Interviews

Interviews: Thinking Out Loud

It is two months after Thinking Out Loud has completed their second full length CD, "Install Rebel Government Here". The completely self-produced album has taken over a year to record and mix. The songs range from straight forward rock anthems, to ambiguous vocal tracks over city noise, to simple political chants, to 12 minute orchestrated love-song suite thingys. The only blanket statement that can be made is that it sounds like something new. As I sit down to talk to them, Thinking Out Loud seems to be a band that is relieved at finishing a musical expression of such magnitude, and both excited and uneasy as to the way the record will be received. Visit Thinking Out Loud...

This record doesn't seem to fit into any well-defined genre or style. What type of audience is "Install Rebel Government Here" aimed toward?

[awkward pause]

Dan: Well, there's certainly no built in crowd that we appeal to. I guess we're pretty much trying to convert people.

So you're creating your own audience?

Dan: Yea. I think we felt like that even on the last record. We listen to so much different stuff that we couldn't really help it.

It's been about two months since you finished the new record. Would you say that it's a success?

Dan: It's hard to tell right now.

Matt: We were so excited to have it done, but we don't have a lot of resources or distribution or even a label right now. We had a huge build up after finishing the album but no one has been able to hear it.

Dan: Ask us that question in a year.

Mark: We had these grandiose visions of things that were going to happen; then the CD doesn't sell as fast as we had hoped, and the gigs don't come as fast as we expected, But this month we're playing out more than we did last month, next month we'll be playing just about every weekend and we're selling a lot more CD's than ever before....

From where you are now, how would you define 'success' in a year from now?

Mark: I would like to feel like we are as established in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and pretty much the whole east coast as we are in the D.C. area. That would be a minimum.

Dan: It would be nice if we didn't have to go out on the streets and promote whenever we played out of town. We want people to come out to shows because they know and appreciate what we're doing.

That must be hard when you're introducing a new genre of music.

Dan: We've been facing that problem since square one. You know, it's a lot easier for a Ska band, you just hook yourself up with other Ska bands and have a big Ska showcase! Come see our Ska band!

What kind of music do you fit in with?

Mark: We've played with bands all over the board. And we feel like we can go pretty much anywhere as far as shows are concerned.

Dan: When a band really believes in what they do, they don't see any stopping points as to what they are playing and who might be interested. It could be anything, success could be anything. Maybe, for us, success could be doing this full time and have it become our lives. But it doesn't have to stop there. So many styles of music come into vogue for a little while, get big on the radio, but some things last forever regardless of radio play or fashion or any of that stuff.

You spent about a year recording the album, you even produced it yourselves. Do you see yourselves taking the same approach on future albums?

All: Yea, Yes, Oh Yea, etc....

Mark: I don't want to produce it ourselves again, though. And I don't know what to say about the approach. It's not like we sat down and said "let's make a style that's completely different." It's just the way that we were writing. I just think that naturally we'll end up taking the same approach. In the heat of things, we're always second guessing everything.

Matt: I think we'll always have a strong mind in the studio. Personally, most of the songs that I write, the way it's going to sound on record is the first thing I have in mind. So we'll never be in a situation where we have some sort of authority figure in the studio telling us how we should sound. But it would be nice to have someone around with experience and more importantly, motivation.

So it was a disadvantage producing it yourselves?

Mark: Yea, I think so. It just took so long. But on the other hand, we've gained a lot of knowledge. The next time we're in the studio we'll have a better idea of the sounds we want and we'll know how to get there.

The album is, more or less, a studio creation. What's it been like trying to pull these songs off live? Have you had to completely change the sound?

Matt: I was surprised by how well we were able to pull some of those sounds off.

Mark: People have actually mentioned that our live sound comes really close to the sounds we got on the record.

Matt: We've had to cut a few things, but I'm surprised by how well we pulled most of it off.

So you feel like you're a 'live' band again?

Mark: Yea, it feels like it's just starting to come together again.

Matt: We just had a really solid show, and we've consistently had good practices. We're feeling comfortable on stage and we're more confident about the arrangements.

Dan: The arrangements have really been a trial and error thing for us. We really didn't know what was going to work. It took us a while to realize that some things weren't coming across the way we wanted it to.

Matt seems to have written the majority of the songs on the record. Was that intentional? And is that something to expect from future projects?

Matt: No. We all had songs on the album.

Mark: Whoever is writing the most when we're recording the record is going to get the most songs on the album. We don't know who that might be in the future.

Dan: This album was based on a specific concept. We pretty much took songs that fit the way we wanted them to fit.

