts of my brain.
T: It makes me feel like we’re on the right track, like we’re in the right place or something.
The electronica seems to have worked well. Some bands tend to overdo it. Does that take a while to evolve that blend?
J: We don’t want to be just this electronica band. We like a lot of organic stuff. I think that’s the balance of Gram Rabbit—mixing organic and real soulful stuff with more alien,
futuristic sounds— because that’s what the desert kind of has brought out in us. The old cowboys and the old West, and “Wow. I just saw a UFO!”
Look at this huge sky above us and what’s going on up there. You notice that kind of stuff out here. The spirit of the old West and the cosmos. It just kind of falls into place.
“Cowboys and Aliens,” that song is a perfect example of the quintessential theme. I think that’s what keeps it together. We’ve got cowboys and aliens and whatever makes us smile at the moment.
What’s the songwriting process like for you?
Travis: Todd and Jesika do most of the songwriting. They work really well as a pair. They can go off and come up with something in an hour and have something worked up and thrown together
and get it together where other people can come in and add their parts to it. They throw down the bones really well together.
T: Every song has a different story. There isn’t a certain songwriting structure that we follow.
Where did “Dirty Horse” come from? It’s really good imagery.
J: I wrote it in my old bedroom out here when I first moved out here four years ago. I just picked up the guitar and started playing those chords. That’s another song where it just
spilled right out of me. I don’t know where it came from. It just spilled out of me and I did it a lot at Crossroads on open mic night. Todd thought it was a cover. He didn’t know it was my song.
As far as the lyrics go, it’s basically just a story about Jesus and the devil taking a walk together and talking about how screwed up the world is and that it’s neither one of
their faults, but the fault of people. And maybe them becoming friends. The dark and the light coming together.
You say the desert influences your music. What are some of the more interesting experiences you’ve had in the desert?
T: Jesika got attacked in the old house by a guy with a Sonny Bono candle. She wrote two songs about that incident.
J: Just all the weird coincidences. We don’t believe in coincidences. Just the strange things like when I first moved out here one morning I was going to work and saw this big, dead raven on
the side of the road. Something made me stop and look at it. It looked really beautiful. I think it might have just been killed or ran into a pole or something. I went along to work and later that evening when I
came home it was still there, so I picked it up and brought it home for some reason, cause I like to do that. One of my roommates claimed that he dreamt about a raven that night before. So here’s this big raven on
the front porch.
So we turn on the television and put on the X-Files and the X-Files episode was called, “The Raven.” The first scene was a raven landing on this windowsill and talked about how
ravens represented magic. We proceeded on and went to a friend’s house out behind the Rancho (de la Luna). They have a huge record collection and I was looking through it and all of a sudden I saw a record by The
Stranglers, a band I like a lot, and I was pulling it out to see which record it was, and it’s this record, “The Raven,” which has a huge raven on the cover.
That’s just one example of daily life for a while. How it was just always like that every day. It was getting a little spooky where I thought I was turning into a witch, or I was
tapping into too much stuff.
T: On a daily basis. It was so weird we had to pass it off as normal.
J: It’s kind of tapered off a little bit.
T: We’ve been a lot more left-brain I think.
Up on stage you’re working with all these little boxes and cords and things. How do you keep all that stuff straight?
TR: You just do it over and over. I go to neighborhood thrift stores right here in Josh and get albums and sample them for the live show. I try to do something different for each show.
Different little clips of people saying strange things. It’s usually good if it’s the last piece of someone telling a story and it’s the little piece that sums up the whole story and you can’t really figure out what
it’s saying, but it makes you think about a whole bunch of weird things that may or may not have anything to do with it.
You have a new member who played with you at your CD release party at Pappy & Harriet’s?
J: There are four of us. He lives in L.A. and his name is Tracy Lyons-Tarr. I used to play in a band with him in Minneapolis. He plays rhythm guitar and kind of thickens things up. He’s a
weirdo. He looks like an alien. He weighs about 90 pounds and he’s got big eyes like that. He’s really into the band.
Do you think all the coincidence and magic out in the desert might work in your favor?
J: Absolutely.
T: That’s what Gram Rabbit’s all about. Our band and our music was really born from that.
J: It’s a special thing. Not everybody has that in their life, or would even get it, or let it exist.
T: I didn’t really get it until I moved out here. When I came down here I became much more cognizant of the paranormal. Things aren’t always what they seem.
J: I started listening to the Art Bell show because it was the only thing I could get. When I first moved out here, I went to bed at night and there was no TV. So I found this weird show
telling me about all this weird stuff. I’m living in this weird place with all these weird things happening to me all day long and they’re talking about it on this show.
It’s cool, Art Bell lives in the high desert. He lives in Pahrump, Nevada. He’d always talk about how weird the high desert is, and if you haven’t been there you don’t know,
and there’s something about the high desert folks. And here I am in the hi-desert and yeah, he’s right.
It’s a goal someday to have our music on that show.
T: There are a lot of parallels between our music and that show.
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