Now that I Love You But I Must Drive Off This Cliff Now is out, new interviews have been released. First is an interview Mary did with Lucky Magazine. Aside from discussing Got A Girl, Mary also talks about her favorite fashion brands, style influences and what’s next for her. You can read it in full by clicking the link.
Lucky: How did you first meet Dan the Automator and how did you start working together?
Mary Elizabeth Winstead: I had been a fan of Dan for a long time, since like my late teens. I was really obsessed with his album Lovage, this project he did with Jennifer Charles and Mike Patton. When he said that we should try to do something together, I was just in shock because nobody cool like that had made an offer to work with me musically, so I was pretty excited and I didn’t know if he was serious or not. And it just slowly progressed. He lives in San Francisco and I live in L.A. so it was just emailing back and forth. He eventually sent me a track and said, “Try to write something to this—and if it’s good maybe we’ll record it, and if it’s not good maybe we’ll scrap it and move on.” It ended up being “Did We Live Too Fast.” So we recorded that and just sort of slowly turned it into an album over the course of a couple years. We got together every couple months and did a song, and it just kind of worked itself out.
How did you and Dan choose the name Got a Girl?
We were really just spitballing — that’s kind of how a lot of things in this project came together, us sitting in a room shouting things out. We were stuck on a name and were walking around San Francisco going into different book stores and art museums and things and trying to get inspiration. Dan said it at some point, like, “I got a girl, got a girl,” and we both just started saying it over and over agin. There’s something really snappy and catchy about it. That’s what we were looking for, something that had that kind of energy to it and just clicked. It’s the same with the album title [I Love You But I Must Drive Off This Cliff Now]. We just said it as a joke one day and we kept saying it, and kept saying it, and it just stuck.
The sound of the album and the visual components have a very ‘60s, Mad Men, Bond girl kind of feel to them. Where did that come from?
I guess we really lucked out in the sense that Dan and I have such similar sensibilities, in terms of music and film. So we really didn’t have to talk about it too much more when Dan said he was interested in exploring a kind of French-girl vibe. I was like, “I’m there,” because I love New Wave film, and I love ‘60s music, particularly French pop. So it was really easy for us to connect. It just felt really natural.
Fast Co-Create interview:
On how they began collaborating:
“I would bring a track to her, and she would work on it, and then I’d look at what she was doing and help her flesh it out a bit,” Nakamura says. “We would do that a few times, then we figured out that we were kind of good at it, so we would block out more time. We started doing one day here or one day there, and then we were like, ‘Let’s do a week here or a week there.’ We just started tearing it apart and really making it right.”
How they decided to go with a ’60s feel for the band:
“We were trying to get something that got the vibe,” he recalls. “And we were hanging out at City Lights Bookstore, looking at inspirational stuff, and everything didn’t seem right–and then I just caught something. It just popped into my head and it was like, ‘This is what we’re going to do,’ and she was like, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’ Instinctively, we go there. We disagree about stuff when we know they’re not right. We know this was right.”
Winstead name-checks ’60s European pop-culture icons like Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin when talking about the inspirations for the album.