Seen Your Video: The Airborne Toxic Event's "Gasoline"

"Gasoline" has been one of my favorites from The Airborne Toxic Event since the very first time I saw them at SXSW in 2008. (So much so in fact that I found myself asking for even the roughest demo of it to go with the big interview we did with them less than a month later.) It's got such energy, and that combination of Daren Taylor's drum beats and Mikel Jollett/Steven Chen's guitar riffs creates the hookiest of hooks.

The video for it came out a few weeks ago and it's charming. Both a band video and homage to their stomping ground of East Los Angeles, it shows the landscape and the streetscape on which ATE thrives.

Airborne Toxic Event's Daren Taylor and Mikel Jollet Play DJ on Q Radio

(Photo Credit: Martin Godwin)

The Airborne Toxic Event are playing at the Black CAt here in DC tomorrow night (with Henry Clay People opening, who you should definitely not miss). This is a band whose musicial influences and preferences are pretty interesting and different (this is a band covering Goodbye Horses for pete's sake). Drummer Daren Taylor and lead singer/guitarist Mikel Jollet founded Airborne a couple years ago, and something I've always enjoyed the two of them is how truly fucking funny they are together.

This gives you a good indication of both these points; the music is good but the banter is priceless: Daren Taylor and Mikel Jollet dj on Q RAdio, 7/3/09.
Playlist:
:: The Airborne Toxic Event - Some Time Around Midnight
:: Neil Young - Revolution Blues
:: PJ Harvey - This is Love
:: White Stripes - Red Rain
:: XTC - Radios in Motion
:: Roxy Music - Editions of You
:: Stevie Wonder - Heaven Help Us All
:: Bob Dylan - Boots of Spanish Leather
:: David Bowie - Quicksand
:: The National - November
:: Modest Mouse - Bankrupt on Selling
:: The Clean - Tally Ho!
:: Brian Eno - Third Uncle
:: Pavement - Here
:: Leonard Cohen - If It Be Your Will
:: Pulp - Common People
:: Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
:: New Order - Age of Consent
:: Iggy & the Stooges - Gimme Danger
:: M83 - Kim and Jessie
:: Beach House - Gila
:: Lykke Li - Little Bit
:: The Cure - Close to Me
:: The Airborne Toxic Event - Gasoline

Airborne Toxic Event Tour Blog; Drummer Daren Taylor Talks to Animals

This is one of the video blog posts that The Airborne Toxic Event is doing during their "30 shows in 30 days" tour throughout England this month.

Let's hope Mark Wahlberg's radio has been tuned to something besides KROQ all this time. You know, for drummer Daren Taylor's sake.

(See the rest of the tour video posts here.)

Show Review: The Airborne Toxic Event@ DC9 (7-29-08)

After The Airborne Toxic Event took the stage at DC9 here in Washington, DC recently, we were supposed to sit down and follow up on our long interview from a few months back. But with their driving to Boston the next day (a hellaciously long trip), very Pemberton-weary faces all 'round, and the knowledge that we were seeing each other again twice in next two months anyway, I suggested we reschedule. (Lead singer/songwriter/rhythm guitarist Mikel Jollet, back fresh from a long jog down to the Capitol and back, and I did squeeze in a few minutes about Airborne's acoustic video series and the general state of Airborne these days which you can watch here.)

Not planning to interview the band AND review the show, I left the notebook at home. But I did bring a camera, thinking some snaps might pair nicely with the interview....


(click on any photo to enlarge)

...as well as a friend who'd never seen or heard Airborne before, who was going merely on my mentions of how energetic Airborne is live. He has a predilection for old-school hard NY/Boston punk, and while Airborne is punkish in Daren Taylor's strong backbeat and Steven Chen's piercing guitar chords, theirs is a punk more like The Smiths than punk like Minor Threat. I wasn't sure he'd like it at all.

Guess what? Airborne's live show struck again. He loved it. And I loved his comments on it so I included them below:

The music rocked my socks off. I really dug a lot of the songs. Another thing I noticed is that when I catch a show by a band I don't know is that I will often like them better after a couple of hearings; its like my brain has to hear a song a couple of times before it clicks. The Airborne setlist, on the other hand, grabbed me immediately. Not sure what the reason for the difference is.

You know how sometimes there are summer nights that feel different -- wide open, like something unusual and wonderful could happen? Kind of a sense of mystery and possibility in the air? The night of the show was the opposite of one of those nights, and you could feel it in the audience before Airborne took the stage. The whole atmosphere was leaden and exhausted (not that I was surprised, this is DC after all. DC is Hollywood for ugly people after all...). I thought that it was interesting that once they started playing, Airborne gradually pulled the audience out of its funk, until by the end of the show the crowd had real energy. Even another talented band might have succumbed to the initial lethargy of the crowd, but Airborne didn't seem fazed by it.

And I was surprised at how laid back and accessible the band members were before & after the show. A band with a nice start on a body of work like theirs could get very arrogant and full of themselves, but the members were all very cool.

Oh, I forgot, one other thing...did you ever watch Deadwood on HBO? There is a character named Seth Bullock played by Timothy Olyphant.

In the series Seth Bullock is the sheriff of the town, and not someone you want to mess with. He had a volcanic temperament and was lethal with a sidearm. So Daren the drummer has a similar facial hair thing going as the Seth Bullock character, which I noticed when I met him. Then later, after you got up to chat with Noah, Daren is walking by the bar, when this big doofy meathead looking guy inexplicably sticks his foot out behind him and Darren trips over it. There's no way meathead meant to do it I think -- he was looking the opposite way. Daren stumbles for a split second then catches himself, and looks up. And for a brief moment, Daren looks homicidal. I am really thinking he is about to break a chair over doofus' head, and Airborne is going to need another drummer tonight while Daren cools his heels in the pokey. Then he snaps out of it, takes a sip of beer, and heads off where he was going. Which was a relief, because its better to look like Seth Bullock than act like him -- too many corpses.

Like Keith Richards once said of Charlie Watts, "Never fuck with a drummer, man."

"Does This Mean You're Moving On," Track 5 of the Airborne Toxic Event Acoustic Video Series Released

Ok, I love Daren Taylor, drummer of The Airborne Toxic Event. I got a chance to hang out with him some after Airborne's recent Webster Hall show in NYC, and he's one of those really *good* guys. It only takes 5 minutes in Daren's presence to pick up that he's a) funny as hell, b) passionate about what he does, and c) a genuinely kind personality. Daren is the guy that you'd always want at your parties because he'd keep things lively, as well as always be the first to offer to help clean up when it was over.

He's also INCREDIBLY talented in terms of his drumming style. He seems to have a great ear for filling a space with exactly what the song needs-nothing more, nothing less. I've heard the new cd and the creative nuances he adds is something that really stands out, something that one can't always hear in a loud rock club.

This creativity is obvious in the fifth track from their acoustic song series, "Does This Mean You're Moving On." The videos for this acoustic series are shot in different locations around Los Angeles, and for this latest one, the band is performing the song while piled in the back of a car that's driving down Sunset Blvd. How does a drummer play in cramped surroundings that include two guitars, five people, some room to shake a tambourine, AND room for the driver? By pounding on the roof of the car with his fist. Now that, my friends, is creativity.

Show Review: The Airborne Toxic Event @ Pianos, NYC (6-12-08)/Webster Hall, NYC (6-13-08)

(Click on the photo to enlarge)

So as it turned out, the weekend I was heading up to NYC to visit college friends was the same weekend that The Airborne Toxic Event was playing two shows there, this past Thursday night at Pianos in the Bowery, and this past Friday night opening for the Fratellis at Webster Hall. Given that the room at Pianos holds roughly 130 people, I had a feeling that it would be the show to see, given the “personal" nature of Airborne shows. Listening to Airborne’s lyrics is somewhat like hearing a close friend pour his heart out about a romantic relationship that went array but set to music. That sort of thing is better to hear about in a smaller setting than in the midst of a giant crowd (and Webster Hall holds three floors of giant crowds), so the choice of which show to attend was obvious.

Having last played in NYC in early 2007, the band looked cheerful, chatty, and happy to be there. But don’t be mistaken, once they got started, the set at Pianos could only be described as “intense.” I’d discovered Airborne this past March during SXSW, late one night in an outdoor courtyard. And they were fantastic. But something was definitely different this time 'round (and it wasn't just the trannie fashion shoot taking place across from the bar (heh)). It could have been the smallness of an enclosed room in a tiny Bowery bar that begged for its walls to be blown out versus a courtyard surrounded by a vast Texas night, but believe me when I tell you the songs were leaping off the Pianos stage Thursday night, grabbing the audience by their collective lapels and shaking madly.

This was a band on a mission, like they were telling the many press folks in the audience (based on the number of notebooks and mad scribblings I saw going on), "Go forth and tell others what you have seen here tonight." Lead singer/songwriter and rhythm guitarist Mikel Jollett had a look of vivid determination on his face as he sang the 10-song set, and he didn't just sing/scream his lyrics, he SCREAMED them in a passionate caoinadh. Lead guitarist Steven Chen, who normally appears rather stoic onstage, was crouching and swaying over his guitar and keyboard, almost as if his fevered playing was taking everything out of him and he was about to drop. Violinist/keyboardist Anna Bulbrook was either on her knees and tearing the sound from her violin, or a whirling dervish of dance, hitting her tambourine so hard I feared some nasty bruises would result. Drummer Daren Taylor was standing up behind his kit at times, but only to better beat the bejesus out of his cymbals and snares. This passion, coupled with the size of the room, created a definitive bombastic wall of sound especially during "Papillon," "This is Nowhere," "Sometime Around Midnight," and "Innocence." “Does this Mean You’re Moving On,” a hit on Los Angeles radio, jumped and cut more than the recorded version; there was definitely an edge to it this night. “Something New” isn’t a song I was familiar with, but when you hear it, pay close attention to Chen’s guitar riffs as they are quite catchy; all I could think of was Dick Dale if he was in the Smiths with Johnny Marr. Bassist Noah Harmon is probably the only classically trained bassist who could teach a class on how to do rock kicks and stances without looking foolish, and man, can the man play. The crowd ate him up especially during “This is Nowhere.”

If folks weren’t converted in these first seven songs, the last half of Airborne’s set changed all that. Jaws hitting the floor people, I saw jaws hitting the floor, and this all started with “Sometime Around Midnight.” I personally know at least three people from that audience who had never heard Airborne before this show, and liked what they were hearing ok, but “Midnight” was what hooked 'em for real. I’ve tried no less than 10 times now to write what I saw/felt, both in terms of the vibe in the room and what I saw on stage during these last few songs (“Sometime Around Midnight,” “Wishing Well,” and “Innocence” specifically), but I’m just not finding the words to do it justice. I think it’s because these aren’t songs with just words, these are songs that drip with vulnerable emotion. The way these songs are constructed lyrically, you’re sharing the same mind/body with the person running into that ex-lover who could always break you with a look, sharing that same busted heart from a love tangled in blue, feeling that same screaming sense of despair, regret, loneliness. The way they are constructed musically, you can’t think or focus or look away from this barrage of sound and hooks and screams of lyrical pain coming at you from the stage, even if you wanted to. It is a rather exhilarating and slightly uncomfortable experience, all at the same time.

The encore song “Missy,” Jollett’s ode to a girl and Los Angeles, didn’t lose any of this power. (Let us also not forget to state here the apparent rarity of an opening act getting an encore in NYC.) I read someplace Bulbrook loves this song because she gets to jump into the crowd and dance around, a comment I thought of when I saw her crouching down by the monitors, waiting, waiting, waiting for Jollett to scream “Well I swear that there’s still some good in me,” which is the point in the song where it goes from a bouncy little melody to something full-on and raucous. And she does it in heels no less.

