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I mean, I worry sometimes. I’m a little bit lazy in regular life.
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I mean, I worry sometimes. I’m a little bit lazy in regular life.
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The last time I sat down to chat with Matthew from Nada Surf was about a year ago, before their sixth album, The Weight Is A Gift was released. Since then they’ve pretty much been on tour and to be honest, they seemed more relaxed and at ease than they did back then, but I suppose having been a band for more than a decade now, slipping into the rhythm of being on tour feels comfortable for them. I spent the afternoon with the band before their gig at Haarlem‘s new Patronaat (rapidly becoming one of Incendiary’s favourite venues) and they were all in good humour. Daniel had a flight to Vienna to catch at 5:30 in the morning so spent half the afternoon trying to decide whether to stay up all night and go straight to the airport or crash out for a bit first. Matthew had some friends visiting from France so spent a few hours showing off his language skills and Ira and I spent about 5 hours surfing You Tube and discussing the genius of Keith Moon which, whilst surely not good for our health, made for a very entertaining afternoon.
It wasn’t all fun and games though, after all I had a job to do, so I managed to drag Matthew to one side and have a chat.
IN: Ok, let’s try to be serious and professional for a minute shall we?
M: If you can manage it.
IN: Yeah, so, it’s been about a year since we last sat down and spoke about things and that was before the album came out, although I did see you at Haldern of course,
M: Oh yeah I remember that.
IN: You made the sun come out.
M: That was good fun.
IN: And I also managed to catch your show at the Melkweg at the tail end of last year which was a great night.
M: That was wild and what a beautiful room too.
IN: Yeah the crowd were really up for it that night but I was wondering how things have gone down for you overall on the tour?
M: Really pretty charmed, you know, and it doesn’t seem to be just this record. It just seems to be continuing to get slowly more fans. Although (The Weight is a Gift) is still selling, which is nice. But we have absolutely no complaints and I feel like we’re reaping the exponential reward of staying together for so long. I’m starting to feel like more of the people are coming along know all of the records and are fans of the whole deal, you know and that’s good.
That’s kind of a first for us, you know. It’s like, the crowds are continuing to become almost nicer and nicer and we’re continuing to be surprised by the applause and that, you know?
IN: Well do you think that is just part and parcel of the fact that you’ve stuck at it together for so long? Or, considering that the Weight is a Gift is such a confident sounding record, I was thinking that this album seems to have opened you up to a wider audience.
M: Well I think it is because of just staying together for so long. Maybe that just starts to happen after ten or eleven years.
IN: Well you’ve been living with the album on the road for almost a year now so is it a case of you just getting back into the swing of things or are you still as excited about playing it as you were this time last year?
M: Oh, you know, it’s never really changed. It wasn’t, like, more exciting to tour because we had a new record and it’s not any less exciting because it’s now an older record. It is just day to day run of the mill, but it’s a run of the mill day to day excitement. Do you know what I mean?
I mean, I worry sometimes. I’m a little bit lazy in regular life. I don’t want to be but I’m not the biggest self motivator and I find myself like, here again, my job today is to soundcheck and to fool around with tone. Have a rock and roll show. Have a glass of wine afterwards. Say hello to some people. Sit on the bus and so on and so on. I mean there’s plenty to be industrious about, but one isn’t always.
IN: Do you still get the pressure from the shows? That every night it’s a new group of people in front of you or that you feel the pressure to perform if, say the last three nights have been brilliant?
M: Oh yeah. That’s there every night. It’s not so much because of people but because, say, if I have a bad show I just..well..I just get personally depressed.
I mean we just played Hurricane and the Southside, which are two German festivals. And we were playing the Hurricane, which is in the North of the country and it was the day the Germany vs Sweden football match. The festival had this area arranged for watching the game and because it was Germany the area was getting so crowded there the Police decided that the game had to be shown on the Jumbotron’s at the side of our stage.
IN: Whilst you were playing?
M: Instead of us playing. So we got cancelled. Of course we suggested, “Why don’t you just show the game and we’ll just play?” but of course they wouldn’t have that. So we ended up playing at half-time and we played four songs. But, you know, I just didn’t have a good four songs. I was bummed out for the entire rest of the day. I was really out of sorts but then the next day we played the other half, at Southside and we had a stonking, fucking awesome show and I was really happy again.
But those shows are always, always good shows. You know, the one after a bad show because well, just, you know it has to be. We played this radio festival in LA in the winter and The White Stripes were there and Death Cab For Cutie, who are friends of ours, they’d played with The White Stripes the night before and said that is was like, the worst. You know Meg was all drunk and Jack got pissed off and they played like a fifteen minute show and Jack walked off. It was just a disaster and then we saw them the night after and I’d never seen them before and they came out and played one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. They were incredible, just fucking awesome.
IN: That’s the beauty of live music though, don’t you think? Where you never know what you’re going to get. You’re always waiting for something.
M: Right. In fact I think that sometimes things messing up, like technical difficulties, make the shows better. Particularly in this modern age of CGI and autotune and all that stuff. It really kind of reminds you that it’s real. Just like being out of tune a little bit, although I don’t want to do that, the fact is that when you are out of tune a little bit it’s like an instant hit, it kind of bypasses people’s brains right to their, their whatever, and proves to them that it’s not fake.
