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.

Interview: Mikey Way of My Chemical Romance

Trust Your Gut

When your gut says destroy the album you just finished and start over, you should listen. That's what My Chemical Romance decided on Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Reprise), the band's fourth studio album and follow up to 2006's critically acclaimed Black Parade.

After a grueling two-year Black Parade tour, My Chemical Romance realized that what they really missed was color. So in the 11th hour frontman Gerard Way, his brother, bassist Mikey Way, and guitarists Frank Iero and Ray Toro scrapped the album they mixed with producer Brendan O’Brien and ran with their instincts. They weren’t going to be the My Chemical Romance they had been. They would be the My Chemical Romance they had become. The band rejoined Black Parade producer Rob Cavallo and weeks later turned out an album they could stand by.

My Chemical Romance bassist Mikey Way explains how the band’s hunch paid off.

Interview: Tommy T of Gogol Bordello

World Citizens Brigade

Greed and politics may divide the Earth, but Gogol Bordello is doing what it can to bring the world back together with their new album, Trans-Continental Hustle. Frontman, Eugene Hutz, has described Trans-Continental Hustle as a “quest for solidarity” among the world’s ghettos. And calls his bandmates “unofficial ambassadors for immigrants around the globe.”

Interview: Toby Leaman of Dr. Dog

Dr. Dog Learns New Tricks

The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. That’s what Dr. Dog discovered while working on Shame Shame, their Anti-Records debut. The band has always had an insular approach to making music, producing albums like Fate (2009), We All Belong (2007) and Easy Beat (2005) alone in their Philadelphia home studio. And that’s always worked out for them. Their critically acclaimed albums have not only drawn praise from artists, like Jack White, Beck, Jeff Tweedy, Kanye West and Lou Reed, but by fans who help them sell out 1500 capacity venues around the world. With Shame Shame, however, Dr. Dog knew they needed to try something new.

“We’ve been doing it our own way for so long that there was really no more we could figure out on our own,” says Dr. Dog bassist/vocalist Toby Leaman. “We needed somebody outside of us that had been doing it a long time and been doing it differently and recording different bands and all that kind of stuff.”

OK Go - Damian Kulash Interview

The Sky's The Limit


Nothing online is guaranteed to go viral…unless OK Go creates it. OK Go’s songs and videos have been streamed and downloaded hundreds of millions of times, making them the most-downloaded band ever. Their 2006 video for “Here It Goes Again,” which won them a Grammy®, has been viewed 50,629,115 times on YouTube. And their video for the single “This Too Shall Pass,” from their new album, Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky, saw over six million views in its first six days, becoming the #1 Top Rated (All Time) music video on YouTube and going to #1 on Viral Video charts, Reddit and Digg.

But it’s not just the band’s homemade video’s that spread across the Internet. A February 21^st New York Times Op-Ed piece written by lead singer Damian Kulash had over 500,000 hits in just two days. (Kulash was criticizing Epic Music’s move to disable embedding of the band’s videos).

So what’s the secret to the band’s viral appeal? “We make cool shit,” says Kulash. And band members Kulash (vocals, guitar), Tim Nordwind (bass), Dan Konopka (drums), and Andy Ross (guitar, keys) intend to continue sharing that cool shit with fans online. They’ve parted ways with EMI to form their own label, Paracadute. So they look forward to creative life outside corporate confines. And now that they’ve found “magic” in writing music there’s no telling what’s next.

The Aquarian Weekly talks to OK Go’s Damian Kulash.

The Used - Quinn Allman Interview

The Way It Used To Be

by Tina Whelski

All it took was new management, a new producer, and a new album for The Used to re-familiarize themselves with their old way of making music. The Used’s fourth studio album, Artwork, is due out on September 1 on Reprise Records, and it marks a turning point, or possibly a returning point, for the band.

The Orem, Utah band was certainly appreciative of its rising success. They spent eight great years touring and appearing at major festivals like Warped Tour, Ozzfest, Leeds, and Taste of Chaos, while selling more than two million albums in the U.S. alone.

But band members Bert McCracken (vocals), Quinn Allman (guitar), Jeph Howard (bass) and Dan Whitesides (drums) missed how simple things used to be. They needed a change.

So they severed ties with their management. And ended their relationship with John Feldmann, who produced The Used’s past three albums (Lies For the Liars, as well as 2004’s In Love and Death and 2002’s The Used, both of which were certified gold).

Then they connected with producer Matt Squire, who let them create the sound they’ve wanted from day one. A dirty sound that The Used calls “gross pop.” The result is a band that’s closer than ever. And an album that’s made The Used feel new again.

The Used’s Quinn Allman picked up the phone in Munich, Germany to tell The Aquarian Weekly about the new album.

AW: You said that Artwork’s first single, “Blood On My Hands,” “Sums up everything about The Used.” Why is that true?

Quinn Allman: Because it’s everything. It’s heavy and it’s dark. And it’s got this bouncy rhythm to it. And the lyrics are just, I don’t know. They’re brutal. They’re just great. That was the song that when we were done, we were like, “This will be our first single.”

