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Matthew Perryman Jones

A few weeks before his New York performance at the Living Room, I spoke at length with Matthew Perryman Jones about his latest album, Swallow the Sea. Jones filled me in on his writing process, which he describes as “a stream of consciousness exercise,” as well as the current Nashville music scene and the inspiration behind many of his songs on the album.

Be sure to check out his MySpace, and if you like what you hear, find the widget on his page for a free download of his last album, Punches In the Dark. Read below for the in-depth interview and check back in a few days for the full MP3 of my interview with Matthew.

Swallow the Sea is your third full-length album. Did you go into the studio having a certain concept for the album?
About six months prior to the full recording of this record, me and the producer Neilson Hubbard had gone into the studio and recorded some stuff. We don’t really do demos anymore, it’s more do a recording of how you want it to sound. We did some recordings a while ago, like “Save You,” “Without a Clue” and “Don’t Fall in Love” that are on the record that we actually recorded a while before we started the full-on record. I think those were just recordings that started the idea to do a record.

Eventually, in March this year, we came back in and we did a live recording. What made it different for the rest of the record is that we came in and we recorded live. We got the whole band together and rented out a different studio where we could do a live recording. Our vision was to make a bigger sounding record, so the studio we used and doing it live gave it that bigger sound and also gave it a little more energy in the performance. That was kind of the vision in terms of finishing the record, which was really to go with something that has a bigger sound and a little more energetic than what we have done before.

“Without a Clue” is one of my favorite tracks on the album. I was just curious to the inspiration behind it.
I wrote that song with Kate York. I had the song idea coming in, I just wanted to have her come in and hash out some lyrics with me. We just came onto this theme of a nostalgic love song. Something that was good at a certain point in time and ended at some point. We fell on that theme as we were writing; it kept coming up a lot. A lot of times when I write, I don’t really come with an idea; usually the melody and there are words that start coming out with that melody. That one in particular ended up having that nostalgic feel to it. We just hashed out these lyrics and the idea of this old love story that was good when it was there. That’s the general idea of the song and we just worked it out.

This album you’ve co-written a lot. How is writing a song vs. co-writing a song different for you?
I used to always write on my own and after a while, especially when I moved to Nashville, I started doing some co-writing with people. At first I didn’t like it a whole lot, it felt too invasive. Then, I started getting to know certain people that became friends of mine that weren’t just songwriting partners; we knew each other, we had similar perspectives. I started writing with folks that I knew and I trusted and it actually became enjoyable to me because I’d have ideas; I’d come with a melody idea or song structure and lyrical fragments. It’s been really cool to bounce back ideas creatively and to see how other people approach an idea or a song. So, in a lot of ways it’s been a real growth experience for me, writing with other people and being able to be challenged creatively.

The way I do it, especially when Neilson and I write, I’ll come in with . . . I usually keep recordings of melodies and song ideas, structures, with little lyric ideas. I’ll come in and start singing these melodies and he’ll have a pad and pen and just start writing down everything. I’ll just start singing and I won’t think about what I’m singing at all, even if it’s complete nonsense. Kind of a stream of consciousness exercise. I just start singing and my main goal is not to think about it, just go and start singing out words even if they make no sense. He’ll write down things that he’s hearing; certain words that come out a lot or themes. Then we find the theme of the song, which is exploring it through the stream of consciousness way and he’s just transcribing words. And then we come on to the feelings of a song, or what I like to call it, the guts of the song. At a certain point, we have to start giving it some shape and really start putting some meat on it.

The process is mostly to try and find the guts and the feeling of the song so the song has an emotion to it; something from a deeper level. I used to think, is that writing approach less honest because you’re just not thinking about it? I think it’s the opposite. I think it’s more honest to do it that way because you’re not thinking about it, you’re not imposing any ideals or any ideas on a song that don’t need to be there. You just let the song do what it’s supposed to do. It’s just been a fun way to discover a new way to write songs.

On the surface you’re just aware of your daily life and the stuff you have to do here and there. But, on a deeper level and a subconscious level, there’s way more going on. It’s funny because after I’ve finished a song, even after I’ve recorded it and put out a record, I’ll listen to a song months afterward and go, “Oh, that song makes perfect sense now. I know what that’s about now because I’ve processed certain things and I’m more into my conscious life.”

Tell me about working with Neilson Hubbard. I know you worked with him on your last album, so obviously things have to be going well.
Yeah. I love working with Neilson. I knew some of his work before the first time we worked together and I really, really liked it. I loved his approach. As I got to know him, we’re both about the same age so we come from the same school of music which is the late 80s. Bands like Pixies, old U2, Echo and the Bunnymen, all those late 80’s mod-rock bands. It’s where both of us developed our musical tastes so we connect really well there. We both love the in motive, moody, vibey, yet edgy rock kind of stuff that’s really reminiscent of that era. We just connected really well. He’s definitely more of a minimalist in his production; he likes to be really sparse. I like that about him, but I tend to lean more towards the grandiose and a little overboard, so I think when we work together there’s a balance that happens and I think it’s a really cool balance of how we both approach stuff.

Your song “Save You” has been getting a lot of play on television shows like “Private Practice” and “Kyle XY.” How did that come about? Do you feel it’s helped your career in getting your name out there?
It came about a while ago. A guy in Birmingham who works at a radio show, Scott Register has a show called “Reg’s Coffee H
ouse.” Wh
en [last record] Throwing Punches came out, he really championed that record and really pushed my stuff to a lot of people. We recorded “Save You” because some people had heard it live and they were interested in the song, so we decided to record it a while ago. Actually, the version on the CD is the first recording we did. He gave it to a licensing agent in L.A., who heard it. According to what she told me, she said it wasn’t even done with the first verse and she wanted to work with me and work that song. Literally, within two weeks she had the placement on “Kyle XY.” It was really cool to see how that had an immediate connection with people. It’s gotten my music into a different audience because my music has never really found a way into a younger audience; the later teens, early 20s mind span. Mostly college-aged to mid-30s tend to be the typical audience. It’s gotten to a younger audience and it’s been cool to see how it’s connected with people of that age group and it’s definitely helped get my music out into a lot more people, so it’s been a great thing.

How do you feel the Nashville music scene is different from other parts of the country?
I guess, in a way it’s [just] different from other cities. I was in Atlanta before I moved to Nashville, and there was actually a really good music scene going on in Atlanta. But, it’s a much bigger city, and the music scene was not really part of the city as much as it is in Nashville. You think of Nashville and you think of Music City. Most people just think of country music. When I first moved here, there was this really cool, underground group of artists and songwriters that were amazing and inspiring. This town, even in the last three years, has just beefed up its artist roster.

People are moving here from other cities, even from New York and L.A. because the music scene definitely has more of a communal sense to it, people really support each other. In a way, I guess it’s different from other cities in that there’s definitely more of a concentration of artists here and the community is definitely really big and supportive. Not to say it doesn’t exist in other cities, I’m sure it does, but I think it’s a little more prevalent here. I think it’s helped me too, in a sense, because it’s a really inspiring city to live in. Especially right now, we just had a festival last week called “Next Big Nashville.” It’s just all Nashville artists — hundreds of bands and singer-songwriters and artists from Nashville. It’s amazing. I went to a bunch of shows and every show I went to I was blown away. I was just blown away by living in Nashville. This is just a great city to live in right now because there’s so much great music coming out of Nashville. It’s just inspiring I think.

Tell me about your “10 out of Tenn” showcase.
Trent Dabbs, a singer-songwriter in town, he and his wife went on vacation together, just to give you a bit of the story. They put their travel compilation disc together and as they were driving down, Trent turns to his wife and goes, “This is amazing, because our compilation disc is all our friends. We just put all our friends on this compilation disc.” So he got the idea, “Why don’t we put an official compilation recording together of all these artists and do a tour and bring it around the country?” Really, in a sense, bring a part of what’s happening in Nashville around the country in different parts and different cities. We did a tour about a month ago, went up to the north and southeast, played with Butterfly Boucher, Griffin House, Katie Herzig and Tyler James and a bunch of folks from the neighborhood here. We’re all friends and we all see each other and we just kind of hopped on the bus and did a show together, which was pretty awesome. We took Willie Nelson’s old touring bus from the 80s. It was pretty amazing, actually. It was really cool, but really bumpy and really hard to sleep in, but it was still really cool.

You’re an independent artist and a huge help is MySpace and the Internet on getting your music out. Do you feel it’s easier to be an independent artist nowadays or are you eventually looking for that record contract?
It’s definitely easier to be an independent artist today. One, with MySpace and a lot of mediums that exist out there for people to get their music in front of people and be heard and also collect a fan base and know where people are and know how to find people and play in certain towns. Its way easier now, because even 10 years ago when I was playing, we were doing hard mail outs to people to addresses. To put shows together we were literally physically mailing stuff to people and snail mail. That’s unheard of now. It was lot harder to get word out to people back in the day, especially before the Internet really developed a lot of these sites. Yes, it’s way easier to be independent now.

It’s actually more desirable. Even with TV placements these supervisors are looking specifically for independent artists, artists that don’t have the red tape of a big record deal and publishing. It’s a lot easier for them to work with independent artists so they’re looking for independent artists specifically. It works out best for both worlds, because they don’t have to deal with as much read tape and the independent artist is able to have this medium to get their music out to a broader audience. It’s a really great time to be independent. It’s not to say I wouldn’t sign a record label deal because there are definitely advantages to what they can do to sustain your career in a lot of ways. There’s another side to where they can completely ruin your career, so there is no hard way to go about it, it depends what’s right. I’m not apposed to it, if it ever happens, if it’s the right deal.

You’ve been getting amazing reviews, being compared to John Lennon and Leonard Cohen. How would you describe your music to someone who has never heard it before?
It’s funny, because I’ve read those reviews with those comparisons which blow me away. Because, if I’m honest with myself, I don’t think I’m anywhere . . . the whole, it just doesn’t even compare to me. Leonard Cohen and John Lennon are these freaking icons. I think what they’re saying by citing those artists is that there is more of a poetic element to my writing. I think that’s why they get the Leonard Cohen comparison, because a lot of his writing was more poetic. Even John Lennon had that element to his writing, more impressionistic, more poetic. Lyrically, I think I lean more that way; more impressionistic, more poetic. All music to some extent is poetry, but in the sense of singing it as poetry, if that makes any sense.

I would describe my music as mood-rock. It’s got a little rock in it, but it’s got more mood to it. If I were to sum it up in a way to describe it, it would be mood-rock. Because it’s not emo by any means, but it does have an emotional element to it, it’s driven by that. I know that sounds weird, because all music has an emotional element to some extent, but I think some music has more of an achy, mood to it, that I think I go for in my music.

Your song, “Motherless Child” is strikingly different then the rest of the album. You definitely feel the mood with that. What’s the story behind that song?
That song is an, old, old spiritual, from hundreds of years ago, so I can’t take the credit for writing that song. I improved a couple lines in the song. I reinterpreted that song. I did it live a few times and it had this real achy mood thing to it, but it also had this aggression to it, which is how I interpreted the song a little bit. And I wanted it to have some aggression to it. We created that song in a way that
it had both elements, where it had this haunted feeling to it and at the same time, this anger to it. That’s one of my favorite tracks on the record. A lot of people say it’s so different from the rest of the record, and I know that it is and that’s why we put it in the middle because it sort of peaks the record a little bit. I was able to sing out more of an emotional, what was going on in me emotionally at the time. In the record, I feel like that really captured at least me, where I was at, at the time. I really liked how it turned out.

You can watch a live performance of “Motherless Child” below. Be sure to check back in a few days for the full audio of this interview.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B9NT-LFzhs]

For more on Matthew, visit his MySpace.