Jollett, in a conversation we had about songwriting awhile back, told me, “I always spend a lot of time trying to find the right words to say, and I don't know if I always do.” From the number of “Tell me you just saw what I saw” looks of amazement on many faces after the show, I think it’s safe to say his word search, for these 10 songs at least, was a stunning success. And I think the band knew they’d tapped into a something major as a band and with the audience this night too, given the big shit-eating grin each of them wore at the end of the set.

And I did wind up seeing the Friday night show at Webster Hall after all. I hadn't planned on it initially because a) I couldn’t score a press pass and tickets were around $30, and b) Webster Hall isn’t always the greatest place for a show , a venue known to “ruin the live-show reputations of good bands.” But we wound up scoring reaaally cheap tickets at the last minute, and I thought eh, what the hell, maybe I should actually *see* the show once (after the Thursday show, friends asked me if I actually watched any of it with my eyes because I was so focused on writing stuff down). Plus who knew, maybe Pete Townshend would show up for this Fratellis show too. So we went.

Airborne’s set at Webster Hall was good and I think many of the Fratellis' fans were won over based on the enthusiastic level of applause at the end of their set. But was it a hair-raising-on-your-arms kind of intensity and energy that moved from the audience to the band and vice versa like Pianos the night before? Not really, though I think that had everything to do with the vastness of Webster Hall than anything to do with the band. Hell, Bulbrook couldn’t even jump out into the crowd during “Missy” because jumping from a stage that high up and whatnot, she’d probably broken an ankle. A guy near us at the bar, who had only ever seen Airborne live at this show and the Pianos show, made an interesting point: “Last night was more personalized, more energized. At Pianos you could almost reach out and touch them, you felt the energy. Here, it is such an expansive and big place it’s tough to have that same connection. To hear the lead singer make comments like “We want to know you so come say hello” and stuff, to hear that said at a big place like this, it just doesn’t ring true in the same fashion, though they obviously mean it, given what I saw at Pianos last night.” So do I regret seeing both? Of course not, but it did prove to me that we didn't hallucinate it, that Thursday night Pianos show was something special, so much so that it spoiled anyone who attended both.

Airbone's first full length LP is out August 5th on the Majordomo label, and will be performing at, among other places this summer, the Monolith Festival in September.

Sound and Vision: My Interview with The Airborne Toxic Event (Act IV)

(Old photo "disappeared" so....new photo via Modelography)

Act I of IV
Act II of IV
Act III of IV

ACT IV of IV
"No matter how long it holds me if it falls apart/or makes us millionaires/We'll go through this thing together/and on heaven's golden shore we'll lay our heads"-Golden, My Morning Jacket (File taken down per request of a threatening entity)

Mikel and I reconvene a day or two later, again via video conferencing, to tie up some loose ends.

Me: You guys only have an EP out but are looking to put out your first LP. You have gotten some label interest. Say you get a lot of interest but no one you're really knocked out by. Would you ever consider putting it out yourselves?
MJ: Yeah absolutely, we have extensive plans for that. We've gone pretty far down that road already thinking about it. We just made the record ourselves at the first of the year, and then it was, "Well let's find a way to put it out." And we knew we were going to be in front of labels and all that kind of stuff in January and to some extent, February. What we decided is that we want to do whatever makes sense. And what makes sense could be a 360 deal on a major--we doubt it but it could--that's one extreme, right? Then there's the other extreme where we just put it out ourselves. We'd have a proper release for it, but it's just whatever makes sense.

We've been like...I dunno if "disillusioned" is the right word, but the fucking major label system is broken for a reason. It is just...I do not understand how those people think, at all. (laughs) It's like a sinking ship.

(From here, we start discussing the book about Wilco, Learning How to Die, which covered the band and their trials and tribulations with the whole record label merger mess that took place around the time of their seminal record, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.)

Me: But it's exciting because people are starting to put stuff by themselves and such, ala Radiohead.
MJ: Yeah, one of the cool things about all this is that the distribution channels are no longer guarded by these huge corporations. It's like well, the whole thing is fucked anyway. KROC [a major radio station in LA] for example, they added us even though we're unsigned because they're like, "Fuck it, this whole thing is going down." And all those indie rock promoters of the '90s promoting major radio, that's all dead with that huge lawsuit. And no one is making money on cd sales….Except indie rock. Do you know that indie rock sales are actually up 8%, and country and hip-hop have taken the hardest hits? It's like heyday for indie rock right now. We think it's because it's lean years now but indie rock bands are used to being lean. It's like, "Fuck we have to be in a van? We've been in a van for 20 years, who cares."

Me: I'd asked you before about why you didn't study writing in school versus the science stuff you did study, and you answered briefly, but we had to break at that point so things got a little garbled. Basically your life/training had been veering towards science at that point; being a writer was a big switch. Why and how did it happen?
MJ: Well, I decided to become a writer when I was 26 or so, and I moved up to a horse ranch, as I think I mentioned. And I've felt all my life that the smart people in this society were the writers, those were always the people that I respected and admired. So whenever I thought about becoming a writer, I'd get a little tingle in my spine, you know, kind of nervous and excited. Whether I had any proficiency at it is another question. (laughs) But I certainly was interested in it.

So I decided that's all I wanted to do with my life, and for a long time, that's all I did. All I did was write, write, write, write. for years. And then I had this big turning point with music where I was working on a novel. I had a story go up the ladder at the New Yorker but then they ended up not taking it--that's the one coming out in McSweeney's next month. And I got into Yaddo [an artist colony and residence in Saratoga Springs, NY] that same month, which is a huge honor for an unpublished fiction writer. So I got in there and I got the prime spot in the summer, they gave me 2 months. I had a really good literary agent I'd landed, and I had a novel that was just about done that he was really excited about. That same month, I met Daren. And I remember my parents, my friends, everyone I knew, were like you've got to take this. I had to make a decision…if I went to Yaddo, I wasn't going to be able to start the band. And suddenly, it was "Am I a writer or am I a musician?" I remember telling my folks, because they'd seen me struggle for years and years trying to establish some kind of writing career and working on the novel forever, and they said "You're out of your mind!" They thought I was nuts. And I was like, "But I met this drummer and he's really good, he's a great drummer," and they were like, "Who cares!" (laughs) But then I chose not to go [to Yaddo] and instead, I locked myself in the warehouse with Daren for a few months, played music, and started Airborne. And we haven't looked back. My parents, they understand it now I think. At the time they didn't get it, they were like "What are you doing??" But now they seem to get it, that we had some real clear ideas of what we wanted the band to be, and we didn't want it to be the run of the mill whatever.
Me: Wow man, that'll either be an inspiration to a lot of people or piss a lot of people off. (laughs)
MJ: But then it's funny because now I've been doing music and I'm finally getting published as a fiction writer.
Me: I guess the question I have of that is, what, Daren wasn't going to stick around? Was he shipping off to sea or something? (laughs)
MJ: That's a good question…I guess I really understood that it was a crossroads. I think at the time, I really understood that [if he went to Yaddo] I would have had to finish the book, and then go and become a writer. And you know, Daren might join another band before then, and he was the first drummer I'd met that I was like, this guy's great, I gotta work with him. We just clicked immediately; we knew we wanted to be in the same kind of band. We lived and died by it and we knew this was going to be a thing for us. I guess I knew it was a crossroads.

And music suddenly felt way more real. Like the writing of the novel, which had been the focus of my life for years, suddenly seemed really academic and almost, like I was an imposter because all I did was play music, like all day long. And that's what ultimately helped me make my decision. I couldn't imagine literally going to this place and writing because I had literally been playing and singing for 8 hours a day for the previous 8-9 months, ever since the whole thing with my folks and my disease and everything. It just seemed stupid, like this isn't me anymore.

On working with Filter*/industry folks he knows:
(*Ed. note: If you're coming in late to our interview here, Jollett used to be Managing Editor at Filter)
MJ: We won't work with them. You know how like in the Senate you can't just avoid a conflict of interest, you have to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest? Being in LA and an indie rock band in LA, Filter's a big part of the scene here, so we've just avoided it at every turn. It's important to us; we don't want to look like we're cheating.
Me: That's interesting. When I was doing my research on you guys, I guess I'd come across some comments and such that went like, "Oh they're just industry people, they're getting big because they're using their connections."
MJ: Yeah I actually didn't mention it to Daren for the first 6 months. I didn't mention it to club promoters because I just didn't think it was relevant. And also, nobody fucking cares. (laughs) I mean, people are going to come see your band or they're not. If I said to you, "Hey let's go see this show, there's this Fader writer playing," you'd be like, "Who fucking cares!" (laughs) Same thing with us. And also, if you're a writer, you don't have any connections, you know publicists, you don't know anyone else. It's like, "Hey you're a publicist, I have a band," and they'd say, "So what, I know 5000 bands...and I'm in a band too." The whole thing is kind of silly.

I try not to read press because it just makes you super-self conscious all the time. But I feel like it's sort of part of it, slagging off bands. I used to like to slag off bands, it's fun to slag off bands, it's part of the sport of it. If you can't handle people having strong opinions about what you're doing, then you shouldn't be a musician....that's part of the sport of rock and roll. I mean you're putting yourself out there for it, and you have to take it all with a grain of salt, the praise and the derision. 95% of our press has been extremely positive so we're very spoiled....but it [bad press] is all part of the sport, it's part of being in the mix….it's awesome. It's more fun being in a band and making music and being part of it all, you know?

On doing videos:
MJ: Yeah it was fun. It was a big group of people, everyone contributed. My friend Jason Wishnow directed, and he's just an amazing director, he just put the whole thing together. And we did it on a shoestring budget...the "crew" was us and our friends, and we just kind of did it.



We're doing another one pretty soon for "Midnight." We were going to wait a little while but I think we've decided it's time to just make a video…we don't care. We have some good ideas for what we want to do with it. I think the important thing is to have a good idea and then try to execute it, I mean how much was that OK GO video, which cost them what, 1000 bucks? (laughs) But it was super smart.

On the all black wardrobe the band often sports onstage:
MJ: Yeah, that's on purpose. The idea, at first, was we wanted there to be a certain anonymity to what we were doing. The original idea was something like mirroring the static of a television…we didn't want it to be a question of what's cool, but more to serve the artistic purposes of the band. Like dealing with a world so saturated with media and trying to cut through it by doing something that's really not.

About the name "Airborne Toxic Event":
MJ: The name The Airborne Toxic Event made a lot of sense to us for a few reasons. The cloud itself is formed in "White Noise" when an explosion at a chemical plant releases this enormous black cloud into the atmosphere. It's deadly, or at least reported to be so. The protagonist, Jack Gladney, gets exposed to it and thus spends the entire rest of the book thinking that he was going to die. It made him confront his fear of death. The Airborne Toxic Event was literally a symbol of his own death, floating out on the horizon somewhere.

I wrote a lot of the music for the band in a very dark period after my mom got diagnosed with cancer and I got diagnosed with auto-immune disorder. It basically made me feel very mortal. I guess it was the first time I really realized, in a powerful way, that I was totally going to die someday. And at that point, with that realization, suddenly all I wanted to do was play music. So I guess the name made sense since it literally symbolized that idea.

