One of our journalist friends is lucky enought to have been granted an interview with Lars Ulrich from Metallica and he's been nice enough to agree to ask him a few questions on behalf of readers of Stereo Warning. So leave your questions for Lars in the comments to this post and then check back in a week or so to find out what answers Lars gave. Pretty cool, huh?
Is Lars Ulrich a happy man? Ha, ha. Yes, Lars Ulrich is a very happy man. It’s going well. We’re driving hard and it hasn’t gotten any easier just as I’m getting up there in age. But as I like to say, if you ever hear me complain, smack me over the head. I have some wonderful children and a girl I’m very happy with and a father and a family and three guys in a band that I actually can talk to. We can hang out in the same space. When we’re in the same city we stay in the same hotel, ha, ha, now that’s luxury.
Have you learned to deal with the restlessness you are also known for? Remember who you’re talking to. I still have a very frenetic energy. But I’m less restless today because of two or three things: kids, the fact that I’ve become older and… shit, we’ve been doing this for 27 years. When you’re in your 20s you don’t stop long enough to embrace what you do but 20-25 years later it’s a different story. I’ve gotten better at opening my eyes, look around me and just be for a moment. I’ve used a good part of my life worrying about the future. I’ve always been good at looking ahead, more than most. And that creates that restless energy you’re talking about, but I’ve been better at dealing with it.
You’re in a business that sings praises to the new young thing. How do you deal with that? I’m okay with getting older, also in this business. Shit, when I look at my dad, he’ll be 80 years old very soon. It’s inspiring. He is so calm. I’m not panicking over having already lived half my life or whatever (knocks three times on the table). I’m happy and I like being here now. Besides, all the new cool bands that are coming, such as Sword, when those boys stand backstage and stare while I bang the drums, it gives me a spark – now I’ve got to show them how it’s done.
Will you be on stage when you’re old like Charlie Watts from the Rolling Stones? I have no clue. The way things are going right now inside the band, mentally we can do it till we’re 100 years old. We’re doing alright. The problem is not here (points to the head) but down here (points to shoulders, back and neck). This metal that we’re doing pulls your teeth out. I have no idea if I’ll be able to play the way I want to when I’m 65. No disrespect to Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones inspire me and we have played with them, but it’s a whole different thing technically and physically playing their hits like “Start Me Up” compared to playing “Damage Inc.” or “Fight Fire With Fire” or the other speed shit we play. I can see that the man that works the hardest on this tour – apart from me, of course, ha ha – is our physiotherapist, who is on call 24/7.
Back to your father. He has been a huge part of your life. How is he these days? I have a very close relationship to my father. We travel a lot together. My ex-wife, about whom I won’t say anything bad, had a tough time with the concept of family because she had a difficult relationship with her own family. In the years we were together we didn’t visit each other’s families that much, but now with Ms. Nielsen, she loves my father and in the last five years we’ve really fired up our relationship again. It’s brilliant, he’s so inspiring. He’s so nostalgic and always tells stories of the old days but also talks about philosophy and this and that, so when you are with him you always leave richer, better and smarter.
He’s lived such an unusual life, how has that influenced you? It was a different upbringing over there in Hellerup. It was different in our house compared to most of the houses of my classmates. But I’m really thankful for that today. My mom and dad did a great job making sure that I wasn’t trapped by all that freedom I had as a boy and that I wasn’t blind to how the rest of society worked even though I was privileged. We’re trying to teach our kids the same thing.
You moved to USA when you were 16-17, how was that? Dad was going there to play tennis, so I went too to try to play tennis as well. I lived in a weird place that is called Newport Beach which makes the north of Copenhagen (rich suburbs, ed.) look like a slum. It was a little odd for me after two years of having hanging out in Christiania every day all of a sudden to hang out with all these rich pigs in their pink Lacoste shirts. I started to associate tennis with that world and so the rebel in me said fuck this shit, I’ll go and play rock music instead. Now the U.S. has been my home for 25 years and I love where I live. San Francisco is brilliant and my kids are Danish-American.
You’ve smashed many drums to pieces since then. Have you made it? I won’t play it down, it’s been a long run, a hard run, but I’m not one of those that sets a target… I have a goal… I’ve always been afraid that if you have a goal and you don’t get there naturally you can change direction and become fake and creativity will be influenced negatively. The life I live today was not something I particularly was looking for when I was young. I just wanted to play music and drink some beer, hang out and meet some nice girls. It’s the same plan I have today, ha ha ha. Now we’ve all found the nice girls, but hopefully we’ll still have some beers later, instead of this protein shake.
This is also a world full of pitfalls. How did you deal with those? We have been lucky and smart enough not to let those overcome us. I think the love for what we do has been so strong that it overcame the worst crises. There were the drugs, the fights, all that shit. But we’ve always been able to sit down, talk to each other and find ourselves again. Because Metallica is more important than all that nonsense. We’re lucky that the personalities in this band managed to keep their feet on the ground… okay there have been a couple times when there were some slipups, but shit 27 years, that’s something.
How is it being on stage today? It’s hard to describe. I become a 12-year-old kid again. I sit there and think wow, this is pretty cool! When I’m up there it’s the best two hours ever. It’s a comfortable place, because nobody comes and tells me what to do. it’s a safe place.
Why did you decide to work with Rick Rubin? We got Bob Rock in the 80’s, it was because he was making the best records back then, and Rick Rubin is making the best records now. We’ve always been very afraid of repeating ourselves, that’s why we’ve run in so many directions, perhaps too many. Especially me, I’ve always been terrified of doing the same shit twice. Rick got us to find inspiration in the old stuff, more musically complex Metallica. All 10 tracks on this album are from 7 to 9 minutes and we’ve gone back to working a lot with changing tempos.
What about the lyrics? The album is called Death Magnetic. It’s not just about cruising and women. All the lyrics are about death. James wrote them and I think he’s done a great job. They are very dark, poetic. A lot of exciting things are happening in James Hetfield’s head.
Is he doing better now, he doesn’t drink anymore? Of course, but the demons that live inside don’t disappear, they just sit under a lid and come out every once in a while. I think you can work a lot on it, but what’s in your DNA you can’t run from.
What is it with metal boys and art? I’ve always been interested in art. When you’re lucky enough to sell all these records, you can all of a sudden get all these things that you like. I began by buying a few things by Asger Jorn and Sonja Ferlov, then I went on to people like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Willem de Kooning. These days I buy especially things from galleries, the new, young people. What attracts me to painting art is that it has nothing to do with Metallica. Here I am just Lars instead of Lars Ulrich from Metallica. It’s another identity, my world alone, where I can be myself.
Do you have a big collection? I do, but I change it often. I found out a few years ago that I don’t want to own art. You don’t own art, it’s just something you take for a while until you pass it on.
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So enjoy, and keep watching this space, cuz we're gonna publish an interview with Lars Ulrich from Metallica that one of our friends has translated from a Danish magazine. Stick around!
In a dusty parking lot at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in the California desert, a shiny tour bus sits in the sun, engine running to power the air conditioning. Inside, the founding members of the Brooklyn electro-psychedelic band MGMT relax on leather couches having just performed to an adoring crowd at one of America’s biggest rock festivals. Several attractive young women climb aboard, smile sheepishly at the two guys and head straight for the room at the back of the bus. As the door opens and closes, a whiff of marijuana escapes. It is a scene fitting for the young musicians, whose meteoric rise to stardom has been fueled by their hit single “Time to Pretend.”