Categories
Interviews

Strive

Strive has been compared to that of U2 and Switchfoot with their inspirational lyrics and The Fray with their piano pop-rock sound. You can hear a bit of Josh Groban in singer Derick Thompson’s vocals as well. Fire, Strive’s first global release, is a solid album, both lyrically and musically. First single “Smallest Things,” has already been gaining much attention globally while four additional songs from the album have been licensed for various MTV and E! shows.

Derick was nice enough to chat with me just a week after the release of Fire. He filled me in on how the band began, their global efforts on teaching AIDS awareness through rock concerts throughout Russia as well as the meaning behind many of their songs. While they won’t be touring for some time, they welcome fans to check out their songs and chat with them on their Website.

To listen to Derick talk about the history of the band, their music and latest album, Fire, click here. To learn more about the music writing process, being ranked No. 14 on CCM’s top 100 artists and a very personal, in-depth description of his favorite song on the album, listen here and feel free to read the full Q&A; below.

How did Strive get started?
Strive started back in 2000. It originated from a few bands I’d been in high school and wanted to carry on into my college experience. So I showed up at Wheaton College in 2000, met some other musicians and decided that we should form a band and called is Strive. That was the initiation. We played a lot of shows around the Chicago area where Wheaton is during our years there. During our junior year we took Strive to Russia on a tour to do AIDS awareness rock concerts where we went into clubs and schools and festivals and talked about AIDS education, basically the facts about the disease, HIV and AIDS.

That stemmed out of Bono visiting Wheaton College on his “Heart of America” tour talking about Africa. That spurred us to want to get involved in the crisis globally. I grew up in Russia and had contacts there so we decided to go to Russia instead of Africa to get in before it turned into the situation that’s happened in Africa. That was pretty monumental for the band; as far as just gelling it together and making us feel like this is something that we feel really called to and that we can have an impact, not just with the music, but with what we were able to do with people who love God and love giving back, and trying to make the world a better place for everybody.

It’s definitely something that forms who we are as a group, just the way I approach songwriting and the band in general, because we’ve had the experience of going through a great education and developing a global perspective. For me specifically, I grew up overseas, I spent five years in Russia as a kid in my teen years, which definitely formed who I was. To bring more of an immigrated faith and learning perspective to that, and then to meet like minded people was a huge opportunity and definitely was the basis for where Strive has developed and gone.

You said your international experience had a big impact on your writing; did this influence your latest album Fire?
It did. [Fire] has this general, more social minded [impact] than some of the stuff we’ve done in the past. We’ve done five full-length records and a few EP’s. Then we went through this phase where we did this rock opera on life of Christ and geared everything around Christ and spiritual stuff and realized we were limiting ourselves. We wrote that project to bring Christ to people who hadn’t heard about him and we realized we were pigeonholing ourselves from reaching that demographic because it was so overtly Christian that it wasn’t even given a chance. We were reaching the church, which was great, but it wasn’t what we felt called to do. That transition happened in 2005, when we went to Brazil on tour with that project. We realized we were having a much larger impact playing other songs than just being an American rock band in this non-profit that was doing a project on the life of Christ.

The stuff that spun out of that was this desire to write an album like Fire, that talked of things like, what does it mean to live a life in the knowledge that God saved you or that he created the world for us? And that he gave us things like sunrises and coffee with friends. The concepts like that spun out the song, “Smallest Things,” which is our first single off the record. That is just reminding ourselves that we have so many great things in our lives and ultimately we’re called to, because of that, share it with others and love other people and serve them. That is a set theme throughout the record. After eight years of being together and writing a lot of songs and seeing a lot of things, I really feel like this album best articulates where I’ve been personally, by God and the circumstances. It definitely has that gear to it.

I know you’ve been compared to Switchfoot and The Fray with your piano playing and U2 with the positive messages. How would you describe your music?
I would say its melodic, piano, pop-rock. In general, it’s just authentic music that to us, is what we like to listen to and hear. The lyrical content and the melodies we choose are very positive and bright for the most part. So when people listen to us I think they’ll walk away feeling uplifted or positive about something or they’ll take away a thought, like, “I really hadn’t looked at life that way before.” But, in that, whether it’s somebody who has a spiritual background in the church or an atheist, they can communicate on that level. There are some simple truths that run through the world and just the way things work. I think everyone can feel love and appreciate nature and beauty and grace and salvation, regardless of where they find it.

We hope that the music speaks, that it’s evident to people that there is something more to who we are. I feel like as people search and discover more who Strive is and get to know myself and the other people that are involved with us that Christ’s name will be great through what we’ve done, even though it’s not worship music. It’s not like, “God saved you.” We definitely get, “Why isn’t there more spiritual, overt lyrics about Christ saves you?” my response is that Christ came and he told stories; he didn’t beat people over the head with a stick. He was more eloquent and graceful; he was an artist, he was a poet, he was a storyteller. When I embody Christ the best in my music, that’s when I’m reflecting in the songs that I’m writing, seeing the world through his eyes and through the relationship I have with him.

Your lyrics are very positive and uplifting and the music industry today doesn’t always embrace that. How are you hoping to stick around and make that impact into the music industry?

Well, because we
decided on the front end of this disc with our partnership with GoDigital Records that we were going to, right from the start, be in both spheres — CCM and mainstream — we’ve been able to do that pretty effectively. We’re getting spun on Christian stations and mainstream stations. There really isn’t going to be a crossover for Strive, I feel like we already are a crossover. It helps that we never had huge success in either realm; it was more on the indie plane with our previous discs so there’s not as much, “This is who Strive is, now they’re reinventing themselves.” It’s more like, this is the first entry into the more commercialized realm of the music industry.

Your current single, “Smallest Things,” has been downloaded all over the world. Did you ever imagine it having so much success?
We worked really, really hard to develop indie marketing tools, so that was one of the reasons we were identified by GoDigital Records, because we were doing it all ourselves. I had been working for a company that does Internet marketing and that kind of built a platform to market Strive on this Internet platform and it worked really well to deliver the music to radio stations and other media around the world. Basically, we added some extra momentum to that with GoDigital and then pushed out the new single through the strategy that I developed before for Strive and it came back five times as successful thus far, and that’s just the beginning. I thought it was going to work really well. It’s not a surprise, as to what’s happening initially because we’re doing it very intentionally, as far as getting it out at the grassroots level of radio and media instead of just taking it to only the main watering hole. We’re bringing it to the door via email and other Internet communication tools.

Do you have a favorite song that you’ve written, or one that’s stuck out as being more meaningful to you?
Well, I feel like the title track for the album, “Fire,” is a pretty strong song conceptually and lyrically for the disc. It’s kind of the under theme of love for the whole album. There are a lot of songs that deal with love, specifically for this disc, a lot of those songs come out of the relationship that I have with my wife who I met when we were on tour for the first time in Brazil. A lot of emotion comes out when you first get married and in your relationship. There are some different concepts and perspectives about what I’ve learned about love and I felt like this album is a great way to communicate that. I think for society in general, what better way to connect with people then talking about relationships? Because everybody has them in one way or another.

When I wrote this song, which basically talks about the way sex should be in marriage — the way I feel like God as the creator intended it to be — there was some initial reaction from my circle of friends and family saying, “I don’t know if you should be singing about that.” There’s nothing overtly sexual about the song. It talks about having intimacy and creating the mood to experience the joy of sex. To me, this song is my effort to paint a picture for culture in general and we wrote it so that it would be pushed into the mainstream. It’s our fourth single, so to say, “It’s cool and its right and sex is better in the context of marriage where it was created to be shared.” Instead of the cultural thing, which says, “Good sex is meeting a stranger and having sex with them or premarital sex with boyfriends or girlfriends.” I think for the church, people that are married and agree with that sentiment, it’s kind of a reminder to them that sex is what makes a marriage strong. And that we have to place importance and speak honestly about things like, “Yeah, you should love your wife and your husband and you should share your gift of sex with them.”

I think the other angle that the song talks about is, not to promote abstinence, but to reinforce the concept for kids and people who are looking at sex. That even rock bands and people that are maybe capable of misusing and abusing sex that it is actually cooler and more right to wait for marriage and find somebody that you want to spend your life with to share that with because it’s going to be better. I can speak honestly; I had sex before marriage so I’m not this naïve kid that is like, “Well sex is so much better when you’re married.” I had it in both spheres. So, I understand both sides of it and I can honestly say, not being on a soap box trying to push an agenda, it’s just better. I feel like, as a believer, I need to use the life experiences that I have in every area to communicate truth. I hope this album, and that song in particular talks to that.

A lot of songs you get to know the songwriter. Do you ever hold back because it’s too personal?
My songwriting process is, normally I’ll sit down and the music will spill out of me. Usually it only takes a half an hour to hour to write the music for a song. I feel it’s an inspired act for me. Normally I have an idea about what I want to write about. I’ll record the music and then just start writing lyrics. In general, it comes together authentically. To me, there needs to be some rhyme and good form for the track, but I don’t really think through, “Is this going to be too personal for me,” or “Is this going to share something” or even try to be overtly, “I want them to take this away from song.” Instead, I try to be a conduit to my experience and to show the gift that God has given to me. It’s not me manufacturing, but more me communicating the truth. That’s the way I write, not thinking it through too much.

I find a lot of inspiration in reading, literature, stories, and things like that. If you look at the song, “Fire” that’s kind of a painting of Adam and Eve’s first night together. There’s a lyric in there, “I was taken, you were taken,” conceptualizing in the biblical story, he was taken out of man. I think people who have read the same things I have, especially scripture, they’ll see a lot of, maybe it’s not overtly Christian stuff, but the concepts that are there and some of the nuances of lyrics, I’m falling back on a lot of theological and spiritual truth that I have from my upbringing and studying and life experience.

Your song “On Our Way” seems like there is so much meaning behind it. I know you said it was sparked by a conversation you had with a friend. What were you thinking when writing it?
I have a really close friend, Rich from Zimbabwe, and he went to Wheaton and was actually part of the band at different points as the bassist. He and I, originally when Bono came to Wheaton’s campus, we talked about going to Zimbabwe and then it transpired for us to go to Russia instead. The thought has always been, in the band, that we should keep it close to our hearts that we need to be doing something in Africa, at least use it as an example to keep us accountable for compassion and realizing that the world goes far beyond our little suburbs here in Chicago. “On Our Way” was the peak of the conversation where he’s considering going back to Africa to be part of some social issues. His father works for USAID over there so we have a lot of information coming in. We were talking about how sometimes the Western world approaches countries that needs assistance as a benevolent dictator almost. As a rich person that says, “I can help you, but here are the strings you have to jump through and then pay it back.” Sometimes we’ll come along as brothers and sisters that say, “We’re not so different. You’re facing things that are difficult, we are too. It might look different, but ultimately we are the same.”

“On Our Way” talks about that second approach, which says, “Together we can do something

.” The change that happens with that interaction is much more lasting and impactful because both sides have a big buy in and both sides benefit from it tremendously. That’s what Strive has committed to as a band and that’s what we did in Russia. We have some plans, once Rich gets over there, to do a long-term partnership with him in Zimbabwe, hopefully if the political situation settles down a little bit, if he can even get into his country. At this point he can’t even go back. That’s what that song is about for Africa, but really for the whole world.