About his disease:
MJ: In a way, it makes you grounded because I'm never going to be like, pinup rockstar guy. I never wanted that anyway, but that's just not an option so I better really, really mean it. And I can't get vain because in the next couple of years I'm going to start looking really funny. It's already kind of started. But you know, shit like that, it's just hair...I have a funny peanut head so I'll probably just shave my head at some point. We talked about it in the band. Noah's like, "When the day comes and you just got to shave your head because you're on nothing left, we're all gonna do it, we're all just going to shave our heads, an act of solidarity in the band." (laughs).
Me: Even Anna?
MJ: Oh I dunno about Anna. (both laugh)

About being so forthright and honest in his songwriting:
MJ: I feel like the best thing you can do is invite people into your life. I mean, you go to an Airborne show, you know a lot about me because all these songs are about real things that happened.

It's sort of appropriate, like a deal with the devil in some weird way. You're going to have this band of great musicians you get to play with, and out of nowhere you're able to write songs, but you're gonna start looking funny in the next couple of years so you better not let it get to your head, you better not become an asshole. You have to actually mean it. You have to be in it for the right reasons and not for vanity and stuff like that."

Dénouement
5 days prior to the initial publishing of this interview, I came across this. When Jollett and I talked that weekend, I inquired about it. He said he couldn't dish, it was a PR thing, but that they were officially announcing their plans on Thursday. That Thursday, I received this:

From: AirborneToxic@aol.com Sent:Thu 4/17/08 1:16 PM
good morning, We are thrilled to announce that we have officially signed a record deal with Majordomo records. Majordomo is a new, independent, west coast label made up of refugees from both major and indie labels including Rhino records, Warner Brothers, Mute, V2 and many others. The situation (and the deal) combines the tenacity and dedication of an indie with the large scale distribution (Majordomo is distributed through the enormous Sony/BMG network), meaning our record will be everywhere records can be. When we looked at the options and considered who and what we are as a band, the state of the music industry and the intelligence and innovation of Majordomo, there was no doubt in our minds that this was the right home for us. The deal is a partnership arrangement, very similar to that which Radiohead signed with TBD Records, that we feel allows us to control our destiny as artists while benefiting from a large and dedicated team at our label. It just felt right. Our self-titled debut record will be in stores on July 15th. We will be touring extensively in support of the record, announcing all those dates very soon. One date we can announce now is June 7th on which we will be playing BFD, Live 105's summer music festival at Shoreline Amphitheatre in lovely Mountain View, California. Can't wait to play that one. Also, we'll be playing Last Call with Carson Daly on Tuesday, April 22nd on NBC. Big day for us. more soon... we miss you and love you, more than you know, more than we could ever begin to tell you-- Mikel, Daren, Noah, Steven, Anna the Airborne Toxic Event myspace. com/theairbornetoxicevent --- a new, a very extensive interview with an East Coast music blog, published in four parts (this is I and II): http://betweenloveandlike. blogspot. com/2008_04_01_archive. html

On this, the virtual eve of their signing to a major label, I asked Jollett how he defined success. He said it wasn't so much about the money and whatnot, it was more that people (about a million in fact) discovered and appreciated ATE's music. New people that is, not people who already knew them or had a vested interest already, but people they'd never met, people who didn't know them, but who just got the proverbial "it." He told me a funny story about how he'd met a guy named Ray after a show one night, and how psyched Ray was that Jollett had written 'Sometime Around Midnight,' as Ray had been through something similar with an ex-girlfriend of his. With this signing to Majordomo and SONY/BMG's distribution muscle, Jollett should expect to hear something similar from Rays in Kentucky and South Carolina and Boston and... in the not too distant future.

After the many hours of us talking and pickling our livers, I think I gained more than a few insights about ATE... Like they're each absolutely whip smart. Very, very funny. Look out for each other. And universally dedicated to making their band succeed. The optimist in me thinks that while that book of Crash Davis idioms might be necessary for some bands, I don't believe it is for these guys. The record industry is a tough bully sure, but Jollett and Company are like a brainy family of siblings whose dad taught them to fight; they may seem small, but if pressed, none of them are afraid to throw that left hook to a jaw and leave that bully bleeding in the corner.

Travis Woods, an LA writer whose work has been in Prefix Magazine and the LA Times (as well as a great interview with ATE back in Sept 2007), picks up where I leave off here. His interview includes the band's outlook after signing, information about the new label, AND the mp3 of a great song ATE plays live, "I Don't Want to be on TV." Go check it out...
Web in Front, Featured Artist: The Airborne Toxic Event

Sound and Vision: My Interview with The Airborne Toxic Event (Act III)

(Photo via Modelography)

Act I of IV
Act II of IV

ACT III of IV
"The hope I had in a notebook full of white, dry pages/Was all I tried to save"-Via Chicago (Live, 2.18.08 at The Riv, Chicago)-Wilco

(We pick up the interview where Act II closed. Steven is in another room playing guitar.)

Me: Has there been one writer whose books you collect/always pick up when they put one out?
MJ: Yeah, probably Fitzgerald, Phillip Roth, Don DeLillo, and Alice Munro are ones I like.
Me: And in terms of music?
MJ: I've always followed the career of Eric Bachmann pretty closely….Archers of Loaf, Crooked Fingers, his solo stuff, I think he's this misunderstood musical genius. He's almost a morality tale in terms of why you not only have to be serious about your songwriting, but serious about what it does for your life. He's an extremely talented guy and I've always looked up to him and admired him, my whole life. I've always felt he was a very important songwriter that's been kind of overlooked. But yeah, pretty much anything he does I'll follow. For years and years I followed anything The Cure did, though I lost track of that bit a little while ago.

But I'm more of an archive person, I more discover things and follow their catalog for awhile. I don't read books, I read authors. I find a book that I like and I want to read every book by that author, the same thing with bands. So I have these seminal bands that I've listened to every one of their songs and tried to absorb some of what they were doing I guess.
Me: I ask that because I know some friends who are also writers and really, really into music, but they'll follow a certain band and then say "Oh they put out a shit album and I'm not going to follow them anymore." I just disagree with that.
MJ: I agree with them, you shouldn't put out shit albums, because you can lose the plot as an artist. You stop working as hard, you stop trying as hard, or you start taking shortcuts with what you're doing. And so it's perfectly appropriate for them to say, "Yeah they kind of lost the plot with that record." It's true, it's abso-fuck-alutely true, they did lose the plot, and you know why, it's because they weren't paying that much attention. You gotta pay attention as an artist because that's your job. So I agree with your friends on that. I mean, what, you're supposed to just absorb everything someone does just because they happen to be a musician? Who cares, write a good song, you're a songwriter, that's your job.
Me: But it's not so much that. If a certain person originally reached out and grabbed you in some degree, I think it could still possibly be there…We can agree to disagree I guess. (both laugh)

Now books…some books I've gone back to multiple times even though I have brand new books sitting on a shelf. Name two like that for you.
MJ: Tender is the Night and Lolita.
SC: (from the other room) John Grisham's The Summons.
MJ: (laughs) Steven's making a joke. "Tender is the Night" I've read probably 12 times, and "Lolita" I've read probably 10-15 times.
Me: And yet you're complaining you have only 16 year-olds coming to your shows? (laughs)
MJ: No, I think people misread "Lolita." There's that Vanity Fair quote about "Lolita" that it's the only honest love story of the 20th century. It's not a love story; it's a story about obsession...
Me: (interjects)...and lust
MJ: I don't even know about lust, lust is this other thing; I think it's actually just about obsession. Really what I admire about "Lolita" is the story-telling, watching him literally be conspiratorial with his audience. Half the time you read Nabokov, you're caught up in the story, and half the time, you're just admiring this man who can tell this fucking story so beautifully and so perfectly…..
SC: (from the other room) In his second language.
MJ: In his second language, that's right, it's not even his first language! It's his fucking second language and it's just unbelievable to me. And also, obviously White Noise, I've read quite a few times. So I'd say those three are the books I've read the most. (Starts scanning the walls of the room) I'm looking up at the books taped to my wall...I've got The Trial by Kafka taped to my wall, Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky, American Pastoral by Philip Roth, Laughter in the Dark by Nabokov and strangely enough, Steinbeck. I actually like Steinbeck quite a bit, I think he's actually a really good writer. He's like a bull with his characters. He has a really repetitive voice, and he's not particularly interested in diction, but his way of telling a story is "Here are these characters, now watch me push these characters through a series of really, really bad things." And so, it's hard to turn away.
Me: But that's a lot of what the songwriting is with you guys, it seems, hard to turn away. A lot of these situations people have endured and yet, they're being spoken of in a way that's very forthright, very vulnerable, very Westerberg-esque if you will...heart on your sleeve sort of stuff.
MJ: (laughs) Well it's not on purpose.

Me: What the best and the worst part about being a writer of songs rather than a writer about songs, and vice versa?
MJ: Whew, you're going for the big guns here, Erica. (pauses) Well...The worst part is feeling like a fraud. What happens is you listen to a lot of music from people that you respect and you feel like they become these demagogues in your mind....Bob Dylan is a god he's not a person, or Robert Smith, David Bowie, John Sebastian, you name it, they're not people. And so as a songwriter when you start to write songs and people listen to them, you start to feel like you're a fraud, like "Who the fuck am I?" I mean, I went to high school, I've got parents who still think I'm 11, I've got friends who roll their eyes at some of my habits...You feel like you're a complete and utter and total fraud, and anyone who would listen to you is just buying into some persona that you're projecting. And it sucks; it's like a really shitty feeling of just being almost embarrassed by all that vulgar emotion that you're showing. So that's the worst part.

And I guess conversely, the worst part of being a writer when you write about music is feeling like you don't matter. And these people who write the songs are the ones who matter and you're just some asshole commenting from the wings. And no one cares what the fuck you think, they just care about these songwriters.

So then there's the best part of being, I guess, a critic which is that you can tell people when other people are full of shit. You can say, "That record sucks because this guy was just reading too much of his own publicity, and it's crap." And it's fun, it's really fun to slag off on bands. There can be a certain sort of...conspiracy you have with your reader.

And then the best part of being a songwriter is connecting with that audience. It's bringing everybody into your room when you wrote that song. It's like you wrote it, and finished it, and you had this feeling at 1 in the morning, on a fucking Wednesday night, and you're broke, and you're not sure how you're going to pay your rent in 2 weeks...And you're sitting there by yourself with writing all over your arms and your legs and your walls and whatever...And now here's 200 people singing it with you. And it's just really, really affirming where you just feel like..."fuck you loneliness!," this happened, and other people felt it too.

