Ezra Kire, a thoughtful punk. Photo Courtesy of Fat Wreck Chords
In a nutshell, Morning Glory frontman Ezra Kire is a worldly man with a message. If you ask him, his band is a bastion of “revolution rock” – a style that melds sociopolitical punk with a melodic collection of strings, horns, pianos and chunky metallic riffs. On the heels of releasing the album “War Psalms” (Fat Wreck Chords) earlier this year, we sat down for an intimate conversation with Ezra to learn about the man behind the music, including his fascination with Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher, his favorite word and the similarities he finds between surf and music culture. And that’s just scratching the surface…
Corey: Your latest album War Psalms shows off a much more polished, mature sound than your previous records. It also has more of a sociopolitical stance. Can you comment on the life experiences that informed the content on this album?
Ezra: Music is definitely a direct reflection of what’s going on with me. I’m kind of an egocentric writer. The Poets [Were My Heroes] record was sort of around me getting clean off drugs and rediscovering music because for a long time I wasn’t able to write any music while I was on drugs. It was blocking my creative path. The War Psalms record took that progress one step further. It’s me rediscovering the fact that I like sociopolitical music and that I have a message and things I want to say to the world. A lot of my earlier music was based on politics and with War Psalms I remembered that that’s what I really like to do.
Tell me about your interaction with yours fans. Would you say that on average they are well informed about the issues in your music? Would you expect them to be?
That’s a really good question, man. I would say that they are not super informed people, but they are people that care, which is nice because it gives you an audience that’s willing to listen. I used to have a hard time communicating with a lot of [my former band] Leftover Crack’s fans. That sort of bothered me. I played in that band for years and felt that our fan base was the lowest common denominator in the music world. It was a lot of street kids and dropouts – which is fine and I’m not judging them at all – but a lot of the message didn’t “stick” I guess. Sometimes you could feel like you were screaming at a wall or something. None of that, of course, really mattered because it was the energy and emotion that counted, but Morning Glory has a little bit smarter of a fan base I suppose you could say.
Again, I’m not trying to judge anybody or say that I’m a super smart guy or some intelligent professor who knows everything, but sometimes when you’re talking to people and singing these songs you want people to understand them.
We have a good relationship with our current fan base, but even more than that – and not to sound like a total douche bag – we have a personal connection with a lot of our fans. We have a lot of hardcore fans that come out to everything we do and we mostly know them by name. There’s not a lot of them, but there is a good group of diehards that we’ve gotten to know from seeing them at shows and it’s been a good experience in that sense.
Punk definitely attracts some of the types of fans you talked about, but on the other end of the spectrum there are guys like Greg Graffin from Bad Religion, Milo Aukerman from Descendents and Joe Escalante from The Vandals who have all received PhDs and JDs. Are those types of educational pursuits something you’d like to see more of in punk or think the scene could benefit from at all?
I’d like to see more of that stuff in punk as far as role models go. When you get somebody like Tom Morello who has a background in politics and law, I would tend to take those types of people more seriously or look up to them more, you know? When I was a fan and a punk growing up, the bands that always made an immediate impact on me were those who I knew had some real world experience in politics or school or something educational. That was just me. I had an automatic respect for them because going to school wasn’t something I was able to do, though I always wanted to. It sort of gave a legitimacy to the music I was listening to.
A lot of the songs for War Psalms were written on the fly in the studio. Can you comment on this approach and how you generally go about writing music?
Sure, but I warn you, when I talk about songwriting I tend to go pretty long so just cut me off whenever you feel like it [laughs]. Songwriting is one of my favorite things in life. The short answer is good songs write themselves. For me it should never take longer than the duration of the song to write the song. So if a song ends up at three and a half minutes long, it shouldn’t take more than three and a half minutes to actually write the thing. The song should just appear to you. Most songwriters can agree with that. Songs that you end up working a long time on never turn out the way you want them to, you know what I mean? I always consider songwriters to be messengers and not writers. It’s like a puzzle – it’s your job to figure out what words go with the music and what the music is, but I don’t feel like I actually write the songs. I just sort of decipher them. I feel like they’re already there and it’s my job to transpose them or translate them into guitar music or piano music or whatever it is A lot of the songs that we were writing in the studio were just appearing. I’d hear them in my head and I’d be like “Oh, this part is for this and this part is for that” and that was it. And of course, those songs ended up being the best ones.