You’ve accomplished so much as an independent band. You were ranked No. 14 on CCM’s top 100 artists. How did that come about?
I don’t know honestly about that ranking. I feel like we had a pretty strong presence on their MyCCM site, when it first started and they featured us and some of the editors really liked us, I guess. That was right when we had recorded the EP that got us signed to GoDigital. We had started some Internet marketing. I feel like Strive, because it hasn’t been a big name, we’re kind of like that guy in the back room that has a lot of potential, but hasn’t been in the spotlight yet. A few people in the industry still look for those kinds of bands. I think that’s probably how we made it on that list. GoDigital is definitely a visionary as far as identifying some unique artists and strategies to sell music. Our publicist, Rick Hoganson, he is too, just being willing to jump on our project and be part of what we do. We just have a great team and it’s awesome that that’s happening and will continue to happen I think.

What’s your advice to upcoming independent bands? What have you learned?
If you look at most of the successful bands that are out there, it could take, easy 10 years to get into the main core of your career. So you better have some other things that you’re doing, while you’re doing your music because it’s not like it’s easy to be an independent artist or a major artist for that matter at the moment. There is not as much money coming in through record sales, but there are other revenue streams, marketing, advertising, things like that that bands can tap into.

For me, right now, even with what we’re doing, I’m part of church plant that’s happening in the Chicago area as the creative arts pastor. I’m doing that full time alongside with what I’m doing with Strive. To me, I have new inspiration for songs; I’m more creative when I am doing the stuff for Strive, I have more relationships and connections, there’s more depth to just seeing things and understanding. And then there’s accountability. I think all those elements are really important for independent artists and new artists, just to continually live life. Don’t fit into a bubble, that “This is all that matters to me. If I only focus on this, then I’ll be successful” because that’s not normally how it happens. If you’re anything like me, it’ll drive you insane just to have that to focus on. We love to be doing our art and if you’re not making any money doing it and you’re working a dead-end job, life can just stand still and it’ll pass you by if it never happens big time for you.

Do you have a favorite place you’ve played?
Brazil is definitely the best place to play. Just in general, I’m in love with Brazil as a country; it’s beautiful, the people are authentic and friendly and loving and interesting as a culture and a society, it’s progressing extremely fast. Their taste for music is constantly expanding. We just found when we were there, they resonated with us and we resonated with them. I’ve been able to learn Brazilian Portuguese fairly well. I think long-term; Brazil is a place that Strive will tour a ton in because we see the opportunity for a major impact, not just socially but spiritually as well. It’s just an opportunity to live an authentic, Christ-like life down there.

What do you feel makes Strive different from other bands out there?
I think the unique aspect of Strive is who I am, what my life experience is, how I’m able to communicate that through the medium of music and songwriting and performance and art in general. That is what makes every band unique, the people that make it up. Will Puth is the lead guitarist for Strive. He is just a really dynamic, spiritual and mature guy. He has an interaction of our music and what he’s able to bring, he’s the other main creative element to our sound. I feel like when that happens between individuals, specifically in Strive, makes us who we are. It’s not so much that we’re not better than this other band or not. I feel that we’re unique and people will either resonate with that and resonate with the lyrics and the melodies that come from my heart and my mouth or they won’t. That’s how I like to look at things and encourage people to give us a chance. You’ll either love it or not love it and either is fine, but we appreciate having the opportunity to reach listeners.

For more on Strive, be sure to check out their Website.

Categories
Interviews

Sam Sparro

Though he just released his debut album, Black & Gold in the U.S., Sam Sparro is becoming quite the musical sensation. With many of his singles topping the charts throughout Europe and much of the rest of the world, it’s only time until the U.S. catches on. When listening to his music, comparisons to Prince abound and you can’t help but dance along. His album encompasses much versatility, with hints of electrofunk, house, dance and soul. Hard to pin down into one genre, and a music lover himself, Sam’s distinct tastes can be heard throughout the catchy tracks on Black & Gold.

The Australian singer-songwriter grew up singing gospel music in church. While he spends most of his time in between LA and London, he will be touring throughout Europe and Australia within the next few months. In a phone interview, Sam talked to me about his album, singing for Chaka Khan when he was younger and his upcoming plans, which includes collaborating with Lindsay Lohan on her next album. Be sure to watch his latest video for single, “21st Century Life” — a video Sam describes as being “really nutty and eccentric.” (You can see that here.) And if you like that, check out his hilarious video for “Cottonmouth” below. Make sure you watch until the end! You’ll get a good laugh, I promise.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxVq4y-n-0Y]

To listen to the audio version of my interview with Sam, click here. Feel free to read it below and check him out on MySpace if you haven’t yet!

Congratulations with all the success of your album. Is it overwhelming yet or are you still taking it a day at a time?
It’s nice to have a moment to collect my thoughts. I’ve been traveling so much. I’m back in LA now and it’s nice to be home to have a minute to take in all the crazy things that have happened this year. It’s been amazing.

Tell me about your album. Each song sounds entirely different from the previous one. Did you go into the studio having a concept for the album or an idea for what you wanted to come across?
Well, I listen to so many different types of music and I’m influenced by so much different stuff. I wanted the first album, at least, to really reflect that. I think it’s an album for the iPod generation where you don’t really listen to the whole album, you just kind of shuffle around. It definitely has that feeling to it, where all the songs are different and the influences are so far and wide.

What were your influences for the album?
I’m very interested in and influenced by late 70s to mid 80s electro and funk and disco and soul, electro-soul. And then I’m really interested in early 90s dance music and house. I’m into new wave, modern dance music and stuff like that. But, all with a very soulful twist.

What is your usual writing process like?
I don’t really have a formula for writing. Sometimes the music will come first if you’re working on a piece of music. Sometimes I’ll have something I want to write about and I’ll start writing lyrics. It doesn’t really ever happen in the same way, it’s always very different.

I read your song “Black & Gold” was written at a low-point in your life. Did you ever imagine that you’d make it to this point, have your album out?
I did. I always felt like I was meant to be really successful in music. So, I wrote that song when I was feeling like, “How come I’m not doing anything?” and “Why isn’t anything working out?” And ironically, that was the song that kind of propelled me and my career.

I love your song “Recycle It.” It’s such a fun song, how did it come to you?
That was just really back into dance and Parliament-Funkadelic. They could sing an eight-minute song about a hamburger and make it sound cool. It just seemed very time appropriate. We’re living in a time where we are questioning the way we live and trying to look for solutions to save the planet. I just thought it’d be fun to do a silly little ditty about recycling.

I really like your song “Pocket.” What were you thinking about when you wrote it?
My life had started to change already because I was recording the album, but “Black & Gold” had already become a big hit in Europe. I noticed people’s attitudes started to change and a lot of vampires started coming out of the woodwork. It’s a song about having people in your life that you can trust and also being a trustworthy and loyal friend.

You already have so much success in the UK, your singles are on the charts. What are your hopes for America?
I’ve always felt like my music would do really well in Europe. Success in America is not something that I’m expecting necessarily. For me, it’s just really nice to be here and be appreciated for the music. In England it’s gotten a bit distracted. People are more interested in who I’m hanging out with. Because it’s a bit more underground here, people are more interested in the music. People are writing about me in their blogs and people in LA know who I am and people in New York know who I am. I’m quite happy with that actually.

I read that you started a speakeasy night in LA — an underground music night with Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine. Can you tell me a little about that?
Well, my dad was renting a studio space in a friend’s loft downtown. It was this massive 5,000 square foot loft. David J, who is the bass player in Love and Rockets and Bauhaus, lived there as well. They wanted to start a night where people could come and play their music. It was free to get in, you could bring your own alcohol, and it was very low-key. And then it became [this] really thriving, really cool night. That was where I met Jesse Rogg who I collaborate with musically. It was just a really cool time of meeting new people and playing music without any kind of pressure.

Do you feel pressure now to fit into a specific genre?
I don’t feel any pressure to fit into any certain musical genre or stereotype. There is definitely a lot more pressure involved with my schedule [being] very hectic. I have a lot of things to deliver and to do all the time. It has definitely changed. That’s what happens when you become successful.

I read that Chaka Khan is quite at admirer of you. Have you worked with her at all?
Well, that’s a slight exaggeration. I met her, a couple of times when I was quite young and I sang for her. She s
aid, “Wow, you really have
a good voice.” Recently she did an interview in the UK and someone said, “I hear you’re a big fan of Sam Sparro” and she’s like, “Who’s Sam Sparro?” So we don’t know each other, I met her casually about 15 years ago.

You’re working with Lindsay Lohan on her next album?
Yeah. We haven’t started working together yet, but we’re hoping to do some stuff together. It’ll be quite danceable, electronically produced, it should be quite exciting. I’m really looking forward to it actually.

What are your plans for the rest of the year?
I’m doing a headlining tour of Europe and the UK. I’m going back to Australia to do some things, going to Japan, doing some writing and producing with other artists on some of my side projects and then I’m going to start working on the next album.

Do you have any ideas for your next album?
Yeah, it’s going to be quite electro with influences from gospel to classic rock. There’s going to be a lot more guitars on it.

Do you play all the instruments heard on your record?
Most of time I do. There are a couple of collaborations I did with other producers where they played a lot of the music, but most of the time I play and arrange everything. Sometimes they bring in live horns or bass or guitar, stuff like that.

What would you be doing right now if it wasn’t for the music?
Probably still waiting tables. [Laughs]. Yeah, not much.

Categories
Festivals Interviews

The Duke Spirit

Gracing Rolling Stone‘s Breaking Artists blog as well as being part of many summer festival line-ups, U.K. band the Duke Spirit is getting quite some attention as of late. With catchy choruses provided by singer Liela Moss and solid musical accompaniment backed by the rest of the band, the Duke Spirit is definitely a band to check out. Their MySpace is worth a listen and to watch two music videos from their latest album, click here. Read below for my email interview with bassist Toby Butler, who talked about their sophomore album, Neptune, their writing process and why you should give the Duke Spirit a listen.

How do you keep your songs sounding new and fun from track to track?
Our producer Chris Goss was really instrumental in helping us give each song a personality. I think it’s important not to get stuck in a regimented way of approaching things. It’s good to try new things as much as you can, to spread your wings. We’d use lots of weird instruments and sounds on each song to give them a less formal ‘rock’ sound. Guild the lily.

Did you go into the studio with a certain concept for this album?
Not really. We went into the studio with a bunch of songs, and we chose the album with Goss from them. I guess the concept was more the sound we wanted. We went to Goss because we love the way the records he makes sound. Heavy yet delicate.

Having already had the experience of recording your debut album, do you feel the process went more smoothly or was entirely different?
It was a whole lot different. We are now much more confident and open minded about making music. We were pretty inexperienced when we made that first album. I love the way it sounds, but in retrospect there are things I would have been more conscious of and things I would have done differently. Making Neptune was a much more fun and creative process, that was more a product of what is in our heads.

I love the song “Dog Roses.” Does that have timpani in the background? It just has such a deep, dark feel to the song. What was the inspiration behind the song?
We recorded that song back to front. It was probably the most fun and openly approached song to record. We laid down an acoustic guitar track and just weaved everything else into it. Just four mics on the drum kit. I don’t think it was a timpani, I think it’s a de-tuned floor tom with loads of reverb on it.

What’s the typical writing process for you like?
We demo whilst we write. If one of us has an idea for a song, then we record it in our little studio in London. Melodies and lyrics generally come after we have some kind of musical structure, or verse and chorus at least.

When I first heard “I Do Believe” the intro to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” came to mind. Did that occur to you at all when you were recording the song?
Ha ha. Well we’re all fans of Queen! It wasn’t the inspiration for it, no. It was something Liela came up with that we thought would be great as an intro for the album.

Do you have a favorite track on the album? If so, why that track?
“This Ship Was Built to Last” is a favourite. I love the big rolling sound it has. I wanted it to have sound like a huge ship pounding through massive waves. That’s how it makes me feel. I love playing it live.

