Interview with Nathan Willett of Cold War Kids

Taking Risks

If you’ve ever had that feeling that “something’s missing,” you know how Cold War Kids singer Nathan Willett felt writing songs for the band’s new album, Mine Is Yours, via Downtown Records. Willett and band mates, Jonnie Russell (guitar), Matt Maust (bass) and Matt Aveiro (drums), had worked hard on previous their records, Robbers & Cowards (2006) and Loyalty To Loyalty (2008), but Willett realized there was something more he had to do on Mine Is Yours. It was time to get personal. Willett talks about taking risks.

Your new album deals a lot with personal relationships.

I didn’t feel as connected to the lyrics for the second record as I wanted. Even though I worked hard, I just felt like I didn’t know where to go from there. So it took a while writing this record until I realized that something more revealing and more personal was what I needed to do to shake things up and give me that feeling of risking something.

What discoveries did you make once you put relationships under a microscope?

One thing I learned, as far as things being more personal, is it’s one thing to tell a story and not have to take responsibility for how it actually connects to your own life and another to try to go out and say it. While someone in my life could hear it and know that something is maybe about them, it also has to take place in a moment. And in a way, a moment is always an embellishment of the grand scheme of the relationship. You have to trust that the way you feel in a moment is a thing worth telling and while it may not be as true tomorrow, it still was telling in the moment. That’s definitely a big lesson, I think, for me. It made things fun for me to realize there’s definitely a risk involved in singing these songs a year from now on tour or beyond and feeling like, “Man, why did I say that?” You just have to deal with it.

How is Mine Is Yours different musically from the last album?

Well, on the first two albums we put a real emphasis on recording them live and having a real spontaneous aspect. We would write the song in our little rehearsal space and go record it. We’d spend a week or two on those records and do them quickly. We don’t love to be in the studio for long stretches of time and didn’t want to over think things for the first two records. For this one, we went in with no finished songs. We just went in with ideas and it was musically a lot different. Jonnie did a lot more layering of guitar and I did a lot more singing things over and over to get them right. Just everything as far as the production of it, spending a lot of time with piano sounds, guitar sounds, drum sounds. It was a very different experience. We wanted things to be just right.

Name some favorite songs on the album.

“Skip the Charades” is one of my favorites. We were watching a lot of movies at the time. Cassavetes and Woody Allen movies, like Husbands And Wives. A lot of movies about things like infidelity and commitment and growing older that became themes on the record. That’s why “Skip The Charades” seems to represent a lot of those things well.

The song “Mine Is Yours,” is in ways, a really different one for us. I think fans of our first two records are either going to really love it or hate it because it has a more straightforward feel. It doesn’t have the looseness of previous ones, but in ways it embodies the themes of the record, the joys of sharing a relationship and the challenges.

“Cold Toes On The Cold Floor” is another one of my favorites. Playing that song live has been a lot of fun because it is the most like our previous albums, where it is kind of loose and we can improvise a lot.

You worked with producer Jacquire King (Tom Waits, Kings of Leon, Nora Jones, Modest Mouse). What’s one thing he contributed that was different?

It was interesting going in with him because of the different artists that he’s worked with. Just from Tom Waits’ Mule Variations alone, I have this respect for the kind of sound that he has. I think he puts a lot of faith in artists to really come up with the answer that they know is in there. The secret to a good producer is really hard to pin down. I think they know how to make an artist confident in their choices. It’s like when you have a teacher in the room, students feel much more comfortable.

You were an English teacher. Name a book that got you excited?

So many. Reading J.D. Salinger books, I mean especially as far as the teaching side of things go, because I actually did do Catcher In The Rye with high school juniors. To read that book in school on my own, then to actually try to teach it to high schoolers, who find it harder to relate to the language, gave me a whole different appreciation for Salinger. I really loved him a lot. And then David Foster Wallace was a guy that I always like. Discovering him in college was one of the most exciting writer experiences.

What’s a memory you have from teaching? Anything rewarding?

Yeah, so rewarding. So many funny memories. Let’s see. There was a kid who was a junior who I ended up exchanging a bunch of emails with later on, once our band was touring. I didn’t even know that he played music when he was a student. He was writing because I think I pulled him aside once and said, “Hey I know you’re a much better writer than what you’re doing and I know you’re treating this like you’re bored with it and you don’t really care about it, but you should really work at this.”

It was just that kind of stuff that I didn’t think a lot of at the time. I was doing student teaching and wasn’t a fulltime teacher, but I would take risks doing stuff like that. I think it was because I felt so close in age to the students. He ended up writing me about how that was really important to him and challenged him and that now he was trying to make it in music. That was really cool.

What’s one of your earliest music memories?

I remember the Stand By Me soundtrack when I was really young, being in the car with my dad listening to it. It’s a song that has a very emotional vocal performance, and to just sing along to it, having no background in music or anything like that, I remember having this feeling of like a smirk and also a little shyness about really belting it out. And the feeling of what if my dad was like, “Whoa, what is he doing?” The shyness it made me feel is something I always remember, which I guess in a way is a metaphor for how music was to me for a very long time. It was something extremely special, but also really private.

Cold War Kids perform at Radio City Music Hall on March 24. Their new album,Mine Is Yours, is available now. More info at coldwarkids.com.

Interview with Butch Trucks of the Allman Brothers

Don't Think

Sometimes you just need someone to believe in you before you can believe in yourself. For drummer Butch Trucks that person was Allman Brothers Band guitarist Duane Allman.