"Let's make some music, make some money, find some models for wives," Andrew VanWyngarden sings on that song. "I'll move to Paris, shoot some heroin and f*** with the stars/You man the island and the cocaine and the elegant cars/This is our decision to live fast and die young/We've got the vision, now let's have some fun."
The album broke the top 10 in several countries. At one point earlier this year, “Time to Pretend” was the most requested song on the Los Angeles legendary rock station KROQ. So are these guys the new hedonistic rock stars, out to resurrect the Sunset Strip party days of the 1980s or are they just making fun of that lifestyle? Officially, they’re on the fence, but the glistening in bassist Ben Goldwasser’s eye gives a hint on which way they might be leaning.
“I’ve had this whole thing playing around my head whether I want to keep myself grounded in real life or if I wanted to completely let go and go insane and be like ‘hey I’m in a band on the road’,” says Goldwasser. “It’s hard to tell where to draw the line. I don’t want to be completely unrealistic in my view of the world, which I think kind of happens when this is all you do, but on the other hand if you’re in a band you’ve got to go a little crazy.” Goldwasser and VanWyngarden formed MGMT at university in Connecticut and have been friends since 2002. Goldwasser is unassuming but outgoing and garrulous, while VanWyngarden is flamboyant but calm and quiet. They’re the Ying to each other’s Yang.
After playing small local shows and touring a bit during their university years, they started to create a buzz, which only grew once they released an EP that included “Time to Pretend” in 2005. Only a week after moving to Brooklyn in 2006, they signed a record deal with Columbia Records. The label spared no expense and brought Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann on board to make their debut album, “Oracular Spectacular.” Before it even hit U.S. stores in February, the record sold about 20,000 copies as a digital release. It’s a warm and hazy album that pays homage to the great forefathers of psychedelic music, but still feels fresh, with catchy tracks like “Kids” and “Electric Feel” giving “Time to Pretend” a run for its money.
And here they are, in the California desert, having just played to thousands of people into a sweaty tent packed way over capacity, with L.A. B-list celebrities lining up backstage to check them out.
“I’ve never experienced something like that before, it was really crazy. I was smiling the whole time,” says VanWyngarden. Goldwasser is still on a high from the show. “It wasn’t stressful at all. Usually we have some catastrophe before our shows, but this time everything worked,” he says. “There’s been all this hype, people categorizing us as a buzz band, and that can seem all fake or like it’s not happening. People are telling you numbers, or who said what about you, but to see a crowd of people like that really getting into it and knowing the lyrics to our songs, that’s really special.”
With the notoriety of course comes the press attention. Before me on the bus, a loud and hyper woman from Rolling Stone magazine kept jabbing at MGMT with her tape recorder. “Is this is like your dream come true, or what?” she asked at one point. The boys took it all in stride, as they do the constant questions about their ridiculous name.
“The dumbest question is when people asked why we picked our band name,” says Goldwasser. “It’s not so much that it’s a dumb question, but it’s a dumb answer and people should know that. It’s not an exciting answer. It’s very boring, but everyone asks.” Well we didn’t ask about the name, but we did want to know how they came up with their sound. Was it deliberate, or did it naturally fall into place?
“We weren’t thinking about musical direction when we first started, it was really informal,” says VanWyngarden. “We just wanted to make some music together on our laptop computers. That was the easiest way for us to record songs, so it was electronic by nature. A lot of it was instrumental. That all changed when we graduated and signed to a label and were going to make a full length album. We didn’t want to do electronica.”
Adds Goldwasser: “We listen to a lot more rock and psychedelic stuff, old music, and we wanted to represent ourselves a little more and play the kind of music we would want to listen to.” VanWyngarden, who is a fan of Neil Young and a mish-mash of 60-70s mellow psychedelic music, nods in agreement.
As relaxed as they seem lounging on their tour bus and joking around with the road crew, the two know that they are under a lot of pressure to keep up the momentum and not become a one-hit onder.
“I’m excited to record and make another album, but that won’t happen for a while,” says VanWyngarden. “I think we’re going to be around for a while. I hope so. We just need to put out a strong second album.”
“When we recorded the first album we weren’t thinking that tons of people were going to love it,” says Goldwasser. “We were just making the music that we liked and as long as we keep doing that hopefully things will keep going well for us, but at least we’ll be happy and still have fun.”
Sure, that sounds good, but what about a backup plan? After all, they confess they don’t know exactly how much money they’re making, just that the record label is giving them a monthly payment.
“My back up plan is to learn how to surf and live on a beach,” says VanWyngarden.
“I want to do some really punishing social work. A job that drives me crazy but is helping people. I have friends who are social workers. They love it but it’s really hard work,” says Goldwasser.
But for now, it’s time for another kind of hard work, and quite a lot of fun, too. The band has a whole list of summer festivals in Europe ahead of them, including Denmark’s Roskilde – one of the festivals that inspired Coachella’s organizers. VanWyngarden professes to be a camping fan, so this summer’s schedule should suit him fine. Besides the three songs mentioned above, he’s looking forward to rocking the song 'Of Moons, Birds & Monsters', a spaced-out jam that seems tailor-made for festivals. “It’s great for people stoned in a field,' VanWyngarden says with a smile.
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The release of Metallica's Death Magnetic.
If you're a fan, this has got to be good news: the boys have brought a finished song to their record label, Warner and played it for the execs. Yes, the good news continues: label sources tell Stereo Warning that the song was "heavy" and "brutal" but also "punkish." I don't know about you, but to us that sounds kinda like "Ride The Lightning." Can anyone say "Creeping Death"? One can only hope, right?
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As a teenager in California, Peter Hayes first tried his hand at playing guitar by learning the Jimi Hendrix song “Castles Made of Sand.” Years later, after four albums with his garage rock band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, he is keenly aware that a career in music is just as fragile these days as a kid's construction on a beach. He laments high-spending rock stars that ruin the good name of modest, hard-working musicians and low-spending music fans who would rather download BRMC for free than support the band with a little cash. Check out our interview.
Where/how did you grow up? I was born in California and raised in Minnesota on a farm of 90 acres until I was 14, then I moved back to California. I guess I grew up with a healthy disrespect for city folks. Us farm boys stuck together. I still have a bit of that even though I live in a city now. Just holding on to the roots... I just look back at that and what I do now I don’t really consider work. That was work, on a farm. Out here, playing music, is nowhere near working. I try to keep that reality in my brain. Back in California, as a teenager, I started listening to a lot of Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd and I remember learning a Jimi Hendrix song and trying to write. It was “Castles Made of Sand.” I always liked poetry and I just kind of put that into music. Listening to other bands, they weren’t always saying what I wanted to hear so I decided to start singing my own way.
Do you have to compromise between art and money? Definitely. All the time. Absolutely. We’re out on this tour right now and we had to drop a musician because we weren’t making enough money to survive on the road, which affects the music. This guy would play bass on some songs while I was playing piano. He’d play acoustic guitar, he’d do three-part harmonies with us, but we didn’t have enough money to make that survive and that affected the music. We could also use an extra guy to help us with the house sound. At the same time some of this stuff can be looked at as just extravagance. It could be done without those people, but it’s affecting the music.
What was your greatest moment of doubt? I still doubt it, man. I still doubt being able to pay rent. All I wanted to do was be able to pay rent.