What makes the Duke Spirit stand out as a band? Why should people check you out as opposed to other bands out there?
We make interesting, intelligent, psychedelic, heavy, delicate, rock and roll music that makes you wanna bang your head and shake your ass!

If that wasn’t enough of the Duke Spirit for you, be sure to check out Rolling Stone‘s feature on them, with two live performances and a brief interview and if you like what you hear, catch a show when they’re in town!

Categories
Interviews

The Graduate

Continuously on tour throughout the past two years, Illinois-based band the Graduate has been gaining quite some attention. From stints on Warped Tour and Germany’s Rock am See festival to tours with Jack’s Mannequin, Simple Plan and currently Secondhand Serenade, the Graduate has definitely been keeping busy.

Frontman Corey Warning was nice enough to sit down with me before their show last week in New York to talk about the band, their music and what it feels like while performing: “It’s a different feeling being onstage. As reserved as I can be in person, being onstage is definitely an empowering feeling,” Corey said. “That’s one of the best parts about being on tour too. If something bad is happening I feel like I can work that out onstage, even if it’s just pounding on a drum or strumming a guitar for a while. It just has this power to work out whatever you need to work out.”

Read below for the rest of my interview with Corey as well as some MP3’s and videos of their songs. Be sure to check them out on MySpace for when they’re on tour near you — you won’t be disappointed.

How did the Graduate begin?
We were all in different bands before the Graduate. Myself and Jared who plays bass, we were in a band together for about three years and Max, Matt and Tim were all in another band. We all played shows around the central Illinois area for a few years and we all knew each other from trading shows back and forth. Both of our old bands had broken up around the same time and there were still a handful of us that wanted to keep pursing music so we got together and wrote the song “Sit and Sink.” After that we decided it was something we all wanted to follow through with so we came up with a band name and made a MySpace page and just started getting serious with it. We wrote our Horror Show EP in a few months after getting together and recorded that with a friend. After we put that out online we started getting response from labels. We realized it was getting more serious than we had thought it was going to a lot faster, so all of us dropped out of school and pursued it full time.

Horror Show was the EP that eventually had you featured on the cover of CMJ Magazine after being the number one most added in college radio the end of 2006. How was that experience for you?
It was all pretty strange to us. People who we were working with were telling us how great these things were that were happening and we didn’t know anything about what was really going on. We’re all just small town kids and were clueless at the time so we were excited, but I don’t think we really realized how much that was giving us a head start. We had got that feature when we were in the studio, so before we put out the album we already had our foot in the door and people had their eyes on us and realized who we were and what we were trying to do, so we were really lucky for that.

You guys have been on tour non-stop for the past few years. How do you keep going?
It’s just something that we jumped into head first. We all kind of knew what to expect before we got going out. We grew up with bands like Junior Varsity and the Park who were always on tour all the time and we just knew that was going to be the road that we were going to be taking. At the same time, I don’t think you can really prepare yourself for something like that. It’s a little bit more exhausting than you’d think, but it’s fun. It’s definitely a very different way to live your life. It’s a pretty cool feeling to be able to wake up in a new city everyday and see parts of the country and even the world that we might not have ever gotten the chance to visit.

What’s the most memorable aspect of touring?
I think so far for us, one of the biggest things was that we got to go overseas last year. That’s something that I didn’t think I would ever get the opportunity to do. Our first day over there we drove to Germany and we opened up a festival called Rock am See. We opened up for Nine Inch Nails and the whole day we felt a little out of place. It was definitely a really humbling experience for us and we’re very grateful for that opportunity.

Did you get to chill with Nine Inch Nails?
No. [Laughs]. Our dressing room was actually right next to theirs and we all had talked about, “Should we go say hi? Our friends are going to think we’re idiots if we don’t try to talk to them.” But, we’re pretty shy guys and I think we were too scared that we were going to embarrass ourselves or something like that.

How was your experience performing at Rock am See?
It was really strange. There were probably about 5,000 people there when we played. We have pictures that I can look at and it’s still so hard to believe that’s something we did. This was in the same year that we were going on tours and sometimes we’d play for 50 people, sometimes we’d play for three people and we went to a country that we had never stepped foot in and there are 5,000 people. I remember there was one moment onstage after we played our first song and I wanted to see if I could get everybody clapping and just kind of gage how we were doing and almost the entire crowd was going with their arms with us. That was definitely one of the best feelings I’ve ever had onstage.

What was your worst moment onstage?
I think one of the worst was when we were playing a show in Delaware. At the end of our set, sometimes we bring out additional percussion and we have a drum off and sometimes we like to pour water on the drums for an added visual affect. So we did this and the stage was soaking wet and it was a hardwood floor and I took a step and just slipped and fell flat on my back in front of a crowd. That was probably most embarrassing, for myself at least. I think the only thing that really hurt was my pride.

So tell me about your album, Anhedonia. How did you come up with that title? It’s so unique.
Anhedonia is a condition where you can’t feel normal emotion or things that give you pleasure. When we were writing the album I had a bad case of writers block and everybody that we were involved with was saying, “Write about what you’re feeling.” I was just feeling pretty empty and hollow. We came across the word from our producer’s wife when we were talking about different album titles and it just really struck me on how I was feeling at that time. I ended up writing the title track that day and it really felt like that fit the feel for

the rest of the album.

Di
d you have a certain concept for the rest of the album or did the title mostly affect the rest of the album’s writing process?
I think that all the songs on the record are really just about everything that was going on during that time. We had just signed with a label and we all quit school and quit our jobs and we had spent three months holed up in a basement writing the record, no contact from our friends or family. Everything was just a lot different for us. The record is mainly about all the things that were going on in my life and the different changes and how it was affecting all of our relationships.

Are you the main writer?
No. It’s definitely a five-part process. Everyone writes. I write the lyrics, but as far as music and the songs go, all five of us contribute to every song.

Where do you find inspiration for the lyrics?
The more I’m reading books the more I tend to write. It’s always different for me. I can watch a movie and sometimes I’ll pull something out of that that will make me think of something that’s happened in my life. I always try to write things from a personal perspective. I usually try to make it so if somebody else listens to it, they can relate to it so it’s not too personal where nobody knows what I’m singing about. I always want there to be that connection with the listener.

Do you tend to write more while you’re in a relationship or after a break-up looking back on it?
I’m kind of a moody person and I always let whatever is going on in my life affect everything. So, if I’m writing a song then yeah, a lot of that will get put into it. Even if we’re getting ready to go onstage and something’s happened back home that’s affected me, that’ll come out onstage too. A lot of times I can be like a sponge and anything that’s going on I just soak up and let affect me. I think that’s a good thing because I don’t think people that are frozen can really put themselves out there and write good music.

I really like your song “Doppelganger.” How did you come up with it? [You can listen to the song here.]
Well, there’s a myth that somewhere in the world there is your exact copy going around. When I wrote that song I was just in a transition in my life and I was going in and out of a relationship and there were parts of me that I felt like were changing and sometimes I felt like another person. The song had this eerie feel to it and a lot of times what will kick in with me with songwriting, I can just get inspired by the music the guys will write and show to me. For some reason I had been thinking about that that day and it just felt like everything was clicking. That song is about me changing and feeling like I had almost another personality.

I really like “The City That Reads.” I was curious about the story behind it.
I wrote “The City That Reads” last minute in Baltimore. The song almost didn’t make the record. I stayed behind while the band left to spend the holidays with their families. I never realized how important that time of the year was to me until that year.

What would you be doing if it wasn’t for music? Did you grow up thinking, “This is what I want to do”?
Absolutely not. When I was 16 there was a girl that I had a crush on in high school and I had no musical background at all. I never even took piano lessons when I was a kid or anything. This girl was selling her acoustic guitar and I figured if I could get that and learn how to play it, maybe I could win her over. That didn’t happen, but I learned how to play guitar. It kind of spiraled from there. I had a couple friends that I was working with that played music and they wanted to start a band. It’s actually not something that I really saw myself doing. I’m not always the most outgoing person and being on the stage in front of people is terrifying to me. I finally got talked into it and it just moved on from there. I really don’t know what I would be doing if I weren’t in a band. Ever since we got going it’s just something that really intrigued me. Being able to put yourself out there like that was kind of a cool experience for me. Once we started writing songs I was able to get onstage and express myself like that, it kind of changed everything. I guess if I wasn’t doing this I would be bagging groceries or something like that, I really don’t know.

Do you still have stage fright? How do you move past it every night?
Sometimes. It’s something that I just worked out after time. There’s always those moments onstage. It could be as simple as making eye contact with someone you see that maybe you don’t think you’re connecting with and then all of a sudden you get paranoid and think maybe everybody else isn’t paying attention. Sometimes when that happens I just close my eyes and get through the set. But most of the time all it really takes to keep me going is just seeing that one person that is really into it and I can get over it pretty easily. The crowd always makes such a huge difference on how we play onstage. I think a lot of times too, how we are with each other. If we had a good night the night before that could really affect it because we really play to each other when we’re onstage. There’s a lot of collaboration with us onstage. If everybody’s doing different things you can get really into it. Sometimes in a set there’s something real small that can set us off. Tim can just do some quick fill that everybody thinks is badass and that’ll just set us all off into badass mode I guess.

How would you describe your music to someone who has never heard it before?
That is the hardest question that everyone always asks and I just don’t know how to put it. I think the reason that it’s hard for me is because when we got together we never really said, “We want to sound like this” or “We like this band, so let’s try to sound like this band.” I guess I would just say that we’re youthful, emotional rock, trying to steer clear of the emo. We get thrown into it so much and when I was younger it wasn’t anything that I ever cringed at. It just has such bad ideas that come with it now with guys crying and wearing eyeliner and all that kind of stuff.

What is your ultimate goal with the Graduate?
We’re kind of getting close to where we’re going to start the next record and my hope is that we can distinguish ourselves more on the next record to get out of some shticks that we have right now. Maybe they’ve heard one song of ours and they’ve already made up their mind about our band. I think one of my biggest hopes is to get some of the people who are on the fence with us on the music that we write. Just try to step it up on the next record.

Do you have any songs written already?
We have a lot of ideas and concepts right now. We’ve been on tour so steady for the past two years that it’s been tough for us to actually sit down and write. I’m hoping that we can start getting real heavy on it at the end of this year.

Do you have a favorite song that you’ve written?
I think so far “Anhedonia” is probably my favorite, which is kind of why we went with that for the title of the album too. That song kind of got me out of a really bad funk that I was in so that song is just my favorite because it just pushed me over the edge that I needed. [Listen to “Anhedonia” here.]
How do you feel the Graduate stands out from other bands coming out now?
From what a lot of our fans have told us recently, they always say, “I heard your CD and I liked it and I thought you guys sounded cool.” But, a lot of people say that they come to our show and see us live and that’s what really pushes them over the edge for us. I guess just from what we’ve heard and the responses from people that come to our shows, our live show is what makes us stand out. We try to be as genuine as possible live without being too over the top and fake, trying to manipulate the crowd or anything like that. It’s actually kind of weird if we see people crowd surfing or moshing or anything like that. It always makes me feel uncomfortable, I don’t know why. I guess it just seems so strange to me. I think the best way for me to gage if the crowd is into it is we can always tell on people’s faces if they’re really paying attention. That’s always the best feeling for me, just to look out. Nobody has to be jumping up and down or pushing people over their heads or anything like that. If somebody’s paying attention or just the little nod of the head is all it really takes for us.

What about those nights that you don’t feel like you’re getting their attention? How does that affect your performance?
I think a lot of times I let it affect my performance too much. I think I tend to focus on it and freak myself out and sometimes I’ll get this real blasé attitude and just try to close my eyes and get through the set. That’s something I’m trying to work myself out of because I feel like that’s definitely not the right attitude towards the show. Just because you see one person that might not be getting into it, there’s no reason to take it out on the rest of the crowd. You just have to work past your insecurities.

