Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
| Sony Connect Interview | ||
 Posts: 2363 |
Posted Mon May 28, 2007 11:46 PM | Quote |
| I can't open this link on my Mac, can someone copy and paste the interview and post it here? http://musicstore.connect.com/custom/promos/brmc/br_interview.html |
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| Re: Sony Connect Interview | ||
 Posts: 1316 |
Posted Mon May 28, 2007 11:52 PM | Quote |
| I don't think it's just your Mac. I think you have to be a member of Connect or something. | ||
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| Re: Sony Connect Interview | ||
 Posts: 1127 |
Posted Tue May 29, 2007 1:16 AM | Quote |
| yeah it doesn't seem to work. :( | ||
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| Re: Sony Connect Interview | ||
 Posts: 344 |
Posted Tue May 29, 2007 3:28 AM | Quote |
I can't open this link on my Mac, can someone copy and paste the interview and post it here? http://musicstore.connect.com/custom/promos/brmc/br_interview.html Black Rebel Motorcycle Club Exclusive Interview The brooding melodies and heavy guitar riffs continue to resonate on Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's latest album, Baby 81, named after the infant tsunami survivor that was claimed by nine different couples in Sri Lanka. The new release welcomes the return of drummer Nick Jago who was absent for most of BRMC's last album Howl due to alcohol related problems. With the three original members back together, Baby 81 is their most powerful and "jagged" album to date, and CONNECT Music was lucky enough to talk to Black Rebel bassist/guitarist/vocalist Robert Levon Been before the band headed out on tour. We found out about his all-time favorite songs, eclectic musical influences, how time is haunting him, his ideal plans for the Rolling Stones, and more. CONNECT: You guys are about to go on a long tour starting in a week-and-a-half. Where are you at currently and what are are you doing? BRMC: We're in LA right now trying to learn whatever the hell we did on record, and trying to do these shows coming up with some self respect. It's been tricky, you know? It's funny, we've been rehearsing next to the Queens Of The Stone Age guys and every day they would come out and just shake their heads at about the exact same time we would come out shaking our heads too. We were talking to them and they had the exact same problem where you kind of let it get away from you when you are recording, and then you're left with figuring out all these things that you don't know how you are going to pull off live. But the last couple days it's turned a corner. We've figured out a few tricks of the trade - how to only use the bare essentials to make it powerful - and it's working. I think every record we've kind of scared the sh*t out of ourselves and figured out a way to do it. That's kind of the fun thing about it too, actually. You kind of feel like you've earned your suffering, you know? Until you've, like, really worked for it. You don't know if you've earned it unless you've worked for it. We've worked pretty hard though and we still have a week-and-a-half. CONNECT: What are some of your personal musical influences? Do they differ from the band's collective influences? BRMC: I kind of started out just liking whatever was on the radio while I was in high school, like Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Metallica, and Alice In Chains - pretty angry music. That's what was speaking to me then and still speaks to me now in some ways. At one point I ended up getting into a lot of British music with a song called "Leave Them All Behind" by Ride, and then I got into a lot of British sounds like the Stone Roses, The Byrds, Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine. I wasn't into every band under the sun at that time. I know a lot of people who thought wholeheartedly anything British was great, but that's definitely not true. After I got that out of my system, I started playing music with (BRMC bandmate) Peter (Hayes) and he had a lot more country influences like Johnny Cash, and I really got heavy into a lot of those sounds, like Neil Young and The Band, and a lot of soul music like Sam Cooke. I guess it was a little musical, and told a story like Bob Dylan and things like that. I don't know if you are ready for that kind of music as much when you are younger. It took me a little while. I kind of have three speeds for me, and then there is a bunch of other sh*t going on. I don't have an all-time favorite album, but I have been asked that question so many times I've figured out my favorite songs, which are "A Change Is Gonna Come" by Sam Cooke tied for first with "Tears Of Rage" by The Band. Albums are tricky. I've never really heard a perfect record. I'm a critic. CONNECT: What is your favorite album at the moment? BRMC: I just heard the new Nine Inch Nails record, Year Zero, and that's got a theme through the whole thing. It's really great - different though. I've been listening to PJ Harvey from back in the day. The new Arcade Fire record, I've only heard it once or twice so I can't really pass judgment on it. It seems like it's very big - that's the only thing I'm not sure about it. It's hard to get inside it. It's hard to find a small point inside of it to hold onto, but maybe I'll find it. There's probably some other stuff but I'm drawing a blank. CONNECT: Baby 81 sounds a lot different than Howl. Were there different influences on this album? BRMC: I think all of us got back into some of the stuff we were into while we were in high school, like Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails. I think a lot of the kind of angst that's in this record was us rediscovering those records. I think I needed to step away from them for awhile to realize they weren't just a high school thing. They have a lot more to say maybe than the way I was hearing them at the time. I remember listening to a lot of Nine Inch Nails and I think I was just rediscovering it for whatever reasons. That's where my head was at. I think the biggest change with this album, the reason it came out this way, has more to do with playing in a band again with Nick coming back at the end of Howl. We just started recording and writing as a band, and it takes on a different form and shape when we do that. With Nick banging on the drums, Peter and I