What were the last two years for you like, and how does it feel to be free of Elektra?
The last two years were really good and kind of bad. Right when that record [The Proximity Effect] was supposed to come out and then, all of a sudden, didn’t, I think we all tried to play it off, you know? In some sort of defense mechanism, like “eh, whatever, whatever,” because I guess we were touring a lot for it in Europe, and it was getting a really great reception over there, so that felt good. Then, a year later I started to be kind of upset about it because I really wanted it to come out here, so then we started getting more serious about pursuing it, and then we finally did. It feels really good, we’ve lost a little time, but it’s kind of neat in a way because I think we like playing together even more now and we’re excited about the new stuff, so in a way it’s kind of good to have some time off. Did you take time off between high school and college?
Actually, no.
Because I took a year and a half off, and it was great, and when I came back I was more excited about it. I think we’ve had a bit of the same thing happen here where now that we’re doing it ourselves, we’re doing so much more, but it doesn’t seem like that much more work, because we used to worry about all of the little details even though we weren’t doing it ourselves, and now it’s kind of the same amount of energy spent. So, basically I think we’re really happy to do it ourselves because it feels better and it gives you a little more motivation to get up in the morning.
But is it odd to be to finally touring an album that’s at least two years old to you?
It’s a little odd. I’m happy to say, though, that we still really like playing the songs. We kind of had that with the first record anyway, because it came out here and then a year and a half later it started doing stuff in Europe, so we did it all over again, and now we’re having the same thing in reverse. So it’s not that new a concept, but now I’m still totally into it. Plus we’re doing a few new songs every night, and we’re going to start rotating the new songs because we want to start recording soon.
Because like you said last night, it had been a year and a half since you’d played “Bad Best Friend,” and then it just came out last month, here anyway.
Yeah, that was kind of weird, it was just because someone was asking for it.
How has the reaction been on tour? Do people still remember Nada Surf?
Oh, fantastic! Just fantastic. We’re learning that a lot of our audience is younger than we thought. The all-ages shows are really much better. People have been really good, so even the night’s that aren’t super-crowded, it’s usually like some of the people drove for like five hours to get to the show, or whatever. It’s like the quality is really high. People are being really nice to us and really receptive, so it’s great.
I understand that you’ve been camping on tour.
Yeah. It’s funny, we did a couple of shows with the Ultimate Fakebook, we did four shows with them and there was this weekend in the middle of it where Ira [Elliot, drummer] had to fly home to play with his other band, called Champale, which is this great sort of cross between Burt Bacharach and Teenage Fanclub, maybe, with like vibes and horns, and they’re really good. But I digress, so Daniel [Lorca, bassist] and I had a weekend to kill, so we bought a tent and went to a campsite in Arkansas, and it was so great that in the morning we were like, “this more pleasant, more fun than motels, I wonder if we could actually do this in context of actually touring with the band?” And so we started doing it. It’s actually easier because you don’t have to take all of the guitars out of the van, and you don’t have to worry about the van. You know, every night in a motel, you’re always kind of nervous about the van, but here we’re sleeping right next to it. It’s so much better. It’s nice to wake up in the country because the street where I live at home in Brooklyn—it’s a great neighborhood, but my particular street is like the noisiest, busiest delivery, garbage trucks, you name it. I’m really in the middle of Industrial Hell, in a way.
Have you been doing it out here in California, just out of curiosity?
Yeah, we camped on the beach in San Luis Obispo, and the last time we camped before that was Salt Lake, maybe. We stay at friends’ houses a lot, but we’ve camped like seven nights on the tour, and we’re going to do it a lot more because we’re going to New Mexico.
Have you had a chance to get up to the Redwoods, ever?
No. Years ago I drove up Highway 1 with my mom, so I’ve done it, it’s beautiful, I wish we’d had the time, but we’ve been doing a lot of extra little things, like we went and played at our distributor’s office and then we went and played at a BIMX conference. Not the kind of thing we’d normally do, but a friend of ours’ company was there and he was like, “Help, we need bands! Help, help, help!” and we did it and it was hilarious because it’s one of those situations where it seemed like it was going to be awful, because we didn’t have our acoustic stuff and they hadn’t brought any acoustic stuff, so we’re sitting there with amps and guitars on like .005 in a conference center with people walking by and it looks like it’s going to be really bad, and Ira’s got nothing to do. But then we saw this Roland booth nearby, and they had one of those hand-controlled drum kits, really funny, like Symphonic or something, so we borrowed it and ended up having a great time. Why am I talking about this? I’m not sure, I’m sorry. (Laughter)
Moving away from the tour, what inspires you to write songs? Because I noticed that some of them, especially on The Proximity Effect, kind of move away from the kind of alienation kind of love songs and social issues pop up.