How would you compare The Used of 2002, releasing your first album, to The Used today?

Well, we’ve learned to endure a lot of the bigger picture things that happen. I mean we got kicked around by our management and we were kind of put into the corner. And we had always worked with John [Feldman]. And it was just this routine that we were sort of placed into. But in the beginning it was never like that. It was just about Bert’s lyrics and my guitar and it was that simple. It just turned into this—it just became a little methodical. And now, we’ve got new management. And we got a new producer. We just did things the way we wanted to do it. So it’s a lot more like the beginning now.

Sort of returning to that simplicity?

Yeah. There’s just more of a true collaboration within the band. Which is great. Everybody gets along great. Things are better than they’ve ever been.

Let’s talk about Artwork. Where were your heads when you started writing?

We were done with bending over backwards for our manager at the time. We were doing Taste Of Chaos, which was a tour we paid for as a band. But the money that went into it went to our management. That sort of kicked us down a bit. We were out there touring, doing all this work. But then it was for someone else’s benefit. As soon as that came to surface, this is all during 2008, we rented a house and we just worked and tried to write as much as we could. We just focused on going into the studio with as many of the songs written beforehand as we could, you know. Just go in there and do it. We got really picky and took our time and did exactly what we wanted. We always wanted just like a messy, big and heavy pop sound. And I think we got it.

You made changes in the studio this time around. You worked with producer Matt Squire instead of John Feldman who produced your last three albums? What did Matt bring to the record that was different?

He had a little bit more of a laid-back, pop approach. He’s worked with a lot of pop bands so he understands that world. It’s not something we were really looking for. I mean none of us have even listened to the bands that he produced…so it wasn’t really based on anything that he’d done. We just heard that he was really easy to work with. He was laid back and cool. And that was exactly what he ended up being. You could see in the studio that we had a game plan…He just let us take all that stuff that we learned with John and compound it and let us just do our own thing. And totally trusted us. At first we were talking about “gross pop,” the sound that we wanted the record to be, and how we’ve always wanted it. And he was like, “I get that. I don’t know exactly what it’s going to be yet, but I get what you mean.” And we were like, “O.K. cool. That’s what we want.” …He wasn’t trying to run everything and do it a certain way. John likes to hear things his way. And you go “O.K.” and you try and you’re like, “I don’t know.” And he’ll say, “Just trust me. If you don’t like it tomorrow, we can change it.”

Were there any unexpected moments that made their way to the album?

Yeah. Some songs, “Empty With You,” and “Blood On My Hands,” just came out. Those were written in like two days. It was pretty crazy. I brought an idea in. We did the scratch drums. Scratch guitar. Scratch bass. Did some keyboards. Bert was in the other room writing lyrics. “Empty With You,” the same thing. It was pretty cool. The songs just came out of nowhere. They were the last two songs we wrote for the record.

What track do you personally think is going to be the most fun to play?

“Men Are All The Same” is going to be fun. We jam that one…It’s a lot heavier live than it sounds on the record. “Born To Quit” is really fun. “On The Cross” is cool. “Watered Down.” I don’t know. It will be a surprise to see which ones work out.

What does it feel like to share your songs for the first time?

I don’t really think about it too much. Generally if I’m happy with it then people accept it…It’s like drawing a picture and hoping it goes in the Guggenheim or the Louvre or something like that. And is appreciated. You can never have those kinds of intentions. It’s cool because when your efforts are sincere, people can see that.

What bands are you excited about right now?

I’m into a little bit more organic music at the moment, like folk fusion stuff. Animal Collective is a pretty cool band. I love Bright Eyes and Cursive and all the Saddle Creek bands: Rilo Kiley, M. Ward, Iron and Wine. I’m also into Converge. Converge is still a band that kicks my ass. I think that’s the best rock n’ roll band that’s around right now. I’ve fucking eaten through every one of their albums. They’re fucking amazing. People don’t realize it.

Can you pick a song on Artwork and describe what you like about it?

The song “Watered Down” came about from me and Dan driving from the studio or something one night talking about rhythms that carry on through different generations. You’ll hear them, but you won’t realize it. So that beat in “Watered Down” is just doo doo doo bah, doo doo doo. It’s got like a 50’s kind of feel. But then it’s also in a lot of 80’s music too. We were just talking about songs that have that beat and how funny it was. And then we went to our practice place and he started jamming that. And I made a little loop over it. And it was pretty much that right there.

How did you choose Artwork as the title for the CD?

Well, originally Bert had written it on a folder with some art that we were turning in to our label. He just wrote “Artwork” on it with a big silver pen. It looked so cool…Just the way Bert had written it and everything. We started to talk about how ironic it was that life is art. And life is work. It’s just funny how they seem like opposite ideas or whatnot…It’s just kind of there to ponder…It seemed to be right with, like I said, getting new management, taking over all the decision-making in the band—a lot more of the work that goes into it. It seemed fitting.

Listen for Artwork on September 1. 

Originally published in The Aquarian Weekly (August 27, 2009 issue).