What is your advice to aspiring musicians?
The reason I always have a hard time with this is because I still feel like I’m learning so much. We’ve been touring for two years but I still feel really new to this. I think that my biggest advice to bands that are starting out is, as cliché as this sounds, just be honest and don’t try too hard. Don’t try to fit into what you think is popular right now or anything like that. I think the best music comes from people that are just being honest. Don’t take it too seriously. Have fun.

For more on the Graduate check out their Website or MySpace and watch their most recent video for “I Survive.” For Windows, click here. For Quicktime click here. Or, if you just want to listen to the MP3 feel free to check it out here. Enjoy!

Categories
Interviews

Jason Reeves

Singer-songwriter Jason Reeves is perhaps most known for his co-writing efforts on MySpace sensation Colbie Caillat’s debut album, Coco. But not for too long. While Colbie’s radio hits “Bubbly” and “Realize” were co-written by Reeves, his major record debut will surely earn him a reputation of his own. Being released digitally August 12 and in stores September 9, The Magnificent Adventures of Heartache (and other frightening tales) is sure to impress. If you haven’t yet, be sure to check Jason out on MySpace and to learn more on the singer-songwriter and his upcoming album, read below for my email interview with him. I’d love to hear what you think!

Tell me about your album, The Magnificent Adventures of Heartache (and other frightening tales). Did you go into the studio with a certain concept for the album?
I didn’t go into the studio with a direction at first. I was just writing about what was happening to me in my life and in my imagination and it all came together like a strange unorganized puzzle.

I love your single, “You In A Song.” What was the inspiration behind it? (To listen to it for Windows click here, for Quicktime click here.)
“You In A Song” was inspired by me always having to leave wherever I was. It’s a song about somebody you love being stuck in one place, while you are stuck on the move. With the sentiment that you can take them with you wherever you go in a song.

What is your typical writing process like? Do you carry a pen and paper wherever you go?
There is no certain way or process to writing for me. Every song comes out of somewhere else in a different way. It’s random really. And I do carry around pens and paper though. I wish I had a typewriter that fit in my pocket though, because they’re much more fun to write with.

Do you have a favorite song on your album?
I don’t have a favorite song because to me they’re all one big song telling the story that is the record. Without the others, each song would not be the same.

How was the recording process different, if at all, on this album than your previous albums?
This is actually my fifth album, if you count the Hearts Are Magnets EP as one. And the last two have been very different because they were made in California at Revolver with Mikal Blue. Before that I was making them in a basement in Iowa. There’s a limitless feeling now because of all the incredible musicians I’m lucky enough to play with. With the new one though, I was getting a lot more comfortable in the studio. It takes a long time to learn how to record your music the way it is in your head. I feel like I’m getting closer to the two being the same.

I love that one line in “Never Find Again” — “You still say that love is nothing like it should be/Isn’t like the movies where everything goes right…” What were you thinking when writing the song?
That song is about the fear of falling in love and how one person is always more afraid than the other. I wanted to make it an argument between the two people. One scared as hell and one completely fearless, or at least on the surface.

Two of your songs are a bit shorter and different from the others: “Sunbeam Lights” and “The Fragrant Taste of Rain,” where you talk throughout, almost a slow rap-like part of the song. Both seem like they end with an open ended question. How did these two songs come about and how do they relate to the rest of the album?
Those two songs are transitions of sorts in the story. Just as every song is, but they are specifically meant for that. To bridge the stages I guess. And they came out randomly in the studio, just messing around and capturing accidents on the microphones. “The Fragrant Taste Of Rain” is simply a one take of me singing/saying a poem I’d written while playing an extremely old piano from the 1800’s. I had no idea what I was doing and I like that about it.

Your songs are very optimistic and relatable and just have so much honesty. I read a quote from Colbie Caillat talking about co-writing with you on her last album and she said, “Jason is a total, hopeless romantic. So he’ll have an idea for a song, and it’ll be about love.” Where do you draw your inspiration from?
I think I’m more of a hopeFUL romantic. But inspiration comes from every little thing. Everywhere and always. Mostly falling in and out of love.

Do you draw more inspiration for lyrics by being in a relationship or after a break-up?
Both situations are amazing for writing because they’re opposite highs. One being very up and one being very down. The heaviest songs come from the break-ups though.

Tell me about working with Colbie Caillat. You helped writing on much of her album, Coco, including current radio hits, “Bubbly” and “Realize,” what was that like?
Writing with Colbie is my favorite. She was my first friend when I moved to California and we started making music the first night we met. It just feels so natural and easy with her.

MySpace and iTunes have spread quite a buzz about you, how has that affected your career?
Myspace and iTunes have been incredibly important in getting my music out there. And they’ve both been great to me. It’s so overwhelming how quickly the internet changed the whole music game. There are completely different rules now, and they are continuously changing.

What is your advice to aspiring singer-songwriters?
My advice to anybody is that you cannot be impatient with your dreams. It takes a great deal of time and work to get to where you want to be. And you have to give all of yourself to it.

Have you always wanted to be a singer-songwriter?
I didn’t want to write songs until I was 17. I got an acoustic guitar for my birthday and was just discovering Bob Dylan and James Taylor.

What would you be doing if it wasn’t for music?
If it wasn’t for music, I’d be building ewok villages in the woods and taking and painting pictures for the overwhelming grace of the world.

How would you describe your music to someone who has never heard it before?
I would say it’s new folk. And that it’s honest.

Categories
Interviews

Lights Resolve

Back in April I met the guys of Lights Resolve while touring for a few dates on the “Get A Life” tour. After winning Samsung’s “Unsigned Battle of the Bands” contest, Lights Resolve opened up each night of the national tour followed by Street Drum Corps, Army of Me, Straylight Run and headliners, the Used.

I caught up with Matt, Neal and Sherman of Lights Resolve this past Saturday when they were playing at Maxwell’s in Hoboken and learned more about the three-piece band, their music and tricks of the trade in getting concertgoers to remember them. Their set Saturday was incredibly energetic — one of the most lively I’ve seen in a while — at times Matt and Sherman even jumped off the stage to play in the crowd.

Afterwards, they gave tickets away to their show this Saturday at Blender Theater in NYC, which you can still get tickets to (for free!) by emailing Lights Resolve here. I’ll be there covering the show so look back for a review next week and, if you haven’t yet, check out their tunes on MySpace, I think you’ll dig. Read below to learn a little more about the band.

Here are the names and instruments they play so you get a better idea of who is answering:

Matt — vocals/guitar
Neal — drums/percussion
Sherman — bass guitar/piano/vocals

Tell me a little about Lights Resolve. You were all in another band together, right?
Sherman: We were in another group, been around the block, had fun, got to travel to Southeast Asia, East Coast, the States. We were a four-piece and then one day we came to the bridge where we needed to downgrade to three and Matt started singing lead vocals, Neal stayed on drums, I was still rockin’ bass and we’ve been Lights Resolve since two years, since 2006.

You guys were just on the “Get A Life” tour with the Used. How did that come about?
Matt: We saw that Samsung was running a contest for a band to open up for the Used and being Used fans, thought it was a good opportunity so we just posted a song called “Lost and Jaded” on the site and ended up getting more votes than anybody. It was something like 200,000 votes or something crazy and then we won. They ended up giving us a nice, fat check to go on the road with them and we got to go on the whole “Get A Life” tour with the Used, Straylight Run, Street Drum Corps and Army of Me and we just had a blast.

That was the first big tour as Lights Resolve. We had done two national tours before, they were each a month and a half or two months each so we had a good bit of real touring experience, but this was more luxurious touring. The venues actually had people in them and we had catering and all that stuff and we were playing with really good bands as opposed to before, we had to work our asses off to get 10 or 20 people in the room to play for them. It was really good that we had that experience beforehand because we knew a lot more. Once we got on the Used tour we knew what to expect and now we know even more so what to expect after being on that type of tour. So, we kind of covered it all besides the Rolling Stones tours or anything. We haven’t done that, but that’s next. [Laughs].

What did you learn from watching the other bands on the “Get A Life” tour?
Matt: Just learned how to perform a little better, learned how to function on the road a little better, learned what not to do, learned what to do, learned what works when trying to get people into your music and trying to get them to walk away with a t-shirt or a CD or just something from the band. Some interesting stuff. One of the things we saw was when we put up our gobo, which is a light shining through a little cut and our logo shows up as a background for our set, we ended up selling 50% more merch then when we didn’t have it. So we learned that a logo does something, it gives people something to remember. We were the first out of five bands on that tour so we really had to make our mark on them because there was a circus after us with Street Drum Corps. So, we had to make our mark and we found that that was one way to do it. Another way was we were out there peddling our stuff and working our asses off to try to get people into the band. Dedication.

Neal: I think the biggest thing for us was, when you’re playing bigger rooms it’s very easy to only play to the people in front of you, but I think we learned how to play to the entire room. That means, if kids are in the back or to the side you’ve got to basically play to everybody. I think playing with enthusiasm and excitement really rubs off to the other kids so when they see that you’re putting your all into it, it’s kind of like cause and effect. I think that was really important, learning how to perform on a big stage especially because we’re only a three-piece so we have to cover a lot more ground than maybe a four-piece. We definitely learned a lot about performance.

Is it harder being a three-piece?
Matt: It’s way harder. Every note that you hit is an obvious note and if you hit a wrong one, you’re fucked. It’s the generic thing to say, but there’s more weight to pull for each member being a three-piece. The way we try to fill that out is we try to . . . at least I try to use a lot of delays on my guitar and try to fill out the sound. Sherman plays the bach organ on his bass, Neal hammers the drums. We try to leave as little space as possible unless it’s warranted for what we’re playing. It’s all about filling the space.

Neal: If your guitar breaks a string, you’re in deep trouble. If your bass player cuts out, it’s two people.

What do you do differently during a show being the opening act vs. the headliner?
Matt: Say the headliner’s name a lot.

Neal: Yeah. I think your job as an opener is to get the crowd warmed up and ready to go, so I think you just have to go out there with no fear and just have to lay it out on the line and have fun and be exciting. I think that’s what translates. You can’t think of yourself as the opener you just have to say, “You know what, I’m about to play. Let’s do it! Let’s have fun and kick ass.”

How much does the audience’s vibe affect you as a performer?
Neal: Well, I think it’s a lot better when the audience is into it. You feel a certain type of energy that you can’t really explain it, it’s just there and you can’t help but feed off it. Sometimes when the crowd isn’t into it, or they could just be into it but maybe they’re just not as animated, you still have to do the same thing and look past it and play. Play for yourself, play for whoever you can, it’s the best thing you could do.

What are your plans for the rest of the year?
Neal: We’re definitely working on new material right now. We’re taking the summer to do just that, we have a bunch of new songs. I think our plan is probably in the fall to do some kind of tour, whether it’s either September do the Northeast and branch out in October and do something, possibly a national tour. We’re focusing on new songs right now and just getting those ready and possibly recording soon as well.

Matt: The reason that we’re playing so many shows right now is because we want to test the new music that we’ve been working on. We never went into a studio and just recorded a song that we haven’t played live yet, so we’re hoping that we can get all the songs that we’re writing and play them live and see how they translate on a stage because that affects what we think of the song a lot of the time. So if you’re doubting a song and you bring it out there it could work and its great, or you can bring it out and it can fail miserably. We only want to do stuff for the stage, because we have more fun playing live on a stage than in a recording studio, that’s just how this band works.

