Every Day Life
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Well I appreciate you giving me a chance to do this, I've never had the chance to interview somebody and be actually on the other side, so please suffer me for a little while here.
"It's no problem whatsoever. I've known about your music for a while. There's no disrespect here. I'm excited."
I'm excited too. I've gotten the music, actually, I only got it a couple days ago, but I really dug the music. I was curious about how you guys recorded it. Were you in a studio, was it a house? Was it done live?
"We recorded the whole record in the Green Room, in Huntington Beach, which a lot of some of the better records that have come out in ‘96, ‘97 have. Plankeye recorded their record there. Blackball recorded their record at the Green Room. There's just this really great vibe. It's a house, and you's never even know that in the back room there's this beautiful 24 track recording studio. A lot of great records have come out of that place, but not a lot of people know what it's like when you walk in there. It's like the most comfortable feeling in the world. It's like you've just walked into your favorite room in your house, and it's one big room."
Don't you like recording in a house? I recorded my latest record in a house.
"It's incredible, because you walk out of the studio, and you start hanging out in the living room. And your attitude changes from the minute you walk out of that studio, and you're sitting on the couch hangin' out playing pool or something."
Yeah, it's real laid back, and you don't have the time pressures of going, "Whoa, every second that ticks off is costing us X number of dollars."
"And it feels warm too. It doesn't feel like you're in this big recording studio, and all the pressures of the world are on you. And it feels good, because literally, you could just walk out and go down to the local convenience store. And that's nice too, because it's actually on a block where if you wanted to go for a walk, there's actually, like, society . . . instead of jammed in the middle of a corporate park area, and it's real impersonal under those circumstances. We actually recorded our first record under those exact circumstances, and I think that record suffered because of it."
It sounds like what you did with this record is very similar to what I did. Is there a name for the style of music that you're doing?
"The odd thing about that is, we never thought that there was. We just considered it a more, like a hybrid alternative, or a very simplistic metal. And it turned out, as we were going through on the couple of tours that we've done, all the kids deemed it as rap- core, because hardcore was catching on, and hardcore is really substantiated itself. And I guess because of the element of hardcore music that's involved with the making of the actual songs, they kind of took it upon themselves to combine the two, because it wasn't hip hop, but it was rap, and it wasn't hardcore, but it was still hardcore music with rap lyrics. So they kept calling it rap-core, and eventually, we found that with other bands that were doing the same style, kids were calling it that as well. So it's almost started, over the past year to become its own entity and its own musical style. So yeah, rap-core is basically what everybody is coming to know it as."
Cool, well, I wasn't sure. Actually, the bio mentioned something called power groove.
"Yeah, that's what we used to call it. The records were real . . . The drums and the bass are always the primary, they're always the foundation of a good song. And if you scrape down everything, and you take off all the guitars and rapping, and you look for a second at just what the bare root minimum of what we've laid down is, it's almost like some of the grooves are almost like a Gap Band kinda groove, you know, real funk, still real straight ahead. It was real focused, it was a real tight groove. And the drum was a solid four four with some really great fills."
That's what I was digging about it, I think. You mentioned the Gap Band. Would you consider them to be a musical influence?
"It's odd, because when you play this kind of music, it almost seems like you can listen to the record and hear an influence for everything. Like in ‘Residence,' some might consider the Dave Matthews band an influence, but at the same time, it might be considered somewhat of a Brian Wilson-ish type song. That song was written, you know, I love the Beach Boys. They are one of my favorite bands in the entire world, and that song was written in kind of that frame of mind, like ‘Be True to Your School, or, wherever you're from, there's something to be proud of. And one off the things I realized was is that I wasn't proud about any place, because I hadn't stayed any place long enough to be proud of."
Something tells me that, upon first listen, not many people will connect you guys with the Beach Boys.
"No, not at all. But I don't think that they would give us the credit, either, that I'm a big Carpenters fan. Carl, our guitarist, came from a predominantly metal background when he started developing his musical influences, but now he listens to a lot of techno and house, and deep bass and groove, and a lot of drum and bass work . . . a lot of indie rock too. When I was growing up, you know, there was still John Cougar Mellencamp who was out there, you know, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. And not a lot of those songs really clicked in my head, and to this day, I don't really know why I know all the words to those songs, considering that I was listening to, like, Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, Rappers Delight, Houdini, LL Cool J, I still don't understand why I turn on the classic rock station, I know the words to Led Zeppelin songs."
Yeah, it's scary. I've found that out by touring, because a lot of times, we'll listen to classic rock when we're on the road, and I'm thinkin', "This is scary. I know the lyrics to these songs!"
"Yeah, and all the sudden, I know all the words to ‘Come on Eileen,' by Jackson Midnight Runner."
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