just start digging in deeper, and it makes the music a lot more jagged. It's kind of a primal feeling. CONNECT: Your new album is named after the baby tsunami survivor that was claimed by nine different mothers. Why was this story significant enough for you to name the album after it? BRMC: I liked the name of it, even without the story behind it which is kind of my favorite thing. Having a true story behind it is always the most important thing. Even when it can stand on its own without that, that's when it kind of turns my head because the name just sparks a lot of imagination in my head. It sparks a lot of different pictures. That's what makes it a great title. I noticed it does that a little bit differently to everyone. Someone just told me in an interview I did that the word "baby" is one of the most classic rock and roll words used in rock songs. There are things it sparks in everyone. It kind of has this slightly apocalyptic thing about it - you know, numbering people and that kind of thing, new images sparked in your head. There is more than what is on the surface which is what I look for in album titles because that's usually what an album is made up of. CONNECT: Is there a recurring theme in BRMC albums? BRMC: All I know is there is something about time that keeps stringing together every record. I hear it and it freaks me out. The first album had this chant about time: "I'm going to take my time / I'm going to take my time / I'm going to take my time," and that was the loop that had this crazy drum rhythm to it. Each record has this strange reference to time, something to do with time. Like on the album Howl there's the song "Shuffle Your Feet" that has the lyric "Time won't save your souls" repeated in it. In this album, there's a line in "It's Not What You Wanted" that goes "I can't wait for time to save us / I can't break your fall forever." I don't know. It kind of freaks me out. That's the only thing I've noticed in all of them. CONNECT: Originally the titles to each song were supposed to be named after the cities the songs were created in. They have all been changed except for "Berlin." Is there any reason why you guys changed the names of the songs back to regular song titles? And why is "Berlin" the only song that kept its city title? BRMC: Not all of them, just a handful of them were written on the road because that was the only time we had to write. They just kind of get those titles by default because you can't remember them and they don't have titles to begin with. It was called "Berlin" and then we said that so many times it ended up sticking. There were others: "Boston," "Melbourne," "Kansas," "Dublin," "Paris" - you can't call a song "Paris" though, it's too cute. "Berlin" kept its title because we couldn't think of a better one. The name itself started having a kind of atmosphere to it that belonged to the song. Everything else we ended up using more or less the chorus line of the lyrics. CONNECT: Songs on past albums referenced current events. Were there any significant current events that you touch upon on this album? BRMC: I think after years of kicking and screaming you kind of just accept the fact that you just write about what you know and what's going on around you. I think we try as hard as we can to hide that, but in the words there are obvious politically slanted songs and songs that have more personal stories. We spend an extra minute trying to close that so it's not so easily detected by ourselves and by people listening. It leads you to the general meeting area but it doesn't walk you by the hand too literally. Songwriting's tricky like that. We're always nervous about putting ourselves into it too much anyway. We leave our ego out and try to make it mean something to people. It's more important to do that anyway. CONNECT: Who is your dream musician, dead or alive, that you would love to collaborate with one day? BRMC: I'd love to produce a Bob Dylan record, I think. I might be thinking ahead of myself. I think we're at a point where we can produce other people, but we've only done it with ourselves. I don't know. I'm afraid Dylan would be a bit stuck in his ways, but if he wasn't, that would be ideal. I think the Rolling Stones would be more fun though because even if they were grumpy about change I would make them change. I would scream at them and shout and pout and yell at them to change. They still have a bit of an edge - more than a bit, actually. We got to play some shows with them, and it was the coolest thing ever to play with them and see them live. They could wipe the floors with us live still and that's impressive. I think everyone dreams of them just going back and making an old stripped-down record again, and not so much with the modern Pro Tools, fancy rig and new instruments. Just give them all that old rickety sh*t, strip them down again, write a couple hooks that don't overdo themselves and that would be the best thing in the world, which would be my dream. I met a guy a while back who had that chance. He was a music producer and he was going to work with them and I was like, "Man, you have to get them to do it bare bones and do it on 2-inch." I don't know what it is but a lot of artists think the big new modern style is better, but it's really not. All the amps and imperfections are really what made those records great back in the day. I heard this story about how Lou Reed was listening to The Strokes record at the time, and he was like, "Yeah, it's good, but everything sounds so ratty and why do they want to sound like that?" And he realized they were trying to do the old Velvet Underground sound and he said, "We always hated that sound. We only had that sound because we were working on such bad equipment. We were always trying to make it sound better and they can sound better but they're not." That's the problem. I think back in the '60s and '70s they always wanted to sound a lot more crystal clear and perfect but thank god the equipment wasn't good enough for them yet. It breathes, it's got life, it has all the imperfections that life has in it. So that's my long-winded answer to a short question. |
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| Re: Sony Connect Interview | ||
Posts: 1127 |
Posted Tue May 29, 2007 4:28 AM | Quote |
| that was a great interview...very insightful. :) | ||
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