It’s an opinion thing, and that’s fine. I feel like it was just an attention grabber. I’ve seen people use me as an attention grabber on Twitter, which I’ve come to expect, and I don’t really care. But I felt more bad for Anastasia, who fuckin’ charges Pipeline, gets towed in to fuckin’ 30-foot waves, and who is that dude to discount her? Just because she’s sexy, I could go on and on. Right when I read it I was like, “Fuck, it’s not for me.” Joe Turpel is a professional, and Strider – he’s fuckin’ Strider. And then it’s me kind of in the middle and Anastasia who was told to be flirty, sexy, and interview guys. She deals with haters all the time. But whatever, I moved way past that, like five minutes after I sent you that e-mail fortunately.
Good. Well, okay, so in more exciting, uplifting news, Kut-U-Up, creators of possibly the best tour documentary in existence, Riding in Vans with Boys, is back! Tell me about you guys being back.
We basically have been, this whole time, playing shows, playing music together and we were kind of going, “Fuck, we’re getting older,” and want to maybe redefine our legacy, which sounds kind of pompous. Kut-U-Up is like, “Those are the guys that went on tour with Blink 182 and Green Day!” I feel like we have some good songs and kind of a different sound; so it’s kind of like now that we’re all mature enough to handle being in a band. And we have who all this time have been hitting us up on Facebook, it’s crazy the fan base. It’s mostly international; I just got a text today from some girl in Russia saying, “Please play in Russia!” So it’s unfair to the fans that hung in there that long and unfair to us that we let it go out on that kind of note. There is this album we are doing right now that’s an EP and it comes out on limited edition vinyl, which I believe is available soon.
Yeah, July 2nd I believe. Just in time for the 4th of July.
Yeah, exactly so we are going to play a show at the saloon down here and we are going to stream it live. Just kind of get a lot of momentum back, which you lose a lot of momentum in 10 years.
We’ve kind of been building it back up so it’s pretty exciting for us. We found a studio that we are stoked on, it’s affordable, where we can control all of out own music and get it to sound like we want. It’s cool, we almost have enough for another album so we’re just going to keep recording and playing shows; small tours here and there. It’s a lot more fun now; back then there was a lot more pressure and some of the guys in the band just dealt with it by getting fucked up. I dealt with it by getting married. Which is a band killer in itself, but now my wife understands more that it’s an outlet so she’s fully supportive, and my kids finally saw me play which was pretty cool. They haven’t seen the documentary yet though.
Nice. How old are your kids?
Four and two.
Well, thanks for sending me the EP, I’ve listened to it quite a few times now, and I really like it. One of the things that is interesting to me is that you seem like one of the happiest guys around, and this record is not. It’s not necessarily unhappy, but you tackle more serious issues than most people might expect. Could you talk about that?
Yeah, it’s funny cause a lot of these songs, like “Worse Than Wolves” (the EP title track) is a pretty dark song and for the most part, it leans more towards indie-rock than indie-pop I guess which was the first album I guess. When we play live, we play a pretty serious song and then we’ll tell a joke about a dick or something; the shows are still fun. It’s funny that you mention that, cause I listened to it and I thought, “This is kind of darker than I would expect.” It’s heavier than the older stuff for sure. I think it’s cool cause it definitely sounds like us, which is important to me especially; cause we all have our favorite bands that come out with a new album, and your like, “Who the fuck is this band?” So I think it still sounds like us enough, and of course when we play live, people are obviously super into hearing the old stuff. Like any band you go see you want hear their “hits.” So we mix it up when we play live.
So, who and/or what is “Worse Than Wolves?” (The title of the new EP)
That actually came from a trip to Cabo where I was just on a bender, and I felt like an animal so I felt worse than a wolf because we were just getting so stupid. So in one way, it’s taking it way to far, which is a three-day bender. I came home and I was just worked, so that was kind of the genesis of that song. Just kind of drinking and feeling like an animal, just sucking when you get done with whatever you’re doing.
One of the songs is titled, “Give A Shit.” I don’t know exactly what it’s in reference to, that’s why I’m asking, but I feel like that’s one of the coolest things you can do. That’s something that surfing is very reticent to admit, but I think “giving a shit” is the coolest thing you can do.
Brandon and I write all the words, and it was kind of a collaboration where it started with us jamming and just mouthing shit. So I’ll be like, “Oh, were you saying this?” And he’ll be like, “No, but that sounds rad.” And he’s been on a spiritual journey for the last couple years, and he was pretty fucked up in the past – really not giving a shit, one bit, about anything; even his own life. So I think maybe that came out of him asking himself, “What is your problem? You don’t give a shit about your own life?”
That’s the thing about lyrics, that’s the fun part, is trying to figure out what they are about. I think, for the bands I like at least. I mean, a lot of times we write something, and it’s so abstract and does not make sense. You start singing a song a certain way, a lot of songs just start with some words you say that sound good to the music. A lot of the songs start like that; you just form them into something that’s meaningful to you or to whoever is writing the song. And some of them are just stories about whatever. We have a song called “Fine Columbians” that’s just a fictional story that I wrote about this drug deal gone wrong ust came. It kind of came out of nowhere, one of those that came out in two minutes that we still play and are pretty stoked on.