And then I guess the median point between all these things is that we're all critics that suck, and were all complete frauds, and we're all conspiratorial with our audiences, and we're all completely with them while they go through our pain with us. At various times, everybody is all these things; the fun part is being one of them. It's realizing that you can be part of it. And it makes you want to tell everyone you know, "Hey man, quit your job, start following bands or reading books or watching movies or looking at art or whatever it is you want to do that actually excites you or interests you." Because wherever your place is, as an artist or a critic, or appreciator, or as a complete and total fuck-up mess that just goes to museums, whatever, go, be part of it. Just don't be part of some soulless, nameless, credit-driven corporation who tells you what your life should be because THAT's bullshit, that's soulless and wrong. And everything else, whether people hate you or think you're a god, everybody's wrong. Anyone who hates you is wrong and anyone who thinks you're a genius is wrong....At least you're not sitting behind a desk, under a florescent light, pushing papers for a profit margin because that sucks.
Me: (ponders, then calls out to Steven still in the other room) Steven do you agree? (laughs)
SC: Yeah he's right.
MJ: (laughs) He's half passed out on my bed because he doesn't handle scotch.
SC: I drank too much Jameson!
MJ: Tell the truth you can't handle scotch!
SC: (coming in from the other room) I'll handle scotch back and forth across this room, I'll handle it all night!
MJ: Just go lie down you're not doing well. (laughs)

(Steven leaves)

MJ: Erica, when are you going to ask me about my five songs I wish I'd written? I spent some time seriously thinking about this.
Me: Great! (Reading over notes) Well I think we're at that point, so ok, name five songs you wish you wrote and why.
MJ: I wish I'd written “Chelsea Hotel #2” by Leonard Cohen just because I like the part where Cohen says, "We're ugly but we have the music." I love that line. It's about him having sex with Janis Joplin...she gets up and straightens her dress and says,"Well never mind, we're ugly but we have the music." That's after that line where he says, "You told me again you prefer handsome men."
Me: She also preferred women so he shouldn't take it personally. (both laugh)
MJ: Yeah he shouldn't take it too hard. You know, I've got autoimmune disorder and I'm losing all the hair on my head and my face and my body, and I'm losing all the pigment on my body...and autoimmune disorder cuts your lifespan down by about 20 years. This is all the stuff that happened to me when I started writing music. And it's funny because my whole life, I've always been, (pauses) I was like the cute boy in high school and college to some extent, and I started a band not until I was 30 something, and then I got diagnosed with this disease, and it changes the way I look. And suddenly everyone is taking pictures of us, shooting videos of us, and I look at them and go,"Wow, you don't have that much hair," (laughs) or "Your skin looks funny," and....it's really nerve-wracking and weird. When it comes to just the art of it, you don't care, you just want people to care about what you write or what you sing or what your band is doing. But then there's this real thing about being in front of people, and other people telling you, "Hey dude, gosh, you kind of look weird." So that line where he says "We're ugly but we have the music," that really speaks to me. I feel like I didn't have the music until I became ugly, and that was my tradeoff with the world. And so I couldn't try to be the cute boy who fronts a band or tries to sleep with groupies…I had to write songs I meant, I had to be with bandmates I truly cared about, I had to do things that I really believed in. I wasn't going to get away with just trying to be cute because I wasn't gonna be cute anymore….I was going to lose all my hair and my skin pigment and look like Moby. (laughs) So he expresses that idea really well. And I feel that way a lot, that I didn't get music until I got so ugly.

Another one is “Quicksand” by David Bowie. Hunky Dory, it's just a great record. I remember listening to that song when I was 11 years old with my friend Jake in his garage. My friend Jake was my best friend at the time, and he was this real awkward kid who loved Sigue Sigue Sputnik and the Cure and the Smiths, and I didn't know from that shit except that he introduced me to it. We were both these poor kids, his dad was a coke addict, and we were on welfare and food stamps, and our escape was our garage with our music. And David Bowie sings that line, "You don't believe in yourself," that always spoke to me…It always meant we don't matter, that our ideas matter but we don't. We're just a couple of loser kids and we'll always be loser kids, but we can attach ourselves to ideas or we can have ideas, and that's the important thing.

The third one is “I Found a Reason” by the Velvet Underground, just because Lou Reed once told me, "Rock and roll can go ba ba ba, it can't go la la la." (laughs) I just really liked the song, it's beautiful, and I wish I'd written it because it's one of my favorite songs.

Number four is “3rd Planet” by Modest Mouse. Maybe it's something to throw you off with a more modern thing in there, but if I had to choose one song that was my favorite of all time, I'd have to say “3rd Planet” by Modest Mouse. It's because you're there with him, you're swimming around in all those guitar delays and all that confusion….And you see the planets and you see your own stupid, pitiful, little life, and it just makes sense to you.

And you know, "My only art is fucking people over" is a GREAT line because it just absolves you from your complete and utter inability to relate. I don't think I'm like that, I think I probably relate ok, but it's a great line and it makes you on his team at that point.

My number five was actually a bunch of different songs. I couldn't decide, so I figured instead of trying to explain or choose one, I'm just gonna list them and you can decide for yourself why.
-“Fairytale of NY” (The Pogues)
-“Like Cockatoos” (The Cure)
-“Rapture” (Pedro the Lion)
-“The Calendar that Hung Itself” (Bright Eyes)
-“Hotel Yorba” (White Stripes)
-“We've Been Had” (The Walkman)
-“A Little Bleeding” (Crooked Fingers)
-“Queen of the Surface Streets” (Devotchka)
-“Lion's Mane” (Iron and Wine)

Now if you're a songwriter, the reasons why you would choose any one of these songs seems really obvious to me, like they captured a little bit of what it felt like to be them at that moment. Before recorded music, poetry was really popular. My theory is that poetry isn't popular anymore because we have music now. Before we had a recording of how people felt, they'd try to capture it lyrically in poems. And now, no one gives a FUCK about poetry because we have all these songs, and they're so much better at capturing what it felt like. When Robert Smith wrote "Like Cockatoos," I know that feeling, I know it really well. "Fairytale of NY," I know what that feels like...You want to see all those police officers singing “Galway Bay.” "The Calendar that Hung Itself," have you ever been jealous in your entire life, of anyone? "The Calendar that Hung Itself" is the quintessential jealousy song. So it's a bit of a cock-up naming all these songs as #5. [Overall] what you're trying to do as a songwriter, you're trying to let other people know what it felt like to be going through this exact moment you're going through right now. And it's a series of lyrics, and a bunch of music, and there's a way that you sing it so that you can communicate with these people like, "You know what man, that's how that felt, it sucked, and that's what happened." So I guess I feel like each of these songs captures a bit of that in some way or another.

Me: Your band has become pretty hot pretty fast. You put out an EP, played Europe even, and then just recently got a manager. In fact, I heard from an industry friend in LA that your single had been picked up by "the" rock radio station out there - the first time in something like 10 years that they'd added a single by an unsigned band to their playlist. I'd read that you guys were pretty much doing everything yourselves. Do you feel like your time spent in the world of music reviewing gave you insights on what to avoid or what to do?
MJ: Well maybe some insights...like we have a band rule against doing coke. (laughs) Nobody in our band is allowed to do blow because we know that blow breaks up bands, so I guess there is shit like that.

I don't know if there's much crossover in terms of writing about music because it was real important to me from the jump never to bring it up. Actually, I think Daren was in the band 3-4 months before he even knew that I'd ever written about music. I always felt like it was two separate things and some of the stuff is just kind of embarrassing. You just want to write a song and you want people to think about the song, not think about you as some critic, some ex-whatever…You wonder if people will ever allow you to be multiple things in your life. It was really important to me to never use anything [from his music reviewing life]....I just never brought it up...ever. We've had to turn down press opportunities because it was someone I knew, and we've turned down a lot of promotion because it was someone that I knew....I just wouldn't accept it.

So it's kind of two different worlds. It sounds so fucking stupid and trite, but I just...suddenly, all I wanted to do was play music. And it's all I've done. I literally have intense credit card debt, I've defaulted on my student loans, I haven't paid taxes in 7 years, I'm so fucking broke...and all I want to do is play music. I just don't care, I just don't care. And when I wrote about music I felt that way, when I was writing a novel I felt that way (laughs)...I don't know how else to be in life, I don't know what else to do.

So did it give me a perspective? Yeah it taught me that bands shouldn't do blow, because it makes everyone super egotistical and then you break up. And that sucks, you became a band because everyone in the band was really talented at what they did, and you came together and were really talented as a group. So we don't do blow as a result.

And I guess it taught me that what's important is you write and record good songs, and the rest of it kind of doesn't matter that much. But the rest of it, I dunno if one informs the other, I think they're two totally different functions of reality. I would have been done with music writing either way; I would have been writing novels at this point if I hadn't gotten bit by this music bug.
Me: That's exceptionally forthright, way more forthright than I expected. (laughs)
MJ: Steven is over there riffing right now you should see him...he just lying on my bed right now, riffing.
SC: (from the other room) You liking the mad riffage?
MJ: Yeah you're tapping your foot, it's awesome. Steven Chen, ladies and gentlemen, Steven Chen....My bandmates are my best friends; we've all kind of cast our lot together, and (pauses)….this is all any of us have. There's nothing else we're better at, there's nothing else we're trying to do, this is it for us. And we live and die by it. So we're friends, but partially we're friends because we're tied to the same fate, if that makes any sense.

Me: How would you define success at this point?
MJ: (laughs) I once remember telling a friend about a year and a half ago that I just wanted five people I'd never met to like songs that I'd wrote. Not friends, not friends of friends, but five people that I didn't know to like something that I wrote, and then I'd feel like I was a success. And now I think my feelings are that you multiply that by about...a million. (both laugh)

But it's the same basic idea, if you could reach people you've never met, people who don't know you, or people who don't have some sort of vested stake in your success, and who just get it. The last Spaceland show that we played...Spaceland's a club that holds maybe 400 people, and the last show we played, about 1000 people showed up. And the crowd, it wasn't your sort of local hipsters but all kinds of different sorts of folk. And this guy named Ray came up to me. Ray was like, "Hey man, I don't want to sound gay or nothing like that, but 'Sometime Around Midnight,' that happened to me." And I was like, "Oh, ok Ray, that's cool," and he was like, "No man, no," (makes the Wonder Twins power motion with his fist) and we pounded fists. Then he introduced me to his wife and said, "No no, it wasn't her, it was some other punta," (laughs) "but lemme tell you, I've been there and I know what that feels like, so you know, alright." And stuff like that...we all want to do this for a living for sure, but stuff like that, I look at shit like that and think, "Wow, fuck man, I totally talked to RAY." How the fuck would I know Ray, and Ray was all psyched that I wrote this song about being all bummed out about my ex-girlfriend at this bar one night. So yeah, that's success, that's good enough for us.

It's weird, you start getting ahead of yourself in your head and thinking like "Wow here's how much money I'm gonna make," and "I'm gonna be rich in 2 years and do this and that," whatever… And then other times you think nobody gives a fuck, like nobody cares about my music or my band or anything. And I guess success is if you're a guy who needs 100 dollars and someone gives you 101, where as failure is a guy who needs 101, and someone only gives him 100. So we're always trying to be the band that only has 20 bucks to their name because we're all really broke. (laughs) And we love that fact that people even know who we are because, you know, we're just an unsigned band from Los Feliz.

Me: How did you guys find SX….Did you find it was worth it, how did you guys get there, how did all that happen?
MJ: Well we took a plane (laughs)....We played this place called the Troubadour in LA and we made a bunch of money that night because it sold out. We took that money and we bought plane tickets.
Me: Nice, smart ass….I mean did you get in* [to SXSW proper]?
(*Ed. note: Often, bands, if they don't get into SXSW, will just come down anyway and try to get into venues and play.)
MJ: There's an application process and we applied. It wasn't clear when we applied that we would even get in. But then we got accepted and we got offered a number of, much to our surprise, a number of showcases. And we didn't even have plane tickets because none of us have enough money to just buy plane tickets. Then we played this show at the Troubadour which sold out. We took the money we made that night and bought plane tickets. Now we're even again and we're back to zero. (laughs)

It's funny because while we were at SX the biggest question we got asked was, "What is it like to be so successful?" And we were all like, "I wouldn't know!" (laughs) We don't have a label, we don't have any of that stuff. It's just us, it's just the five of us, we don't know what's gonna come of it. Everyone keeps telling us that that's what's gonna happen, but we don't know if that's true or not....none of it has really happened yet.
Me: But have you gotten good info from people from SX?
MJ: Well even before SX, we've definitely been wined and dined by labels. Like a lot of big name labels, like the presidents of labels are inviting us to their house at this point. We definitely feel courted, if for no other reason than they want us to feel courted, and maybe somehow loyal to them. We don't know what we're going to do yet. We don't really trust labels, we don't really trust anyone but the five of us. We trust each other but that's about it because you know, people say a lot of shit.