But critics love your music, and kids love it… But it doesn’t mean that they buy it. They just seem to be downloading it. But that’s fine. That’s a culture thing that’s pretty sad. It’s confusing and it’s a shame, but it’s understandable. Why would you pay $13 for a CD when what’s most likely gonna happen is that musician is gonna get rich, buy 13 cars and develop a drug habit and spend $4,000 on a new shirt. That’s a waste. That’s not art, that’s a culture of crap. So once all that shit gets out of the way, hopefully we’re left with musicians that can just do their art.
I love where I’m at, because I’m able to play music, so far. I don’t really want to be anywhere else. I just want to try to keep this going, to make music that people care about and support. If you’re having the same conversation with a politician that’s not getting funding for their political campaign, is that going to work for them? If they give a fuck about it they’d happily do it for free, as long as they find a way to keep it going. If you’re a writer and you love writing, you’ll do it for free, but still you need to at least turn it into a barter system so someone gives you a sandwich for your article.
So what's the future of the music biz then? The Radiohead model? I don’t know what’s the future of that. I do believe art is worth something. And if you’re gonna have it in your life it needs to be respected somehow. Doesn’t matter if you’re giving it away or not, people are taking it anyway. I guess it’s a nice gesture, it makes the point that art should be free, but that’s been going on from day one. Yea, art should be free, but so should food and clothes and so should the roof over your head.
Have you considered starting your own label? That don’t work. Major labels have had their wings clipped, which is good in a way. It went down the road of just money hungry businessmen for a long time and it turned musicians into the same thing, money hungry businessmen. It’s been long overdue for that to go away. We went with an indie in England for a little while. As far as releasing ourselves, it’s possible, but… I’m not much of a businessman, I’m really not. And you kinda have to have a little bit of that to survive. I thought that’s what a record company was for. They were people that were able to get your music out to places, they schmooze the magazine guy. I like the idea of musicians being musicians and business people being business people. I don’t have to deal with having to kiss ass to have someone write about my music. I think that’s a bunch of bullshit. That’s what it’s turned into, you have to be nice to everybody. It should be if you like something you write about it. Same with MTV, if you like the band, you play it. Music is held ransom by people’s attitudes, it’s ridiculous. There should be a line in the sand, you do that, we do this.
Should artists have a political cause? You have no option but to be political. It goes back to lines drawn, there’s us and there’s them. That’s the point of art. That was my point of art, anyway. Be it comedy or movies or poetry or writing or music, it was there to give voice to something that was not being said in the culture. That’s needed and is disappearing.
Sinead O’Connor is finding her way back after a long struggle with bipolar disorder that drove her to attempt suicide eight years ago. “It gets better as you get older,” she says. “You get more used to yourself. You’re not so angst-ridden because you don’t give a shit. It’s a good place to be.” After long avoiding them, she is again performing the songs that made her famous in 1990, like “Three Babies” and the Prince cover “Nothing Compares 2 U.” After a seven-year diversion into roots reggae, she wrote the Bible-inspired “Theology,” an album in which she says God is getting a bad rap because of man’s use of religion. “It pisses me off to see people blowing up people on behalf of God,” she tells us. “I wanted to lift out scriptures and show the peaceful nature of the God character.” Amen! Read on for the full interview.
Why did you avoid all those hit songs for a while? I don’t think I avoided them, I haven’t really been on tour for 10 years is all. The only tour I did was in Ireland and England with a lot of traditional Irish songs and at the time they were more appropriate than my own songs.
Do you see those songs in a new light now? I don’t approach them any differently, but I suppose some of the those songs I wrote when I was 15, and it’s a nice feeling to be 40 and doing stuff that you wrote that long ago. It makes even more sense to me now that when I wrote them in the first place.
They still speak to you? I would never sing anything that doesn’t speak to me. I couldn’t do a good job singing something that didn’t.
Talk about your new album. The theme on that album is based around or inspired by particular scriptures. For years it was something I wanted to do because some of those scriptures are really beautiful and really poetic. They’re really crying out for music, but a lot of religious music is corny. So I was really interested in trying to create something that was on the right side of the line between corny and cool. It’s supposed to just be a beautiful thing, it’s not any big message or anything.
Are you religious as a person? I am someone who thinks that God and religion are two different things. I’m interested in religion and I study it a lot, all my life, but I’m more interested in God than religion, if you know what I mean. But I don’t believe in fucking going on about it. I lived in Atlanta and I grew up in catholic Ireland our priests are quite boring, quite bland, they flicking bits of dust off the altar in the middle of the mass like they’re bored. So I got a bit addicted watching the preachers when I lived in Atlanta cuz they were so alive and completely mental. I thought it would be great to bring them back to Ireland so they could teach the priests how to do it. There was one guy I loved best, his name was Creflo Dollar, he was always going on about how it’s okay to pray for money. I think it’s brilliant.
What do you think of religion in general in the US? Too religious maybe? I'm not really familiar with it. The only experience I’ve ever had was on this record when I was doing promotion I talked to a lot of Christian media and 20 percent of them get really angry if you suggest that God doesn’t like war. If you even say that perhaps, maybe, God might not like war they get really angry. But that’s all over the world I supposed, with lots of different religions. They’re all wondering around insisting that God likes war, especially if it’s against people of a different religion. That’s why I separate God and religion, because God is getting a bad rap because of these fuckers.
Are you tired of being asked about that episode when you tore the Pope's picture? No. it’s natural that people ask, so…
What did you want to accomplish with the new album? Something that might begin to reclaim the good name of the God character. It pisses me off to see these people blowing people up and saying they’re doing it on behalf of God, and that libels God. If there is a God then that is the most libeled creature ever. I do believe there’s a God but I don’t know what it looks like or what you call it and all that kind of shit and I think it’s all the same, it doesn’t matter if you call it Allah, God or whatever. I don’t believe God is in any way violent or would support use of violence as a means of sorting things out. So I wanted to kind of argue these people on their own theology. Go into their very scriptures and show how the opposite of what their saying is true. I wanted to lift out scriptures that would show the peaceful nature of the God character.
How do you feel right now in your career and your life? Comfortable.
Where are you going from here? I don’t know, that’s the advantage that you don’t know what’s around the next corner.
Introduce yourself in a few words. Christ, that’s very difficult. I’d be too nervous. I’d probably just say, I’m Sinead, and that would be it.
What's your biggest contradiction? That I’m an intensely shy person but I do what I do for a living. I just close my eyes or look at the floor. If I look at the audience, really I’m fucked.
What's the best place in the world to be? At home with my kids.
Have you ever had to compromise your art? I’ve done it twice in my entire career and I hated it and I wouldn’t do it anymore. One was when I recorded a song for a band for their album. I fucking hated the song, it was horrible. Every time I had to sing in the studio I just wanted to barf, it was horrible. i won't say what it was, it wouldn't be fair. [We have a pretty good hunch she's talking about 'Tears from the Moon'... -- ed.] ]But I got paid a lot of money. The other one was recently actually, my management talked me into doing a corporate thing because they offered me 75,000 quid. It was a whisky company in Ireland launching a new whisky and it was fucking awful. It was devil business I will never do that again, but I got paid a lot.
What makes you happy/sad? My kids make me happy. My boyfriend makes me happy. Stuff on TV makes me sad usually. The news. I’m mostly watching what goes on here and in England cuz I’ve lived in the states and in England a couple of times. I’m not so interested in irish news, it’s kinda boring. Nothing interesting ever happens.
How do you create your music? Generally songs come to me when I’m doing stuff like washing the dishes or pushing the baby up the street. I start to get tunes inside myself when I’m doing ordinary household things. But I don’t really sit down to try to write something. If the tunes are there then I might vocalize them but I don’t sit down and try to create them. They just start singing their way to you, that’s how I see it. They have a kind of a life of their own, their own consciousness.
