Part 2: Profound Lyrics and Making The Album You have an amazing talent for wordsmithery. It puts other bands to shame. You can take something simple like 'you're a bitch' and turn it into something really profound. I'll hear a 10 Years song on the radio followed by something like...I don't know... 'Crazy Bitch.' It's like night and day... [laughs] That is definitely a balance we face every day in this industry. With the music industry being the way it is right now, it's really tricky. You don't want to be so artsy that you alienate yourself, but you don't want to be so mainstream that you get watered down. I definitely wanted to be more straightforward on this album with my lyrics. On the last record when I was writing lyrics, everything was internal. It all made sense in my head, only to find out later that even some of the other band members had no idea what I am talking about.
How do you approach writing lyrics?
I take it seriously. I treat it like poetry. You can say "I hate you and I want you to die" and that's about as simple as it gets. Or you can be clever about it and the person you wrote the song about becomes a fan of it before they even realize it's about them and it's about how you want them to die. We want songs that will stand the test of time, and songs like 'Crazy Bitch' just won't. We want commercial success, but we aren't willing to sacrifice our integrity to get there. And then, of course, I also like talking over people's heads sometimes.
[laughs] Hey, who doesn't? Do you ever start a song with a particular turn of phrase that you find interesting or a line you find particularly pleasing and build from there? Or does it start with a concept that then gets more specific?
I write one liners all the time and maybe it will go from there. Like in 'Actions & Motives' I used a line that everyone is familiar with. 'Oh what tangled webs we weave when we practice to deceive.' Everyone knows what it means. It's almost like a nursery rhyme. The song is built around something very familiar. The other lyrics fill it out, but that's something people will hear and recognize.
I know what I think the biggest differences are, but what do you think the biggest differences are between this album and the last one?
I think it's apparent. You hear the difference. We didn't want to make the same record twice. We're always moving. If you get stuck in a rut and do the same thing over and over, you make yourself irrelevant. So we wanted to move in a different direction. We wanted something open to the public instead of leaving them on their own to just figure it out. It's been a grueling process making this album and at some point it took on a life of it's own.
Boy, no kidding. I know there was a lot of drama surrounding finding the right people to make this album and getting it done. What happened?
When we first set out to make the record, we were using a producer from our hometown. Someone we knew and had worked with before. We wanted to use him as well as the engineer from
The Autumn Effect. It felt like we were treading the same territory again. I mean, we wanted to be comfortable with people we trusted, but the result was the same. We could have cranked this album out in about a month and been back on the road if we didn't care about moving forward musically. So, we stopped for a minute...well, more like a year. We kept writing and looking for something new. We had people suggesting
Rick Parasher from Seattle. He's done some great work, but he was something we had never experienced before. He had strong opinions about pretty much everything and made it known. Usually the people we work with are more reserved and trust us as much as we trust them. We hadn't worked with someone like him before and it created some problems within the group. There was a lot of division in the band. Some of us liked him...I thought he was a drunken asshole. The band does best when we are together, so we had to reassemble and get back to what WE want. The band really saved the day.
Let's talk about the song 'Picture Perfect (In Your Eyes)'. The new album is produced and polished, but that song really stood out (in the 5 songs being previewed) as being much more organic...
That's exactly it...that's what we were trying to capture. Not over-produce and get that more vintage feel to it. That came from Rick. You look at what he's done in the past with Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains and these other bands. They always had this vintage sound to it that ends up being timeless. We didn't want our record to sound fake. We didn't want it to sound totally different live. The content of 'Picture Perfect' is pretty much about this whole ridiculous world we've been thrown into. Everyone thinks you have it made. That phrase 'the grass is always greener on the other side.' It was such a hard process to make this record and that's one of the things that was on my mind. I didn't want people thinking everything was handed to us when we have been working our asses off to make this album. That's what the media wants you to believe. That it's black and white. You're either picture perfect, or you're a total train wreck.
The lyric that jumps out in that song is 'This isn't how I thought I'd turn out.'
Yeah, when we were a little independent band, teenagers basically, we made music for the love of making music. We wrote songs to write songs. There was no one pulling us or stretching us. Things change as you become successful. When you take a passion and turn it into a profession, everything changes. Like, I don't think porn stars want to go home and fuck after working all day. You can do anything too much to the point where it wears on you. We were overworked and everything we heard out of the business side about singles and chart positions and this and that...it's like 'how did we end up here?'