Me: Well that was actually a question that I had. If you go the Radiohead route and you go completely independent, it's difficult because there's the distribution issue. My friends and I are pretty big music nerds, but we first heard of you, being on the east coast, via SX stuff. Had we not gone to SX, we might not have heard about you guys, but then you're huge in LA. So I guess the question is what do you think about that? I mean, you have this EP, you have enough stuff "mastered" for a full length record, but I guess it's what do you want to do? What would you settle for?
MJ: Well, we're not in the mood to settle. We're very much in a mood to find people who believe in what we're doing and wanna support it. We're not terribly concerned about the numbers. We've already been offered enormous numbers, and also smaller numbers, and we've sort of scoffed at both because we're not signing away our futures. But we're also not interested in only being a band from Los Feliz that never goes anywhere. So I guess there's a line to be walked there somewhere. You can never predict how big your audience is gonna be or how many people are gonna like what you're doing...it's like there's a weird calculation that goes on where you have to figure out what you're worth, and what other people think you're worth, and we don't know. Honestly Erica, sometimes I feel like we're not worth anything. Some days I wake up and I feel like nobody gives a fuck, I feel like the biggest loser on the planet and no one cares...that's the honest truth. And then other days after shows, and there's like, 500 people running up to talk to me or talk to the band, I feel like the fucking king of the labyrinth. And I'm confused by both of those things. It's a very confusing and sort of overwhelming position to be in. It's like sometimes you think you're gonna be the biggest band in the world, and other times you think no one's ever gonna care, you fucking oversaturated fuck.

And I don't know, maybe some people don't go through things like that but those are the kinds of things that I go through. I know this is what I wanna do, I know I believe in what we're doing. I know I'm a participant in our shows, and I've looked at our shows and they look different than other shows that I see. And you kind of have to remain humble about those other things, you can't control them. You've just kind of got to do your thing and hope somebody gets it. And if they don't, you know, you're an asshole if you don't keep doing it anyway.

(After almost 3.5 hours of talking, much Jameson and wine had been consumed by all parties at this point, and we were losing Steven to massive hunger. So we called last question.)

Me: Ok so…have you had previous training as a singer, and are you looking forward to playing new stuff?
MJ: No and no. C'mon, you got a better question in you than that…I've no training as a singer, I spent the last year and half locked alone in my apartment singing 6 hours a day, and that's the only reason I can even carry a tune.
Me: How is that possible, that's nonsense!
MJ: It's true, it's true, I couldn't even carry a tune 3 years ago. I have the mp3s to prove it. It's only because...I'm telling you, my mom got sick, and my dad was sick, and I was sick, and suddenly everything just didn't matter, and I started singing all the time. Before that, I couldn't really sing, it was only after months and months and months and months of trying. C'mon Erica, I know you have another question.
Me: I know you have to go eat.
MJ: Is that it then, are we done, is that the whole thing? (calls to Steven) Steven, we're done, Erica's out of questions.
SC: (from the other room) Oh ok, you want me to ask you questions?
MJ: No I think we're good.

(Steven cheers)

Wishing Well (2006 version)-Airborne Toxic Event (MP3)
Wishing Well (2007 EP)-Airborne Toxic Event (Purchase)


Act IV coming up...

Sound and Vision: My Interview with The Airborne Toxic Event (Act II)

(Photo via Modelography)

Act I of IV

ACT II of IV
"Caught in the crossbow of ideas and journeys/sit here reliving the other self's mournings/Caught in the crossbow of ideas and dawnings/stand I"-Call on Me-Lou Reed

Later that same evening, after the band completes their meeting, we reconvene again. I'm told the Jameson bottle took a beating on our break. Anna goes to yoga, Daren and Noah say g'bye, and Mikel, Steven, and I continue.

Me: Did you have an idea of how the lyrics should "sound" when put to music, or did your bandmates just add what they heard? If it's the latter, that's rather incredible and lucky.
MJ: Most of the songs, for the most part, it feels like solving a puzzle. There's a certain thing I see in my head and I'll start to write a song, and there's a line, and then suddenly, I glimpse the song, the whole thing, for a split second. And then you spend the next days and weeks and months pulling your hair out trying to find what you saw as that song. So they were pretty much written by the time we were working them all out [musically]. And there's a lot of time spent redoing phrases. I feel very flawed in that way, I always spend a lot of time trying to find the right words to say, and I don't know if I always do. It's very difficult for me, it takes a long time, it's not like it just happens in 5 minutes. "Wishing Well" took 8 months for me to write, over and over, until I got the words exactly right. By the time it was done it was like yes, that's it, that is how I meant it, that's what I was feeling, that's what was going through, that's what it looked like. Trying to get that all right, that's a very long and arduous process.
SC: It's like structuring an emotion, something that's going to hit you in the gut. If you can do it well, you don't even see it, you just feel it.
Me: I ask that because "Midnight" is a song that starts and then swells, and the lyrics move to this point where at the end, Mikel, you're screaming. As it goes along, everything gets louder and there's this main crescendo and then it descends, and it's striking....I thought wow, if the lyrics hadn't been planned out with the music ahead of time...
MJ: You go through this thing where you're a writer for awhile and a listener for awhile, and a writer, then a listener....the emotion and what you see if really, really real...but then finding it is arduous. That song, "Sometime Around Midnight," that happened…..
SC: I was with him when it happened.
MJ: (to Steven) Yeah you were the friend, you don't remember that, you'd said "What the fuck happened to you"? (to me) I went home [from the bar mentioned in the song] and locked myself in the house for 3 days. I kind of started to write this riff and spent 3 days alone with the song. I was like ....driven, it was all I did, I didn't answer the phone, I didn't go out....I just sat there for 3 days straight writing this song. It was revising, and the first original thing of the song was very different. But it's like being a stonecutter or something; you chip away at it as you go. You try to craft it so that it matches what you were going through.
SC: I remember distinctly when that song came together. We had been torturing ourselves and arduously going over how this song would come together. The way that the song builds... there were a lot of things that didn't work. We were having trouble with it and in a period of like 3-4 hours, we figured out exactly how it would go, and you felt it happen. We had finished playing what became the final version and everyone just knew that incarnation of everyone's arrangements had actually hit the mark. It ended up resonating well when we finished it.

(Discussion ensues as to whether there needed to be more lighting in their room. Steven goes to fix the blinds and I'm told that Steven is the tallest guy in the band at 6'2, and has talents very similar to MacGyver.)

Me: (to Mikel) Do you feel the adult-like jobs you've held as a writer (NPR commentator and Filter magazine writer/managing editor), where you were in essence telling or relaying a story, contributed to your style of songwriting? I say that because a lot of the songs tend to be who, what, where, when....
MJ: I guess being in a rock band, it's like living your dreamland in front of people. It's like you woke up one morning and wrote down all your dreams, your crazy lust-filled, angst-filled dreams, and then at night, you act them out in front of people….at least that's our band, that's what it's like for me, it's living out the dream life. Once you start playing, you don't think about where you are, what day it is, who's out in the audience, who you are, you're just in it. Where as writing, it's more formal and you can adopt different voices. As a singer I can't really do that. There is like a sense that you've lost your mind a little bit...or maybe I have a sense that I've lost my mind a little bit. I mean, it's not sane to do some of the stuff that we do. But I think it's appropriate.

But if you're on NPR or you're writing, you're telling a story and you're within confined bounds, like you're writing a story for your high school English class, it's a little more formalized. I think as a writer, I was definitely always trying to reach the reader. I was never really interested in being a critic, I was always trying to tell a story about political figures or musicians or ideas that I thought were interesting. But music is a different thing, or at least Airborne is a different thing, it's like being completely unhinged and you're completely naked in front of people. Because it's so loud, and everyone's screaming and you're kind of drunk, it's like the energy is all very appropriate, it all makes sense.

Me: Writing as a process. As a writer myself, I seem to be more productive in certain surroundings, with certain music, etc. Can you speak to the specifics of yours?
MJ: Yeah, I'll go like 3 days, 5 days, 8 days, without seeing anyone. I'll lock myself in this apartment, I'll write on the walls, I'll write on myself,...
Me: Yeah I saw that at the Cedar show, you had written on your arm some line like "Life is a ghost?" I was like, what are you Eddie Vedder? (all laugh)
SC: Yeah, "Pro choice ‘92!"
MJ: I guess I get into a mode. You're a writer you may understand this… I'm a very social person. I really like interacting with other people, tend to enjoy being around other people, always a lot of ideas running through my head. I think for writing, I'll deprive myself of that, and I guess I'm so....I dunno, angst-ridden by it, that I have to write it down. The writing or the song writing becomes the only way I can express myself. Where I would naturally communicate to a friend at a cocktail party or whatever, I can only do through a song. And you get into a mode where you haven't seen anyone in 2-3 days and you're just sitting there by yourself...it's usually in the middle of the night, sitting with a guitar, and everyone else is asleep…and you're awake, trying to write about something you feel pretty strongly… Sometimes it's for an audience, it's because you want this girl to hear how you felt and just be moved by it because you want...
SC: (interjects) Or not...
MJ: Yeah in your case (laughs), and you just spent all this time working on it because you want her to have heard it and been moved by it and be like, fuck he was awake at 3 in the morning writing that music, feeling that about me. And other times, it feels like there's just no one, like no one in the world that's awake but you, and you're sitting there in your hovel of an apartment, and your books on the wall, and no one's around, and you're like fuck it, I'm gonna talk to the void.
SC: Well, if I can ask a follow-up question, do you feel like when you go back to it later, that moment of purity, do you feel like it was worth getting there or was it like what the fuck was I thinking, I was so out of sorts...
MJ: (interjects) Always worth it. My best moments are always those moments where you come back and this thing was written...and….really, truly it's not like you wrote it, it's like you wrote it down. You're just this desperate, pathetic, fucking, mongroling little thing who just wanted this one moment to be right. And you don't care what you're accused of, you don't care how you look the next morning, you don't care what sort of person you come off being, you don't care what judgments other people are gonna make about you…you just put yourself out there because you believe that people are gonna get it
Me: Well yeah but that's if you put it forward [and others hear or read it].

(Mikel gets called away for a phone call. Steven continues…)

SC: You're not really writing as much as it is channeling. It's like it's something in your mind that already exists, and you're just trying as smart and as fast as possible to get it down. I feel that a lot of those really memorable hit songs, the writers describe them as writing them that way. It comes down in a flash and you know this part has to happen, and that part has to happen, and when you're done, you almost don't believe you put it together. I've talked to Mikel about this, I feel like songwriters feel that way when they put together a really, really good tight song that people can relate to...You stand back and go "Did I just write that? That has to have existed before"….But it didn't and you feel like you're channeling at some point.
Me: I read about that, where Keith Richards wrote the riff to “Satisfaction”--he'd woken up in the middle of the night and happened to put this thing down, then woke up the next morning going "Where the hell did this thing come from?"
SC: Yeah right? And then, I feel at least, you almost feel like you don't deserve credit for it...like that couldn't have come just from me, I probably stole it from somewhere. (laughs)
Me: So you're a writer too?
SC: Yeah, I was working on a novel, I still sort of am. Mikel and I, we had sort of bonded in San Francisco because I'm a little bit younger than him and I was trying to find people to help me out in my writing career. So a friend introduced us and we sort of bonded late night over bands and whatever. And it's strange to me that playing music never came up. I was surprised when I found out that he played as much guitar as I did. So before, the basis of our relationship was so literary that we hadn't had to talk about that other element. I dunno...I guess neither of us wanted to be boastful about the fact that we could play music, because who are we, we're just some writers... But that's how Mikel and I became friends. But we didn't become really, really great friends until we started this band together, and saw each other at our best and our worst.