What was your greatest moment of doubt? Probably in labor. With all four of my children.
Ben Harper has been playing with the Innocent Criminals for more than a decade, each album soaring higher than its predecessor, hitting a peak with the soulful “Lifeline.” On stage he delivers electrifying slide guitar solos. He sings with abandon, eyes closed, living and breathing the songs, easily ranking as one of the most magnetic live performers out there today. Ben is a true music fan who still does it old school, listening to CDs instead of mp3s, studying the lyrics and the liner notes. In this interview, he reveals his secret: an early immersion into music and a keen ear for inspiration.
Where and how did you grow up? I grew up in a town called Claremont, in California. It’s about 40 miles east of Los Angeles. I discovered music through my parents’ passion for it. They have a music store they built up since 1958 and it’s been open until now. That’s my earliest inspiration, the earliest way that music formed me.
If you were to introduce yourself in a few words, what would they be? I usually start with first name and go from there. I like to let other people talk and tell me more about them than I do myself. It sort of trains me in the art of listening. The older you get, the less you listen, so you’ve got to always retrain yourself to listen.
What is your greatest contradiction? Oh man, I’m a contradiction a day. I’m choc-full of them. I can argue both sides of my own argument. It’s an exhausting proposition. Anybody who knows me will know exactly what I’m talking about.
What is the best place on Earth right now? It could be my backyard, but basically anywhere that I can have my whole family together and just take a deep breath. That’s number one. And number two is on stage.
Do you have to compromise between art and money? Not yet my friend, not yet.
Should artists have a political cause? If they feel it, and only if they feel it.
What makes you happy and what makes you sad? What makes me happy is sitting still in my own backyard. What makes me sad is waiting in line at Trader Joe’s in Santa Monica.
What comes out of boredom? Creativity is connected to isolation. But are grownups allowed to get bored? Don’t you call that apathetic, which is more of a fancy term for slacker? What do I do with my boredom… I get out, exercise, make music, have conversations with friends, change the world. I don’t think I get inspiration. I think inspiration grabs me out, shakes me up, turns me over from the ankles puts itself in the melody. Sometimes I sit down and say I’m gonna write a song right now and I’ve done it. Sometimes inspiration just comes naturally and the song was waiting there. Sometimes you’ve got to piece it together. That’s what’s great about music and art in general, that there are no rules.
What was your greatest moment of doubt? When concerts sell great and records are going strong, there is no doubt to be had. When ticket and record sales aren’t so great, doubt creeps in. It’s no different than sports, really.
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This is a long conversation we had with The Cure's Robert Smith while he was working on his band's latest album, 4:13 Dream. A very candid Robert talked about everything from his relationship with Porl to the trials and tribulations of writing the new record to his approach to the live show. He even talked about drinking, getting old and (maybe) working with Ashlee Simpson. Enjoy!
Once again, you made big personnel changes in your band. What happened? At the turn of the year 2005 it was time for a change. Roger O’Donnell and Perry Bamonte left and Porl Thompson returned for his third time in the band. It’s very hard to leave a successful group. Sometimes it takes a little cajoling and a little nod to make people realize they’re not happy in what they’re doing and holding everyone else back. I’m always the driving force of the band and if everyone’s happy with what I want to do it’s a happy band, if they’re not it’s not. I’m not very good at compromising when it comes to music and art. I just find it ridiculous that I should have to do something I don’t want to do, so it leaves everyone only one option, to leave. That’s what happened to Roger and Perry.
Is that what happened to Porl the other two times that he left? Porl actually had a little bit more courage. The first time Porl was squeezed out early on, before the first record. He was a part of the live band that came out of school and led up to “Three Imaginary Boys.” He was the fourth imaginary boy that never made it onto the record. But the second time he left in 1993 because he wanted to play with other people and follow a different musical path. I like that. I wish that everyone that left the band had that kind of courage to their convictions but unfortunately there’s the lure of a safe job and all that goes with it. Sometimes I like to shake things up because I’ve never seen The Cure as a job, it’s a vehicle of expression and that’s all it should be.
How’s your relationship with Porl now? Porl is my brother in law, he married my younger sister a long time ago. He’s part of the family. It's strange, when he was in the band we had a difficult relationship, and as soon as he left our relationship got a lot better. This time around that he’s back into the band we’re all older and wiser and we know each other a lot better obviously. I think we want the same things now as a band, which is why he’s back. He’s brought back a sense of urgency, we’ve got a rock edge again. He’s such a fantastic guitarist -- the new record that we’ve been making is showcasing what Porl does.
p>How’s the recording going? As usual I’m holding it up, because I can’t get the words how I want them. I find myself stopping short and thinking I’ve done this before better, so it’s hard to find subject matter that really matters to me, things that I really want to sing. I just don’t want to make a record because we’re in a group. That flies in the face of what I’ve always wanted The Cure to be. It frustrates the others a lot I think but there’s not much anyone can do about it. The last four Cure albums have really stalled on my lyric writing. I think it’s worthwhile because they end up better than they otherwise would have been. I never worry about writer’s block, I figure if I don’t have anything to write about I shouldn’t be writing.
What does the record sound like? Does it resemble any of your past work? It’s incredibly varied at the moment. Everyone’s contributed so there are some very different styles. It could be a mix of all the different styles or it could focus much more on a down beat or it could be incredibly energetic and upbeat. I tend to favor the first option, I like the idea of kind of starting and traveling and ending up somewhere else rather than being a mood piece like “Bloodflowers.” I like the idea of it being more in the style of the “Kiss Me” album with different things happening. But the art of that is to get it to all hang together which is quite difficult as well.
We didn’t demo this album. It’s the first time we hadn’t done band demos since the early 80s. It’s a bit of a leap in the dark but I wanted to capture the band just playing. I loved the way Russ Robinson recorded us for the last album, the demos for that were sensational, but we lost something when we worked out the songs went back in and rerecorded it based on what I’ve written. I wanted to let the band play and then write to what we played, which is why I’m finding it a little bit hard. I used to steer the band into a direction based on what I wanted the song to say. This time I’m giving the band a couple of vocal pointers and some titles and some words and then we’re playing and then I try to fit the song to that. It’s more enjoyable because it’s a way around of doing it. It doesn’t sound like “Pornography” though, it doesn’t have that relentlessness that some of those early albums had. It has more color, a lot more style.
