Bandmates. Photo Courtesy of Fat Wreck Chords
So you live in New York, right? What are the things you like and don’t like about living there?
Yeah. New York is great if you’re into saxophones [laughs]. Umm…that’s a quote. Who said that? Oh yeah, Fear. You know that band Fear? I feel like New York has changed a lot. I might move away soon. I’ve been here almost twenty years.
Where are you thinking of moving to?
I don’t know, that’s the thing – I can’t really think of a better place to move, so until I do, I’m kind stuck here. I might just move deeper into Brooklyn [laughs].
Let’s do some fact checking – is it true you worked for Clear Channel at one point?
It’s funny actually. I was doing freelance music work doing lights and ended up at iHeartRadio. I really liked it there despite that it was part of the mega-corporation Clear Channel. All the people that worked there were amazingly nice and they knew who I was. They didn’t know right away but they figured it out really quick, partly because Leftover Crack had a song called “Clear Channel Fuck Off” which was the first track on the Fuck World Trade record [laughs]. It was a big joke to them and to me as well. I don’t really have any qualms about working for them. Everyone works for the man in one way or another. I would always take the paychecks and put them into other music stuff. The hardest part for me about doing it was when bands would show up to play at [iHeartRadio], I would really want to be playing instead of hauling their gear in and setting up the lights. [Clear Channel] afforded me the opportunity to see how it’s done on the big level and I learned a lot about being professional and showing up on time and setting up your gear properly and basic stuff like that. I’ve worked with literally hundreds and hundreds of the biggest name acts at this points – people like Lady Gaga, Jay-Z, Neon Trees, Justin Timberlake. All the biggest names in hip hop and rock play the theater I work at so I sort of get to see how people work in a small, intimate venue. It only holds 150 people. Of course, I’ve never been into the music or anything, but every part of the music industry fascinates me so I’ve absorbed it. I think a lot of it has helped our band in the end.
Having worked in multiple areas of the music industry, what would you change about the industry right now if you could?
There a ton of things I would like to change. One of the main things about the world we live in in general is that there are always a few real artists, then there are a thousand copycats that make music after them and clutter up the scene and make everything harder to do. I’m all for having more music in the world, but along the way there are so many people trying to figure out if music is something they want to do or not and sometimes it makes it harder for people who are trying to do it for real. So that would be one thing I would like to see change. I’d also love to have fewer lawyers in the music industry.
If you had five minutes with Barack Obama right now, what would you say to him?
I wouldn’t even take up the whole five minutes. I would just tell him how disappointed I was in him. I didn’t actually vote in the last election because I wasn’t home at the time, but if I did I would have voted for him. I haven’t voted in an election in a long time but that was one that I felt mattered. In the end, the whole thing just turned out to be a whole crock of shit. He didn’t end up doing any of the things he said he was going to do. He turned out to be another President just like anybody else. I actually watched a program recently called The Obama Deception…whatever man, just do the things you say you’re going to do when you’re trying to get elected. He didn’t do any of those things. I feel like I got fooled.
What if you could have five minutes with anybody in any field right now? Who would that be?
I would love to talk to Noam Chomsky. Not about political issues. I do really enjoy his political theories and ideas, but he’s a linguistics guy and I’d love to have five minutes of his time to pick his brain about language. I love language. One of my favorite apps on my phone is the dictionary app. It sends me new words every day and I write them down and try to memorize them and throw them in my vocabulary. I really like studying the etymology of words and finding out where they came from, why we use them, how long we’ve been using them, the different meanings they have and that stuff.
Lyrics are an interesting thing because a lot of times, especially with our audience, if you end up using words that they don’t understand you lose them. I learned the hard way that you have to use simple words to get your message across. People don’t like it when you get all big-worded on them, you know?
I suppose it can go both ways. In some respects, simplicity can be genius, but I listen to some artists whose lyrics are really poetic that just “wow” me. I listened to a lot of No Use for a Name growing up and I felt like Tony Sly had a way of blending the two styles. It was powerful.
Yeah, I’ve struggled with this for a long time. I’ll write words down and try and think of better ways to say them so they fall within the right amount of syllables or whatever. But I’ve discovered that you can’t really do that. You have to say things the way that you originally think them in your mind, no matter how simple sounding they are. It’s most effective to just say things as if you were talking in a conversation like you and I are having right now.
That’s really interesting, actually. Someone who I think has done that really well on their last few albums has been Laura Jane Grace of Against Me! I saw an interview recently where she talked about how she writes lyrics completely separate from the music itself then molds them together at the end. I thought that was an interesting approach.
I find that super interesting. I’m the same way. I write music totally separate from lyrics. I’m always writing music and I’m always writing lyrics but rarely together. Music is super easy for me – I can write music like I’m eating cake or something – but writing lyrics is a lot harder. I’ve always struggled with it so I sort of started carrying around a book – well, now I use a phone, of course – but whenever words would pop into my head I would write them down and then later on I’d have a piece of music and go back to my lyrics to figure out if any of those words fit with the song. Not necessarily in a rhythmic sense like “Oh, this is the right number of syllables for words in this song”, but in the overall “feel” of it. A lot of times I would write lyrics and music months apart and then be like “Oh, these are the words that go to that song.” But they didn’t arrive at the same time. I really feel like only one set of words belongs to one set of music and it’s your job, your challenge, to figure out what words go with what music. It’s like a puzzle. It’s something I really, really enjoy.
