Deerhoof’s one of those charming bands equally capable of jarring and pacifying a listener to their heart’s content, sometimes simultaneously. As they kick off a tour in support of their latest album, Offend Maggie, we took a sec to converse with founding member and drummer Greg Saunier about injuries and theme songs.

MetroWize: My friend cut her face open.

Greg: How does one do that?

MW: I’m not really sure. But in the spirit of events, have you got any good gory injury stories?

Greg: We’ve been lucky. Never had equipment stolen. We always rent cars so we don’t have vans breaking down in middle of tours. All the classic disasters that happen to bands, so far, although I’m probably hexing it just by discussing it. Mostly our biggest complaint is John gets tendonitis sometimes because he has to play guitar and do too many emails. He seems to be fine if he’s only playing guitar or only answering emails but if he has to do both, then he gets tendonitis. I’ve hit my head on the snare drum a few times. I have bled from the head. Usually it’s not from playing. Both times that it happened, there’ll be a part where I was actually silent and there were no drums. I was just listening to everybody else. And I got kind of so into everybody that I was rocking back and forth and I was banging my head and it went down too far and I banged my forehead straight into the snare drum and got a big gash. That’s happened twice. It looks terrible. It looks much worse than it actually is, but it’s got like a pro wrestling type of feeling or something. I did have a big injury once, in 1999, which was the year that John joined the band. But the injury wasn’t the band. I got hit by a car. I was standing on the sidewalk in San Francisco and in the intersection these two cars collided and then one of them suddenly came straight at me. Like up onto the sidewalk, basically it broke my leg. For about a month we played shows where one of my legs was broken and in a cast, and it was my right leg, my bass drum leg so I switched everything around, played bass drum with my left foot, which I had not done in my entire life. It didn’t end up being that hard. I got kind of used to it. Then it was kind of strange to switch back when my leg healed.

MW: That happens to athletes too.

Greg: Really? Where they have to switch?

MW: It definitely happened to me. I played volleyball and I hurt my right like, back, so I had to hit with my left hand. After healing, sometimes I would intend to use the right and the left arm would come swinging down, the old switcheroo.

Greg: Oh man, that’d be killer in, you know, as fast paced a game as volleyball…Sometimes we switch around instruments and it works about the same.

MW: You can just switch parts?

Greg: That’s why we did this sheet music thing online with this new song of ours, “Fresh Born,” where we put up the sheet music for the song and anyone that wanted to could record their own cover. This was before our version was out at all. A video version of our song just came out but for the last couple months people have just been sending in these cover versions straight from the sheet music without ever hearing our version. All these different cover versions are totally different. We didn’t put any instruments on the sheet music. One person did it for middle school concert band. Another person did it as acapella vocals. Another person did it with a heavy metal band, another version was totally electronic, like dance music. All the versions sound good. The song stays the same. There’s something about our songs that sort of rides all the different ways it can be presented.

MW: How come you decided to do that? For fun?

Greg: Well obviously for fun! And it turned out to be way more fun than expected. So many people sent in versions. I wasn’t sure anybody was going to even do it. Something like 40 versions got sent in. It was really fun. We also thought it would be a fun variation on leaking a song before the album goes out. We always would send out an mp3 of a song a couple weeks before the album goes out to kind of drum up interest, but I thought this would be a more fun way. If you listen to these cover versions or even look at the sheet music then you’re already getting familiar with the song, even though you aren’t hearing our version. But it is still something special when our version comes out. It’s not like, “Oh, I’ve already been hearing this song for a couple months.”

MW: If each of your band mates had theme music, what would that be?

Greg: That’s sort of what we’re making already. We do have theme music in that it’s sort of like everybody in the band writes their own theme music and we play it. If you listen to Offend Maggie, you get to hear several of everybody’s theme songs. It’d be hard to boil it down to one song. Everybody’s got sort of a stack of theme songs. Since everybody in the band writes music, we tend to write everything separately. We don’t really make up the songs together.

MW: So someone gives one part and someone else adds another?

Greg: Sometimes the person writes parts for everybody. I guess it depends. We don’t really have a system for how to write a song or how to arrange a song. It kind of comes out different every time. If we do come up with a system that works one time, it’s pretty much guaranteed to not work the next time we try it. It’s sort of like a trick. We have to trick ourselves into making songs. When I hear Offend Maggie and one of the songs comes on, I can’t help but think of the person who wrote the song and to me it seems like their theme music I guess.

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