The album will be what would normally be demos, but it sounds fantastic. We spent one day per song. We’d learn the song in the afternoon. When we’re comfortable, we take a break then we come back and we run through it until we think we’ve got a take. Exactly like last album, the difference this time around being that we’re not going to go back and rerecord it. The reason why demos often sound good and exciting is because it kind of teeters on the edge. Everyone’s concentrating and trying very hard to get it right. Often when you come back and rerecord there’s a bit of a comfort zone, there are no mistakes or glitches, they always get rid of them in the end. This time around we’re not gonna get rid of those. Listening to the live stuff from last year with Porl playing drew me to this idea because I thought we played 60+ songs and there was no way we could’ve rehearsed that many songs to get them all perfect and we just went with how we felt on stage about that particular performance. Some of them have what one might call mistakes in them but they sound great and that pushed me to this idea of not trying to refine everything all the time. That’s something I do a bit too much I think.
p>You don’t have a keyboards player for the first time in decades. Why did you not replace Roger? There’s no need to when you got someone like Porl playing guitar. He can pretty much create any sounds that you want. There are only two songs out of the 33 that have any keys on them at the moment and that’s me playing so I don’t really miss the keyboards. It’s nice every once in a while to totally limit the palette of sounds that we have. We did that on Disintegration to only allow certain sounds to happen so that that holds the whole album together so if you’re playing a very slow Eastern sounding song and put it against a really upbeat driving song, the fact that you’re using the same instrumentation and the same palette of sound tends to hold the whole thing together. On a lot of the albums, the keyboards you hear aren’t played by the keyboards player in the band. An awful lot of keyboards on Cure albums are played by me. If I say it needs to sound like this and just play it, there’s no need to teach the player how to play it if it’s already been played. If there’s no keyboard player, there’s no sense of “well, what am I going to play.” It sounds great without a keyboard player, so why bother putting one in? If we had five people, you’re snubbing the person if you don’t want their instrument in. So you almost have to have keyboards when you have a keyboard player. Live, you might miss the keyboards on some of the songs a little bit, but if you’re a Cure fan you sing along and fill in the gaps. On others it’s not that important to play it live. It’s all about the energy and the performance and the words.
What is your approach to your next tour? We’re going as a band everywhere around the world. The idea of being a four piece is getting back to that stripped down stage look and sound. The fact that we can turn out anywhere with very little equipment and play a concert is going back to the old idea of The Cure. It’s less grand than things we’ve done in the past, but we’re still planning to play for three hours.
I read somewhere that Ashley Simpson said she might collaborate with you on some music. Is that true? (laughs) I happened to meet her a couple of times. I don’t normally hang out in places where I bump into artist like Ashley Simpson, but I took some of my nephews and nieces to see her in (the musical) “Chicago.” Musicals aren’t really my form of entertainment I have to confess, but I was pleasantly surprised by it actually. As to working with Ashley, I’m not so sure how that’s going to happen. I’ve been tempted to work with a couple of people that I’m not normally associated with and I suppose I won’t rule anything out. I’m a lot more easy-going than I used to be.
You already retired once, how much longer are you going to be doing this? I’m genuinely surprised at the people’s reaction when we play shows, it’s hard to ignore it. It’s gratifying to know that people still want The Cure to exist. The best thing about playing live is that we’re an old band playing to a young audience. As long as I still enjoy it I should keep doing it. I personally find it slightly upsetting to see seriously old people performing contemporary music. I haven’t quite reached that very old person stage but I’m aware that time is moving on. Once I won’t be able to sing for three hours and also mentally wanting to do it, that’s when I’ll stop. I don’t want The Cure to fizzle out doing 45 minute shows of greatest hits, I think it would be an awful way to end the legacy of The Cure.
The last time we talked you said you were thinking about growing a beard and starting to write film music. I’m not so sure about the beard part, I look like Father Christmas when I have a beard, which is entertaining for this time of year but not really for the other 11 months. Film music is definitely still my goal. But I had to choose between to continue on with The Cure and make an album with Porl or become a film music writer, and I opted for The Cure. Hopefully another opportunity will arise for me to be involved in a film. If it doesn’t I still think I made the right choice. I’m still able to stand up and sing for 3 hours so as long as I can do that I should probably take advantage of it. The day will come when I can’t then it’s probably the time to sit down and start making film music.
Does it bother you that The Cure is still being called a goth band when it’s so much more complex than that? I’ve given up a long time ago worrying about mainstream media calling us a goth band. It lightened up a little bit when we were called goth-pop after the Live 8 show, where we played some upbeat 3-minute pop songs. It’s so pitiful really when “goth” is still tagged onto the name The Cure...
p>What would you call it? We’re not categorizable, that’s the problem. We are unique, we don’t conform to any norm. I suppose we were post punk when we came out and we’ve been since at different times, but in total it’s impossible. How can you describe a band that put out an album like “Pornography” and also has greatest hits where every single song was top 10 around the world? It just doesn’t work. So it’s easy to just pick on one aspect of what we do and say yea that’s the Cure, they’re a goth band. They called us goth when we did “Friday I’m in Love” and I thought how does this work? I kind of gave up right about then, 15 years ago, worrying about what we were going to get called. Probably when we stop they’ll look back and think of something a little bit more apt, but I just play Cure music, whatever that is.Do you like any of the bands who profess to be influenced by you? Who will pick up your mantle when you retire? I like a lot of them. I’ve seen Mogwai this year and they’re still top of my list. I take my nephews and nieces out to see bands all the time. I really still like Interpol a lot. I listened to their album on the drive up tonight in my car. They really have got a fantastic sound. Most of the bands that have name-checked The Cure over the last 2-3 years I tend to like anyway. I like to think that we can give hopes to young bands that we can do something we want and still be successful. I like the idea of inspiring people to do things their own way.
Reviewers almost never fail to mention that you still wear makeup on stage, some even suggesting you’re too old for it. Does it bother you? My makeup is pretty 80s, isn’t it? (laughs) my appearance is preposterous anyway, so it doesn’t matter how old I am. I don’t think I look that different than I did 10 years a go, with or without makeup. It puzzles me why such a big deal is made about it when everyone puts make up on when they go on stage. If I didn’t wear makeup on stage it would be very hard to discern my features. I haven’t got very strong features so I do it to accentuate my eyes and my mouth. If I wanted to accentuate my nose I’d paint a big yellow stripe on it, but I don’t. It’s part of what I do when I go on stage. I wouldn’t feel in the right frame of mind if I went on stage in bare feet on no makeup. It’s part of the ritual of going on stage and performing for people which is in essence what reviewers have missed – you’re actually performing for people. It doesn’t come that naturally to me even though I’ve done it for years. I go thru this process when I go on stage, I don’t need to wear that kind of makeup to put fuel in my car. But sometimes when I go out, when I went to see the musical “Chicago” I wore makeup just in case I was asked to go on stage for the encore (laughs).
In the past you also used to drink before going on stage to work up the courage to perform. Are you past that now? It was more to liberate me from my natural reservations. I got past it on Curiosa. For the first time in my life I went on stage straight and I found out I enjoyed it. I always knew when we were playing stadiums that I was too drunk to be good but it didn’t seem to matter that much to people. It was more the event or the occasion and I got away with it more. I am keenly aware more than anyone of how old I am I’ve always maintained that there’s something reasonably charming about seeing a 17-year old fall over after one beer too many and very far from charming seeing a 47-year old keel over after one beer too many. So that’s another reason why I don’t drink like I used to but I still have a fair go at it when I’m with friends. I acknowledge my age, but I’m not thrilled about getting older. Nobody ever is, but it’s not as crippling as it used to be for me to understand that I’m getting older.
(c) Stereo Warning 2007. All Rights Reserved. Be nice and don't reproduce this content without prior written approval.
STEREO WARNING: When you were preparing for your comeback , did you have
a clue whether anybody still had an appetite for you brutal sound and dark lyrics?
TRENT REZNOR: The culture, the times, the people and the business had changed.
I had a new excuse to fight: what if I can’t write sober, what if I don’t
have anything to say, what if I’m irrelevant, what if I’m just old
now, what if it was just an accident that I got popular in the first place?
My lack of putting out records and time between records, although not a calculated
career move, may have benefited me because it skipped certain whole subgenres
of really bad music. But I didn’t go into the record cycle [for "With
Teeth"] assuming that I had all the power that I once wielded.
SW: Has the success of “With Teeth” reignited your love for making
music and touring?