Outside of music, I do a lot of writing and editing as well.
Me: Now did you do this [writing] in undergrad?
SC: Yeah, I did it in undergrad and grad. I write a lot of articles and used to write about music as well. I write a lot about film now. You get to a point where you don't know how to write about music anymore. It's weird because once you start playing music you can't write [about it], it's a tradeoff. So I started writing more about film and at some point, I had some really, really good ideas about fiction, I was always more comfortable with non-fiction. Fiction always seemed to be very indulgent and I wasn't sure if I could pull it off. But after awhile I just started wanting to write really, really fun stuff. Mikel and I differ in that, Mikel's writing is more heart wrenching and very serious, and it's very depressing a lot of the time. I tend to gravitate more to the Seinfeld school of thought where you can poke fun at anything. So that's kind of where I came from.

I guess also in the practice space when we're working on music, a lot of that may come into play. I'm always pushing trendier stuff maybe, and Mikel's like, "I dunno..." But it's a good tradeoff between the two of us. And Noah's a huge force in the band in terms of that too because he's such the quintessential songwriter who's trained in what kind of constitutes a 'proper song'. So I think a lot of us come at it from different angles. And I guess what comes out is, hopefully, well structured and concise and really, really soulful.
Me: Who do you like for writers? Or because you've written about film, whose films do you like?
SC: I was an early fan of Tom Perrotta, he wrote "Little Children" and a really funny book called "Wishbones." I do like a lot of the Cameron Crowe type writing. I tend to shy away from films about really, really quirky people, like 'Look how crazy these people are" or "Look how crazy this family is." I feel that's the richest material, when it's just bland, because ordinary people can sometimes be the strangest, weirdest people you've ever met. I really like Alexander Payne, he did "Election" and "About Schmidt." They're about the most ordinary people in the Midwest and I feel like those are really interesting stories. Movies about drugs and alcohol, that's so typical and predictable that these people are gonna wreck their lives because it's in the cards....How does an ordinary person wreck his life, what does he use?

(Mikel comes back. The situation with the shade resumes and Steven" MacGyver" makes another attempt to fix them.)

MJ: Sorry about that, I had to take that, it was a really important call. We're in the middle of a ton of things right now….
Me: (interjects laughing) Name two...
MJ: Uhh...(calls to Steven in the other room) Steven what are two things we're in the middle of?
SC: Like books?
MJ: No, as a band from a business standpoint...(to me) Well, we're trying to figure out how to put out our record, which label, if any, we want to rep us...you know just stuff like that.
SC: (from the other room) We're trying to figure out how to take over the west coast. (all laugh)
MJ: Please don't quote him on that. (laughs)

Me: So we were talking about writing as a process... I mean do you find you work better at certain times of day, or….for example, I find I work better late at night, listening to classical or jazz…I dunno, things just sort of come then. Are you the same for that or do you find that it just varies?
MJ: I think I work better when I'm just completely deprived of people. Like I'll just completely lock myself in here...I don't have a television, I've never had a television, I don't have a radio...I have books and I have cds. I think when I lock myself indoors, I have time, then I tend to write a lot. Sometimes that's in the morning--I honestly don't get a ton of work done between noon and 5 pm. The evenings or early mornings, I tend to work the best. When I haven't really been around people for awhile I can kind of get into my own thing...these things have a way of piggybacking in your own head.

Me: I've always been interested in what makes someone go from listener/appreciator of music, or in your case, writer/commentator, to the person who needs to make music. Can you speak to how and when this change took place for you, first, how you knew you wanted to write about music as a profession, and then second, that you wanted to be a musician/singer/songwriter?
MJ: Well, I should point out, to be accurate, that I was never a professional writer about music. I was really, really broke during all that time. I wanted to be a novelist and I liked music a lot. I wrote under a lot of pen names and I made very little money, like less than 20 grand a year.
Me: But I thought you were Managing Editor of Filter?
MJ: Yeah, I worked from home and I never met the people I talked to. Mostly I was a writer and I got a title because I would write under different names. I think it sounds really important but literally, I was here, the same place I am now. I was just trying to find a way I could meet Robert Smith and ask him questions I wanted to ask him.
Me: (laughs)
MJ: It's true! I was trying to find a way to meet David Bowie and ask him questions. I think those David Fricke's of the world or those people who are real critics, I don't think like that.
Me: You don't write like that either
MJ: I just don't know enough about music, I don't know enough about the history of music. I don't own enough of the big albums, like by Big Star or Television, I don't know that much about Josef K….I'm not pedantic like that. I knew I liked music and I knew I wanted to meet David Bowie and Robert Smith. So it was a way of doing that. I was really, really broke the entire time. I remember reading this book called How Soon is Never by Marc Spitz, who is a writer for SPIN. A couple friends of mine and I were reading it and we were all writing about music at the same time. The opener was all about this character, this music journalist who was so over his life because all he ever did was do blow and hook up with Strokes groupies. We were laughing as we read it out loud because we were all thinking "This guy needs to lose a foot" or something, "This guy needs polio," this guy needs something fucking real to happen to him in his life. We were sacrificing so much just so we could write our dumb little pieces about The Cure or David Bowie or Lou Reed. And it was because we were writers and we liked music and wanted to write about music. We weren't critics, we weren't paid anything. We literally made it up as we went.
Me: Yeah, I read your review of Devotchka and I was wowed by it. I hate to be all fangirl but that was really well done. The ending was like something exactly that I would have written [about a band I loved].
MJ: Well, you know you have to thank Devotchka for that. Their goal, which was much harder than mine, was to make me feel that way. It wasn't by accident, and I just happened upon it. I saw that movie Ratatouille and it brought a tear to my eye a little bit. It's stupid, it's a movie about food, but there was this moment at the end where this critic goes something like "As much as I consider myself important, I know my absolute best work is worth about as much as these people's off days, because they're actually contributing something and I'm just remarking about it." And that type of thing wouldn't have hit me that hard a few years ago, but now I think it's totally true. I mean, it took me 8 months to write that song “Wishing Well,” 8 months of effort and work, of absolutely trying to create this impression in people's heads. I think if you're a really good songwriter, it's not that hard, what you're trying to get across is this thing that happened. And that idea which you feel very strongly, people have felt. The gift of music is that you're able to make other people feel exactly like you did at that moment--it's really, really hard. And maybe other people are better at it, but it took me 8 months of rewriting that song to get that exactly right, to get to "that's exactly how I felt." I felt like killing myself, and I felt like running in one direction and not looking back, and I felt like writing her letters, and I felt like getting drunk and fighting... I felt like nothing fucking mattered. And to get that across in a song that's got like guitar and bass and drums and violas and keyboards and all this shit, it took a long fucking time.

Being a critic of it or being someone who writes about it...you know, it's good, some are better than others and you can find your own art in it. But in the case of that Devotchka review, the credit there goes to Devotchka for writing those songs that make you feel that way.
Me: How did you know, in the case of the song that took 8 months, how did you know it was done? How did you know that it was exactly what you wanted?
MJ: Because you hit the last chord and you go.....that's what that was, that was exactly how that felt. And it wasn't until 2 years later, after having tried to record it 20 times and getting it exactly right in the recording, that you finally go.... THAT was it.
SC: It probably didn't help that you started off trying to make it a reggae song and that's why it took 8 months. That was a bad joke... (laughs)

Me: Talk to me about muse and inspiration. I know I've written some of my most inspired pieces if something was on my mind and I'd had a few drinks. But obviously, one could turn into Lester Bangs doing that every time and dying at age 32. When you're stuck creatively now, is there anything you do to kick your mind into gear?
MJ: No, not really. I go through phases where I write a lot then I won't for awhile. I don't have a lot of control over the process, and I don't try to control it. I'll write 10 songs in 5 days and then I won't write anything for a month, and then sometimes I'll write a song a day for 3 weeks and then I won't...It just kind of comes and goes and I always have faith that it's gonna come back, so I don't really worry about it that much or try too hard. I tend to just have a lot of songs in me. And again, I can't take credit for them. I don't really want to act like they're my ideas because they're not, I just sort of write them down. I'm hunting for them, but I didn't create them.
Me: So if you didn't create them who does?
MJ: In the book This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald talks about this. He's talking to his mentor and there's a point at which his mentor is talking to him about the difference between a scholastic life and a non-scholastic life. And he's using the word scholastic, I think, to mean a person who deals with and writes down ideas, whether as a sculptor, artist, musician, writer, whatever...And he says there's really no difference between a scholastic life and a non-scholastic life, the only difference is that if you live a scholastic life, you leave a record….and I guess I feel like that. I mean, I don't think I go through anything that other people don't go through, I just try really hard to try to leave a record of it.

So as far as inspiration, where do the ideas come from….I dunno, where do the ideas come from that you feel when you and your boyfriend or husband break up? Or where do the ideas come from that you feel when you walk out of your 10th year high school reunion, saw your ex-boyfriend, and you feel a sudden sense of longing for youth or whatever? What is it you feel in the grocery store aisle? These things are very human and very real to everyone on a day-to-day basis, and you can't take credit for them, they're just part of what makes you human. So my goal, as a writer, is just to write them down.

Sometime Around Midnight (acoustic)-Airborne Toxic Event.mp3
Sometime Around Midnight (2007 EP version)-Airborne Toxic Event (Purchase)

Act III coming up...

Sound and Vision: My Interview with The Airborne Toxic Event

(Photo via Modelography)

The Airborne Toxic Event (ATE), a soon-to-be-signed band out of Los Feliz, CA, create music that runs counter to the "it's-got-a-good-beat-and-I-can-dance-to-it" mentality of pop radio marketing these days. ATE songs will make you dance (in fact, I dare you to stop yourself), but ATE's music also has depth; these aren't your kid sister's emo or top 40 songs about love, lust, and yearning, baby. Frontman Mikel Jollet has a baritone voice that echoes Echo and the Bunnymen lead singer Ian McCullouch on steroids, and writes songs like Tom Waits or Bruce Springsteen, with lyrics so vivid you are walking (or more likely dancing) with the band as the plot unfolds.

I first discovered ATE at SXSW this year, our last band on the last night in fact. Great sound, great stage presence, great lyrics...Some of my notes from the show included the following: "For the SX mp3 track "Wishing Well", the lead singer starts out saying, "My mom had cancer..no one asks about the lyrics." Rather forthright, like the Paul Westerberg of East LA if he's the sole songwriter, and yet incredibly shy/soft-spoken, almost like he's shocked and surprised people like his stuff."

When I read up on them, I discovered their odd name is taken from a Don DeLillo novel (White Noise), one of their songs shares the same name as a favorite Steve McQueen movie (Papillion), and Jollett used to be a damn good literary and music writer. Being a music geek and writer myself, I found that last part most interesting--how and why does one go from being a literary writer to the frontman of a band? Literary writers are not typically the personality types you'd expect to see fronting a band since the vast majority of them are, I'd imagine, introverts. So what caused the switch? Would one's writing technique and style require dramatic alteration to accommodate? Do the same mechanics apply? Plus, frankly, I was curious if the band was for real. What band says things from the stage like, "This is the only thing any of us have, so thank you," as Jollett did in Austin, and truly means it? Were they choosing idioms out of some book like The Crash Davis Guide for Rock Bands: How to talk to the Public/Press? I had to find out.

