http://www.1031thevulcan.com/cc-common/news/sections/newsarticle.html?feed=104648&article=8482132
On the inspiration for the new album, All At Once...
MJ: I came home and in my own family, a bunch of stuff had gone down. I had a bunch of family members [who] had died - but not like from some tragic car wreck or anything, they just each were really old, like my grandparents. That kind of thing changes your perspective. I sort of locked myself in my room for, I don’t know, 3 or 4 months and just wrote and wrote and wrote. I think that when so many [people in your] family die, your perspective on life changes, and things you thought were really important turn out to not have been that important.
NH: Maybe being cold on the tour bus is not quite as big an issue as you thought before...
MJ: Out of 50 songs, we did 40 demos, and when it came out in the wash we noticed this thematic equivalence between things we were doing aesthetically which is changing a genre, and then the things that we were doing thematically which was writing a record that was about how life changes very, very quickly, and it happens sort of all at once.
You go through these events, and I think there’s this idea that you evolve, and it’s not really true. What happens is you have these moments of punctuated equilibrium, where you’re sort of the same person and, this intense thing happens and five minutes later you’re like another person. We decided to call the record All At Once for that reason, and also because of the fact that we were doing all these different genres all at once.
iheartradio: How does that work? Mikel brings 50 songs, Noah brings songs to the table, and then do you guys all get together and decide and pick and choose?
DT: It’s getting in a room, playing it in six or seven different ways to figure out what works. Playing a lot of these songs live helps - we try to make as much of a live album as we can. It’s just a matter of weeding out.
MJ: We’re not a very genre-specific band, and I think in the modern world you’re supposed to be like (English accent) "four blokes from Liverpool" you know? Have like, a certain hair cut, certain guitar effect. And that’s your thing. We are just, as a group, not like that. Anna comes from a classical background, Noah comes from a classical and Jazz background, Steven comes mostly from indie rock and Brit rock, Daren, Indie Rock and Punk Rock I’d say?
DT: With a hint of soul.
MJ: *laughs* Yeah with a hint of soul. And I was just a writer; I’m not even really a musician. I was working on a novel so the fact that we started to come together to do this band, we just didn’t think about genre so we decided to turn that into a strength - or try anyway - by creating this record that challenged the idea of genre.
On touring/fighting with cops/gay bars in the desert...
iheartradio: You guys are touring to promote this record. For the Origins Tour, you're retracing your steps, going back to the first venues you ever played. Talk a little bit about what it’s gonna be like for you.
SC: We spent so much time playing shows in Los Angeles, New York and London and in New York our first show here was at Pianos. It’s really small, and about 50 people showed up. It was our first record and it was our first show and it was really exciting because we were playing in New York. We kept coming back and we just kept playing slightly bigger places... after that was Mercury Lounge and Bowery Ballroom, Webster Hall... and then Town Hall. Doing that week of those venues (again) back to back starting at the smallest and ending at the biggest in London, we just thought it was a great way to play in all different kinds of rooms.
iheartradio: You guys obviously spent a lot of time on the road, do you have any tour war stories?
MJ: Yeah, we as a group are not you’re typical "sex, drugs, and rock & roll" kind of rock band, we’re like a big loud family. There’s a lot of cousins and aunts and uncles, it’s you know, that’s kind of the backstage vibe is a lot of wine and spaghetti family style eating, right. It’s boisterous and loud and pretty fun.
NH: But sometimes it gets out of hand...
MJ: Yeah, but sometimes it gets really f***ing out of hand like we’ve had nights where [for example], Billy Ruane in Boston, this local legend is like hanging off the side of a fire escape, after we drank a whiskey and he’s still calling the bar, we all thought we were going to die. The next night in Atlanta, when like Daren, Noah and I got in a fight with some cops and we got arrested and spent the night in jail.
iheartradio: What? Why’d you get into a fight with cops?
NH: We were political prisoners.
MJ: Yeah, we were political prisoners. *laughs*
DT: They were saying some sh** in this bar...
NH: The racism in the south is just...*kisses the air* magnifique!
MJ: We were just sitting there and they were like “Oh, Obama this, and George W. Bush that” and we were just like “You gotta be f***ing kidding me!” and you know it’s the south, so whatever, and then out of nowhere this cop just “Bam!” just hits me over the back of my head, he doesn’t even recognize me, and I realize he’s a cop, I just thought it was some guy in a bar.