“I was lucky enough to meet Duane Allman,” says Trucks. “Until I met him I was very introverted and insecure. I mean, I could play drums but I didn’t know it. And then Duane, in a moment—I’ll never forget that moment. I think Duane knew I was a good enough drummer to be in his band, but he also knew that I didn’t have what it took to be in his band. I had played with Duane before and Duane, I think, understood the level of my insecurity, but Jaimoe (drums/percussion) kept telling him, ‘This is the guy you want.’ So Duane decided he was going to see what I was made of.”

“We’re jamming one day playing this shuffle and it’s not going anywhere and I started backing off thinking everybody was looking at me because I was sucking. It’s what insecure guys do. And he whipped around and stared me in the eye. And played this lick like, ‘Come on, you little prick, play.’ My first reaction was it scared me to death. Then he did it again. And again. Then I got mad… I started beating my drums like I was beating him upside the head. I forgot about being afraid. We kept it up and we kept going back and forth ‘AAARRRGGGHHH!’ I hadn’t noticed, but the music started soaring… He finally backed off and smiled and looked at me and said, ‘There you go.’…From that day to this, I have never once gotten up in front of a crowd of people and been afraid. I realized you can play and give it all you have and if they don’t like it, that’s their problem.”

Forty-two years later, Trucks still plays with fellow Allman Brothers Band founding members Gregg Allman  (vocals and keyboards), Jaimoe (drums), and band mates Warren Haynes (vocals/guitar), Derek Trucks (guitar), Oteil Burbridge (bass) and Marc Quinones (congas and percussion).

“It’s just been getting better and better and better,” says Trucks. “I know a great deal of it has to do with we all like each other now. And everyone in the band now can actually remember the songs that they’re supposed to play from night to night. But it’s more than that. I’m 63 years old now. I know what’s going to happen. About the fourth or fifth night I will get to the Beacon and I will feel like a 110 year-old man and it will come time to play and I will look at those three steps going up to my drum riser and I’ll go, ‘How in the hell am I gonna get up those three steps?’ Then halfway through the first song I’m a seventeen-year-old superman. There is something magical about music that gives you this energy… At least the music we’re playing now. There was a time in the not so distant past where this didn’t happen.”

What makes the Allman Brothers Band special is that they just follow the music.

“Duane changed us all,” says Trucks. “He got us all to realize how important music was and that being in a band isn’t about money and isn’t about fame. It isn’t about success. It’s about playing music… After Duane died we lost that. I think that our best music, and when we were having the most fun, was up until Duane died. We lost that leader… After he died we released Brothers And Sisters and got really successful. Then everybody turned to drugs and the music became secondary. Now the last few years we’ve gotten back to what it was like the first few years. And it’s really magical.”

That magic keeps the band going.

“When we play music, there is a spirit that comes,” says Trucks. “[You’re] completely in the moment to where there’s no tomorrow, there’s no yesterday. You’re right there… It’s tapping into that spirituality that allows this beaten-up 63-year-old man to pour out the amount of energy that I do every night.”

It’s also what’s helped Trucks and Jaimoe drum together since the beginning.

“We never talked about it or worked it out or anything else. We just play. And it works… I think it has a lot to do with we both started out playing in the marching bands in high school so where we started is the same. But then I went in a rock n’ roll direction… Jaimoe went toward jazz… When Jaimoe and I get together, I play the rock pattern that drives the band and Jaimoe is the icing on the cake. He’s playing around what I’m playing… If it hadn’t been that way, we couldn’t do it.”

Playing with Gregg became just as natural.

“Well Gregg doesn’t jam much,” says Trucks. “I mean we put together the band and Gregg was the last one to come. We had me and Jaimoe and Duane and Dickey [Betts] and Berry Oakley… But we didn’t have a singer. So Duane said, ‘Hey I gotta call my brother…’ Gregg always had problems with what we did. When he wrote “Whipping Post,” he wrote it as a slow ballad. I’ll give that a minute to sink in. We took it and changed it from a slow ballad. Gregg almost quit the band because of what we did to it. He said, ‘You’re messing my song up.’ And Duane said, ‘Shut up’ (laughs). So Gregg sings and I think he really appreciates and loves what we do now. Gregg’s contribution to the jams is Gregg has a way of playing the Hammond B-3 where he gets the best tone and basically gives us this background that allows us to jam. It fills the sound out so that we can do that. It’s really great.”

The band’s ability to improvise has also helped them weather music industry changes. Their answer to reaching fans today is Moogis.com, a genre-specific community where live shows are streamed via a subscription service.

“You can sit there wherever you are and watch,” says Trucks. “You can hook your computer up to your widescreen TV and to your surround sound stereo and invite all your friends over and get in a real tight group in your living room and spill beer all over yourself just like you’re at the Beacon… But there’s one cool thing you can do watching Moogis that you can’t do at the Beacon. We have a chat room.”

Trucks wants Moogis to become the Facebook of music.

“There’s no place for new bands to be heard,” says Trucks. “That’s what I want Moogis to be… I’m just trying to prove to people that it can work. Once I do, we’ll get the capital that we need to wire up clubs and to get the cost down to where we can get 50-200,000 people subscribing. Then we’re the Facebook of music.”

Whether it’s Moogis or the band’s annual Beacon Theatre residency, Trucks remembers Duane’s lesson.

“You don’t think,” says Trucks about music. “You let go. And you just get completely in the moment. You can’t make a mistake.”

The Allman Brothers Band with be performing at the Beacon Theatre now through March 26.