What is your writing process like for each song?
Sherman: Well, we have a cool process. Every song sometimes will take a different toll, but typically we’ll have a melody in mind or some sort of progression, like an order of chords on the guitar where we’ll bang it out in our rehearsal space, in Neal’s basement. We have all our gear down there and the kit and we just build off of simple progression. Vocals tend to be . . . would you say later, Matt?

Matt: I usually end up using the first thing that comes up, just because that’s the most pure and untainted. Not all the time, but that’s my favorite thing to do — just use the first thing that I come up with, just because it sounds more natural and unforced. We haven’t had the best recording experiences thus far. Our first CD we’re not that happy with, the actual recording process that we went through. And we learned from that for the second EP that we did.

Our friend Ryan Siegel, who is now in a band called The Urgency, he recorded that for us with a guy named Brian Chasalow and the two of them just helped us on that as well as Alex Ferzan helped us. That one we came to the table with a little more knowledge of what we wanted with this band and the certain energy that we wanted to capture. At the same time it was limited because it was in Brian’s house. We just set up in his house and went for one weekend and we took three days to do it so that was also limited. So this next recording we kind of know exactly what we’re looking for and we’re hoping to get into some kind of, I don’t know about real recording studio or what, but we know what vibe we’re looking for and we know we want to capture the energy of our live show, which I don’t know if we’ve fully done yet. This one we will definitely do that, there are no questions, we’re not compromising.

I really like your latest EP, Currency and the first track, “The Hills and Michael Jackson.” How did you come up with that title?
Matt: It does go along with the song if you listen to the lyrics and you think about it for a little bit, it will make sense. The title came to me when we were in California and the song . . . I think the song came after the title, so I think that maybe the title influenced the song somehow.

Do you have a favorite song you like to perform?
Matt: Right now my favorite recording of what we have is “The Hills and Michael Jackson.” We all love playing “Lost and Jaded,” we love playing “This Could Be the Last Time.” I don’t know; all the new stuff. Whenever you write a new song, that’s all you want to play. You don’t want to revisit all the old stuff. It’s all about the new stuff every time you come out with something new. We want to rework some of the old songs. We found by playing them on the stage that some stuff doesn’t work because we’re a three-piece. We tried to record as a three-piece and in some cases it worked and in some cases it didn’t. So we’re going to end up reworking some of the songs to make them fit how we play.

What do you feel is the biggest challenge for Lights Resolve?
Matt: Not killing ourselves. Everything. Everything about being in an up-and-coming band right now is a challenge. I don’t know how to expand on that, there are too many things.

Sherman: For someone who has no idea about being an unsigned group — packing our own van, paying for the van every month, sometimes playing some odd gigs, it’s all a part of what we do. Every now and then we get a bone thrown to us where we get something prestigious and then packing the trailer right after. It’s a lot of different duties. We also have to be really good about being on the computer and stuff like that, as much as we may not like to because we’d like to focus more on the music, but we have a really great time communicating with all of our fans. They’re kind enough to send us messages and bake us cookies and whatnot. We have some very sweet fans, very thoughtful. Having really supportive fans makes us think really positive about this crazy business.

Matt: I remember when we were playing South by Southwest this past year back in March. We had a couple of shows that were not part of the South by Southwest festival and they were on the other side of the tracks at a place called Pete’s Bar which was smaller than this room and it was the Mexican part of Austin. It was all, probably first generation Americans, their parents were Mexican I think, or maybe some of them were Mexican. I don’t know, whatever it was, these people weren’t the normal people that would go and see a show with all the dyed hair and everything. These were just people going to have a drink or whatever and they didn’t know what to expect, they were just hanging out. We ended up playing and the people just were having a ball, they were just having a good time.

That’s when I realized it’s so great to just play music and have people enjoy it and it made it all worthwhile because I had been bummed being as SXSW and seeing so many bands and so many people’s noses in the air. SXSW this past year just wasn’t my vibe and then when I crossed over the tracks and met these “real people” and we had a good time with them, it kind of made it all make sense to me. It was funny because the drummer that we played the show with [in the other band] said the exact same thing so we had a similar experience.

What is it about Lights Resolve that makes you stand out from other bands out there? What would you say to convince people to come check you out?
Sherman: The tightest pants. [Laughs].

Matt: We just have fun. Not a lot of bands do. We have fun onstage, we’re all somewhat proficient in our instruments. We’re very tight as a band because we’ve been together for so long, through the other band and this band so the tightness is there. Maybe our only goal is to put on the best show that we could possibly put on. All the other stuff goes
with it — writing songs and having a hard copy so that people can go home and listen to it. But, we want them to live for seeing the live show. I guess word of mouth gets that out. I know on the Used tour a lot of people had checked us out for the first time and were impressed and even the other bands that we were on tour with were really excited that we were on the tour and we would walk into their dressing room and they would be singing our songs and it was just a cool vibe. It’s just about that. Right now, Will from Straylight Run is working on some demos with us and Quinn from the Used played guitar for “This Could Be the Last Time” with us at some of the Used shows, I got to sing “Box Full of Sharp Objects” with the Used. Why would anyone want to see us? I don’t know. If they want to see tight, white pants. Maybe Sherman. The smiley drummer.

How would you describe your music to someone who has never heard it before?
Neal: I think it’s very atmospheric, somewhat anthemic. For the three-piece that we are, we try to produce this big sound that’s meant for, hopefully someday a big arena. There are a lot of dynamics. I think it’s really this big rock sound is what we are.

Matt: Its cinematic alt-rock I think. It’s a bit theatrical.

What are your hopes for the future?
Matt: We hope to become rich and fat. [Laughs]. We hope to just write the best music we can write and come up with the best show ideas that we can come up with, be on as many tours as possible, reach as many people as possible. I mean, it seems like the pretty standard thing for any band to say. Try to figure out something in this changing industry right now that could be cool to do that nobody else has done. We’re still working it out.

Do you feel that a band needs to have a record contract to be successful?
Matt: I think at some point it’s necessary for a band to have some kind of funding or some kind of promotion behind it. That’s usually a record label, whether it’s an indie or a major, just somebody financing the band. Money does play an important role because you can’t do a lot of the stuff that you want to do without money and you can’t accomplish a lot of the things you want to accomplish without somebody pushing your material and it’s hard when it’s just the people in the band pushing your material. I don’t know whether it’s a label or whether it’s money or what it is, but at some point you need to step it up and have somebody else take the business reigns out of your hands.

Sherman: I would agree with Matt completely, but being unsigned thus far, we’ve had more success then a good percentage of cats out there. So, we’ve been really, really lucky so far without the big bucks behind us.

What keeps you going?
Matt: Every time somebody says they like your band or they like your song. We just came across a video of a girl on YouTube that a girl sent us, actually there were a bunch. First, there was a girl from Bakersfield, California, who played beautiful guitar and sang beautifully, she did a cover of “The Angel Sings,” one of our songs, and she did her own version of it and just did it really, really cool. I didn’t expect it to be so amazing, but she did and that was really cool to see. The other one was this girl, she filmed it in her garage with her cat on a leash, and she was just dancing in her own world, loving it. I would never even be able to dance that way if I wanted to try, but she had her own thing, so that was cool. Really cool. It’s just the little things. It’s people saying hi. I also sometimes snoop around on the net and read people’s blogs and stuff about their experience at the show and you never realize, you never think what people do in order to make your show. They have to take the train and the cab and do all this stuff just to see you. That made me appreciate it more.

Neal: I think playing live is just the best thing anybody could do. If you can make a living out of it and performing, it’s the most incredible thing. It’s so raw and real and that’s what we love doing the most. Having people you like to play with helps too. It’s doing what you love with people you want to be with.

If you checked Lights Resolve out on MySpace and liked what you heard, pick up a copy of their EP’s on SmarkPunk.com and catch a show when they’re in the area! Below is a live interview I found of them talking more about their music and influences as well as clips from various shows and performances. Let me know if you’re planning on attending the Saturday show! And be sure to email them if you want tickets!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOUOAeYneHQ]

Categories
Interviews

Supergrass

While out in California last week I caught U.K. band Supergrass’ incredibly energetic live show — chock full of solid guitar riffs and catchy choruses — at Avalon in Hollywood. (You can read that review here.) Bass guitarist Mick was nice enough to sit down with me for a bit before their sound check for the night. He talked about their current tour with the Foo Fighters, their new album, Diamond Hoo Ha and American fans: “We do have a really big cult following in America. That’s the weird thing; we seem to get good reaction, that’s why we keep coming back.” Read on for the rest of the interview and check them out on MySpace if you haven’t yet!

You guys are on tour with the Foo Fighters. How’s that going?
It’s great. We’ve done two nights so far, really big gigs. I think this is maybe our third tour we’ve done with Foo Fighters. We toured with them, maybe in ’97; I think was the first time, which is nearly 10 years ago. We’ve known them for years and they’ve always been really into our band and dragged us along a few times. It’s great, we played Wembley Stadium with them in London last month and that was maybe one of the biggest gigs we’ve done. They said it was there biggest gig; it was like 86,000 people which was astounding and really fun.

How is it different from touring with Foo Fighters vs. doing your own headlining show?
You have to get scientific about what sort of set you want to do. We’ve got maybe five, six albums worth of stuff to choose from. The set for the Foo’s, we’re onstage for a lot shorter so you want to try and make your point quite quickly whereas you can stretch out in your own gig. You’ve got your own fans coming and they might want to see different elements of the band and slow songs and want more obscure tracks from our back catalog. And also have a bit of fun and try and mix it up a bit.

You just released your sixth studio album, Diamond Hoo-Ha. Tell me a little bit about it; did you have a certain concept going into the studio?
Yeah, we did. The album before was kind of a very reflective, kind of quiet, acoustic record and we wanted to go back and play heavier stuff. A lot of people have said in reviews it’s a return to former stuff. But, I think it’s a new direction again. There are no slow songs on the album whatsoever. Usually there are quite a few stylistic changes, but we wanted to have the focus of the last record and just go in one direction. We did it quite differently. We spent a lot more time writing the songs and a lot less time in the studio. We just got very prepared and went in and recorded it very fast.

We traveled out to Berlin into Hansa Studios, which is a really famous studio where David Bowie recorded Heroes, Iggy Pop recorded there, U2 did Achtung Baby there, David Hasselhoff has recorded there. It’s just got loads of history to it and its right near where the old wall was in Berlin, in the center of Berlin, and it’s just such an amazing city.

So did that experience play into the album itself?
It’s difficult to know whether it played into this album. It did on the surface of things. It’s more when you were there, you took onboard the whole city and that will probably go into the next record. When you’re in the heat of making the record you go off looking out into the city, but when you get your days off you’re wandering around, taking stuff in and it takes a while for that to absorb into your psyche and come out in the next record.

You’re also having a DVD out in August.
Yeah, well there was a side project. I had an accident about 10 months ago where I fell out of a window and broke my back. In the middle of the night, I had gone on holiday with my family, and I was looking for the bathroom, I was looking for a glass of water and I just took a wrong turn and went out a window, hit the ground. I really did myself in. I was lying up in the hospital for two and a half months. I couldn’t go out and do some of the touring at the beginning of the record so the lead singer and our drummer, Danny, went off and did this little side project to tie things over and launch the first single basically. They did a few really small gigs around England to 500 people, to really bring it down to basics, just drums and guitar. They took Gaz’s younger brother and they all, for some strange reason, probably lack of sleep, they took on these alter egos and ended up filming themselves and this is what’s being released, three hysterical people with not enough sleep.

You guys have been around for a while, since 1994. How do you keep your music fresh and new?
Too long. [Laughs]. We still inspire each other. Everybody in the band writes. I think if there was one songwriter everyone would get a bit tired, but we’re all checking things in from different directions. We always try and not repeat ourselves. Case and point is our last two records. Even if you’ve done something that has been successful or worked out really well, it’s good not to try and repeat that because you get less in returns the next time around. I think we learned that quite early on.

