The House We Built
EPK (Electronic Press Kit)

EPK Revised 15.35

Date: 22 November 2000

This is a promotional interview tape featuring the girls talking about the making of the album, and showing clips from the Push It All Aside and Pretender videos.

Shellie says: "This album was written really quickly and easily and we knew it was coming. When we’d written loads of songs, and when this one started coming together was when we wrote a song called ‘Can’t Say Sorry’, and then we thought, well, that’s how the album should go. And at that point, it all sort of plopped into place.

So, it’s really organic, it’s live, just over dubs with flute, backing vocals and strings. Bill Bottrell (the producer) encouraged us to record songs in one take."

Shellie: "Yeah, he’s a really good producer. To be honest, every producer we’ve used have been quite high profile, haven’t they? Yeah, that’s the way it’s worked. We’ve worked with smaller people, and we’ve produced ourselves.

But it’s always the ones with the big names which makes everyone go “Oh what was it like?” It was actually really nice, he was a lovely bloke and good fun."

Karen: "He was brilliant. His whole vibe is just about, you know, the imperfections of things, and things that are magical."

"We’d never really worked like that before, especially the way that we did our first album and we just literally took out all of the stuff and just made it really simple.

It was like just the most pleasurable thing, and we came back and were so enthralled about what we had done. We’re happy to be doing it again now."

The girls recorded the album in Bottrell's studio in Mendocino, California.

Shellie says: "It was beautiful. You have to take yourself away from your normal surroundings to go and make a record, if you want to do it the way we do it anyway. It was just up from San Francisco. It was a tiny little place where everybody’s sort of madly creative cause there’s nothing better to do."

Karen: "Yeah, it’s like Kippy county, you know, it’s like, 3 hours north of San Francisco so you have to go up these windy roads. We actually made the album in a studio that was on the edge of a cliff, in the middle of a field with nothing else around. So, all you had to do everyday was think about what we were doing and that was it, and then have a couple of glasses of wine after or during as well. So, yeah, it was just brilliant to be up there, where nobody cared about who you were, what you were wearing."

Do the girls bicker as much in real life as they do in the video?

Karen: "Oh God, we are Betty Davis and Joan Crawford, all over - it’s pretty shocking."

Shellie: "I think we laugh more!"