Whose idea was "Install Rebel Government Here"?

Matt & Mark: Dan's

Matt: That sketch on the back was a drawing of Dan's. It's the layout we were working from. The drawing wasn't even meant for public consumption, it was just a map of where we were going with the record, more or less a guideline.

Do you feel like you got those ideas across in the music?

Dan: I don't know yet. People that we know really well have commented on the concepts of the record, but listeners we don't know very well haven't brought up the connections they way I had hoped. A lot of themes run consistently from song to song and certain ideas that reoccur throughout the record. But no one has come up to me and talked about any of those specific things.

Charlie: It the kind of album that you've got to listen to over and over before you pick everything up. A person might not pick up on some things until the fifteenth listen.

Matt: First and foremost, an album has to have an initial emotional impact. I didn't want a record that could only be absorbed intellectually. We were going for a multi-layered affect. We want the initial reaction to be 'this is good music, it sounds good to my ears', but the more you get into it the more you discover.

Would you say there's a 'Pop' element to the music?

Matt: Well, [weird face] I Guess so. But I think there's a 'Pop' element in most music.

Dan: I don't think pop is a dirty word. It's important to be able to pull someone into your music.

Matt: Our label is called "Quasi Pop" because we defined ourselves in that way for a while. Sure 'Pop' is used to describe commercial, trite shit like "The Backstreet Boys" or whatever. But I remember "Sting" defining 'Pop' as a cultural mix that takes a bit from Jazz, a bit from Classical music, from literature, and history, from electronic music.... That's where 'Pop' is a good word.

Part of the message that I got from this record is that people are becoming apathetic and numb to anything that doesn't catch their ear or their eye right away. It seems to me that you have to give in on this subject a little bit if you want to attract a decent size audience.

Dan: The hard thing is finding the audience. Especially if you listen to a lot of local music that doesn't try to make these kind of statements. There is such a glut of material out there these days. It's hard to say something that is going to attract attention.

Matt: We set out to make a record that had continuity and, in a way, a theme. It's a concept album. But we didn't want to make a really rigid record that you can only listen to when you're in a certain mood. For example, I like "Pink Floyd" a lot, and I like "The Wall" a lot. But it's not something I would throw on all the time because it's very clear what's going on. It's a triumph as a piece of art, but it's hard to superimpose your own feelings and own experience on it because it is so exact in what it's trying to say.

You're trying to force people to bring their own feelings and experiences to the songs?

Matt: Yea

Mark: The concept really relates to that. I like the way "Install Rebel Government Here" isn't so specific. To me, the concept of the record is something that we all go through over and over and over and over again and it can relate to many different things. I like that fact that it is kind of vague. And if people don't want to pick it up they don't have to.

You're making a statement about social indifference, what I want to ask is, what makes this an album we should pay attention to?

Dan: Whether you can solve the problem or not, it's important to recognize the problem. The thing is, we couldn't just go out and make a 'Ska' record because it's just not us. It might sell really well or give us a built in audience, but we couldn't do it and feel like we were offering all of ourselves. What we're doing now is all of ourselves. How many more love songs can the world sustain? The point is there's always something new. It might take hitting someone over the head with an idea, it might be something subtle that only one person in the world would get.

Matt: There are new things to say, but more importantly there are new ways to say it. There are always new perspectives on (and this sounds really grandiose), life. New ways to express yourself. At times it's intimidating and discouraging to look at how much art is out there and to realize you are an insignificant voice. But when you're creating you shouldn't be concerned with how you're going to be received and how you're going to shape the world. It should come from a really intimate place. It doesn't always, but it should.

Mark: Where's my wallet? Oh, I think it's in my car? Yea, it's in my car.

Matt: Originality should just be a bi-product of sincerity.

It seems funny that it takes so much work to sound sincere.

Mark: It's so easy to judge your own work once your finished with it. But when you're in the middle of it, you really have no idea if you like it, you don't know what you want, you don't even know what sincerity is. You'll never really know. You just have to do it, judge it, do it, judge it. I have to go get my wallet.

Is this a prescriptive or a descriptive statement you're making?

Dan: Descriptive, definitely. The record is just a collection of songs that make a story, nothing else. We're four kids from Fairfax, we're not going to try and tell you how to live. We're definitely not preaching. We hope that at least, that comes through. Who needs to be preached to. I always tell people this, the reason I got into politics was "Living Colour". You can say 'the guy's wearing a wet suit', but, ten years before that people were getting into politics because of "The Clash".

Matt: That's strange you say that, because "Living Colour" got me into wet suits.