Rock straight to the 'heart'

The Black Heart Procession, a band with music marked by melancholy piano and eerie synths, plays tonight at the Second Story. The band's latest and highly conceptual album, Amore del weTropico, depicts a nostalgia-laden tropical murder mystery, and is punctuated by a feature length film based on the record.\nBand member Tobias Nathaniel talked with Weekend about Amore del Tropico and what to expect at the show.\nQ: What musical and film influences lead to Amore del Tropico, and how did the album translate to the Tropics of Love DVD?\nTobias Nathaniel: It wasn't super pre-planned, or really directly influenced by anything. It just sort of occurred to us at a certain point that this would be fun. I remember Pall (Jenkins) and I were talking about sequencing the record, and Pall had a vision about all of the lyrics all of a sudden, and the songs coming together in a certain way. Based on that, taking it a step further, we started talking about making one video, and then we thought about making a bunch of videos, and then the DVD.\nQ: For your live show, do you or have you considered trying to visually portray the story of Amore del Tropico, or do you feel that on stage your music can convey its narrative on its own?\nTN: We discussed it, but in the end it was ruled out. I think that live, the music is the most important thing -- and then having some imagery, but keeping the imagery a little subtle compared to the music.\nQ:Is there a noticeable difference in playing shows in big cities like Chicago versus college towns like Bloomington?\nTN: Our shows are pretty consistent as far as the type of people that come out. In smaller towns it's a smaller crowd. There's not too much of a difference, unless we were playing some random small town where no one had heard of us and it's just the locals getting drunk and being pissed off that we're not hard rock or something.\nQ: What do Black Heart Procession fans have to look forward to?\nTN: Most immediately, the tour we're doing right now is a bit of a throwback to the earlier stuff. Due to some scheduling difficulties we weren't able to have our normal bass player and violin player, so we have someone who's played keyboards with us for a long time, and now it's a four-piece again. So we're playing a lot of songs from the first three records and a couple from the new one. I think maybe that will disappoint some people, but at the same time we're constantly getting asked to do songs on the earlier records and so it's kind of exciting for us to go back and relearn all these songs and present them right. We weren't able to present Amore right without having bass and violin. And then we're currently working on a new record. We're in the middle of it, hopefully it will be out sometime next fall, maybe a little bit earlier, but that's the plan.