TR: Now I have confidence that I’m working with myself instead of against
myself. I can’t tell you how inspirational that feels and how in love with
music again I am. Somehow I lost that and forgot why I was doing this and it
became a job, a hassle.
SW: How tough has it been to remain sober?
TR: My priorities have shifted. I really want to make the two hours on stage
the best two hours I have that day. In the past, those were a pretty good two
hours, but the three hours after that were going to be even better.
SW: What was going through your head when you came back to New Orleans after
Hurricane Katrina?
TR: I’ve missed New Orleans since I’ve moved to Los Angeles . It’s
a very flawed place, but I spent a lot of time there. I really got to know myself
there. It’s been shocking to see what’s happened to it. I’ve
been grieving the loss of a place, because it will never be the same.
SW: How do you approach your live shows?
TR: I like the feeling that I’ve got a great show and a great band and
an interesting presentation that I think isn’t rock show by numbers. I
put a lot of thought and different layers in the presentation to frame the music
in an interesting way. It feels good being backstage knowing that you’re
about to unleash that on people. What I don’t like about it is the length
of time and the tedium that inevitably crops up doing the same thing day in
day out, moving around constantly. My routine is messed up.
SW: So how do you combat that boredom?
TR: I designed a show that could use the scale of the venue and reveal itself
over time and it doesn't get tedious to watch.
I’ve tried to make it something that visually can support the music. I’m
using these props as a framework so that I can get across a range of emotions
and have a set that starts in one place and winds up in another. It’s like
watching a film or a play, that’s the mission. My goal is to make it so
you don’t have time to go to the bathroom during the show. Nine Inch Nails
has always had a theatrical quality and in the 90’s that wasn’t necessarily
looked at as a legitimate thing in the world of blue jeans and flannel shirts.
I’ve always felt like a performer should be and could be larger than life
without being comical and goofy – it doesn’t have to be Gene Simmons,
you know.
SW: What are you most proud of at this point in your career?
TR: I’m proud that this hasn’t devolved into a nostalgia show. It
doesn’t feel like I’m playing a role, it feels relevant and true to
me, as much as I can tell. Admittedly, I can't be that objective, but one of
the big fears putting the tour together was about the older music. Does that
mean anything to me anymore? Do I feel comfortable singing some of these songs?
We spent a lot of time learning the new record and then moving backwards in
time and finding things that felt good. And I can honestly say looking at the
set list that I can’t wait to play these songs.
SW: Are you pleased with the response from the audience so far?
TR: The fact that I look in the crowd and I see teenage fans along with older
fans that have been with me from the beginning, that feels great. I’m not
trying to sound humbled, but when I came back, I didn’t know how much time
passed and how much things are different culturally than they were in the 90’s.
It’s been a pleasant reception and I’m grateful for that. I felt like
Nine Inch Nails got much bigger than I ever dreamed it could get and I told
myself that the reason that happened was that at its core it was honest and
true and, luckily, it happened to strike a nerve with people. If I ever pandered
to that, to the dollar or commercial sales not listening to what the artist
in me has to say, I think that's just death. Throughout my career, throughout
getting sick and disappearing for a while, I can sleep at night feeling like
I’ve always done what I really thought was the best I can do, like it or
hate it, but it never was for the wrong reasons.
(c) Stereo Warning 2006-2007. All Rights Reserved. Be nice and don't reproduce this content without prior written approval.
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The
Roots are the best live group in hip-hop right now. The only other performer
that comes close is Kanye West. So when
we talked to Roots drummer ?uestlove recently, we had to ask him why so many
hip-hop acts suck so bad on stage. He also told us most hip-hop artists are
broke, both financially and when it comes to meaningful lyrics, which of course
we know is at least party caused by a rotten attitude of "sell big or get
out" at major record labels. On the lighter side, we discussed his former
bandmate and current in-demand producer Scott Storch's recent propensity for
fast cars, thick gold chains and appearances in tabloid pages alongside various
starlets. So, check it out, and catch The Roots world tour, coming soon somewhere
near you.
Stereo Warning: Many people thought that signing with Def Jam would mean
your big commercial break. But you stuck to your guns. Were you ever tempted
to get Jay-Z to guest-star on Game
Theory or do anything that would draw mainstream attention?
?uestlove: We kinda knew that people were gonna overestimate the situation.
And I love playing people for a loop. I knew everyone expected us to break open
the bottle of Cristal, hop on a yacht, have an iced-out chain and holler 'we're
partying now.' That would've been a dreadful mistake. The look on people's faces
when they heard the record and said 'oh shit, they didn't sell out' was great.
How strange is it that Def Jam is a label that once overflowed with artistic
merit? In the 80's, if it said Def Jam you knew that the album was an instant
classic. And now it has almost the opposite meaning.
Still, there's nothing wrong with being successful. Do you ever wonder 'hey,
when are we really gonna be rich?'
Hip-hop is a strange story, man. The lesson that I learned in the past two years
is that hip-hop is full of tall tales. Eighty percent of those people that we
thought were living the life, I'm living better than them. And that's real.
I didn't know that Bentley was leased, that house was rented. You sit at home
and watch MTV Cribs and you're like 'man, what's going on here?' But then the
truth starts to reveal itself. I know a very high profile person in the hip-hop
nation that only has $1,000 to their name. I won't say who it is...
But you cannot survive on record sales alone. There's two ways to making money. Either you're ubiquitous, or you tour. A person like Jay Z, he has to have the clothing line. I'm the king of touring in hip hop. But half the hip-hop nation, they don't even have a good show. So you deal with people that depend on radio sales, publishing checks, advances for the next record. Unless they're doing commercials or endorsing a clothing line, they're not getting paid.
It used to irk me, but then I looked at my life, and said wait a minute, my life is fine. My definition of success is having a comfortable home for me. I'm on the road 200 days out of the year so I'm not even at home to enjoy my home. I bought my mom her dream house, I'm taking care of my father and my siblings, I feel like this is success. If this were to stop tomorrow, I'd still be cool for 10 years.
Your former band mate Scott Storch seems to be cultivating an image quite
different from yours, all about money and flash. Is that the Scott you know
or has he changed?
He's Scott playing dress-up. Even back in the day, if Scott had only $500, he'd
spend $800. He now has $17 million, but he spends $30 million. Scott is addicted
to making music. Scott won't let 10 minutes go by unless there's an idea in
his head. The fact that all this music can flow out of him is amazing to me.
Do you ever see little girls play dress-up in their mom's closet? That's how
Scott is. Scott is still a little kid, but he's got his big brother's Gucci
glasses and all these links.
You've been going counter to mainstream hip-hop for a long time now, but
still you have dedicated fans and support from critics. To what do you owe your
success and longevity?
Even though hip-hop is a genre, it's just an amalgamation of all types of music.
That's something the godfather of hip-hop, Afrika
Bambaataa taught me. He would DJ a party in the Bronx and he could play
the Commodores in one moment and then turn around and play Sympathy for the
Devil by the Rolling Stones. You do that today at a hip-hop party, you're
liable to get beat up. But Afrika Bambaataa felt there was hip-hop in that song
because there is a long percussion break in the beginning. That's how I approach
my music now when I present it live. There is rock stuff that we can do that
can still have a hip-hop feel to it, as in something that you feel in your soul.
There's a way to talk to different audiences. By day I can do a song with Mobb
Deep and then by night I can do a song with Bob Dylan and it will still all
make sense.