NH: I tried to diffuse the situation by grabbing the gentleman and reasoning with him…but it didn’t go over well. Steven got some of it on video!
MJ: So the next night, we got out of jail, they had to bail us out you know, and we had to fly to a show the next night in Phoenix. So we go to Phoenix, and we had a night off, so we decide to rent motorcycles, and we went out a couple hundred miles, and then we ended up at some lesbian bar? *laughs*
NH:...in Bisbee, Arizona. *laughs*
MJ:So we’re totally wasted with our new best friends saying “We should move here! Just move here! You guys are awesome!”
NH: Yeah, that lady’s name was like Cricket?
iheartradio: "Low key, wine & spaghetti" huh...
MJ: And we’re just like “F***, let’s just start a new life! All of us should get a place together! We’ll all try to meet girls, all of us!”
NH: And what’s happened between then and now is a mystery, yeah...
On killing people with covers...
iheartradio: I know you guys like to perform covers - talk about some you've done...
MJ: Yeah, we’ve been covering Bruce Springsteen, Magnetic Fields, Sugarcubes, Eli Tango, we covered the Smiths for a long time, we used to do this, sort of Smiths medley, and then we stopped doing that.
NH: “Goodbye Horses” is the one we do the most often...
DT: We did “This Magic Moment” as done by Lou Reed
iheartradio: A cover of a cover?
NH: I think it might have been by The Platters of the Drifters.
MJ: It was an old Motown song, and then Lou Reed did a cover, and we covered the Lou Reed cover the way he arranged it.
NH: And we played “I Fought the Law” via the clash once.
MJ: Once.
DT: We gotta bring that back!
NH: Oh and Johnny Cash.
iheartradio: Very eclectic...
MJ: The thing is we did a cover of “Goodbye Horses” by a guy named William Garby, and he got very mad. hH sent me an email saying “Hey man you’re screwing up my lyrics!” 'cause I was singing a line wrong. I wrote him back and I was like mortified, and said “Sorry man! I didn’t know it, so I looked it up and the lyrics sites said it was this,” so he wrote me back and said “You know, I’ve been watching your stuff on YouTube and I really like the cover it’s great we should really meet sometime.” And it was really sad cause then like a month later we had this whole email exchange, (cause it was the first time I met someone that met someone that I really admired, and we were like this new band and here’s like this guy who was a real song writer and I was just a dude in some new band), and um. And then he died.
iheartradio: He died?
MJ: Yeah I know, we were super sad.
NH: We were going to meet in Cincinnati and he was going to come out and play the song with us.
iheartradio: So now the cover means even more for you.
MJ: No, it gets worse! Because then we covered Jim Carroll and we started playing that, it was sort of a big deal because we made our own version of it and our fans were going nuts, and so much of the first record was about these intense things and people would throw beer in the audience and dive, and they’d run out on stage, and we’d run out on the stage and there was this huge thing of people all screaming this thing, and then Jim Carroll died.
iheartradio: Oh my God!
DT: *laughs* So we stopped playing Lou Reed.
On All At Once as a whole...
iheartradio: We’ve heard "Changing," saw the video for "Numb" that just came out... What can we expect from the rest of the record?
MJ: The record sort of poses a series of questions in the first song, it grapples with those questions throughout, and then in the last song it presents I think some kind of, not really solutions, I guess, but maybe a conclusion or two. There’s some really quiet almost folk music, there’s some really loud heavy rock and roll, there’s some stuff that has more of an electronic base, so aesthetically speaking, it’s supposed to be that way. But I think it really hangs together, it doesn’t seem like shocking, you know? It doesn’t go from LCD system to like Johnny Cash, you know? Or whatever. But there are elements of both of those sorts of things in there.
NH: Yeah, on the record.
iheartradio: I’m looking forward to hearing the rest of it, the best of luck on the tour, on the album, everything. Little piece of advice: stop covering people who are about to die.
AB: Stop killing people by covering them.
MJ: It’s like a horror movie, you know the one with the cell phone? You know, where you answer a cell phone and you die? It’s like that, we do a cover, and the person dies, it’s like-
iheartradio: It’s airborne!
MJ: Oh my God!
AB: Then we cover Justin Bieber, Oh my God! Millions of girls are sad around the world!
MJ: They’re so mad, they’re so mad!
NH: We shan’t be doing that...