I mean I was watching a T-Rex DVD called Born To Boogie, I’ve been watching it a lot lately and he’s flagrantly, flagrantly out of tune and they’re these massive shows. Like Wembley, not the stadium but like the Wembley theater or something and he’s way out. He’s so far out of tune and you’re like, it’s obvious. But this is the biggest band in England at the time so, of course, there must be someone right there with an extra guitar or a strobe tuner or something or at least to be able get it in tone himself but he’s way out.
Born To Boogie is a movie that Ringo Starr made about him and there’s this footage of him. There’s a shot of like this string octet and there’s a table set up with, like, nuns and monks. You know, actors and actresses. It’s all very elaborate. They’re having this crazy lunch scene and at one point he picks up his acoustic guitar and sits down in front of these string players and they play four or five T-Rex songs and he’s way out of tune. But it’s great. You know, it really works because he’s like, this phenomenal singer and he’s got that almost operatic…not in a bad way, but like that wobble in his voice. And when you combine that with like a kind of wonky donky guitar, it’s kind of like a magic formula.
I think he’s amazing because even though it’s kind of neanderthol… and I think that’s a compliment, but it’s neanderthol music sometimes T-Rex, it’s really simple. Then once in a while he’ll do this little flourish and I’m like, “Jesus Christ that was really fucking fast.” You know, he’s like hiding it. He’s hiding his technique and err…I don’t know what we were talking about but I suppose that doesn’t matter.
IN: Nah, we’ll just natter on as usual. So I was wondering are you guys already trying to think ahead?
M: Yeah of course. We always are and we’re sitting on a couple of little, well, pieces of stuff. We went to the Dominican Republic recently to work on music and we didn’t play that much together but what thing I did, that I can never manage to do at home, was listen to old cassettes. I have tons and tons of tapes of stuff. ‘Cos most of the time when I fool around with music I’m not actually writing a full song, I’m writing bits of songs and pieces of stuff. I’m not doing it…like, whole songs don’t just pop out you know? It’s just these little bits and I have endless cassettes of this….garbage. Listening to it back is kind of painful because it’s hard to listen to yourself play…bad, sub-par, crap. But you have to do it. Cos‘ you know one percent of that stuff will be really good and then I’ll develop them and eventually they’ll end up as songs that I really like.
So even though it was really hot, ‘cos like going to the Tropics in summer was kind of crazy but, you know, it was so peaceful and away from any screen or phone that worked. So we have a little bit of a head start and we’re thinking ahead. We’ll see. One of the challenges that we have is that every time we make a record I have to find a new way to be. In that I mean that if I want to sit down and finish a bunch of songs I have to be feeling happy with myself as a person and that takes some doing. You know it’s like you can turn over a new leaf every day but do you ever stick to it? To make a record, and I found this with the last three, it’s like I have to stick to one of those leaves because otherwise I kind of feel like a sham. You know, I can string together a few chords and I can kind of catch some melodies here and there but, you know, if I don’t feel like a good emotional citizen of the world, so that I’m not doing damage to people around me, if the ledger is good then everything’s good. Because you know, the ledger often is not. You know like this aunt writes to me or this friend writes to me and I read them but I don’t answer them. You know, it’s like I’m getting a lot of affection but I’m not giving any back and making a record is often like, you know, you have to take a look at that ledger. You can’t help but see it and if it’s off balance then I probably couldn’t do it.
IN: Well last time I spoke to you, you said that writing The Weight Was A Gift was such a challenge because of the label struggles you had and also for the fact that you thought the last album was so good that you had to better it. Are you still applying that pressure to yourself?
M: Well it doesn’t necessarily have to be better but we were just talking about this the other day. Someone asked us, “Where will you be in ten years?” and part of the answer was like, “Well I hope we’re doing the same thing.” But then part of me was like I hope we’re looking back at a bunch of good records because if we’re not then I think that would kill us. If we made one that we thought wasn’t that good well…I don’t know… I think it would either finish the band or it would make us go crazy and want to make a better one. I don’t know, but I’m excited about it.
At that point we called the official business to a halt and decided to crack open the beer fridge. The gig itself was a blast. The band seemed on good form although I think Matthew’s talk of technical difficulties jinxed Daniel somewhat as he simply couldn’t hear his bass through the monitors at all and had to just wing it. Still, those of us in the crowd enjoyed ourselves. After seeing them play Popular as a late, late encore in Amsterdam last year I was pleasantly surprised to see them throw it into the middle of the set this time around. The biggest surprise for me was just how powerful and energetic What Is Your Secret sounded. It’s not one of my favourite tracks from The Weight Is A Gift but it was truly fantastic here. After our discussions earlier in the day, Ira had persuaded the others to put a cover of The Kids Are Alright into the set, which was actually pretty good but to be honest I just laughed my head off at Ira’s Keith Moon impersonation (open mouthed and everything). He should have taped his headphones to his head though.
Interview: Damian Leslie
http://www.fabchannel.com/ – watch the whole of the fabulous Nada Surf show from the Melkweg last November. Truly excellent.