I read somewhere that for the album before this you tried hard to please
your boss at Interscope, Jimmy Iovine, and make a more commercial album. Is
that true and how did you approach Game Theory differently?
Tipping Point was the closest I've ever gotten to trying to approximate
what he wanted to hear. And that's only because I misjudged the situation. When
we first met him, he thought that Phrenology was our first record and
we were like 'wait, you don't know that we have five albums before this and
that we actually have a Grammy and we went plantinum before?'. He didn't know
any of that, he though we were a hip-hop rock group. Then it hit me that he
probably just put the CD on and skipped through the songs for two minutes before
we walked into his office. As a result, we were very cautious with making that
record. That's something we've never been before, cautious. We decided to keep
the record dry. It wasn't necessarily our commercial attempt, but it was as
risk-free as The Roots have ever been. I took out all the experimentation. I
still think there are moments of brilliance on that record, Star is one
of the best songs in our career. So with this album, the one thing that Jay-Z
guaranteed us was absolute freedom for our vision.
You're one of the few artists in hip-hop now to still have a socially conscious
message. I was talking to Chuck D recently and he was saying that as much as
he hates the cash, cars & bitches lyrics of many successful rappers, he
understands the kind of pressure they are under. They see that stuff sells and
they feel like they have to copy it. Do you ever feel that pressure? Do you
think artists have a responsibility with their message to their fans and the
community?
If we were to start now and talk about our boat in Miami, people would look
at us like, 'you ain't got no boat in Miami, get out of here!' For us, it's
just more believable to be ourselves. I know we're frustrated, I know that Bush
is the worst president we've ever had, I know you feel like they stole the election
and nothing I'm going to say is going to start a revolution, but for 2006 to
go by and nobody to talk about how messed up society is, it's amazing to me.
I just can't believe that no one is touching upon political subjects. So I felt
like it was our responsibility.
(c) Stereo Warning 2007. All Rights Reserved. Be nice and don't reproduce this content without prior written approval. Thanks.
Tags: the roots roots rap jay-z jay z hip hop hip-hop questlove paris hilton scott storch public enemy chuck d
Stereo Warning: You guys took three years to make this record and almost broke up because of it. What happened?
Abe: I didn’t expect this album to ever be completed. It was difficult. It took three years to make, a ridiculous amount of time. There was no communication. We were very burned out after White Pony and the self-titled record. We came very close to being over with. This is what I do, music was my dream, and so I was uncomfortable to think that it could be over. I took a deep breath and it got pretty heavy, but things work in strange ways and we’re better now for it. We’re best friends and we’re brothers and we needed to tell each other that.
SW: What took Chino so long to do the vocals? Where you worried when he went on tour with Team Sleep?
Abe: Team Sleep are very dear friends of all of us so it shouldn’t have been anything competitive but it became very threatening when Chino decided to go on tour with them right when he was doing his vocals. We were like, ‘finish your vocals before you leave’ and he didn’t so that’s when it got extra tense. He went away and we didn’t know what was going on. We had put so much into this and we just left it floating and sinking. But looking back now it was necessary for him to leave and get away from this project and come back with a clear head and dive into it.
Chino: I had only a few good vocal ideas at the time. A lot had to do with my personal life, but I didn’t like what I was coming up with vocally, it was too dark and too personal. I wasn’t enjoying singing. I wanted to hide behind the guitar and I didn’t feel like writing words. 
Everybody was like ‘can you just finish the record’ and they were forgetting the quality. After stepping away and coming back everything started to open up. It probably took a whole another year, but to me it was really worth it. I didn’t want to be the person holding everyone up, but what’s the use of making anything if it’s just for the sake of making it. We came really close to a breakup ‘cause no one was communicating that well about it. Once I got back from that tour we met up and sat down and I had to ask them, ‘do you really want to do this, do you want to invest the time of your life to make this music?’ I needed to hear that everyone was really into it. They asked me the same question. They figured I didn’t care and I figured they didn’t care. Once those doors opened up, everyone started communicating.
SW: Sounds like Metallica in therapy in Some Kind of Monster.
Chino: I watched that movie when we were making the record and my jaw dropped! It was exactly what we were going through. They were making music, but they weren’t happy, just for the sake of making another Metallica record. You could tell it was a dark time for them. And we were going thru the same thing. Sometimes you gotta fall to your lowest point to realize where you’re at and then climb out of it and it can be one of the most therapeutic things.
SW: What music do you listen to on your own time?
Chino: Old classic standards, Perry Cuomo, singers and vocalists, really mellow stuff from the 40s and 50s. I listen to it now and I appreciate it. Not too much aggressive music, I listen to that when we make it. I wanted to make a diverse record, were every song was coming from a different place. It is a rollercoaster ride of different sounds moods and emotions. The dynamics are one of our favorite things. From quiet to loud, from hard to soft, from very intense to very relaxed. I wanted to bring that in but do it tastefully, to have all these different dynamics present in each song.
SW: Lyrically, what did you want to accomplish? Where did you get your inspiration?
Chino: There were but a lot of things I went through – divorce, a lot of personal things that I didn’t want to bring in and make a sad or pissed-off record. I wanted to escape my every day life so I tried to fantasize a bit more. It’s a lot more metaphoric. Beware the Water is about temptations about drugs or anything that’s not good for you. Cherry Waves is asking about the devotion to another person. I tried not to be so dry but paint it up a little bit.
SW: Explain the album title, please.
Chino: It’s not something sexual, or about suicide, actually it’s just a loose term for when you get drunk and fall asleep on your arm. Just simple and lighthearted, nothing too deep. Our record kinda needed that.
SW: What does KimDracula mean?
Chino: It’s a moniker that I was using as my email name for a while. At the beginning of making the record I was getting a little crazy and experimenting with drugs a bit, seeing how whacked out I could get. That’s my split personality I guess. It didn’t work out too well.
SW: You started working with Bob Ezrin, but finished the record yourselves. Why?
Chino: Bob started rearranging stuff right there on the spot. That was good for us ‘cause we’ll keep screwing around with things and we need someone to give us a regimen and show us a different perspective. But at the same time we wanted a Deftones record, not a watered down Deftones record. In the end it started to sound that way. Bob was trying to simplify things to make it more pop-oriented and that wasn’t good for us. Weirder is more interesting to me. It didn’t work out in the end. When we ended up finishing it ourselves, it was a really smart thing.
SW: What are you looking for in your career? So far are you satisfied? Would you care if Saturday Night Wrist hit #1 on the Billboard chart?
Abe: I don’t think we’re done yet, I can’t wait to make the next record. I don’t care if this one gets to #1. It would be neat. It would make sense, but the industry is such a strange business… Our whole premise was to go rock and it pretty much still is. We’re tangled in a strange business, but it’s exciting to do well and to be here after all these years and be relevant. We’re just happy to be doing it.
Chino: I hope the record does well but I just hope that when they hear it people think it’s a progression from what we’ve done in the past. Every record we make is harder ‘cause we don’t want to repeat ourselves so much and get lazy and fall into formulas we figured out before. That’s easy to do. It makes it less potent. If we keep on trying to push ourselves forward and a little bit left of where we went last time, I just want to be recognized for that. It would be good to sell a lot, but we were never a band that made a living out of selling records. We’re a touring band, it’s more of a live experience and that’s our main thing.
SW: Do you think this is your best studio work yet?
Abe: I was out running some errands and I was listening to it in my car. I hadn’t heard it in a long time, there’s been so many versions and different arrangements that it was driving me insane so I stopped listening to it. But now I put in the mastered version and it’s really cool, I think it’s our best record. I always thought that White Pony was our best example of our sound in terms of mix and balance of hard-soft, but I think this is the new best at this point.