Yeah, well like most people I guess I write from personal experience, and those particular songs, those social-issue ones, just come from shared personal experiences, well I mean it’s obviously not about things that happened to me because it’s women’s issues, but I’ve just had a lot of friends go through that in a kind of eye-opening way, because once I started to find out—you know, a couple of friends told me—then you sort of realize that it’s probably a lot more people than you know. That kind of came about because of this thing called “Take Back the Night,” my ex-girlfriend from a long time ago spoke at one of those things and I was just really shocked by how many women, girls, young women were telling these stories for the first time, which made me think that all of the statistics are wrong, it’s much, much more prevalent. I felt kind of funny, it’s just this idea I had about what you can do on the radio. Actually, the idea came from “Popular,” because with that song a lot of people started talking about that song as if, “oh, is it about these kids or those kids, what does it mean?” etc, etc. And it was just a silly, sarcastic, experimental song and it kind of got some people talking, and I thought that if something that sort of superficial can make people think a little bit, then what would you do if you could talk to someone for three minutes? What would you say? I know it sounds totally ridiculous, but it’s just this idea that I had, and once I had the idea, I couldn’t really let go of it, because I just wanted to try it, and I don’t know if it works or not. So, there you go (laughs). What was the question? Yeah, personal experience. On this next record that we’re going to do I sort of started to get self-conscious about always writing about myself, you know? I kind of wanted to get away from it because I don’t want to do the same thing over and over again.
Is it working for you?
I don’t know. I’m sort of fooling around with it. I wrote a song about a fruit fly the other day. (Laughter)
From the perspective of a fruit fly?
Yeah, from the perspective of a fruit fly, and I really sort of enjoyed it. It was kind of like a transference thing, watching the fruit fly and thinking like a fruit fly. It just sounds totally stupid, but I don’t know how people make that move away from always just chronicling their problems. I probably will always do that, but I wouldn’t mind kind of getting away from it.
Yeah, I read an interview with Rivers Cuomo who said that for a while after Pinkerton, he tried the same approach, but it wasn’t coming out as genuinely. Is that a concern of yours?
Yeah, sure. That’s probably why I haven’t done it before because it feels funny to write about other people, but maybe that’s why insects will do. (Laughter) But, whatever, maybe we’ll just end up making another record like these; we always try to do other stuff even if it just comes out the same. Like on The Proximity Effect, when we started to make it we thought, “Oh yes, strings and all these extra instruments, etc, etc, etc,” and friends of ours who play, like this guy I met on the subway, Dylan Williams who’s a really great viola player, who plays on a lot of records and is like 21 years old, we asked him to play and he did all this stuff that’s really good, he’s so talented. And then this cellist that we know, and they put all these strings on that record and we ended up taking them all off, and it wasn’t because they weren’t really good, it’s just because it didn’t feel right, so we went back to our old thing.
Your vocal and guitar parts seem to be totally different, in that your voice always seems to be kind of pure and your guitar is really trashy sounding at times, or scary. Who were your influences in each?
Gosh, well I think guitar-wise, my influences are always a lot clearer sounding than what I end up doing, and I don’t know if that’s because we’re just a power trio and we’re at heart really just a garage band, and it’s very hard for us to get away from the feeling that it needs to rock, you know? So we end up doing that a lot, even though guitar-wise my favorite people are people I don’t play like at all, but just really adore, like Tom Verlaine from Television, and early Robyn Hitchcock stuff in his first band the Soft Boys, and who else guitar-wise? Alex Chilton, Chris Bell, all of that Big Star stuff, and Jimmy Page, he’s almost my favorite. It’s weird with Zeppelin, I don’t love them and I don’t listen to them a lot, but just in terms of the music, he’s really incredible and amazing, he’s got all these different parts and sounds. It’s funny, no ones ever asked me about influences particularly, they just ask for bands I like, but I guess it’s interesting if you think about it. I feel indulgent, but I’ll go ahead. Vocally, God, I don’t know. I’ve been listening to a lot of things in the last couple of years like Astrud Gilberto; do you know who she is?
Uh, no.
Do you know that song, “Girl From Ipanema?” It was the first bossa nova. I guess in a way it was the only really popular bossa nova song, this was like 1961. It’s just beautiful, she has this really pure… you’d really like it, I don’t know if you’re into bossa nova, but if you get anything by Astrud Gilberto or Antonio Carlos Jobim, she was the main singer and he was the main songwriter of that whole genre, and it’s just so beautiful. Really, really great. She has a really pure voice. Maybe part of it was that we finally had a record, we made that first album and I had already been singing this band and some other band for years, but I never had to listen to it, and all of a sudden we had that first record and I would hear it a bunch at people’s houses or whatever, or rarely on the radio, but more often when we had to check shows or something, and listen back to recordings, and I guess I thought I was yelling a little too much, and that bothered me, so I kind of wanted to do something that I would enjoy listening to, (laughter), you know what I mean?
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