I sat down with Jollett and Company electronically, via video conferencing, one afternoon…which turned into evening…which became another afternoon. As one of the darlings of the west coast indie-world, they’ve been interviewed a lot and are often played on major Los Angeles radio stations like KROC; here on the east coast, they're rather unheard of (though if the rumors of them signing on to a label this week are proven true, this will definitely change). So I tried to not ask all the usual questions.

ACT I of IV
"That woman's got me drinking…"-That Woman's Got Me Drinking-Shane McGowan (MP3) (Removed due to record company paranoia)

Various bandmates are arriving early for a band meeting at Jollett's residence. Noah Harmon, the band's bass player, arrives first…

Me: I'm sorry I hope this is done in time for your meeting…
MJ: No it will be fun. We're just like one big disgusting family here.
Me: Noah, I was telling him about how my friends in bands already hate him because he doesn't have a day job.
NH: Yeah, but can they buy things like milk and bread? (laughs)
MJ: Yeah it evens out...Noah and I were talking about this, how you know you're broke when you know the going price for a pint of blood. That's broke. (laughs)
Me: Ok, I guess first off, how about an overview of the band's members, names, where they hail from, ages, what they play. I've seen a variety of things online but nothing really cohesive.

(Steven Chen, the band's lead guitarist, enters)

MJ: Hey Steven say hi to Erica, she's doing an interview with us.
SC: Do you want to ask me anything?
MJ/NH: (collectively) No, you go sit over there. (laughs)
MJ: No, pull up a chair...

(I sip from a glass of wine)

MJ: Hey, she's drinking wine, get the whiskey!
Me: Hey it's later here on the east coast.
MJ: No, it's drinking hour.
NH: Yeah it's after noon.
MJ: Or eleven.

Me: By the way, I just thought you should know, I'm completely intimidated; you interviewed Bowie. (all laugh)
MJ: He's actually much shorter than you'd expect. I thought he was taller and then I met him, and he's this springy little guy...
SC: Yeah and wearing gym shorts and this University of Santa Clara shirt.
MJ: It was really odd, wasn't what I expected at all. (all laugh) Ok so there are five of us...

-Mikel Jollet: 33, guitar, keyboards, vocals, Los Angeles, CA
-Steven Chen: 29, guitar, keyboards, Pasadena, CA
-Daren Taylor: 28, drums, Kingsburgh, CA
-Noah Harmon: 26, bass, dobro, Tuson, AZ
-Anna Bulbrook: 25, viola, tambourine, backing vocals, guitar, Boston, MA

Me: I've read in bits and pieces about how the band came together. Can you cite sort of how/when the band idea began? I also read that you were originally set as a two-piece. What prompted the change to add members? Then, how and when did other members join so it gelled to what it is today? Wow, there's a lot to that. (laughs)
MJ/NH/SC: (agreeing)....get the whiskey, get the whiskey.... (all laugh)
MJ: Well let's see....

(Steven returns with a bottle of Jameson)

MJ: I was gonna write a novel and spending a lot of time at home and had given up the music journalism thing a few years ago to write a book, I had no aspirations whatsoever to be a musician. I was just home a lot writing...(takes a sip of Jameson)
Me: (seeing the bottle) Wow and Jameson no less? You're boys after my own heart!
NH: Well we figured you were having a drink so we might as well. (all laugh)
MJ: (continues) I'd just wanted to be a novelist you know, and I was home a lot and started writing all this music out of nowhere. And then I'd gone through some shit with my health and my mom's health. Having gone through that, when I came to after this really bad month, I just started playing music everyday a couple years ago. It was like being bit by a bug or something, I can't explain it. Suddenly all I wanted to do was play music. I had no ambition before that to do music and had given up music years ago, but I just started writing all these songs and it just started to take over my life. All I ever wanted to do was play music and write songs and sing and sing and sing, like 8 hours a day. It was like having OCD but with a guitar or something.

I decided I wanted to start a band, I started playing with Darren, we met through a friend. We didn't have any plans to be a 2 piece; we just couldn't find any bandmates. (laughs) It's actually really hard to put together a band it seems, and I'd gone through a couple of drummers before I'd met Darren too. We just really gelled immediately, he's such an incredibly talented kid, and I think, wanted to do a lot of the same things I wanted to do.

And then I'd been friends with Steven for a long time, like 5 years, we'd met through mutual friends awhile back. Noah, I actually asked Noah to join and he said no. (all laugh) Little thing you should know about Noah, Noah is the best bass player in Los Angeles.
NH: (being modest) Ahhh, it's not true, it's not true...
SC: He's our secret weapon
MJ: It's like if you're gonna start a basketball team, you need an all-star power forward. He was our draft first round out of college, it's true! (Noah modestly denying)
Me: I'd actually read about that, aren't you a music teacher Noah?
NH: I teach at 2 different community centers.
Me: I'd read all these comments from kids who said "Noah, he's my teacher, he's so cool!"
NH: Yeah, it was nice of them to say that, it cost me a little bread, if you know what I mean. (laughs) But no, it's really funny with the whole radio thing, they're all high school kids in East LA, and totally unimpressed. They're like "Oh cool so you're a millionaire? Lend me some money man." (laughs)
MJ: Anna, I'd sort of known, we had friends in common. We'd see each other around, and I actually saw her out getting tacos late one night, like 2 am and said "Hey don't you play violin?" The original plan with Anna was that she was only gonna play on 2-3 songs but she's such an incredibly talented musician, she can play so many different things. She actually doesn't play violin, she plays viola live because she didn't want to break her violin at some stupid fucking rock club. (laughs) So she plays viola, and she can sing and play keyboards and guitar….between everything, she wound up becoming a full-time member.
SC: The funny thing is, Mikel and I had known each other for so long, we just never talked about the fact that we both played music. It just wasn't part of the conversation. I was a writer too in San Francisco. We'd talk about bands and stuff but I didn't know he was doing what I was doing at home, playing guitar and making songs. At one point he said "Hey don't you play keyboard?" I said "Yeah but I also play guitar, that's more of my main instrument." So when I came in, I did a little ditty on the keyboard then strapped on the guitar and that felt much more...
MJ/NH: (interjects) Who woke up Steven? You did a little ditty? (all laugh, and both Mikel and Noah start imitating Chuck Berry riffs)

Me: Noah and Steven, just to give you an overview, being a writer myself, I decided to approach this on more of a "writerly" aspect, and so I'm talking to people who are primarily songwriters. So a lot of the questions I'm going to ask are primarily slated towards Mikel because of the writing background, as well as being the main songwriter...
NH/SC: No, no we just stopped by…
Me: But it's all good because having you guys give insights on things wouldn't be bad either.
MJ: Yeah, I mean everything is very much in the open in our band so it's alright…
Me: Do you have a band house too, one of those big scary group houses? (laughs)
MJ: No, we all live near each other but we haven't crossed that threshold of annoying yet.
NH: Yeah thank god! (laughs)
Me: You know I shared my hotel room at SXSW with two guy friends, and all I can say is "God bless Anna," she's got to have the patience of a saint with four of you. (all laugh) By the way, you should tell her that all my guy friends think she's damn cute.

(Collective groans from Mikel, Noah, and Steven)

MJ: Yeah I'll put it like this, there's always this large amount of awkward indie-dudes with beards and glasses hanging around after shows waiting to talk to Anna. It's like (imitates a smitten boy) "So hey yeah you're that girl..."
NH: (continuing imitation) "Yeah you're totally hot…"
MJ: And like, most of our audience is dudes, so the four of us just sit there like...kind of annoyed (all laugh), it's like "Oh yeah, great"...
NH: And then the errant 16 year old girl walks by at the all-ages show and it's like "Hey thumbs up!" (laughs)...We're like "Yeah, thanks" (all laugh)
Me: I was talking to different friends in bands about what were good questions they would want to be asked, and one of my friends suggested "Ask if they'd gotten laid by being in a band?"
MJ/NH: (in unison) NO! (laughs) Absolutely not….
MJ: It's actually true. We…(starts to explain)
Me: You don't really have to answer it. (laughs)
MJ: No, we don't mind answering it...we're very much of the mentality that whatever is rock star, we are against.
NH: Also it is LA, so it's "Oh you're kinda hot...oh wait, there's Slash..." (all laugh) It's like nobody fucking cares...
MJ: We're just an indie rock band from the neighborhood and we play frequent shows out here. But I think everyone's pretty normal and the whole groupie thing...you have to be pretty media-savvy to know about a band like us anyway, and anyone who's that media savvy isn't gonna be that lame. And anyways, we're just not that kind of people.

Me: Another band thing before we go into the writing part of it....I'd read you guys did a "residency" at a bar in LA called Spaceland, where you played one night a week for a month when you were still relatively new. On the east coast, that type of thing seems to be more for cover bands or more “established” bands, like Alejandro Escovedo, who plays Tuesdays at the Continental Club in Austin, TX, or Bobby Short, who used to play weekly at the Carlyle in NYC. First, is this a typical thing on the west coast and then, how did it come about for you?
NH: There's a lot of clubs in LA that do that with bands that are getting more established, but not broken yet. It's actually a very common thing on Monday nights, Monday night is the quote-unquote "residency night."
MJ: (interjects) Well, on the east side, you should distinguish between the two...
NH: Right, on the east side. There's two parts of LA, there's the eastern part of LA, then there's what you see on TV, like Hollywood, West Hollywood, Santa Monica. We don't even go over there, we're not even welcome in that part of town. If we did, they'd call the sheriff basically, like "Get outta Rodeo!" (laughs)
MJ: "Stop disturbin' my quiet beach town!" (laughs)
NH: So yeah, it's a fairly common thing to do on east side LA clubs.
MJ: And it's usually your up and coming bands. It's pretty common around here. The one thing about the Spaceland thing is that it was a Thursday night residency, which is more of a "show" night of the week, and they'd only ever done that one other time, like 2 years ago with Silversun Pickups. So that was definitely a bit of an honor, and Spaceland kind of getting behind us and the east side scene. We very much felt like that's our turf, we play a lot of shows out here, that's our home.

ME: Did you guys have a definitive sound in mind when you started? I've read a lot about what people think you sound like but myself personally, I hear story stuff like Tom Waits, I hear Brit Pop jangly stuff, I hear Peter Murphy vocals, I hear a lot going on. But it was really odd to hear that five people came together and had that sort of definitive idea about what it is that they wanted to sound like in advance.
MJ: It wasn't really like that. I think it appears like that from the outside. From what I can piece together, it seems like people make a plan like a business plan, like, ok we're gonna be a band of this genre, we're gonna write songs of this ilk, and therefore, attain this audience. Our experience has not been like that; I mean, we just write songs. Sometimes we sound like the White Stripes and sometimes we sound very much not like the white Stripes. (laughs) There's a lot of politics in guitar effects. It's not because you chose to sound one way or the other, it's just what sounded good to you. These choices weren't made out of any particular desire to be part of a genre, we're just musicians. I write a lot of folk music, I write country songs, Anna has a classical background, Noah has a jazz background...The rock and roll songs that I wrote, that we wrote together, or that Noah and I wrote, when we come together and work them out, we're more thinking about what sounds good. And probably there's a bunch of influences going on there that are subconscious, but it's not like the kind of thing that we plan on. So it's extremely flattering to be compared to these bands that we just admire so much, but there's really no intention to it.

