As told to W. Marshall by John Stanier of Battles



Well, the name is pronounced [Lion-Decker] and it’s named after a street in Cologne, Germany where my girlfriend lives, so I spent a lot of time there. That’s the name of the street she lives on and I just liked the name, and the beat for that I wrote in her kitchen, like, the meat of it. The original song began as one small idea but it was the last song we did in the studio, pretty much we wrote the whole record and then we were kind of like “Aw shit, what about that one idea?” I personally wanted to a do a really short song just based on one idea, which is really the beat and the sped-up vocal thing. It was literally done in the studio, at the very last second and vibe-wise it’s the simplest and most minimal song we have on the album, or even in our repertoire. I wanted to do it super minimal, super short…just sort of “jam” song on the record. I wanted it to be different, I used different drums, I programmed the drums and it’s kinda this last minute “vibe” song that…people are feeling it I guess. In a weird sort of way, “Leyendecker” sort of wrote itself, if that makes any sense. It’s ironic but that’s the way it goes in the studio sometimes, so many huge epic songs you end up reading interviews with the people who made them and it’s like “Oh, that almost didn’t make the record” or “ we did that at the last second”, and it ends up being one of the iller songs on the record. As far as the remix, I make beats with this dude EMZ—he made beats for a couple people, he made a Tupac remix a long time ago, Sadat X, Funkdoobiest…manages a label, but anyway, he is a good friend of mine and I make beats with him totally separately from Battles. So EMZ has been working with Joell Ortiz for a while now, he’s one of the first dudes to work with him when Joell was doing the mixtape shit, before he got signed. So he is definitely in that camp, know what I mean, so EMZ has been working with him and I’ve been working on a lot of those beats that are gonna be on his album, on Joell’s record. So we had been fucking around with Joell and then I went away on tour for a long time and asked him to do a remix and get Joell to spit on it. So I just sent him the parts, he did it and Joell came in and just banged it out. I wasn’t in the studio—we were probably somewhere in New Zealand or something—but I heard it all got done in a couple hours, Joell just came to the studio and knocked it out real quick. And they love it, apparently they shot a video for it! I haven’t even seen it. It works out both ways, though; we wanted a remix and someone to rap over it…and I can’t think of anyone I would have wanted more than Joell, he’s pretty hot right now. Also, it seems like there are a lot of indie-rock bands who use a lot of the same dudes…you know what I mean, the obvious backpacker rap guys who do a lot of indie-rock remixes and Joell is from a totally different world. Pitchfork was like “how the fuck did Battles get Joell Ortiz” [laughs]…and it’s funny but it also works! And it also works for him because it’s this totally different sounding beat and I don’t know how many indie-rock kids are into Joell Ortiz…so it works both ways. The pairing of us and Joell just goes to show that sometimes the least obvious pairings work the best. Generally indie-rock bands get the same ten people I would say…you never heard Mobb Deep rocking over indie-rock before, you know. So it’s a very cool thing.