Canadian collective Len will release their second album We Be Who We Be on September 17th. Frontman Marc Costanzo says the album, which features guest spots from the Dust Brothers and rapper Biz Markie, took a lot of drinking to get done. "We made it drunk, so it sounds drunk," says Costanzo. "We didn't make a party record -- we just ended up partying, making a record." Or as his sister, singer Sharon Costanzo puts it, "When you party and make music you end up making party music."

For the follow-up to 1999's You Can't Stop the Bum Rush, which included the sleeper hit "Steal My Sunshine," Len decided to stick with a proven formula. "We recorded, still in our basement, still with the same twelve to fourteen people always hanging around," says Marc. "We ended up in the studio every morning at five o'clock in the morning because we were wasted and we decided to make music."

Sloganeering aside, Len claim to have felt no pressure to revisit "Steal My Sunshine's" near-platinum peak. "Some of these songs are honestly three years old," Marc says. "You just take songs from a big pile you have and say 'OK, which songs are going to be on the album?' At the end of the day you just go, 'This one, this one, this one.' That's what we did last time too. 'Sunshine' almost didn't make it on the last album. Two days before the album went out, we were like, 'Ah, let's put that one on.'"

Songs like "Funnel" and "Boozehounds" reflect Len's cocktail hour approach to songwriting and represent a triumph over the band's somewhat haphazard recording methods. "I'm one of those dudes that throws files out and just doesn't give a fuck, and then wakes up in the morning and goes, where's that song?" Marc says. "And they're like, 'Don't you remember that? You were [passed] out.' And I'll [spend] like ten days trying to find out where it is. So there's no real like anything to the way we do things. Music is the last thing in our lives that matters."

COLIN DEVENISH
(June 17, 2002)