Me: Being at SXSW, I was really struck by how young many of the bands were. You guys are a little older for a first band--is that odd?
MJ: Well to be fair, I'm older, the rest of them are about the same age. (laughs)
ME: (to all) Well remember I'd set these questions up more focused toward Mikel so...
MJ: Yeah it's a fair question....I feel it's absurd sometimes, I mean I had every intention of being a younger first time novelist as opposed to be an older first time bandmate. (laughs) But you know there's this moment of recognition when you're working on something, that your heart’s really in it, it doesn't really matter as long as you do catch the plot. Some catch the plot when they're 12, I literally didn't until I was 30, for some reason it just didn't click in my head. I mean, I was in a band when I was 25, I wasn't very good.
NH: I think that being said, I think it has allowed us to sort of skip making a lot of mistakes that young kids make. Like we've still done some really fucking stupid things (laughs)…
MJ: (interjects) Nightly.
NH: Yeah pretty much daily. That little bit, that touch of age, has really allowed us to not be intimidated by mister whoever who works for whatever band saying, "Look this is what you've got to do right now, if you don't do this right now you are fucked."
SC: If I could interject, I think it's also that a lot of the things that Mikel sings about, it's awful, and it really happened to him. You get the run-of-the-mill type topics with younger bands. I feel like there is some real struggle in a lot of lyrics that speak very honestly to the bands' experience, versus a bunch of songs about lecture heartache at 21 in retrospect.
MJ: Yeah, I mean I wasn't that good of a songwriter when I was 25, that's the truth of it. I still struggle with it quite a bit. It sometimes feels absurd to me…maybe I should be starting at a law firm or finishing that 2nd novel or whatever…instead I'm playing in clubs. Maybe it's stupid but I just love it, it just feels super natural to me. What else I've noticed is kids just don't care, they don't care one way or the other. I mean, I get all kinds of fan mail...Oh say hi to Anna!

(Anna Bulbrook, the band's viola/keyboardist, comes in. I relay to her my comments regarding her dealing with 4 guys and how my guy friends at SXSW loved her.)

MJ: (to Anna) We were telling her about the many admirers that hang out after shows.
AB: Ahhh… (laughs)
MJ: We call them "Anamaniacs." (all laugh)
MJ: (to me) Oh I was saying about how we have younger fans...We have a lot of younger fans who are like, 14, 15 years old and my emails to them are like, "Stay in school! Working hard has nothing to do with your parents!" I get really personal but I think it's because the songs are real personal. I get a lot of really personal emails from kids, like "My stepdad isn't so good a guy" or "My folks split up awhile ago" or whatever, and I guess I feel sort of avuncular towards them. They're a lot younger than I am but they can relate--I think it's really cool. I'm always like, "College has nothing to do with your parents, go to school, learn things, live your life, love people, have ideas, be beautiful!" (laughs)
Me: Well I figured being older you could win drink-offs or something...
MJ: No, I couldn't win a drink off in this band. Noah, Noah would definitely win the drink-offs in this band. (laughs)

(At this point, "mad riffage" is starting from the other room where the other members have gravitated. Anna soon joins them, and Mikel and I start talking about writing.)

Me: You're the band's main songwriter thus far. Can you talk some about your writing past?
MJ: Well, the biggest thing I guess is in the next McSweeney's I have a short story coming out. It's my first piece of published fiction, so that's kind of exciting. It's about four friends, who are all dying of various illnesses, walking around in one of those weirdly surreal rainy days in LA. It's a short story but it's actually kind of long, like 10,000 words, I'm working on turning it into a novella or a novel, so that's been the main writing project of late.

My background in writing is, I dunno, when I was 27 I moved to a horse ranch and brought with me a ton of books, and sat there for a year and read and wrote, and that's all I did.
Me: A horse ranch?
MJ: Yeah, I was like a stable boy where they gave me room and board if I worked for 3 hours a day, shoveling horse manure. So I did that, and just read a bunch of books. I didn't have a literature background, I was a science person in college, so it was all really new to me. And I just fell in love with it and started writing all the time. I did some music journalism, a lot of personal essays, I also wrote about politics, and during that time, 50,000 words of a novel....I just wrote and wrote and wrote. I think it happened with music too. I kind of throw myself at things and I'm like a jockey on a horse, often I can't control how it goes, I just have to hold on. These days it's with music and songwriting and stuff but at the time it was very much with literature and writing.
Me: What was your novel about?
MJ: Oh, I can't tell you that.
Me: Boo (laughs)
MJ: No it's bad luck, it's bad luck. (both laugh) But I've since abandoned that first novel. The story that's coming out in McSweeneys, it's much more lighthearted. The first one was like "MY NOVEL" and I spent a lot of time on names that represent death. This one, they're all dying--I tend to write about death a lot--and they're all dying, but mostly they just smoke a lot of pot, watch movies, hang around Los Feliz, and crack jokes; it's just about the relationships between these 4 friends.
Me: Where did you do undergrad?
MJ: Oh, Stanford.
Me: Wowza…
MJ: Eh… (shrugs)
Me: I won't put that in. (laughs)
MJ: It's ok. People in my family don't generally graduate high school. I was the first one, so it was all gravy for me, very much a good thing. I come from a long line of mechanics and ex-cons. (laughs)

Me: Did you always have a penchant for writing since childhood? When you got into it, was writing something that just came easily to you?
MJ: Yeah, I think that's fair to say. When I was a kid I used to write stories a lot. It was like a thing in my family...my uncle would ask, "How's the writing Mikel?" when I was like, 8. (laughs) I would always write short stories, invent characters, and tell stories. In high school, I started playing guitar and actually started writing songs--I think I was 15. Of course, I didn't write a good one till I was 30, but I started writing songs when I was 15. It was your heartbroken teenage garden variety sort of trope.

But yeah it's always been a thing for me. If you could look around my apartment here, there's writing all over the walls and books taped up to my walls....things written everywhere.
Me: On the wall itself? (laughs)
MJ: Yeah I just write on my walls. I dunno, that shit just kind of makes sense to me. I always liked books and no one else in my family ever liked books.
Me: So when you move you always carry 18 boxes of books?
MJ: Oh yeah, I have a lot of books and I like to keep them too. I feel proud that I read them and they're all dog eared and shit.
Me: Lots of underlining and stuff?
MJ: It's like a little exercise... I don't underline but I'll dog ear them and later on when I go back, I read it because I'm curious and trying to find what I thought was important. (laughs)
Me: Yeah, I've got books, CDs, and shoes....the latter, it's a chick thing.
MJ: Ah. I got books, CDs...and whiskey. (both laugh)
Me: Well at least it's Jameson so that's a plus. Let's see…was there someone in your life who instilled a love of language for you early on?
MJ: Nah, not really. I come from a family of very poetic people, in their own way, but probably not formal language, that was more my thing. My folks were down with whatever it was I was gonna do. They always sort of recognized I was into different things...
Me: A bit precocious?
MJ: No, I think I was a pain in the ass actually. (both laugh) But I was definitely into things that not necessarily everyone in my family was into. They were always into music though…I'd be driving along with my dad and he would put in a song like off "Eat a Peach" by the Allman Brothers, and say, "Yeah, you wanna hear a smoking guitar, check this out….oh wait right here!" (air-riffs)

Me: Your lyrics for a lot of what's out there thus far are like a 2-3 minute glimpse into someone's emotional core. Some are quite raw, almost like a plane crash, but you can't look away ("Sometime Around Midnight" and "Innocence," for example). I've read they resulted from a week of hellacious events that took place in your personal life. Many writers allude to events like this in metaphor, let someone else sing them, or talk of them only within the walls of their shrink’s office; yours was put out in song lyrics that you yourself sang. Was it or is it weird or awkward to have to sing those and record those?
MJ: Hmm...That's a good question. See that is a different question, most people ask, "What's it like to be sorta famous now?" (laughs) As soon as I got in front of an audience, it wasn't weird. I spent a couple years, like I said, playing in my apartment, and I'd write songs all day. I have 100s of songs that we haven't played, just cause they're not right for Airborne, or the ones we play are really the greatest hits or whatever...

(slight interruption occurs)

MJ: So…I spent a lot of time in my place, playing guitar, really wanting to be playing a show. By the time we'd played our first show, I'd been in my head with this music for a year and half at that point, and I was so fucking ready to play that it just felt really natural. The songs in there are all real, everything in there is true, everything really happened. Like in the case of "Innocence", I just wanted the entire world to see this horrible event for what it was. Or a song like "Midnight", you write that sitting alone in your apartment, and like with all writers, you want to be able to tell the entire world that THIS happened to me and I want others to know about it because it was so overwhelming to me that it happened. So by the time we played a show it felt extremely natural from the first note. I always have these thoughts before shows and after shows about what the show will be or won't be. But during the show, I'm not thinking, I'm just running on fumes and energy and it has nothing to do with thoughts anymore, I'm just kind of a conduit. I see tapes sometimes and I think, "Wow that guy looks really insane, I don't know who that guy is at all." (laughs)

(Daren Taylor, the band's drummer, arrives)

MJ: Daren say hi, this is Daren, our drummer

(We exchange pleasantries and Daren goes into the other room with the other bandmates)

Me: At SXSW, you mentioned that you guys "Couldn't play anything else, you played all the songs you knew." Have you been writing currently? Do you feel your topics/tone has differed since that first round of songs?
MJ: No, we pretty much have our record. Basically the way it works is this: I wrote like, 100 songs in the last year and a half, of that, Darren and I worked out beats and stuff for say, 40. Of those 40, we brought about 30 to the band, of those 30 we played about 25 live. Of those 25 we played live in the last year, we recorded about 16. Of those 16 we decided to keep 10.

In the last year, I don't know if things have changed that much, it's hard to have insight into these things in such a short amount of time. We're still a new band so it's hard to think about change over time. We don't even have our first record out yet.

Me: You were able to take devastating events and channel them through an outlet, and it produced a "type" of lyric. If nothing else bad happens from this point on in your life…
MJ: (interjects) That would be fine by me! (both laugh)
ME: Do you feel that your writing will change?
MJ: I think that you write about what's around you. So yeah I hope so, I hope it's not the case that I can only write about devastatingly bad times. I've just had some devastatingly bad times in the past couple of years. I didn't choose ‘em, I wouldn't want ‘em back. My life's a little better now that it was a year ago so....I would love to write a really, really good song about being in love with a beautiful, kind, wonderful woman that bears me many children. (laughs) It's just all this stuff kind of happened. If you had asked me 5 years ago what I'd be doing right now, I'd probably say I'd be on my third novel and married…..instead I'm in a rock band. You ever have stuff happen to you in your life that just breaks you in half? You never plan for it. It's also stuff I often tell all those young kids who write us letters, I'm always saying, "Shit happens in your life, use it, make something from it, make some art from it." The things that are terrible in life that happen to you are also beautiful, and you can find the beauty in all that terror. Hopefully there's some beauty in just beauty and happiness. I don't know, I've yet to write a good love song that's just about being happy….But I hope to, I aspire to that.

Me: You'd said that you'd studied science in undergrad, and then you just said that you wanted to be on your third novel. So where did the switch take place?
MJ: Between science and writing?
ME: Yeah, I mean there are great creative writing people at your undergrad.
MJ: Hmm, yeah I dunno, I guess I always felt that studying writing is cheating, and that somehow I didn't want to learn all these tricks so I couldn't tell the tricks from things I actually thought.....

(The band meeting is about to start at this point so we decide to reconvene a bit later that night and continue.)

Act II next...