What keeps you motivated?
I don’t know, its rock & roll really. We still really enjoy playing, it’s a bit of a cliché, but when we do stand up in a room you end up forgetting about having to go to the supermarket later or doing some ridiculous thing or whatever. You just start playing and the music excites us and that’s always what has kept us going. It’s quite easy to get ground down by the music industry because it can be difficult to be artistic, but there’s still always room to do it and that’s kept us going.

You have had some of your music featured in movies over the years. How does that go about happening?
Well, just the offers come up. We’re always a bit reticent about releasing songs out to advertising in some ways because they’re your babies and you want to express them. Then again, you have to reach people and have them hear the songs. If it’s a harmless product, then it’s not a real problem.

Have you always wanted to be in a band?
I don’t know. I’ve just always have been in bands. Even before Supergrass, I’d been playing in bands for 10 years. I never looked at it as being in bands or playing gigs, it was just making music. We used to just play in the living room. You’d come back from the pub and you had about five pints. We used to live out in the sticks, so we had no neighbors to annoy and we used to just play in the living room for our own amusement and that’s how we learned to play. Even when I went out to college, all through college I’d play in bands and when I came b
ack from college I didn’t d
o much, but I had always played in bands throughout the whole period without even trying, without even thinking about it. It’s something that just won’t go away, I have no choice.

Was the original name of the band Theodore Supergrass?
Yes, probably for about two months. We had about five different names before that, but then we played this one show in Oxford and it got a write-up in the local magazine, a really good write-up, and we thought if we changed the name again people weren’t going to turn up because they wouldn’t know it was the same band so we ended up being stuck with Theodore Supergrass. And then we realized that Theodore was a bit rubbish so we took that off.

You basically got started in the U.K. and then branched out to the U.S. What’s the difference between your fan base?
We seem to get a more honest reaction in America. I think, in some ways, because we’re a British band and we started off in England. I think every band gets hyped in the beginning and the reality of what the band is, is slightly skewed. But when we came to America people really didn’t know about us and still a lot of people don’t really know who we are. So you get people turning up to the gigs and they just have to react to what they’re seeing on the stage. We used to get bikers showing up to our gigs and really weird people that you wouldn’t expect to show up to a Supergrass gig and they were really into it. Coming in today, a family of five, the parents and three little kids had driven hundreds of miles to come and see us and you don’t get that anymore. Maybe because you don’t have to travel 200 miles to get anywhere, but you get more devoted fans and people that really do get into the band in a really strong way in the U.S.

How would you explain your music to someone who has never heard it?
I usually just say we’re in a rock & roll band. It’s usually too difficult to explain. What’s the point? You wouldn’t want to. Once you start defining what you do you instantly want to break out of that.

How do you feel this record is different from your previous ones?
Certainly, we wanted to make a record that didn’t dip really. We wanted to make it very hard and very energetic, kind of the laidbackness of Road to Rouen previously, it was so focused in that direction, although it had some diverseness as well. We wanted to really focus on just being energetic on this record. Also the speed of it, we wanted to get the energy of recording very fast and doing lots of over dubs and making the production complicated and that was achieved by getting Nick Launay to produce and limiting ourselves with time and bringing a lot of energy to it.

How do you feel the music industry has changed over the years from when you started?
It’s really interesting right now because no one knows what’s happening and all the major record companies are really freaking out. They don’t really know what’s going on and that means there’s a huge vacuum for what could go on. Also, you can go to the Internet and find all sorts of people who don’t have to worry about record distribution in the same sort of way or marketing in some ways. The Internet is such a massive market where you can reach so many people and you can do that from the comfort of your own bedroom. And again, just bands coming out of nowhere that people weren’t expecting to do well and it’s an honest reaction. It’s people hearing our music and wanting it, there are no middle men and that’s really interesting.

What is it about Supergrass that has made you guys stick around for so long?
We haven’t let our quality control drop yet. We still invest a hell of a lot of energy in making those records. We spend a good six months where we don’t sleep for ages. We put a lot of effort into them. We’re not aiming to make a record that will last six months for our promo campaign, you want to go back and listen in three years time and listen to a song. It’s tricky, it’s difficult, but I think we’re putting in the energy. Other bands have tried to survive for a long time. There are good examples out there; a band like The Kills and they have managed to do it on their own terms and still keep going. It’s going to end one day though.

When do you feel will be the time that you’ll think, “Alright, I want to retire”?
I don’t know if I’m going to retire. You could come to the end of Supergrass and what you could do with that, it’d be interesting to branch out and try other things and then maybe come back to Supergrass late in the stage. I’ve always been interested in listening to music certainly, and still very interested in music generally. You get pissed off at things and then you go and see someone else play an amazing gig and it just makes you happy about being alive.

Do you have a favorite song out of the entire Supergrass catalog?
It varies. I tend to go for the really unusual ones. There are a few B-sides that we’ve done. The thing that I like about the B-sides is that they’re always very relaxed and there is no pressure when you’re making a B-side so you’ve got really spontaneous songs coming out. There was a track, the B-side to the “Kiss of Life” and we took the reels off the tape machine and put it upside down so the tape played backwards and then we rerecorded the whole song backwards and it just became this other song that was really unworldly, just really strange lyrics as well because we had to rework what he was singing backwards as well. It was cool. It was called “We Dream of This.”

You all take part in the writing process. Where do you get your inspiration from?
I can’t talk for the others, but me personally, I listen to a lot of music and hear interesting chord changes. Or just little bits you like and you try playing it on guitar and you play it wrong. You try and cover somebody else’s song and you end up fuckin’ it up and it makes you go somewhere else, and you start hearing interesting changes, which drags me in. Part of it is ripping off the other two — if Danny or Gaz have written something interesting I’ll try to work it out my way and it will lead me somewhere else and so we get inspired by each other. It’s always just a small thing that gets you in first and leads you to something else. Lyrics, just living every day, you might hear an interesting phrase or someone says something in a conversation that’s the inspiration for the lyrics. In the visa office, when we were getting the visas for America, some guy said he’s technically classed as an alien with potential on his visa. That kind of phrase, you could write a song called “Alien with Potential” just stuff like that really.

Special thanks to Jennilyn Lazo for these photos.

If y
ou haven’t yet, be sure to check
out Supergrass on MySpace and see a show when they’re in town!

Categories
Interviews

John Mayer

I don’t want to call myself an “unlucky” person, per say. But as far as winning anything throughout my life — whether it be carnival games, slots in Atlantic City or free vacation getaways, I’m never dealt the best hand. So when local radio station Z100 was giving away John Mayer tickets two weekends ago I thought I might as well try — one call can’t hurt. To my shock and amazement the phone on the other line rang and someone answered. Here’s how the conversation panned out:

Me: Hello?
DJ: Hey, who’s this?
Me: Hi, it’s Annie.
[really long pause]
Me: I’m calling for John Mayer tickets.
[another really long pause]
Me: Do you know what number I am?
DJ: Yeah, I do.
Me: What number?
DJ: You’re caller 100, Annie!
Me: Are you serious?
DJ: Yes. I’m serious!

As luck would have it, I actually signed up to be a ZVIP literally the day before I won the tickets. So, in addition to winning a pair of tickets to John Mayer’s show at PNC Bank Arts Center in New Jersey, I also won a pair to his Z-Lounge performance at Spotlight Live in Times Square. Pretty sweet! I guess I’m not too unlucky anymore.

For the half hour John Mayer was onstage at Spotlight Live Tuesday night, I learned a lot more about him than I ever could by just listening to his albums. For one, he informed the crowd that yes, he has in fact slept with a fan before. When asked about his next album, he jokingly told the crowd while he has no idea what his next album will be like, it could possibly be club hits. His sense of humor is a bit eccentric. If you read the full Q&A; from last night’s event below, you’ll get the picture. In between the interview, John played an impeccable version of latest single, “Say” as well as a solid cover of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin,'” “Belief” and “Waiting On the World to Change” from his most recent album, Continuum. Read below for the full Q&A.;

Tell me about writing “Say.”
They sent me the script for The Bucket List, said that it was for a Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman movie and I said, “Let me read it” and I read it and cried like a baby bitch on the couch. You can say bitch if it’s a baby bitch. [Laughter from crowd]. Because it’s hyphenated, it’s not really the B-word . . . well, it is a B-word, nevermind. So yes, I wrote this song for this beautiful movie and it just happened to really strike a chord with me and I was really lucky to have the script as the sort of jumping off point for a song I probably wouldn’t have had if it wasn’t for that, so it’s cool.

So now, I actually love the process so much I’m actually writing songs for movies I wasn’t asked to write for. I’ve written myself a song for WALL-E. It’s called, “Will Somebody Please Say Something!”

Tell us how you got involved in the music business. Is this something you wanted to do as a little kid or did you sort of fall into it?
I did, I did. I won a contest, no I didn’t. I’m lucky enough to have gotten a record contract before they handed them out with oil changes. I just worked. People ask me all the time, “How do you make it happen?” You just practice. You don’t even have to be a guitar player, but if you’re out there and there’s something that you love doing. I don’t mean just like clicking a mouse ball, a real trade. There really is a difference between being famous for playing a song and being famous for tripping. That’s the only way you make it. Just commit yourself and dedicate yourself to something and I’m lucky enough to have done that.

What is your favorite part about being an artist in general?
You know what it is, its total mental freedom to know that whatever song or record or project I want to work on, can happen. And that’s why every day I have a new brainstorm, like “That would be the coolest thing to put out on the radio” or “That would be the coolest thing to put on a record” and I can do it. So that mental, sort of creative freedom, to know that I can do whatever I want to do musically, and not to have to ask for permission. That’s the coolest thing in the world.

You’re not especially known for being a guitar maniac. You’re known for the whole package. It’s like John Mayer, he’s a singer-songwriter.
Thank you. I’m not excellent at any one thing. But if you put it all together in some sort of, like a nice stew, it makes . . . Thank you, I do think that is sort of when I really shine. That if you just take all of it together and go, “That’s a lot of things to do at once.”

Have you guys heard the Fall Out Boy cover of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It?” [asks crowd who then scream incessantly]. I mean, its no “Your Body Is a Wonderland.”
Neither is “Your Body Is a Wonderland.” I don’t even know what that means. Yeah, though, that was cool. Pete asked me, would I come in and play a guitar solo on “Beat It.” And I just think that their skewed sort of sense of humor was perfect. ’Cause it’s kind of tongue and cheek, but it’s also a cool track, so when they asked me would I play on it, I actually went out and found the Eddie Van Halen replica guitar and I learned how to shred in like three hours and put it on a record.

What inspired you to be a writer and who is your greatest influence?
I make a lot of observations, a lot of strange . . . I seem to sort of avoid obvious things to want to talk about. I have always, since I was a kid, made very slight, strange, twisted little observations that I don’t really feel happy unless I have at least tried to make other people understand the way that I see that and writing is a really great way. Writing is really good for people who get told all the time. . . like I’m sure there’s more than a couple people out here who meet new people and they say to the friend they’re with, “Where did you find her?” or “Where did you find him?” And the answer is, “Well, in a good place” because if you can write and get that out, then that’s what’s always drawn me to writing.

The influence, is just, I guess violence in the media and video games. [Crowd laughs]. Smoking in movies. I don’t know. Yes for smoking in movies! I don’t know what I’m talking about again. You guys put me in this situation where it’s like, “Let’s talk to the guy who can’t talk very well and writes songs to make up for it.” But yeah, I’m inspired by people who have a whole lot of control in what they do. You know what it is that I’m inspired by? I watched this Wimbledon match and I was more inspired by the championship Wimbledon match then I’ve been by some music in the last couple of months. I mean just watching greatness or listening to greatness happen. I’m inspired by anybody with really gr
eat control.

