The future is Electric – England in 1819’s Andy Callaway discusses the band’s new album, Fireball Electric Tomorrow

If you’ve heard Baton Rouge’s England in 1819, you’ll note the orchestration, crescendos and Sigur Ros-like grandeur with each song.

However, on the band’s latest disc, Fireball Electric Tomorrow (released this week), a once multi-piece band has been paired down to its core duo of brothers, Andy and Dan Callaway. Those sweeping songs aren’t gone; some of the sounds have just been replaced with more electronics, synths and drum machines.

The band will perform at The Spanish Moon Friday with Brass Bed and Minos the Saint. Tickets are $8. Doors open at 9 p.m. The show starts at 10 p.m.

Below is a one-on-one conversation with Andy Callaway of England in 1819.

Matthew Sigur:The title and certain themes like fire and electricity come up throughout the album, tell me about that title and the writing process.
Andy Callaway: [The album title] is the name of a song my dad wrote in the ’90s. My brother realized that [my dad’s song] kind of sounded electronic like what we’re doing. With tomorrow, we’re looking towards the future. He realized that name fit, and it made sense with what we’re trying to do with this album. My brother wrote a lot of the lyrics this time around. In the cabin, I was doing the music. He, for fun, wanted to make these themes that ran across the whole album like fire.

MS: And the cover art is very striking, what is that?
AC: It’s me and Dan when we were younger. All the album art is all family pictures when we were kids in England. We grew up in England. Dan was born there. I moved there when I was 2. We came back to middle school in America. My dad’s job, he was working, teaching Air Force bands on the base. They had a program where you could go anywhere you want, my parents almost went to Japan. When my mom got a job in London, we stayed there for awhile. It was crazy. I have a warped sense of England. I remember it very fondly because it was my childhood. We didn’t watch a lot of TV. Very few people had cable. There wasn’t a lot to watch when we were kids. My dad would try and stop us from watching TV. We just played music a lot. My dad had the whole living room set up with a piano and violin. Dan started on violin. I started on piano.

The art, though, for each album, it’s been all pictures. Some of these pictures, no one knows who took it or where it came from. The one underneath the CD is like of this weird castle way out on these cliffs, no one knows what country it is. My mom thinks the cover is from Germany, but we don’t really know. Someone tried to take a picture of us standing in front of the building, whoever took it cut off our heads. We just thought it was funny.

MS: So you recorded the new album in a cabin?
AC: Yeah, in North Carolina. While we were on tour, we met a girl whose family owns this cabin. I was joking with her and said, “Well, I’ll go up there and fix it up for you if I can stay there for free.” We didn’t talk for months, then she e-mailed me and asked me if I still wanted to go up there. At the time, I was thinking about taking a break. We weren’t saying we would write an album up there. It just turned out that way. It’s this cabin in the middle of nowhere. The cabin itself was not that beautiful on the inside. No one had been living there, and it was totally infested. The first three days, we had to clean. Then we closed off some of the rooms. Living room, kitchen and bathroom, that was all we had. There was nothing out there. There was cell phone reception, kind of, but no TV and Internet.

MS:Did that affect how you wrote?
AC: I think so because leading up to that, I already kind of wanted to disconnect myself from current happenings so I wouldn’t be too influenced by anything. I wanted it to come out of anything we were feeling. I feel like every song really got explored. They all feel really complete to me. A lot of times I find myself thinking, “What if I would have done this?” With these, we just tried everything because we had so much time.

MS: Using the software, too, you have some limitations but boundaries are limitless. What was it like for you?
AC: With electronics, you have total control over every aspect. You’re not limited by the beat your drummer could play. You can add bass or strings. It’s endless like that. We made small ideas that I thought sounded cool. We made 60 or 70 15-second, 20-second little things. It was one sound, beat, bass line or anything. We called them individual things. If we liked it, we made it grow a little bit. We filtered our own and piecing together things that worked.

There was the thought that at some point, the two of us are going to have to play this live, whatever we do. It was a balancing act between being able to recreate there and letting everything go. It’s weird to have every option available. I miss the physical limitations of sitting down and recording with people, and it’s like “What can we make now together?”

MS:Is it overwhelming sitting there in front of a computer? How do you start?
AC: Yeah, how do you just write a song?