Chino: I’m starting to think that just recently. I’m actually getting really excited about it. It sounds like something that wasn’t really expected. It’s not like our last record. Our greatest up to now… well, it’s hard to say that. My favorite record had been Around the Fur, because we didn’t put too much overanalysis into it, we wrote and recorded it really fast and there something really genuine about that. I hope we can do that again, I’m not too fond of spending years of making records.
SW: How much longer will you be doing this?Tags: deftones chino moreno tool
Mike Patton: the man, the screams, the wacky on and off stage antics, the Epic rap-rock smash hit single, the legend. After Faith No More broke up, he set up one of the most creatively exciting indie labels, Ipecac, and produced some crazy avant-garde music with Fantomas, Tomahawk and others, as well as discovering some real gems like ISIS. Still, we gotta admit, most of the songs he was himself singing on were pretty hard to digest, with the exception of Get Up Punk from the album General Patton vs. The X-ecutioners.
Then Mike brought us Peeping Tom -- music the masses and us poor chaps at Stereo Warning can understand. A bunch of awesome songs set to trip-hop beats and grooves and featuring cool cats like Rahzel, Kool Keith, Massive Attack, Dub Trio and even Norah Jones (her track is the weakest, though). Download Five Seconds, Mojo, Don't Even Trip and We're Not Alone.
Here's a conversation we had with Mike about Peeping Tom, about why Faith No More broke up and about how much money it would take to get them to reunite. Enjoy!
Stereo Warning: After Faith No More, your music has been very avant-garde and not very accessible. What brought the more mainstream music of Peeping Tom about?
Mike Patton: It's more song-oriented. Balance. I really felt stimulated to embark on these adventures and a lot of the time I don't know where they're going, and some of them ended up taking a lot more time than I thought. Fantomas, for instance, started out as kind of a studio experiment and it turned into a band, which is great. I'm gonna keep it on that path. But as a result, a lot of melodic song ideas were seeping up and I had no outlet for them. I remember looking over on my desk and seeing a pile of these tunes and I thought I really gotta focus and start to take note of other adventures and bring them to life.
How much of it was it you telling the guest artists what to do and how much leeway did they have?
I knew what I wanted. The songs had very specific deficiencies. There's nothing worse than saying 'hey I want you to guest on my record, do whatever you want.' You want direction, you want to be put on a path, and I feel like as a band leader it was my job to help them see my vision. Once they saw it and I trusted them, usually I'd send out the files and say here's what I want. In the case of Massive Attack, they felt more comfortable remixing the whole tune, doing a cover version of my version. I'm glad they did cuz it's fantastic. It's about figuring out how your collaborators work most comfortably and then working your vision around that.
What contribution surprised you most?
They all did. This was a learning experience for me. I was pretty open with deadlines but saying 'get to it when you get to it' was a big mistake. Sometimes so much time had elapsed that I'd almost forgotten about a particular song. One day something in the mail would show up and I'd go 'oh God, I forgot all about this!' It was like fucking Christmas or something.
The Kool Keith (collaboration) was maybe the most surprising of all cuz I had
myself set up for this huge dramatic nightmare having heard how difficult he
is to work with. We all know he is slightly off-kilter. I didn't expect to get
that one back, ever. But I'm a big fan of his and I thought that he had a lot
to contribute to this project so I said to myself I'll go above and beyond to
make this happen. How wrong I was! He was one of the most responsible, professional
collaborators on the whole record. I had one phone conversation with him and
three days later I had the track and I didn't have to do anything to it, it
was perfect. Goes to show, you never fuckin now.
How do you see the music biz today vs. the days when you, GNR and Metallica
were playing stadiums together in America's biggest rock tour?
The climate changes a little bit here and there but the way I see it there's a vast majority of shit out there, the way it's always been, but if you look hard enough there's always good stuff. As an artist and as a fan of music I feel like it's my job to look between the cracks and find that stuff. Gnarls Barkley is brilliant. Bjork is consistently interesting. The amount of people that listen to it has nothing to do with whether it's bad or good.
Are fans more fickle now with the internet?
Maybe. Maybe the LP format is suffering a little bit, but it's still the format I'm working in and I'm comfortable with. For the most part, I'm a fetishist, I wanna hold the damn thing, I wanna have it, that's why I do packages like this. (Peeping Tom has a cool package where you pull on one end of the cover to reveal the CD coming out on the other side, like a drawer)
It's more expensive to do that...
Oh god, are you kidding? Yeah! And who pays for it? Me! But I think
it's important and I think that it helps the music. It makes it less abstract,
less weird, and more seductive. I don't know about you, but if I saw this in
a record store I'd go oh my god I gotta hear this. I'd buy it on a whim even
if I didn't know any of these names. But you know, I'm easy. I'm a sucker for
this kind of shit. 
Do you ever look back and say 'ah, the good old days...'?
Yeah, sometimes. But they're good because they ended. If they were still going, they'd be the sad new days.
Will there ever be a Faith No More reunion?
Well, not with me. I feel like when something's really done you have to have the courage and the strength to walk away from it and admit that it's done. We ended it at the right time and everyone's moved on and they're happy. In some strange way I'm busier than I was when I was doing that stuff. I'm in a really comfortable place, especially having my label and having created a bit of my own universe, it's pretty satisfying. But that was a great decade or so in my life and it's all a journey, I wouldn't be doing this now if I wasn't doing that then. I'm happy to still have something to say and have an outlet to do it.
Anyone ever suggests getting back together?
There's some guys in the band who would love to do that and then there's me. Everyone understands where I'm coming from and generally I think they agree. But every 3-4-5 years some brain surgeon in Scotland has an idea, some Svengali who thinks he can change the world, comes with a briefcase full of cash and makes a crazy offer. And it's not easy to go, 'eh, fuck it.' It would be very easy for some of us to rehearse for a couple of days, smile and cash the check. I'm not at that point. I got enough things to worry about, enough problems and enough things on my plate. Maybe if he comes with two briefcases full of money... (laughs)
What exactly did happen, you guys were still coming out with some great music, Album of the Year was awesome?
That was it though, I felt like we were slowing down. It was really hard to spit that record out. it took a long selection process with the music, I thought it was getting a little too scattered and it wasn't quite up my alley and I was ready to do some other things. I was happy with that record, I think it stands up to any of our others, but I was looking in the crystal ball and I could see where we were going with it. To me I felt like the best thing to do was to end on a good note, not walk away with a bad taste in my mouth. Surprisingly enough, everyone else agreed at that point.
So it was your idea?
Yeah, I think I brought it up first, but everyone really agreed. It was a very mutual decision, not teary-eyed. It was our time.
Your vocal range is amazing. How can you go from screaming your lungs out to whispering to singing all kinds of high notes without destroying your vocal chords?
I don't know, I don't have a good answer. I guess over the years I tried to
put myself in situations where I exercise it. It's just a muscle and the more
you do it the more you put yourself in situations where you gotta rise up. it's
like learning a foreign language, total immersion you sink or swim. I've been
lucky enough to tread water in some cases, in other cases I feel like I've learned
a lot and done pretty well. I learned by doing and you have to be willing to
fall on your face sometimes. I don't do it correctly, I don't do it classically,
I just kind of do it.
Man, Axl Rose should have a chat with you...
No one can teach that guy anything. He's a perfect prick.
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