Is the next album going to be a Trio album or the full band in the studio?
I don’t really know. The thing about art for me is that you tour on something or you get known for a certain group of songs and you even know yourself through this certain group of songs. So, I need to go home and forget about all the music I worked on and go back to, sort of ground zero and just start from scratch again and find out what moves me. Maybe that’s the Trio, maybe it’s a new quartet. I don’t know, but that’s the fun part of going off sort of a record cycle and deciding what the next type of music is going to be. I would like to do a record full of club hits. [Starts beat boxing and singing Rihanna’s “Please Don’t Stop the Music”, then tying in some guitar and plays “No Such Thing”]. Because man, when those lights go on and that beat starts goin’, and those glow sticks are turning. That’s what a John Mayer club remix sounds like.

I did hear there’s going to be a special edition re-release of Continuum. Is that true?
I don’t know. They keep re-releasing that record so many times, who knows. Now they’re just going to be like, “Yeah, but we didn’t put gum in it yet.”

There is a new DVD in stores though, right?
There is a new DVD in stores. It’s called “Where the Light Is” and it’s this live performance that transpired back in December in LA and its cool.

Have you ever hooked up with any of your fans from a concert?
I can tell you this, I might have hooked up with people, but as soon as I hooked up with them, they weren’t fans anymore so technically no. Listen, do you respect me for my honesty? The answer is yes I have! Not in a really long time. Not since the camera phone. That camera phone will get you, even if you’re sleeping. Your doughy frame all laying in the bed, dead like. And a picture of that, I can’t deal with that. I’m not trusting enough to really open up to anybody I don’t know very well anymore, which is good for my immune system.

Why are you the only celebrity that TMZ does not make fun of?
No. They do! Well, because TMZ is made out of the same garbage I am. It’s like; you can’t kill what you’re made of. I can’t be killed by garbage because I’m made of garbage. You can’t get trashier then me. No, you can’t. So I just out TMZ everyday and then after a while they just couldn’t get around it and went, “Alright. Truce. Let’s be friends.” But they still like to catch pictures of me when I’m blinking, but that’s the game that’s fine, I’m okay with that. I just want to roll with the punches. It’s not like it was, there’s no TRL, there’s no . . . if fans are saying, “The way that I want to see my favorite artist is walking out of a port-o-pottie or walking down the street to the gym,” that’s the new way to communicate, then I’m going to communicate that way. Especially if I don’t have a choice and it’s in my face. I’m not going to hide from it. I’m going to show my lovely personality and my giant brain.

Which is your favorite song that you’ve ever written?
My favorite song I’ve ever written is “Gravity.” I learned how, if you put too many words in a song, then you diminish the opportunity every day to put your feelings into it, no matter what your feelings are. “Gravity” is so open as a song that I can either lose a wicked game of Halo or have my heart broken and I can still, sort of put that into the song.

Do you do anymore stand-up?
You know, you lose too much focus. If you do stand-up, a lot of the stuff that you talk about isn’t true, it’s just reference to sort of, help illustrate the overall truth. And I really can’t get away with getting onstage and talking about poop or something because then it’s gonna make . . . you know, I’m aware that there’s a certain focus on the things that come out of my mouth. So I have to be really careful. When you get onstage and do stand-up you really are supposed to be allowed to say whatever comes to your mind if it is really thoughtful overall. So I can’t do it. Plus, I wasn’t funny. I don’t know if that’s a prerequisite. But I actually wasn’t funny either.

Listen or watch to the full interview as well as John performing “Say” on Z100. Check out John Mayer’s Website for more on his summer tour and latest news.

Categories
Interviews

Colbie Caillat

 

Colbie Caillat has had quite a year. Just around this time last year her first single, “Bubbly” hit airwaves and her debut album, Coco, was released. Previously, Colbie was known more as a MySpace sensation. She was MySpace’s No. 1 unsigned artist for four consecutive months acquiring over 100,000 friends, eventually landing her a record deal with Universal.

 

Fast forward to 2008, “Bubbly” and second single, “Realize” continue to be played in heavy rotation and Colbie boarded John Mayer’s Mayercraft Carrier cruise ship to join him and other musicians and fans for a fun-filled music cruise. Apparently all this didn’t keep the California native busy enough, as she just penciled into her calendar a US summer tour with Mayer as well.

 

Colbie took some time out for a phone interview while driving from Nashville to Iowa City right before the US leg of her summer tour began. Having just wrapped up filming in Hawaii for “The Little Things” — her third single picked by fans on MySpace — Colbie talked a bit about her stage fright, how she became a MySpace phenomenon and why she thinks “Bubbly” resonates with so many people.

 

To listen to Colbie talk about how her life has changed in the past year, writing songs in the bathroom and advice from John Mayer click here. For more advice from Colbie to aspiring musicians, MySpace and why she thinks “Bubbly” is such a hit, click here. Feel free to read the full interview below and check out Colbie’s MySpace for when she’ll be playing in your area!

 

It’s been just about a year since your debut album came out. How has life changed for you?
So much. A year and a half ago I was just working at a tanning salon and I was recording my album. Now, I’ve been to . . . I can’t even count how many different countries playing my music all over the word, living on a tour bus. It’s a lot different, but it’s fun.

 

Did you ever imagine MySpace would have had such a huge impact on your career?
Not at all. No, I had no idea. I didn’t even know what MySpace really was or could do. My friend made the page for me and told me about it and he helped me upload my songs and everything so I had no idea.

 

How did the whole process on getting your record deal come about?
Well, because I was on MySpace and was eventually on the top of the unsigned artist chart. I was No.1 and I was easily noticed by people and the record labels would notice me easily and that’s how they found me and then offered me a record deal.

 

You pretty much had your songs written before the record deal happened, right? Did you have a certain concept for the album?
Oh yeah, the whole thing was written. The label came into it a month and a half after we were already into recording the album. I wrote these songs and every time we’d go into the studio we’d add instruments up until when we felt like they were complete. I just wanted the music to sound good, laid-back and really pretty and uplifting and sunny and that was the concept I guess.

 

I read that you write songs in your bathroom.
Yeah. I do. [Laughs]. It sounds good in there. Usually when I was at home in my bathroom, I felt like no one could hear me because I was in my own little world. It echoes in there so it makes your voice sound pretty and your guitar has some reverb on it. And now, on tour, being in my hotel room I go into the bathroom and close the door because if I sing really loud, people can hear me down the hall. It’s my comfort zone.

 

Do you remember the first time you heard “Bubbly” on the radio?
Yeah. Well, the first time I heard it I didn’t really count it because we were on our way to that radio station. But the first time I heard it randomly, I was back home on a little break from tour and my family and I, we went out to lunch at this restaurant we always go to. Halfway through lunch, we were outside and “Bubbly” came on and my family of course started freaking out. My mom got up and started dancing. It was really exciting.

 

Are you tired of playing “Bubbly” yet?
There are times when I am. Usually it’s for TV performances because I get so, so nervous on TV that I always mess up the song and then I just dread singing it the next time. Lately, we just went back on tour a week ago, so now I’m actually excited to sing it again. I just need little breaks from it.

 

You’re starting up a summer tour with John Mayer, you must be so excited!
Yeah. I’m kind of freaking out. [Laughs].

 

Has he given you any words of wisdom about the music industry?
Yeah, he has. I met him six months ago and we were talking. I told him I have stage fright and lots of fears. So he just told me to have fun up onstage and not worry because anything you do up there, people laugh at. Even if you mess up they kind of appreciate it more. As far as making decisions, like business decisions, he just said to do what you feel and go with your gut so I do that and it works.

 

Has your stage fright gotten better over the past year?
It has gotten a little better, but it’s honestly different depending on the situation. If it’s not as big of a deal TV show I’m fine. If it’s Leno or The Today Show I freak out completely where I cry right before I go on. I do vocal warm-ups with my band before and breathing techniques and I have to remember to smile. Sometimes, depending what time of day it is, I will have a cocktail before I go onstage just to calm me down a little bit.

 

Your debut album, Coco, is approaching it’s year mark later this month. Are you working on another album?
Well, the third single comes out in August for “The Little Things.” We just shot the music video for that inHawaii a couple weeks ago. But yeah, I’m working on the next album. I’ve been writing for the past year and we’ve already recorded some of the songs. We’re not recording the full album until January and it won’t come out until next summer so we have a while to work on it still.

 

I know you worked with Jason Mraz on his most recent album. Are you hoping to collaborate with anyone on your next album?
I’m not sure. We haven’t talked about it for my album. I’ve done a song on Taylor Swift’s new album and Jason’s album and then a couple artists from different countries. I’m not sure about doing any on mine yet, but I would like to for sure.

 

Your fans have been included a lot on your MySpace, often picking the next single you release. Are you planning on continuing this for the new album?
That’s what I’m trying to figure out how to happen. I definitely want that, but I’m not allowed to put the songs up on MySpace. So now I’m trying to see, maybe having my band learn all the songs first and then we’ll start playing them randomly at shows, but that’s still not the best way to do it so I’m trying to figure out a way to do that.

 

Your songs were taken off of MySpace for a while.
There was some disagreement with MySpace and Universal. So everyone from Universal had to take either their songs off or put shorter clips. I was trying to fight that because as much as I want to respect my label, MySpace was what got me started and my fans, I felt like that was being disrespectful to them. There was a lot of negotiation, so I was able to put my original demos up for the meantime until the lawsuit passed.

 

What is your advice to aspiring musicians and singer-songwriters?
I would definitely recommend learning your craft, whatever it is. Take vocal lessons if you sing or piano lessons or guitar lessons, whatever instrument you want to play. Practice all the time because I didn’t and I wish I would have more now. I can play guitar and I can play up onstage, but I’m not a great guitar player so it kind of makes me nervous. So if you just practice your craft well so that you just have it in the bag. Write your own songs that mean something to you and just be in control of your career. As far as MySpace, make your page look all cute and post bulletins, keeping people involved in what you’re doing. That’s mainly the best thing, to keep them involved.

 

Do you have a favorite song on the album?
My favorite is “One Fine Wire.” Every time I hear that one come on I just like the melody and the music behind it, it’s just very uplifting. I wrote that song about my stage fright and how to overcome it, so that song just means a lot to me.

 

With MySpace, do you feel it’s more important to get fans that way rather than TV show appearances?
Well, it’s just different. My MySpace fans are the original ones that know everything about me. They know when I had all my original pictures up of me playing guitar in the bathroom, they were the ones from the beginning that heard all the demos. They’re different kind of fans than the ones that see me on TV. They [TV fans] become more of, I guess the screaming fans and the MySpace fans are the ones that are like, “I want to say that I’ve been listening to you forever.” They’re both different, but they’re both appreciated.

 

Why do you feel “Bubbly” has had so much success?
I think it’s because the song is about love. Well, it’s about having a crush on someone and all the things that I wrote about in that song, everyone has either experienced before, they’re feeling it right now or they’re dying to fall in love or have a relationship. I think by people being able to relate to a song, I think that’s what does it.

 

What would you be doing right now if it wasn’t for the music?
I was really into photography, so I would have tried something for that or I would have gone to school for interior design. I had fun with that, I was going to school for that a couple years ago. Otherwise, I’d still be singing and writing songs, maybe for other people.

 

If you haven’t yet, to listen my interviews with Colbie click here for part one and here for the second half of the interview. Check out Colbie’s MySpace for more info. on upcoming tour dates and music!

 

Photo: Don Flood